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