Airport Blogging for Claire

Hanging with the ladies--you can't even tell which one is me.

If Claire told me to jump off a cliff, I probably would do it. I mean, she (and Debbie) asked me to bring an envelope with pieces of humans in it to mail to their pathology guy in the States, and I’m doing that. I have a cool letter about it, and they were telling me that if someone gives me a hard time about it, just to leave the envelope, as it’s not worth getting in trouble for. Apparently no one who has done this for them has ever had anyone ask questions, but I hope I get some curious TSA guy with a weak stomach. The perks of being friends with hospital people! (Also, sometimes they give me free meds.) But anyway, Claire said to blog while in the airport, so that is what I’m doing.

Moussa in the background taking photos of me,
and that is why I have so many photos of me in this post.

When you try to take photos of a group of women who are not prepared

Clearing no one but Ashe is paying attention

These last few weeks have flown by, trying to finish up work stuff, entertaining visitors, making short trips to the field, ordering lots of food from the restaurant near my house that delivers because I’ve become friends with the owner and I haven’t had much time to cook these days. I’ve also been invited to several American embassy parties because of Joe, who is currently staying with various Embassy people while I’m gone because they have nice yards and he is irresistible. I’ve also had a few visits from the vet, once after Joe was attacked and bitten by a mean dog in the street and once recently when Joe has been sick with what I think is a cold. A coughy, sneezy, snuffly dog is a sad dog. The vet came late the last visit because he was outside of town vaccinating a bunch of sheep.

Joe sitting inside the gate, the guard putting his hand in to pet him--
I told you he is irresistible!

This is me when I'm sick too. 

Another culture shock moment for Jack-sugar cubes,
"Amanda, what is this? It's like candy! They put it in their tea?"
Apparently sugar cubes are not a thing in Jack's Kenya.

My most recent trip to the field (two days ago, I think, but time is a blur) also involved sheep and camels and goats and herds of cows and that one donkey I almost hit because he would not move out of the road. I headed out to some villages outside of Dourbali to check on a few projects and meet my namesake. She’s called “Amina,” which is my Arabic name. Originally it was my Somali name, but I changed up the pronunciation to use it here. It’s now more widely used than my actual name whenever I am walking with Joe around our neighborhood.

Amina and Amina

Irrelevant to the blog, but I love this guy,
he's been a great supporter of our work,
and he is a wonderful father who adores his daughters,
one of whom is also called Amina, but not after me.

This chubby baby ran up to me and put up his arms, speaking of irresistible!
Kids usually run away from me screaming, so I was pretty excited,
had to commemorate the moment with a selfie, as you can see in my glasses reflection.

I always like to go to the field and spend time with people in the village and hear their stories. I like hanging out with the women, forcing them to let me help with basic tasks that I know I can do (shelling peanuts-yes, making the peanut butter-no), and playing with the babies that aren’t afraid of me. I was happy to meet baby Amina, but I really rushed the trip. Initially, I’d planned to spend the night in Dourbali with Pastor Moussa, which would have given me a whole day to visit 4 projects out in the bush, but I had to get to the Christmas party for IAS staff that evening. I couldn’t leave the day before because I had to take Jack and Emmanuel to the airport at 5am the next day. So I decided to drop Jack and Emmanuel at the airport, meet Nesie at the roundabout near his house, and drive on, beating traffic, which I noted last time is not as bad as Nairobi traffic, but still the probability of accidentally (or on purpose) killing someone on a motorcycle who jumps in front of you at the last moment increases during certain times of the day.

Camel guy thinks we're weird in our car

Guy on a horse thinks we're weird in our car

I really wonder what we are all looking at,
but it's more likely we are all tired of squinting at the sun.

