Following instructions

When I arrived in Chad I decided to employ a house-help. It is common practice amongst ex-pats all over Africa to do this and although part of me struggles with the concept (I've read The Help...) it is a mutually beneficial arrangement - I get my house cleaned and someone gets an income they might otherwise not have.

When I first met Odile we talked through the different things she was to do and she asked about washing the curtains (something I never do at home!). She suggested washing them every two weeks and, not wanting to dampen her enthusiasm for her new job, I replied that every two months would be enough. Even that seemed a lot to me, although everything does get very dusty during the dry season.

Odile has been working for me now for 2 months and so today when I returned from the office I found every cushion cover and curtain in the house (including the shower curtain and my mosquito net) had been washed. Unfortunately it poured with rain today so while the aforementioned soft-furnishings are clean they are definitely not dry. Odile told me she would iron everything the next time she is here but as she only works two mornings a week that won't be until Thursday.

I decided I can live without curtains in the living room for a few days but that, as I am on the ground floor, I definitely need curtains and a mosquito net in my bedroom  So I have hung them up whilst they are still wet - it's as good a washing line as anywhere else - and I hope Odile won't be too upset that I have not waited for her to iron them.

I hadn't really thought about that first conversation with Odile until today but she had obviously remembered it and was determined to follow the instructions I had given her. I am now wondering what else I might have said - I guess I will find out in time...

Laissez Passer

For the last couple of weeks two members of staff have spent numerous hours taking the three company owned vehicles and the two vehicles that are privately owned by international staff through an annual inspection. They would leave the office first thing in the morning and head off to the designated police station where these checks take place and inevitably they would not return until the end of the day.

The process involves presenting all of the vehicle’s paperwork for seven different checks including customs (all vehicles here are imported), ownership, taxes and insurance. The vehicle’s chassis number is verified and some rudimentary inspection is done on the vehicle, such as checking the lights and the indicators. A document is stamped and signed as each of these checks is ‘passed’ and once all seven checks are done you are issued with a ‘Laissez passer’ (‘pass’) sticker to be affixed to the windscreen of the vehicle.

It is not uncommon here to be stopped by the police, who ask to see your vehicle’s paperwork and will inevitably find that one or more of your documents is somehow not in order. If you pay the policeman an on-the-spot ‘fine’ you are allowed to go on your way. A vehicle with a ‘Laissez passer’ sticker should, as the name suggests, be allowed to pass without any further checks being required so the theory behind this is a good one. Unfortunately as with many things in Africa the practical implications have not really been thought through and what should be a fairly straightforward process becomes, in reality, something that takes days to accomplish.

• All vehicles are required to be inspected at the same police station in July – so there are a huge number of vehicles to be processed
• Each check is done by a different official so you battle to get to the front of one ‘queue’ (I use the term loosely because in reality it will be more like a scrum), and then you have to start all over again for the next check
• There is no published information about what this process should cost but there do seem to be a number of ‘fees’ that need to be paid. This is not unreasonable; after all we pay to have an MOT test each year in the UK, but the fees seem to vary and there are no receipts…

People inevitably get frustrated at the length of time the process is taking – it is hot and tempers are short – so it is a pretty volatile place to be. I felt bad that I was asking two of my team to go through the daily ordeal of battling their way through this process. I know they hated it – one of them said he would rather do anything else – but the appearance of a white woman at the police station would only have complicated the process even more and made the fees higher!

Language Learning

As I try to speak more French I increasingly find that I am half way through a sentence and I realise I don’t know the French word I want to say. I ‘um’ and ‘ah’ a bit, trying to retrieve the word from my brain (although in reality it has probably never been there in the first place) and then in desperation I say the word in English, with an inflection that implies a question. I am surprised at how many times the person I am speaking to says ‘Oui’ and then repeats the very same word but with a French pronunciation. This week, using this technique, I have learnt the French for:

flexible

complication

measure

economic

social

individual

Another technique I find helpful for remembering words is to think of another English word meaning (almost) the same thing I want to say. So:

To ask is demander

To stay is rester

To look is regarder

And so on. But my favourite French word so far is the word for raincoat – it is impermeable, which is just what you need a raincoat to be…

10 ways my life is different in Africa

Living and working in a country that is not your own inevitably means a change in lifestyle.
On a day-to-day basis (and in no particular order) for me these changes include:

1. I put more salt on my food - it means I don't wake up in the middle of the night with cramp
2. I eat less meat (see previous blog)
3. I rarely drink alcohol
4. I drink more 'sodas' (Coke, 7 Up, Fanta, etc)
5. I go to bed earlier
6. I get up earlier (not always by choice!)
7. My driving style changes
8. I don't watch TV (although I do bring and borrow DVDs)
9. I wash up in cold water
10. I shower in cold water

I could go on but as the title of this blog was '10 ways...' I won't!

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: