We have these beetles here. They’re pretty big, about the length of one of your fingers and fairly chubby. Most of the time they crawl around looking slightly retarded but at night time they fly about without even the slightest element of control, banging into whatever they can. You can notice that they are trying to get to our neon lights high on the wall, but instead they always just end up crashing into the wall and falling down onto the sand. Inevitably they fall onto their backs and then they stay there trying in vain to get right side up again. They wiggle their little beetle legs like mad fuckers for hours on end, just trying to get back on their feet. Sometimes you feel slightly charitable and you toss one of them over with your flip flop, only for the gobshite to fly straight into the wall again and fall onto his back again.
I’m the logistician on a nutrition project in the centre of Chad, a place called Bokoro. We have a nice little garden, which comes alive at night. As far as I’m concerned the only animal that has any brains are the little froggies that come out and just sit underneath the lights to gorge on the variety of kamikaze insects which fall down whilst trying to ‘attain’ the light. We also have a fearless rat. You’ll be making yourself a cuppa cha in the kitchen and he’ll just stroll in and look at you as if to say: “What’s goin’ on brother, any food hanging around anywhere that I could nibble on?”
It’s still pretty hot, but you can feel it starting to cool down ever so slightly. Things should become nice and cool over the next four to six weeks or so, as we come into ‘winter’. Imagine the nicest possible day that Ireland has ever seen… that’s the Chadian winter! And the locals will wrap up with hats and scarfs and gloves and shit like that while yours truly will sweating in his T-shirt.
I extended my mission until the 10th of December, asking if I could be placed as a logistician on a field project for the last month and half. The idea was to get a bit of field experience and an idea about life without the Novotel swimming pool (OK… I admit it… I also thought that maybe I could shed a gentle pound or two).
I’m here a week today and so far all is going good. I did a 76-person payroll today and have to make sure that everything non-medical keeps on working. We have an intensive feeding and observation ward in the town hospital and we send three teams out every day to ambulatory feeding centres who conduct therapeutic feeding in ten villages around the region and then refer the intensive cases back to the hospital. It’s all a bit mad. We’ve also started distributing 20tonnes of food rations to the families in our programs every week, which has its fair share of logistical challenges.
So I only have six weeks or so left until I’m finished in Chad. I’m coming home on (or around) the 10th of December for the Yuletide banter. It should be good fun considering I don’t have the cost of a pint. (If you see me over Christmas, feel free to ply me with booze… it’s the same as donating money to MSF… not quite as tax deductible though!).
After that who knows… I’ll definitely go away again (if they’ll have me) in the New Year. First preference is Colombia, but half of world wants to go there. Apparently when people go there, they extend and extend their missions and then they end up marrying a local and staying there. So it’s kind of one-way traffic, which is unfortunate for those of us who want to dance meringue while saving kiddies lives. If it’s not Colombia then second choice would be Congo, but realistically I’d go anywhere they wanted me to.
I had a great time in Ethiopia with Barry back at the beginning of September (yeah, I know that’s a long time ago… so what… what are you trying to say… Don’t even f&%king mention the lack of updates… its taboo!). We went hiking in the Simien mountains for the first week and then just chilled out soaking in the rich culture of Ethiopia’s nicest hotels for the second week. Except for a small bout of diarrhea (worst in a long time actually), it was a great two weeks.
Anyway, that’s all for now… I’ve gotta go to bed so that I have a clear head tomorrow morning when I try to ensure that the guard and driver roster for November takes into account who doesn’t like working with who and all the other finer sensitivities of the intricate pattern that is the Chadian social sphere.
Your (yes, repenting!) man in Chad,
C.
Saturday, October 30, 2010
Thursday, September 9, 2010
Tuesday, April 27, 2010
G&T's on the verandaaaaaah!
Its surprising the little things that I miss from home: The certainty that the light will go on when you flick the switch, or that water will come if you turn on a tap, the ability to wake up in a dry bed and not one that is soaked through by your own sweat, flies as an occasional pest rather than a permanent resident on your face.
I’m sitting here in the dark on our terrace. Our generator needs a break, and having left the office early (half past six), I’m the only one home and can’t warrant it being on for me alone. My skin has been prickling all day with something called prickly heat, so I had a shower when I got home and am already drenched in sweat again. I put some talcum powder on my arms so as to dry them out but that’s just turned into a moist paste by this stage.
