New Year: New Assignment. Next Stop Tanzania

It's been nearly two months since I left Chad and the time has come for me to head off on my travels again. On Wednesday of this week I leave for Tanzania, initially just for 3 weeks but with the possibility of returning for a longer period of time later in the year.

I had several possible assignments to choose from but this one appealed to me the most. I was approached by a former MAF pilot, who is now working for a German organisation (Wort und Tat or Word and Deed), who support a number of community-based projects in different parts of the world. One of these projects is in the Tunduru District in southern Tanzania, where they run a health clinic and a secondary school and work to improve agriculture and increase access to safe drinking water for the local community. You can read more about their work here.

I have been asked to help with the financial aspects of this project: to work with the local staff in building a budget and ensuring their systems for recording income and expenditure are robust. Although I am not an accountant I have been involved in managing and overseeing finances in a number of my previous assignments in Africa. I hope this is sufficient experience to be able to make a positive impact...

I am looking forward to returning to Tanzania (I worked there for about 3 months in 2009) and to being a bit more involved at the 'grass-roots' level of a community development project. Despite being in a fairly remote part of Africa I am told that there is access to the internet. I hope it will be good enough to enable me to update this blog over the course of the next few weeks, so watch this space!

Party time

Yesterday we had our team Christmas Party, which also doubled-up as my farewell party. We closed the office early and invited the staff and their immediate family to the compound for a lunchtime gathering. As this is Africa the 1.00 p.m. start time ended up being closer to 2.00 p.m. but that was actually earlier than I thought it would be...

Whilst we waited to begin the children enjoyed playing.

We then ate together.

Followed by the presentation of a farewell gift to me (photos of MAF in Chad in a typically Chadian leather frame) and the obligatory speeches.

And we finished by taking a team photo.

It was a lovely way to finish up my time in Chad. I'm going to miss these people...

Last week in Chad

As the title of this post gives away I have now entered my last week in Chad. I will leave N'Djamena next Sunday evening and arrive home on Monday. There are always a mixture of emotions when I finish an overseas assignment. Inevitably I am looking forward to being home and to reconnecting with family and friends but I am also sad to be saying goodbye to the people I have met - the colleagues I have worked with and the friends I have made. I always wonder if I will ever return or if our paths will cross again.

On Sunday I went to the International church for the last time and today was my last Ladies Bible Study meeting. There are a surprising number of ex-pats working here in a variety of roles - for mission organisations, for NGOs and for commercial companies and it has been good to meet and to get to know a number of them. Some, like me, come for just a short period of time although a surprising number are here long-term spending months and sometimes years learning the local languages and making Chad their permanent home.

In about an hour's time I will head out to the airport to meet a new family who are joining our team. This will be my last airport pick-up although I don't feel particularly sad about that as it is not one of my favourite things to do. The airport pass I get as part of my work gives me access to the baggage reclaim and immigration areas of the airport. Neither area is large enough to cope with the number of arriving passengers and so it is always a heaving mass of people pushing and shoving and shouting in a variety of languages. There is always a great sense of relief when you finally make it back out to the car park again.

Friday will be my last day in the office, although we are planning to finish early and have a special lunch with all the team and their families as a way of saying 'Welcome' to the new family, 'Goodbye' to me and 'Happy Christmas' to everyone.

On Saturday I am thinking about spending the day at the swimming pool at one of the hotels. I can count on the fingers of one hand the number of times I have done that here but as I will be returning to winter in the UK it might be a nice way to spend my last Saturday in Chad.

And on Sunday I will leave Chad for the last time. Or maybe not? My future plans are unknown but I have learnt to never say never as you really don't know what could be next...

Tragedy

It seems that almost every day of the week I hear of some difficult circumstance involving one of our Chadian staff - sickness, accidents, loss of or damage to their home and, all too frequently, sudden death. We only have 9 staff members so there are a lot of tough things for them to deal with and some of the situations seem more tragic than others.

Yesterday morning  I greeted Dieudonne as normal and asked how he was. He replied he was fine but then he hesitated and proceeded to tell me that the day before his neighbour had gone fishing with his six-year old son (and that's fishing as a means of earning some money, rather than as a leisure activity). The father and son were on the river bank sorting the big fish from the small ones when a black snake came out of the undergrowth and bit the boy on his leg. The father quickly killed the snake but within five minutes the boy started shaking and very soon afterwards he was dead.

Dieudonne was visibly upset as he told me this and asked if he could take the day off to attend the funeral. People here live very close together so he must know the family well. He has a son of his own who is just a little bit younger than this boy and I am sure he can imagine what it would be like to lose a child so suddenly.

My limited French only stretches as far as 'desole' (sorry), which is clearly an inadequate expression in such tragic circumstances.

I'm not sure I really have the words in English either.

Road Works

Since I returned to Chad in May of this year there have been on-going road works taking place in the streets around our compound. We live about 500 metres from a main road, in an area that is a maze of intersecting narrow streets. As is typical of large parts of Africa these are dirt roads – during the dry season they are rutted and full of pot holes and during the rainy season they become a muddy quagmire. It’s the reason why you really do need a 4 x 4 vehicle for city living – they are a necessity, rather than a status symbol.

The road works began earlier this year and have been gradually spreading throughout the neighbourhood. The work involves digging out the existing road to a depth of several metres and then packing the hole with layer after layer of sand. At the same time the storm drains that run along the sides of each road are being replaced. Huge concrete slabs are lowered into deep trenches and then they are sealed with concrete blocks. Then when that is completed layers of gravel are compacted over the sand to make a solid surface to the road and a kerb is put along the edges to stop people driving over the newly-installed storm drains.*

At this point I was expecting the ‘new’ road to be finished with tarmac but so far that has not happened. Instead the road works have continued on more and more streets and the new roads are already starting to deteriorate as they are unable to handle the heavy construction vehicles that drive along them all day long moving equipment and materials around.