The car I was planning to take arrived in from Abeche late the night before. I had checked in with the driver while he was on the way to ask him to please put petrol in the car THAT NIGHT because the stations aren’t open before 6am and I wanted to leave before 6am. He promised he would, but then I arrived at the office and found out he had forgotten. It was 4:55am at the time. I did not make much of an effort to hide my annoyance. Anyway, at 5:30 while driving to pick up Nesie, consoling myself with the fact that it wasn’t too long to wait for 6am and trying not to think about the fact that this isn’t a country dedicated to on-time store openings, I saw an open petrol station! I was able to fill up the truck and save myself about 15 minutes of time and an entire day of being annoyed with people who did not keep with my plan. Luckily, I had another chance to be annoyed with someone for not doing something I had asked to be done last week at the IAS Christmas party later that night. And again, it ended up ok. It’s nice when that happens. People will often let you down, and it doesn’t always end up with no one getting hurt.

Camel attack at dawn!

And now the sheep, who were likely vaccinated by Joe's vet

Always the cows blocking the road

One of the best parts of my job is seeing the joy and hearing about new life in a community with a new water point. I love the smiles and the stories. I’m humbled by the generosity shown to me, whether it involves naming your seventh child after me or serving me your best food (though I do try to avoid eating goat intestines and termite stew, if it is possible—I had the goat intestines this time).  But it’s hard to get requests for more help like building a school or a health center in the area, knowing that the need is huge, but that’s just not what we do. There are a lot of needs out here, but it’s a privilege to work with Pastor Moussa and others around Chad to identify needs that we can address.

New hand pump is already hard at work

Best part of the job!

It’s also pretty fun driving around, off-roading it—as long as there is no traffic and I’m in the truck. I do not like off-roading it in the corolla and I don’t like driving in town where my competitive instincts resent cars trying to pass me. The truck can connect to my phone (so high tech!), so I can play music, and that is fun. I was entertained by the contrast of the road I was on and the Rend Collective song “My Lighthouse,” which I downloaded to learn for a few weeks ago when I was helping David lead worship for their TEAM conference. I guess Northern Irish musicians will stick together (he had a few Getty songs in the repertoire too), and it was nice of him to invite an American to join him because it’s fun to play with good musicians, and I don’t get to do that very often. Anyway, the Rend Collective people are singing on a boat in the middle of the sea while we were driving through sand, dodging camels—basically the same. The other entertainment was me asking the guide which road to take. When you’re driving in the Sahel, there are scrubby bushes all around, a few trees of differing sizes, and various types of sand, which turn into various types of mud in the rainy season making many roads impassable. You look for the most defined tire tracks and try to follow them, even though most of them are probably from “chariots” (we call them horse carts). People drive wherever they want and you don’t always know which way is the right one. I’ve definitely gotten lost on roads like that so I kept asking the guy which road I should take. He kept saying, “Don’t worry about it! They’re all going the same way!” I believed him, but then when driving out of Moussa’s house later on our way back to N’djamena, I was concentrating on avoid trees and bushes and I wasn’t really paying attention to the direction I was going (because “all roads go to the same place”) and I hear Moussa in the back laughing saying, “Why are you taking the longest possible road out of here?” And then I looked up and realized I had veered a bit off course.  I need the desert equivalent of a lighthouse, I guess. When I finally arrived home, having taken a few other extra-long roads to avoid potholes, there was less than an hour until I was supposed to be at the Christmas Party. That’s when I discovered I’d left my house keys locked in the corolla, and the keys to the corolla were locked in the office, but Emelie came to my rescue.

