From what I’ve been reading in Libération, Madagascar appears to be falling apart (not that you’d know this from any US news outlet). Apparently, a power struggle between the sitting president and the mayor of the capital city has led to rioting and at least 68 deaths. This has me thinking about my old friend Corinne, who was a colleague of mine when I worked for the French government in NYC at the turn of the millennium. She’s a lovely Malgasy-Chinese blend who spent much of her youth in Europe and landed in New York after winning a green card lottery. We hit it off as soon as I arrived at the trade office, and she remains one of my favorite coworkers ever. This despite our dissimilarities: she’s tiny and reserved, I’m statuesque and imposing. We never failed to crack each other up. There was this running joke we had which involved using the phrase faire les antiquaires (go antiquing) as a euphemism for sex. We also had endless giggles making fun of Corinne’s boss, an airheaded French aristocrat with atrocious fashion sense and a coiffure that would have been perfect on a poodle. Sigh. Almost makes me miss the entertainment value of office politics.
Corinne wound up leaving NYC a year or so after I did. She and her partner now live in northern France and have a little girl who’s 9 months older than Henry. We had lost touch for a couple of years but recently reconnected through facebook. Anyway, she has lots of family on the Grande Ile (including her mother who lives alone in Antananarivo) and is, of course, very concerned. Along with rampant violence, the big worries are food shortages and skyrocketing inflation, she reports. Yet another reason to stop whining about my own minor tribulations.
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