A few weeks ago they also started working on the main road and so the challenge of getting out and about each day increased significantly as what was the main route in and out was no longer an option. Two signs have become a familiar sight – ‘Route Barrée’ and ‘Deviation’. I’d like to think that someone somewhere has a master plan of which roads they are working on at any one time, which will mean that there is always a way through but there is an increasing sense that one day all available routes may be blocked!

The thing we don’t really understand is why so much time, effort and money is being poured into repairing these roads. There is quite a bit of infrastructure development going on in the city at the moment but I would have thought there were higher priorities than the side roads in our neighbourhood. The only reason we can come up with is that there is also a new hotel being built close by. It is huge and the sign outside says it is going to be the N’Djamena Hilton Hotel. Maybe people who can afford to stay in such a fancy hotel cannot be expected to drive over rough unmade roads to get there…

* These new storm drains are potentially life savers. The old drains had fallen into such a state of disrepair that they were uncovered and so had become the receptacle for all the neighbourhood garbage, as well as the public toilet. This meant that when it rained the drains quickly became blocked and the deep water became a death trap in two ways. It quickly became stagnant and attracted mosquitos, increasing the incidence of malaria – a major cause of death in sub-Saharan Africa. And each rainy season you hear that small children have fallen into the water and drowned.

Shopping - Part 3

A new ‘import shop’ has opened in N’Djamena. You might not think that this is worthy of a blog post but, even for a ‘non-shopper’ like me this is an exciting event.

This shop is smaller than the other three main stores, that cater to the international and wealthy Chadian consumer but it is well stocked and has some positive features:

• Everything is clean and the goods are tidily stacked on the shelves in a fairly logical order (not necessarily a feature of all the shops here!)
• For quite a number of products the prices are slightly cheaper than the other shops. I guess time will tell if these are actually ‘opening offers’
• There is a larger selection of both cooked and frozen meats than any of the other shops and, surprisingly, this includes bacon – a rare commodity in this city
• One whole shelf is full of beer, wine and spirits, which is something the other shops don’t stock at all. Alcohol is available in the city – in restaurants and in local bars – but it is not something you see around you all the time
• An assistant carried my shopping basket around for me. I am not sure if this is a standard feature of their customer service or was just because she was bored.

They have yet to get a till so my bill was added up on a calculator and there was no receipt so I have to trust that they charged me correctly. Somehow this didn't seem so bad for what was a reasonably pleasant shopping experience (and pleasant and shopping are not words I naturally put together in the same sentence!)

A definite added bonus is that it has not yet been discovered by the street sellers and beggars so I was able to walk to and from my car without being followed by an assortment of small children and young men.

I shall certainly be going back there.  I suspect it will soon become a favourite shop of the ex-pat community but at the moment it is a bit of a hidden gem.

Public Holiday

Today is Eid al-Adah (or the Festival of Sacrifices). It’s the Muslim holiday that celebrates the provision of the ram when Isaac was almost sacrificed on the altar by Abraham and it is a public holiday in Chad.

I was a bit more prepared for this public holiday than I was for the last one, Eid al-Fitr, which celebrates the end of Ramadan and whose exact date is not decided until the sighting of the full moon. This year that festival fell on a Thursday and so, by some quirk of Chadian law that I didn’t fully understand, the Friday was also declared a holiday (maybe they take the US celebration of Thanksgiving on a Thursday, followed by a Friday holiday as their benchmark for this?). It also happened to be Independence Day on the Sunday and so the Monday was then declared a public holiday, meaning it should have been a five-day weekend. However, as none of this seemed to be known beforehand (we had to wait for it all to be confirmed on the radio the day before) I seemed to end up working pretty much as usual, albeit at a slightly slower pace.

Today has ended up being a bit the same. I was looking forward to the office being closed, to being able to do a few bits of essential work at home and then taking the rest of the day off. But then late yesterday afternoon we received a request for a flight today and so all our plans changed. I did manage a slightly later start to the day than normal, although the chanting and preaching from the local mosque was not particularly conducive to a long lie-in. I worked from home until just after lunch when I headed to the hangar to do the flight-following for the return leg of today’s flight.

As I left the compound there were a handful of men outside the neighbour’s compound praying (or washing prior to praying) on the mats they had lain on the ground. This is not something that they do there every day so I think they are also preparing for a big celebration this evening. Usually at that time of day the roads are busy – full of people on foot, bicycles and motorbikes or in cars, taxis and buses. But today the streets were practically deserted. The guards, who would normally check rigorously everyone’s ID as they enter the airport, just gave me a cursory glance and didn't bother to stir from the chairs that they had carefully positioned under the shade of a nearby tree. The usually bustling and chaotic freight area, which all imported goods must pass through, was eerily quiet. Our day guard seemed more bored than usual, without the other staff to talk to or the interruptions of visitors to the hangar.

On the drive home this evening there was a bit more activity than there had been earlier but it was still pretty quiet. Today is the day that many sheep are slaughtered as part of the celebrations and you often hear stories of the streets running with blood as this takes place in full view of anyone who may be passing. I certainly saw nothing like that today, although maybe I was driving in the ‘wrong’ parts of the city. To me it just seemed that N'Djamena was closed for the day.