Following a "chariot" on a very obvious road

IAS Staff Christmas Party

So I made it to the Christmas party and I had just enough cash to pay for everything. Then I packed the truck with several of my colleagues, dropped them all at their homes, and went back to mine where three friends of mine holding an all-night prayer meeting in the empty house in my compound. A few months ago, Pastor Moussa posted a photo on Facebook of a meeting we had with a former minister in Dourbali about the submersible pump project. Some FB friend of his commented along the lines of “I guess you had to wait for the little white girl to come help you” and “You know that if the white people give you anything, you will be in their debt forever.” I saw the comment, and I definitely know where he is coming from. The legacy of “the whites” in Africa is well-known and almost entirely negative. And plenty of “little white girls” have done a lot of damage over the years, and I know that this “little white girl” has made plenty of mistakes. But I can say right now that Pastor Moussa and others here, even just over the last few months, have given me more than I could ever repay. Their support, love, and faithful prayers have been life to me. I’ve often been annoyed that I see Jesus in my mind as a white guy with blue eyes and flowing light brown hair, even knowing how historically inaccurate that is, but years of Sunday School flannel boards and exposure to anachronistic medieval artwork is really hard to undo. But lately I’ve noticed that, while still historically inaccurate, Jesus has Moussa’s joy (and definitely his smile!) and Nadji’s gentle warmth and Gabriel’s fire and Antani’s servant heart and Emelie’s unshakeable faith and Nesie’s passion to help everyone in need who happens to wander into his path from a prostitute living in the street with her newborn baby and who is now living in his house, to his neighbor’s daughter whose school fees he is paying because he believes girls should get an education, to the street boys he buys bread for when they're coming down off their drugs, to the prisoners he visits in jail. I am amazed that I get to be a part of their lives and that because of Jesus, we are Family in the truest sense of the word. And that’s what I told mon petit frère on Moussa’s Facebook. And when I think of how exhausted I am right now and how little sleep I’ve had over the past few nights, I remember that Moussa and Nadji have had even less—because they’ve been awake, praying for me. So in conclusion, support the Africa projects for Neverthirst so I can keep trying to even the score with them because while they did like trying pizza for the first time, I feel like we could do more with a solar pump or two. Bonne fête à vous!

Moussa and Nadji try pizza for the first time,
and then they ate the leftover cold pizza for breakfast the next day!
Pizza initiation complete!
(Note: I also bought them fish, which they enjoyed much more, I think.)

Quick question: should I make an instagram account for Joe?
I'm not on instagram myself because social media is a Job,
but I feel like Joe is ready to become an Influencer.

Africa Is Not a Country

I'm walking out of the photo because this post is not about me,
or maybe it's because I'm still working with Nesie on
how to take photos--at least he got the ladies on their donkeys

A friend of mine from the UK tells me his favorite (favourite, actually because he’s British) response to “Oh, you live in Africa? I went on holiday once to Kenya!” is “Oh, you’re from England? I went on holiday once to Greece.” I would have to look up the distance between the UK and Greece and Chad and Kenya to be able to tell you if they are similar distances apart, but a glance at map shows it’s not too different. The point is that one country in Europe (until/unless the UK ever manages to Brexit) is quite different from another country in Europe (language, culture, terrain, etc) and one country in Africa is quite different from another country in Africa (language, culture, terrain, etc). Having been in Kenya a few times (though I’ve never really traveled outside of Nairobi), I can tell you that it is very different from Chad. Recently, though, we’ve had a guy from Kenya here consulting for us on some office stuff, and it has been so fun to hear Jack’s observations on life in Chad. It was his first time out of East Africa, and he’s been great about everything. I have his permission to share a few of his “culture shock moments,” as he calls them. Keep in mind that Jack is a good Nairobi boy, and Kenya, like most places in Africa, is quite diverse tribally, linguistically, culturally—so even Jack’s thoughts are just Jack’s thoughts and are not intended to be representative of Kenya as a whole.

Looks the same to me

Here is Jack, trying to solve all of our problems
(he's not done yet!)

Jack’s first “culture shock moment” was actually something I didn’t expect at all. He and Denis (from Uganda) arrived just before lunch time and so we had food available for everyone that day. We did our usual welcome to Chad meal—roasted meat (camel and beef) with mapa (baguettes). We dump everything on a giant circular metal platter and everyone stands around and digs in. You rip a bite-sized piece off of your bread, use it to grab a piece of meat, a chunk of onion (raw, but we don’t mind), dip it in a mixture of hot pepper and lemon juice, and pop it in your mouth.  Jack said, “Oh, you’re all eating off the same plate? This is different for me. We don’t do this where I’m from.” Of course I offered to get him his own plate and eating utensils because we do have them, but we don’t often use them. Jack declined, saying, “No, this is fine. This is nice. No problem!” Which I thought was quite generous of him on his first day out here.

