Work

It occurred to me that casual readers of this blog might get the impression that I am in Chad just so I can comment occassionally about the cross-cultural experience. So I thought I should write something about work.

I spend my working week at the MAF hangar, which is at the international airport in N'Djamena, 6kms across the city from where I am living. It is not a particularly busy airport and there are probably on average less than 10 take-offs or landings of aircraft during the day (with several international flights also arriving and departing through the night).

Here are the two MAF aircraft parked on the apron in front of our hangar:

For those of you interested in airplanes (other than as a means to get from A to B) the one on the left is a Cessna Caravan - C208 - and the one on the right is a Cessna 182.

The majority of my time is spent sitting at a desk working on a computer, doing all the things that managers do. This week that seemed to be mostly about finances - trying to understand the programme's budget, verifying income and expenditure and answering questions from the finance department at our head office in the UK. And it all takes place here:

It is the first office I have worked in where my job title was on the door and it is a daily reminder that, whatever happens, I am accountable - the buck stops with me!

Meat Matters (vegetarian readers may wish to look away now)

When I am overseas I tend to eat much less meat then when I am in the UK as finding a good source of meat can be a challenge. As far as I am concerned in this context ‘good’ means that, prior to purchase, two important criteria need to have been met:

1) The meat must not have been kept in a freezer that is powered by an erratic electricity supply and therefore has most likely defrosted and re-frozen numerous times, and

2) The meat must not have been kept uncovered and surrounded by flies for hours on end in soaring temperatures.

Often when you do find someone who sells meat that reaches these not unreasonable standards you find that the animal that sacrificed its life for my dinner has had a long, hard life and the end result is tough, stringy and fairly tasteless.

In Dodoma, Tanzania the ‘best’ place to buy chicken was, not surprisingly, the chicken market. This is an area of the market where hundreds of live chickens are kept in cages awaiting their fate. As the customer you get to choose your chicken and it is then unceremoniously pulled from the cage and taken out of sight, but not out of hearing. After a few seconds of squawking and a long 15 minute wait in the hot sun the stall holder reappears and presents you with a small plastic bag containing your chicken pieces. Unfortunately, the fact that the bird is probably only for sale because it has stopped producing eggs and is therefore no longer of any value to its owner also means that it is past its best as far as the quality of its meat is concerned. In the three months I was in Dodoma it is an experience I felt I only needed to go through once!

In complete contrast in Kampala, Uganda I was spoiled by the existence of a butcher who had discovered the gap in the market, specifically amongst the large ex-pat community, for good quality meat. The selection and standard of the meat on sale was comparable to anything you would find in the UK.

In South Sudan there is goat… It would arrive on the compound on four legs; spend a few days tethered under a tree and end up as dinner.

Here in N’Djamena, Chad there seem to be two options.

·         There is the supermarket (think corner shop, rather than Tesco or Sainsbury) that has a freezer which always seems to be full of enormous packs of chicken pieces. Apart from being far too much meat for me on my own I am not sure it meets criteria 1) above, or

·         There is the man who comes to the compound once a week on his bicycle and sells huge cuts of beef that look like this:

I have no idea where he gets the meat from and somehow I doubt it meets criteria 2) above but as this seems to be the way that all the international MAF staff buy their meat then I guess it’s OK.

It is also one of the few things I have bought so far in Chad that I think represents value for money. Having chopped it up into cubes and separated it into bags for freezing I reckon I have enough meat for about 8 meals and all for little more than £4.00 GBP.

Of course, I have no idea yet what it tastes like so I may still end up having to find more ways to cook rice, tomatoes, onions and peppers…

How you know it's hot

Chad is hot. It ranks alongside South Sudan as the hottest place I have lived. If you ask me ‘how hot is it?’ my answer will be a vague ‘high 30s to mid 40s (centigrade)’ as I have made a conscious decision not to look at a thermometer too often. When it is this hot I find that knowing exactly how hot it is just makes me feel even hotter.

If you can’t imagine what it’s like to live in such a hot place maybe this list will give you a bit of an idea.