So… the heat! Well, I suppose it’s not as bad as I expected… although it is pretty bad! Everyone always said it was going to get hot, so it’s not like I didn’t expect it, and I had enough time to acclimatize to it. But it is particularly bad. Daytime temperatures hit fifty almost on a daily basis now. In the evenings it cools by about ten degrees but is still fairly uncomfortable. Apparently MSF doesn’t believe in air conditioning, so we’re kept alive by fans. There have been some nights when the generator was on the blink, we didn’t have fans. You don’t sleep then! You just squelch around in your bed and get up every half hour to drink more water. Our entire house is like a big furnace. It soaks up heat all day every day and belches it out from the walls all night. The walls and floors are hot to touch, as is everything else. When you get up in the morning and put on your clothes, they are hot. When you go to lie in your bed at night, it feels like you have left your electric blanket on too long.
We have an air conditioned storage facility for our medical stock. Even with the air conditioners on 24/7, we only get the temperature down to about 28 degrees, but when you come into it, it feels positively artic. 28 degrees and you have goosepimples on your arms.
So that’s enough about the heat. In other news, I had quite a night at a Red Cross party on Friday. I came back from work at about half past seven and hit the G&T’s with a vengeance. By the time we left here for the party, we were feeling no pain and ended up having a smacker of a night. For some reason I don’t have the strength to resist jumping into swimming pools fully clothed, so the night ended up with me dragging half a beachful of sand back to my bed with me.
On the work end of things, all is good! It’s still not getting any quieter though. The level of activity is freakishly intense. Today we loaded a seven and half tonne truck to the gills to send it out to the project in Am Timan. We sent them drugs, an incinerator, therapeutic food, medical supplies, construction materials, fuel and a partridge in a pear tree. The rainy season is on its way here and we need to get the projects stocked up before the rains start as the roads will become impassable. One of the projects will essentially be cut off during the wet season with access only possible by air.
Last week I was lucky enough to go on a little road movement. We don’t do many of them here since we had a kidnapping in the east last year, but we’re starting to get into it again slowly but surely, ensuring that security is managed to a tee. However, mine was only a little one. We drove about three hours outside of N’Djamena to a town called Gelengdeng, where we distributed medical kits for the treatment of simple and complex measles cases to the local health authorities there. We also took the opportunity to see what the scale of measles outbreaks were and reported this back to HQ… all very exiting! Unfortunately, there wasn’t even the slightest whiff of a kidnapping and we made it back to base safely before nightfall (by my reckoning, you could lose weight at a fierce rate if you got kidnapped for a little bit).
Anway, that’s all for now, the electricity has just come back on so I’m gonna camp down in front of a fan.
L8r,
Ur man in Chad…
I’m sitting here in the dark on our terrace. Our generator needs a break, and having left the office early (half past six), I’m the only one home and can’t warrant it being on for me alone. My skin has been prickling all day with something called prickly heat, so I had a shower when I got home and am already drenched in sweat again. I put some talcum powder on my arms so as to dry them out but that’s just turned into a moist paste by this stage.
So… the heat! Well, I suppose it’s not as bad as I expected… although it is pretty bad! Everyone always said it was going to get hot, so it’s not like I didn’t expect it, and I had enough time to acclimatize to it. But it is particularly bad. Daytime temperatures hit fifty almost on a daily basis now. In the evenings it cools by about ten degrees but is still fairly uncomfortable. Apparently MSF doesn’t believe in air conditioning, so we’re kept alive by fans. There have been some nights when the generator was on the blink, we didn’t have fans. You don’t sleep then! You just squelch around in your bed and get up every half hour to drink more water. Our entire house is like a big furnace. It soaks up heat all day every day and belches it out from the walls all night. The walls and floors are hot to touch, as is everything else. When you get up in the morning and put on your clothes, they are hot. When you go to lie in your bed at night, it feels like you have left your electric blanket on too long.
We have an air conditioned storage facility for our medical stock. Even with the air conditioners on 24/7, we only get the temperature down to about 28 degrees, but when you come into it, it feels positively artic. 28 degrees and you have goosepimples on your arms.
So that’s enough about the heat. In other news, I had quite a night at a Red Cross party on Friday. I came back from work at about half past seven and hit the G&T’s with a vengeance. By the time we left here for the party, we were feeling no pain and ended up having a smacker of a night. For some reason I don’t have the strength to resist jumping into swimming pools fully clothed, so the night ended up with me dragging half a beachful of sand back to my bed with me.