I don't have a photo of Jack's first communal meal with shared plate,
but here is an old photo of Leif at one such communal meal.

Now, I know that in the US and the UK we don’t often share food off of the same plate, but we did in the Middle East, Sudan, South Sudan, all over Chad, definitely growing up with sisters who like to try each other’s food, and I just assumed that it would be normal for Jack too, but I was wrong (probably for the first time ever in my life, of course).

Another communal meal that Jack was not a part of

Since our conversation about his “culture shock moment,” I’ve been noticing other things that surprise him about life here. Children go to school on Saturdays! People eat so much meat and very few vegetables! Men hang out after work and play games-cards and this French game that involves throwing metal balls down the street. He thinks they’re grown ups and they are not serious. It’s time for them to quit playing games!

I have no photos of the men playing games,
so please enjoy this photo of me, a grown up,
wasting time taking selfies with kids

When Jack first arrived here, I asked him how he felt about dogs, as he has been staying in my compound where Joe is the King of everywhere. Jack said he is not very keen on them, which worried me a bit. I made Denis sit in the back of the car with Joe when I drove them home because I know Denis likes Joe (he’s been here before). But within a day, Jack and Joe became fast friends. Now Jack goes with Joe and me on our after-work walks. We’ve had lots of interesting talks on those walks. That is when he came in contact with the Chadian after-work gaming clubs. He’s also amazed whenever we were driving home one night to see people outside on the streets, doing various things without being bothered by police or criminals. I explained to him that many/most people here do not have electricity. Often students will go to public areas at night that have streetlights to study their lessons. Other people just like to hang out at night now that it’s cooler then. Either way, Nairobi is notorious for crime and police patrol the streets there at night. Any outside loitering is assumed to be dangerous and people can’t just hang out outside wherever they want. Jack is amazed by this, but also slightly concerned for our safety, I think. Fortunately for him, our greatest danger when walking with Joe is that he will chew through his harness and escape to chase down one of those goats that taunts him from the side of the road. If Joe can take down a goat, he will be so pleased with himself, but I 

will have to pay a lot of money for a dead goat carcass.

Jack in the front, protected from Joe

Joe in the back with me when Emelie drove Jack and me home

Joe, looking cute, missing playing with Jack

 

Jack’s favorite places in Chad are Modern Market, our air-conditioned supermarket with aisles (!) and the Hilton, which we have been told is closing soon due to unpaid debts. I told him that probably means that he isn’t really cut out for a long-term life in Chad, but Jack knows what he likes and he comes from a place of cooler weather, multiple supermarkets several times the size of  Modern Market, and many fun places to hang out if you can make it there in the horrible Nairobi traffic.

Sunset over the pool at the Hilton-we are so fancy here in Chad

Hilton peacock sitting on an ambassador's car--
maybe if the Hilton spent less money on peacocks and more
on paying off their debts, they wouldn't be closing...

Modern Market, photo from the internet
Jack said, "I finally feel like home here!"
Even though several Modern Markets would fit in most
Nairobi grocery stores that I've been to.

Speaking of traffic, Jack’s presence with me in the car while driving to work is helping with my road rage. Whenever I get mad at someone cutting me off or refusing to follow basic traffic rules (even the stupid ones that came from the French like having the right of way going into the roundabout and not going out), I remember that it could be worse: I could be driving in Nairobi traffic. And it calms me greatly. No, people here do not drive well (if I’m being honest, I don’t always drive well either), but fortunately, there aren’t that many people here who have vehicles and our worst traffic happens whenever the President decides to block all the roads so he can drive somewhere without worrying about being assassinated by his beloved people.

Each colored line represents the path of one of the following:
 a motorcycle, donkey, pedestrian, car or minivan.

So there you have it. Those are a few of Chad’s quirks noticed by our wonderful Kenyan consultant. If you come visit me, you can point out other quirks that you notice because I don’t really notice the weird things we do here anymore.

