June 1, 2011 Arrival in N'Djamena

June 1, 2011

We departed DC about 12 noon and arrived at Addis Ababa 12 hours later at around 8 AM local time.  Flight was long and boring.  No one to talk with and nothing to read.  Had inadvertently left the book  brought along to read at Dulles airport. Couldn’t sleep either, so arrived in Ethiopian tired, irritable, and sleepy.

Passed through the Addis Ababa airport successfully and departed for Chad at approximately 10AM.  Flew over some of the most forbidding country I’ve ever seen.  Everything was brown, no green, desert (maybe dry savannah) everywhere with thatched or tinned roofed huts here and there.  When the sun caught the tin roofs at a certain angle they looked like little diamonds against the sandy brown background.

Arrived at N’Djamena at 12:30 PM and the first thing I noticed was the heat, it was stifling.  Sweat it was that introduced me to Chad, sweat that ran into my eyes, drops of sweat rolling down my sides and the smell of someone too long without a bath (me).  It was an introduction to things to come.   I followed NGO personnel thru customs with no problems.  A young Chadian walked up to me dressed in civilian clothes, told a young man nearby to get my bags and told me to follow him.  He led me to the front of the line where baggage was being x-rayed and my luggage was placed in the machine.  The baggage handler  then collected my luggage from the x-ray machine and I was led to the airport exit by the young man in civilian clothes.  I tipped the baggage handler, but the other man would not accept a tip.  I could tell that he wanted the tip, but there was something keeping him from doing so.  Turns out he was a government employee there to help arriving passengers and was not supposed to accept  tips.  Later gave him 2 bucks anyway for he was very helpful. 

After about an hour, Fredrick, a 38 year old Chadian who speaks English, French, and some of the local dialects met me outside the terminal.    I was delighted to see him.  We loaded up in a taxis and headed to the main market to exchange US dollars for Chadian CFA’s.  As my luck usually runs, the US dollar had just been devalued by 10 percent, so my dollars were worth only 450 CFA compared to 500 the week before. Oh well, it’s only money.  We then drove to the Catholic mission where I had a reservation – no rooms.  Finally found a German mission in town where we could rent a room for 17,000 CFA ($37.78) a night.  That bought us a room with no electricity during the day, but power at night to run a fan.  No hot water or really I should say no cold water for the unheated water had a temperature of at least 90 degrees.  The temperature in my room was never lower than 90degrees F.  But I was so tired that I slept anyway.

It’s six in the evening and Fredrick just told me that the lady from the Philippines has been delayed and will not arrive for two days, so we are going to head for Bere tomorrow. (It took her 5 days to travel from the Philippines to Chad.  It’s hard to sleep in an airport.) As we had a meal together, Fredrick revealed that his 2 yr old son had recently died of malaria.  Sad.  The people of Chad are very poor and often wait until the last minute to take sick children to the hospital.  Often they wait until it’s too late.