• The sun may be shining but, unlike the UK, that is not a reason to go outside
• On entering a room I make sure I position myself as close to a fan as possible
• I am just sitting, seemingly exerting no energy, and yet I am sweating
• I spend quite a lot of time thinking about when I will next be able to take a shower
• I take three showers a day – one in the morning, one after work and one before going to bed
• I prefer a cold shower
• After the shower I can’t seem to get dry and then I realise I have already started sweating again
• Working with a laptop on my lap creates large damp patches on my legs
• I don’t need to plan what I am going to eat too far in advance as frozen food takes less than half an hour to defrost
• If I forget to put the butter back in the fridge it quickly turns into a liquid
• Toothpaste and all other gels and creams are always soft and a bit gooey
• My laundry takes less time to dry than it does to wash
• I long for it to rain
• The sky looks like this:

You have got to be kidding...

Here in N'Djamena the most popular form of transport seems to be the motorbike. For a capital city there is surprisingly little traffic but driving anywhere requires you to be constantly looking in all your mirrors keeping an eye out for motorbikes that seem to appear from nowhere and weave dangerously in between the cars.

There is no requirement for motorcyclists to take any sort of test and so, not surprisingly, there is a high accident rate. In an attempt to improve road safety the government has recently introduced legislation requiring motorcyclists and their passengers to where a crash helmet. In fact it is supposedly mandatory for a motorcyclist to carry a spare helmet at all times. Even in the short time I have been here I have noticed many more motorcyclists wearing helmets although, as yet, it is not being universally enforced.

As this is Africa the motorbike is used to carry not just people but also anything else that needs to get from a to b. The Chadians don't seem to go in for this in quite the same way as the Ugandans where, amongst other things, I saw a fridge, a coffin, numerous turkeys, 5 children, a large sheet of glass and at least 10 plastic chairs being carried on motorbikes at different times. However, they do have their moments here and there is a story going around at the moment of a man who was carrying a goat on his motorbike (I have no idea how he managed to get it to stay on the bike but I guess that is another story!). In order to comply with the new laws he made sure the goat was wearing a crash helmet...

Apparently the police who stopped him didn't see the funny side of this and the driver was beaten up by them. There are no reports about what happened to the goat and sadly no pictures of it wearing its helmet!

Construction or Destruction?

A couple of days after I moved into my new house I noticed a pool of water outside my kitchen window. As I had just done some washing up I wondered if there was a problem with a blocked drain. Over the next few days I realised that the pool was rapidly becoming a small lake and that the water seemed to be running out from under the house. I decided it was more likely to be a burst pipe and so the Chadian builder used for such problems was called in. When I got back from work on Thursday this was the sight that greeted me:

Those of you who know Africa will notice the multi-purpose red and yellow
Nido (powdered milk) tin, in this instance used to scoop the water from the hole!

For reasons I do not fully understand (because of my lack of understanding of both plumbing and French) repairing the burst pipe outside also involved replacing the pipes to the kitchen sink. So there were two men in the kitchen taking it in turns to use a screwdriver as a chisel in an attempt to break up the concrete wall and remove the pipes and taps. When they left on Thursday evening this was what my kitchen sink looked like:

I was told the workmen would be back on Friday. When the boss came to the office with the invoice for the work I foolishly assumed that the work was finished and I would be returning home that afternoon to a newly repaired, fully functioning kitchen. Unfortunately that was not the case. Both the hole in the ground and the hole in the wall remain but I at least have water in the kitchen now, through a brand new tap and pipe system.

I asked the compound guard when he thought the workmen would be back and he replied 'Maybe tomorrow, maybe next week, Inshallah (God willing)'. I hope so...

My new 'home'

This week, after 2 weeks of staying in a guest room on the MAF compound in N'Djamena, I moved to the house that will be my 'home' for my time here. The previous occupant had left the day before I arrived and before I could move in it was necessary to treat the infestation of termites that had eaten away at the wooden window frames of two of the rooms. I'm not about to worry about a couple of week's delay if it means I can live in a termite-free house!

Moving day coincided with the first heavy rain of the season and so moving things the short distance across the compound also involved avoiding the puddles and trying not to get too much mud indoors.

Here are some pictures of my new home.



The outside of my house - I live on the ground floor
and another family live on the top floor



The living room with the all-important
ceiling fan and air-conditioning unit



The kitchen - note the purple rubbish bucket,

which for reasons best known to the manufacturer

has 'I love football' embossed on the lid...



The shower, including the obligatory

African concrete grouting

  

The view across the compound from my front door