Fat Frog

The fucking embarrassment of it... Just as I was beginning to get some
'street cred' with the locals here! I came into my tukul tonight (a round
thatched hut that the locals live in) and what do I see sittin' there
nestled in amongst my smalls, but a big fat frog. He was just sitting there
looking at me with this 'what the fuck are YOU looking at' look on his fat
froggy face! So needless to say, your correspondent don's his best Indiana
Jones hat and... goes out to ask if anyone has experience with tukul frog
decontamination. So one of the girls (if you don't mind) immediately jumps
up and runs over to the guards to elicit their support in the venture. In
the meantime, I'm turning absolutely cringingly red while the guards look up
at me like I'm some kind of absolute dumbfuck and start roaring their arses
off laughing.

So now the whole compound is rolling around the floor breaking their shits
laughing and I still have a fat frog livin' it up in my undies! So
eventually Zaccharia, one of the guards, takes the initiative and makes for
my tukul. Everyone jumps up and follows and we all bundle in while he
gingerly lifts the fat fucker off my knickers and gently places it outside
in a puddle under the tree, where Fatty McFatfuck just ribbits off happy as
a pig in shit, oblivious to the fact that he's just made me out to be the
biggest girls blouse since Scooby Doo.

Anyway, I'm outta here tomorrow so I dun give a rats ass anymore.

I'm in Am Timan, a town of approximately 40000 people in the east of Chad. I
came here about a week ago cos there were a few measles cases and we were
gearing up for a potential epidemic and a vaccination campaign. However, the
cases subsided so the campaign was put on hold while the situation is
monitored.

We flew out from N'Djamena on a WFP (World Food Programme) flight. The WFP
provides a few flights in the country for its own staff and staff from other
NGO's can avail of them as well. The flight dropped us off in Abeche, the
main eastern city, from where we jumped into our own little MSF plane, a
Cessna Caravan.

In preparation for a vaccination campaign, we had sent a truck full of
supplies from N'Djamena the previous day, and we were flying to meet it at
its destination in Am Timan. We literally sent everything that you would
need to vaccinate 20,000 people: from the pens that you would mark
vaccination cards with, to the needles, to the chairs that the vaccinators
sit on, to the tent that we would sleep in, to the mattresses that we would
sleep on, to the generators that we would need for electricity to the
chlorine for making drinking water etc. etc. etc.. It was unbelievable. We
were literally prepared to vaccinate 20,000 people in the middle of the
desert and be completely self sufficient!

The measles vaccine is a small dose of the measles virus. It is freeze dried
but must be kept between 2 and 8 degrees Celsius until the second it is
injected into the arm. Not so easy when you're in a desert! The so-called
'cold chain', ensuring that vaccinations are kept cold from when they ship
from Amsterdam all the way until they end up being injected into someone in
the Chadian countryside, is a very demanding process. To that end, we had
two large cool boxes of measles vaccination with us in the plane, packed
full with icepacks, and on the truck we had generators, fridges, freezers,
cool boxes, icepacks, thermos bags and more thermometers than you can shake
a stick at.

So first of all our little Cessna landed on what I am told was an airstrip
but what I would describe more accurately as a (fairly) barren piece of
desert, where we picked up Christa, who was to be the supervising nurse for
the campaign. Christa is in her sixties and has done her fair share of MSF
missions before. She had been working at another of our projects in Kerfi
where the airstrip was.

So then we took off again and ten minutes later we were landing in Am Timan
airstrip. The pilots did a flyover first to scare all the goats and kids off
the airstrip and once it was clear, we touched down. to a fairly sizable
audience of onlookers.

The Am Timan team were on the ground ready to collect us and our cold chain
and we made off to the base in two Landcruisers.

The Landcruisers are standard MSF fare when it comes to transportation.
However, there's a slight drawback to them in Chad. they keep on getting
nicked by bandits! Apparently it's not nice being held up at gunpoint and
having your wheels nicked, so there's been a change of strategy:
Landcruisers are not to be used anymore, and instead we got a fleet of
little 4x4 Jimny's, which the rebels don't like that much. In order to
further dissuade them from pilfering our motors, we got them painted bright
pink. Bright pink is not the 'in' colour for rebels this year!

So anyway, since I got here, there have been no more measles cases and it's
all been deescalated. But still, it's been very exciting (thanks for the
spellcheck mum!). The project coordinator really involved me in things and
its been great. She brought me to meet the governor of the province who we
had tea with. I also met the local village elders today in a community
meeting. MSF's project here is only just starting up, so there's a flurry of
political activity getting all the authorities on board and agreeing on what
our mandate is etc. The plan is to support the pediatric and maternity units
of the local hospital.

It's also been a good opportunity to look at the supply for the project and
to ensure that we're estimating our consumption correctly etc. etc. etc. I
was originally brought in to cover the logistics for the vaccination
campaign and now that it's not happening, I'm heading back to the comfort of
N'Djamena tomorrow. But it's been really interesting to see how a project
works, I feel much more able to support it now on the supply side of things.

Now I have to go to sort out my feet. it's so frickin' dry here and my feet
are completely kaput, flakin' like mofo's and breaking around the heels etc.
I got myself a big tub of Vaseline which I've been horsing onto them on a
nightly basis, so here goes again.

Ur man in Am Timan,

C.