On the work end of things, all is good! It’s still not getting any quieter though. The level of activity is freakishly intense. Today we loaded a seven and half tonne truck to the gills to send it out to the project in Am Timan. We sent them drugs, an incinerator, therapeutic food, medical supplies, construction materials, fuel and a partridge in a pear tree. The rainy season is on its way here and we need to get the projects stocked up before the rains start as the roads will become impassable. One of the projects will essentially be cut off during the wet season with access only possible by air.
Last week I was lucky enough to go on a little road movement. We don’t do many of them here since we had a kidnapping in the east last year, but we’re starting to get into it again slowly but surely, ensuring that security is managed to a tee. However, mine was only a little one. We drove about three hours outside of N’Djamena to a town called Gelengdeng, where we distributed medical kits for the treatment of simple and complex measles cases to the local health authorities there. We also took the opportunity to see what the scale of measles outbreaks were and reported this back to HQ… all very exiting! Unfortunately, there wasn’t even the slightest whiff of a kidnapping and we made it back to base safely before nightfall (by my reckoning, you could lose weight at a fierce rate if you got kidnapped for a little bit).
Anway, that’s all for now, the electricity has just come back on so I’m gonna camp down in front of a fan.
L8r,
Ur man in Chad…
Tuesday, March 23, 2010
It’s my blog… and I’ll cry when I want to!
Yes, I’m feeling slightly guilty about my lack of posting but I’ve been a busy bunny, so what can I do… tough titties! I’m here now, fingers sliding around my dusty keyboard, so stop looking at me like that and be grateful.
I’m sitting on our terrace looking out on our front garden. The pink of our bougainvilla is the only contrast in a sea of beige. There’s been a ‘Harmatan’ going on for the past week or two. That’s a sandstorm for those of you not au fait with the desert lingo of Northern Africa. Last week, it grounded all air travel, reduced visibility to about 20 metres and covered everything (and everyone) in fine layers of Sahelian dust. All African look like they’ve aged about 20 years overnight, with a distinguished speckle of grey in their hair and eyebrows… silver foxes everywhere you look!
There’s always been dust here… As soon as I arrived I noted the tendency for everything to gather the amounts of dust in a day that I would normally expect from something left idle for a year or two. We have a cleaner in the office, Monsieur Martin, whose ostrich feather dusters see more action than Tiger Woods would in a brothel. He’s a funny little man, whose eternal task to keep our desks dust-free is comparable to that of Sisyphus, the Greek mythical figure condemned to eternally roll a boulder up a mountain, only for it to roll all the way back down again before reaching the top.
What suffer most are your various (exposed) orifices though. Blowing your nose reveals a rockery that any gardener would be proud of, and a quick scrape out of your ears would provide the raw materials for an artificial beach.
However, the good thing is that an atmosphere of sand seems to be good at keeping the heat out. It’s been a lot cooler since the storms started. We were hitting 43/44 degrees beforehand but now the thermometer stays below 35 and sleeping at night is a much more pleasant affair.
So on Friday, we kicked off a measles vaccination campaign here in N’Djamena. The target is to vaccinate all children in the city between 6 months and 16 years of age against measles: that’s approximately half a million screaming kiddies. I’m not really involved in the campaign as my role is to ensure the supply of our existing projects, but I’ve got a direct link to the emergency teams flown in for the occasion and am getting a good insight into what’s going on (without having to sacrifice my Sundays, ‘tanks be to de holy lord Jayzuz’ – to be read in a Dublin accent)! We’ve rented a fleet of about fifty pickups for the occasion, and you can’t throw a welly without hitting an MSF vehicle in N’Djamena at the moment.
In other news, I really feel like I’m getting a grasp on my work. At the beginning, everything was reactive and ‘mildly chaotic’ (to say the frickin’ least)… But now, I’m getting some good Germanic order onto things and for the first time being able to proactively plan for the future. The coordination team in the capital has suffered from high turnover of expat staff in the past but things are beginning to get embedded with longer term people arriving and establishing their functions!
Although I do have to say that I kind of like the turnover of expat staff as well. It’s cool having so many new faces in the house. Everyone brings something different to the table!
