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114 chapter 3 The Life and Hard Times of the School Migrant PORTRAITS OF DAILY SURVIVAL June 20, 1993. It’s 5:00 in the morning and the neighborhood roosters have begun to crow. When I open the wooden shutters that have barricaded my room throughout the night I notice the white glow of a fluorescent ceiling light emanating from the small room of my young neighbor, Olive. Now nineteen years old, she has come from Antananarivo to Ambanja to stay with her country auntie (and my landlady) in preparation for her second try at the bac. After tidying my room a bit, I step out and make my way in the pre-dawn light to the washroom we share. I pause to say hello, but she is so deeply involved with her studying that she does not hear or see me. Her thick, ill-fitting glasses ride low on her button nose, and her hair has been pulled back hastily into a top knot. Sitting on her hard wooden chair, she still wears the loose-fitting and faded lambahoany body wrap that serves as her favorite nightdress . The wrap itself is reminiscent of more festive and carefree times: although it is now late June, it is decorated with last year’s calendar, flanked by Christmas poinsettias, flowers referred to locally as Madagasikara, because their petals resemble the island’s outline. I, too, am only half-dressed as I step out into the street in the early morning light, beat-up flip-flops on my feet and a lambahoany wrapped about my torso, my hair unbrushed but braided. Like many others I pass, I am in search of fresh bread for my early morning meal. I am tired of eating baguettes, and so I pass a nearby bakery in search of my old neighbor Maman’i’Fabrice, hoping to find her selling her delicious hot rice cakes of mofo gasy. I take a favorite short cut through town, passing nineteen-year-old Antoine, who is carefully sweeping his large courtyard. The broom leaves a pattern of neat arches upon the bare earth in front of his house, which is flanked by an array of beautiful flowers. His younger brother, Jacques, squats in a far corner, making tea and reheating last night’s rice over a simple brazier . We exchange greetings as I make my way to Maman’i’Fabrice’s a few doors away. Antoine has lived here by himself since he was fifteen, joined this year by Jacques, who is two years younger. Whereas Antoine attends the state-run Technical Lycée, Jacques is enrolled in the private Catholic Academy. Their large, airy house sits on land purchased by their Sakalava parents in 1974. Their mother, a seamstress, and father, a mechanic, have subsequently settled in the countryside in separate villages, which lie approximately five and thirty kilometers away respectively . Their parents also tend fields of rice and other crops on land inherited from their own elder kin. This is a prosperous family, for this mother and father have been blessed with a number of children considered ideal by Malagasy standards— they have had seven sons and seven daughters, all of whom are in good health, and who now range in age from seventeen to thirty-six. Of these, Antoine and Jacques are the youngest. These two boys are also among the best educated of their close kin. Their parents , who are in their late fifties, were the first among their own relatives to attend primary school. Antoine is one of three sons who has made it to lycée: two of his older brothers, who are now twenty-four and twenty-six years old, completed their terminale year at the Technical Lycée. Neither of these brothers were able to find jobs related to their training, and so they, like their parents, have returned to the land to subsist as peasants. Their oldest brother, aged thirty-six, completed troisième and now specializes in refrigerator repair in Diégo-Suarez. Two sisters also did exceptionally well in school: the youngest, age twenty-two, completed troisième, or the final year of middle school, and yet another, aged twenty-seven, completed her terminale. Both have since married men of foreign origin who were once stationed near Ambanja. These two sisters now live in France, where they are housewives and mothers. The five remaining sisters dropped out of school because they became pregnant, and the two remaining brothers similarly abandoned...

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