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…