I’ve booked my holidays… Yippee kayee mofo! I’m off back to the old continent on the 14th of May for three whole weeks of dustless splendour. My lil’ bro, Gavin, is getting married to his long term girlfriend, Rowena, in France at the end of May, so that’ll be a great opportunity for me to show off my dance moves. Can’t frickin’ wait to get home and see everyone again.
OK, that’s all on the ticker for now. I’m gonna go and have a look at one of these vaccination sites today, so I’ll report back on that in due course (or not, whatever I feel like…. Muwehehehehehe!)
Ur man with sand up his nose,
C.
PS: I know that there are an awful lot of you that find my rants soooo interesting that it could be termed an addiction, so you’ll be happy to hear that I’m now officially available for additional drivel on MSF Ireland’s site here… slightly less bad language and slightly more PR
PS: The L shaped house in the middle of this satellite photo is where I live ;-)
View Larger Map
I’m sitting on our terrace looking out on our front garden. The pink of our bougainvilla is the only contrast in a sea of beige. There’s been a ‘Harmatan’ going on for the past week or two. That’s a sandstorm for those of you not au fait with the desert lingo of Northern Africa. Last week, it grounded all air travel, reduced visibility to about 20 metres and covered everything (and everyone) in fine layers of Sahelian dust. All African look like they’ve aged about 20 years overnight, with a distinguished speckle of grey in their hair and eyebrows… silver foxes everywhere you look!
There’s always been dust here… As soon as I arrived I noted the tendency for everything to gather the amounts of dust in a day that I would normally expect from something left idle for a year or two. We have a cleaner in the office, Monsieur Martin, whose ostrich feather dusters see more action than Tiger Woods would in a brothel. He’s a funny little man, whose eternal task to keep our desks dust-free is comparable to that of Sisyphus, the Greek mythical figure condemned to eternally roll a boulder up a mountain, only for it to roll all the way back down again before reaching the top.
What suffer most are your various (exposed) orifices though. Blowing your nose reveals a rockery that any gardener would be proud of, and a quick scrape out of your ears would provide the raw materials for an artificial beach.
However, the good thing is that an atmosphere of sand seems to be good at keeping the heat out. It’s been a lot cooler since the storms started. We were hitting 43/44 degrees beforehand but now the thermometer stays below 35 and sleeping at night is a much more pleasant affair.
So on Friday, we kicked off a measles vaccination campaign here in N’Djamena. The target is to vaccinate all children in the city between 6 months and 16 years of age against measles: that’s approximately half a million screaming kiddies. I’m not really involved in the campaign as my role is to ensure the supply of our existing projects, but I’ve got a direct link to the emergency teams flown in for the occasion and am getting a good insight into what’s going on (without having to sacrifice my Sundays, ‘tanks be to de holy lord Jayzuz’ – to be read in a Dublin accent)! We’ve rented a fleet of about fifty pickups for the occasion, and you can’t throw a welly without hitting an MSF vehicle in N’Djamena at the moment.
In other news, I really feel like I’m getting a grasp on my work. At the beginning, everything was reactive and ‘mildly chaotic’ (to say the frickin’ least)… But now, I’m getting some good Germanic order onto things and for the first time being able to proactively plan for the future. The coordination team in the capital has suffered from high turnover of expat staff in the past but things are beginning to get embedded with longer term people arriving and establishing their functions!
Although I do have to say that I kind of like the turnover of expat staff as well. It’s cool having so many new faces in the house. Everyone brings something different to the table!
I’ve booked my holidays… Yippee kayee mofo! I’m off back to the old continent on the 14th of May for three whole weeks of dustless splendour. My lil’ bro, Gavin, is getting married to his long term girlfriend, Rowena, in France at the end of May, so that’ll be a great opportunity for me to show off my dance moves. Can’t frickin’ wait to get home and see everyone again.
OK, that’s all on the ticker for now. I’m gonna go and have a look at one of these vaccination sites today, so I’ll report back on that in due course (or not, whatever I feel like…. Muwehehehehehe!)
Ur man with sand up his nose,
C.
PS: I know that there are an awful lot of you that find my rants soooo interesting that it could be termed an addiction, so you’ll be happy to hear that I’m now officially available for additional drivel on MSF Ireland’s site here… slightly less bad language and slightly more PR
PS: The L shaped house in the middle of this satellite photo is where I live ;-)
View Larger Map
Wednesday, February 17, 2010
Pics
So, I'm back in N'Djamena. I had a lovely weekend in Abeche on my way back... It's nice to be back to my room and the food here :)
See below for some pics from my trip to the field!