Two Kenyans, a Ugandan, an American (not pictured) in a Lebanese restaurant
in Chad that said American can never go to with her British friends because they think the food is terrible.
The Kenyans, Swedes, Germans, Swiss and Ugandans all seem to like it fine.

A photo of Joe being carried to the car.
I've been told that he is a bit spoiled but the ground
was too hot for his little paws!

Try to say 'no' to that face. You will fail.
This past week Leif, Urbain, Gero, and Jack have all dropped everything to play with Joe.
And I have been invited to 2 parties with fancy Embassy people because they want Joe to come.

Also even Kadidja loves him

💗💗

Winging It, Out of Control

With the Chief

The other day I had some unexpected visitors stop by. The chief of Miltou, a village south of here that can take hours or days to get to depending on the road conditions, and his assistant to the chief and a local teacher of Arabic came to speak with me. I remember this area. We did 5 wells in the area. One was for a community of refugees who had fled fighting in Central African Republic. One of the women giving a testimony about how the well impacted her life said, “We have not been accepted by the local community here because we come from a different tribe. We have been neglected by everyone. No one has thought of us, but today God has remembered us.” I would like to note here that while I do believe that God was behind this, the local chief is the one who told us to give one of the bore holes to their community, and that was a generous gesture. I do acknowledge that the refugees have felt rejected, neglected, and alone. Their access to water is a huge encouragement to them.

So the chief and his entourage stopped by, and I braced myself for the usual requests for schools, hospitals, etc, and while we did discuss their need for medical facilities in the area, that was not what they came by for. “We just wanted to say thank you! We knew we needed to stop by your office and thank you for your help while we are in N’Djamena. There is a notable improvement in our lives after the water project. We have clean water to drink. It tastes good. Thank you!”

Me, Assistant to the Chief, Arabic Teacher, Nesie, Chief

A refugee woman from CAR in front her new pump

I have had people thank us before for our projects. I’ve had communities send letters and I’ve had visits. It’s not rare that it happens, but it isn’t the norm. So it is appreciated when it does. And it does encourage the team and me when we are struggling. But on the flip side, I had to go to visit a government office today, a task that I usually avoid when possible. As usual, said official started off nice, but he was looking for a chance to prove how powerful he was, trying to find a way to insult my colleague and make him nervous that we hadn’t followed rules the guy just made up on the spot. This type of thing often happens in government meetings. I tend to lose my temper internally, say something heated in return, then recognize that I have lost my temper and the continued presence of our work in Chad is becoming precarious, and then focus the rest of my attention on not rolling my eyes, fixing my smile in place and talking until the situation calms down, the guy gets annoyed by my stumbling French, and he ends the meeting.

Posing for Claire in my new culturally appropriate work outfit

I’m trying to focus on the people who are grateful for what we are doing and the fact that we are actually making a difference here even if we didn’t follow a “developmental” protocol made up by a government official so he could get more money from us. On the other hand, the people who are doing their jobs for financial and personal gain, while pretending to care about their countrymen are not unique to Chad. I know plenty of them in other countries, and I have admitted here that my motivations in doing my work are not entirely or even always mostly about helping others—I really do like the adventure of life out here. I’ve never pretended I’m making a big sacrifice for staying here, but I do think that the more that I know what the needs are and the more I know what helps and hurts, the less I want to do anything else. For me, it would be a waste of the weird excitement God has given me for living in the hard and/or dangerous places. It would be a waste of the hard-earned knowledge I’ve gained through stupid mistakes I’ve made.

Here is a stupid mistake I made recently: I got up at 3am to drive Leif to the airport. When I got home,
I noticed that I had been wearing two different shoes. A few hours later, I drove 100km to Dourbali.