Ur man in N'Djamena...
See below for some pics from my trip to the field!
Ur man in N'Djamena...
Tuesday, February 9, 2010
Its not your Mi-Riverbed, Its my Mi-Riverbed!
We just watched a rom-com set in New York and I was going to bed all doe
eyed when my torch picks up a silhouette on the wall. It's a very
recognizable shape and before I can even find the word for it, my mind is
ringing alarm bells. "ehhh, I think there's a scorpion on the ground there!"
I eventually manage to dribble. Whattodo, whattodo. it's me or him, him or
me! "Standondamudderfucker" jumps into my mind and before I get a chance to
analyse the situation any further, my flip flop is jamming down on top of
this poor creature with immense force. I swear to God, I never made a
conscious decision to do it, it just happened! Had I thought about it at
all, I'm sure I would have run away whimpering like a little girl, but I
didn't get a chance to think about, my foot took over and squashed the
little bastard until he was a gooey mess of bits of shell and evil stingers!
eyed when my torch picks up a silhouette on the wall. It's a very
recognizable shape and before I can even find the word for it, my mind is
ringing alarm bells. "ehhh, I think there's a scorpion on the ground there!"
I eventually manage to dribble. Whattodo, whattodo. it's me or him, him or
me! "Standondamudderfucker" jumps into my mind and before I get a chance to
analyse the situation any further, my flip flop is jamming down on top of
this poor creature with immense force. I swear to God, I never made a
conscious decision to do it, it just happened! Had I thought about it at
all, I'm sure I would have run away whimpering like a little girl, but I
didn't get a chance to think about, my foot took over and squashed the
little bastard until he was a gooey mess of bits of shell and evil stingers!
I have to say that I did feel very brave afterwards though. I thought to
myself "must get to computer, must write blog post to redeem myself after
last weeks frog antics".
So now that I'm here I might as well mention what a nice Sunday I had today.
I woke up at half six but didn't have to get up, so kept on slumbering until
nine. Then I got up and had a breakfast of champions: Muesli with milk
powder and cold water and some baguette with butter and apricot jam. And
some peanuts of course. I have peanuts with every meal here. and as a snack
between meals. and as a snack between snacks. and just before I go to bed.
and just after I go to the loo. in fact pretty much every time I inhale, a
peanut enters my system. They're the loveliest peanuts in the whole world as
well!
So then I finally finished my book. My boyfriend Barry gave me a book called
'Africa' before I left. It's a great read cos every chapter is a different
country and you get a bit of a socio political history as well as a little
anecdote or two. The only trouble is that I feel mildly mortified reading it
in public, my first mission greenness already well noted amongst my
colleagues. It's not exactly kosher sitting by the pool with "Africa for
Dummies" slapped open in front of you!
Sara's the doctor here in Kerfi (which by the way is the other of our
projects in the east of the country which I'm visiting at the moment -
should really have mentioned that in the start) and we did pancakes for
lunch and then I slumbered on the couch afterwards waving the flies away.
The flies are pretty bad here, they annoy the fuck out of you and their
objective in life seems to be to get inside your head via either your nose
or your ear.
After siesta, we went for a walk down to the wadi. I'm gonna explain what a
wadi is cos when I got to Chad, everyone assumed that everyone just knew
what a wadi is and they were all like "wadi this" and "wadi that" and I
didn't have a rashers what they were on about. So for everyone who doesn't
know what a wadi is, it's a dry riverbed that becomes a river in the wet
season and is then just a sandy riverbed in the dry season. So the walk was
cool anyway and we saw people getting water from wells and cutting bricks
out of the earth and generally having a bit of a laugh on a Sunday
afternoon.
The town of Kerfi is quite small. There are about 5000 inhabitants and the
same again in displaced people who have set up camp here. Our project is a
Health centre with an inpatients department, outpatients clinic, maternity
ward and therapeutic feeding centre. Sara's the doctor in charge and we have
a few Chadian nurses as well.
So I'm off to my bed now cos I've a rake of shit to do tomorrow. I have to
fill sandbags for our safe room and try to somehow build a morgue table with
drainage for washing dead bodies. Should be interesting!
I'll try to post some pics as soon as I get back to base in N'Djamena.
Ur man in Chad!
Wednesday, February 3, 2010
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