Last week I spent a couple days in Dourbali with Pastor Moussa, face to face with some of my mistakes. He reminded me about how our water project started. From my side, I had gotten a call from the Head Office in the US giving me the go ahead for a few trial bore holes in Chad. I knew about Pastor Moussa and I had met him before and heard about his work. A Swiss missionary had also called me and mentioned I should look into doing a well for him if I could. He gave me his phone number. I had a certain number of wells that I could do, and his area fell in the region where we were working so I called him up. We agreed when I would go visit, and from my side, that was the beginning of our project with him.

Right after I smashed my phone, right before driving 100km to Dourbali

From Pastor Moussa’s side, he had recently moved to that area, with a heart to serve the nomad community in the area. He had the taxi driver drop him off on his land by a big tree. That was all that was there. The taxi driver thought he was crazy. He and his family started setting up camp. This was their new home. But it was not an easy place. The nearest water source was in town. They had to buy the water from local merchants. But they didn’t have a consistent source of income, so this was difficult.  One day he was at the end of his rope, begging God for help, begging Him to provide for the needs of his family, specifically water. And a few hours later, I called him. 

A photo from Pastor Moussa's Facebook of his family setting up camp their first day in Dourbali,
captioned simply "It takes courage to be a missionary."

There is much more to the story, including bits and pieces that I can’t really share on the Internet, but an important thing is that after we had done 12 wells in the area, I realized that we had several problems. All but 4 of these wells are in areas where the water table is quite low. This means that a hand pump will be too heavy to pump. Women and children will have to work in pairs to push the handle down and the pumps break down often because they are not made to work at water levels that deep. I did not realize this would be the case. I didn’t know I needed to ask that question. I’d been to the village. I’d seen hand pumps in other parts of the village that were working. I assumed it would be fine to do more, but I should have done more research to find that the reason most people get their water from the water merchants is that they have dug very deep bore holes and installed generator-powered pumps designed for these depths. But I just assumed they were a bunch of greedy jerks in it for a quick buck. I might still be right about that, but I could also be wrong. I’ve not actually spoken with them. I’ve never seen them around to talk to them. But I do know that a large number of people in the area, especially nomads, do not have the money to buy water. So they search for free options—easily breakable hand pumps and open ponds full of diseases.

Chatting with Victor, Pastor Moussa, and Benjamin about our project.
Victor is our indispensable solar pump expert who came in from Kenya to help us. 

Pastor Moussa's dog who loved me because I pet her and fed her some of my dinner.
I woke up in the middle of the night when I felt someone come and lie down by my bed.
In the morning I saw that it was the happy dog!

So we figured out a way to install solar-powered submersible pumps that will run for free on the powerful, nearly always present Chadian sun. But we had another problem: in Pastor Moussa’s pump and the pump nearest his house, there was a high iron content, making the water red and bad-tasting (health-wise it isn’t really a bit deal, but it does not encourage water consumption, which is important in a hot sweaty climate). That did not stop Leif from coming up with some ideas for filtration systems. We had a fun time looking up youtube videos of iron filtration systems and I read a few scholarly articles about oxidation of iron. Then people told me that if we had drilled to the deepest level where the merchants drilled, we would have hit the clean water without the iron contamination. And I was frustrated with myself again because they sounded so sure. And they are possibly right, but I started to pray about the water in that well.

Pastor Moussa on top of his water tower, smiling of course!

Fast-forward to this week when speaking with my solar pump installation team about the work in Dourbali. They showed me photos of the water at Pastor Moussa’s house running clear. Victor said, “There’s no more iron. The water tastes great.”

“What happened?” I said. “I thought the water was iron contaminated?” He said, “No, I think it was just a reaction with the galvanized pipes. But we had to remove them and install PVC pipes. Also, with solar pumps, there isn’t as much water just sitting in the hole reacting to the galvanized metal so with the PVC pipes and the solar pump, the water is now clean and iron-free.” So was it the water depth as the people said that caused the iron contamination or was it the galvanized pipes or was it something else? I don’t know. Not all the pumps had iron issues, but all of the pumps had galvanized pipes installed. But the water is clean and clear now. And I will check carefully for iron contamination in future projects because I read all those articles, and now I want to see if it’s possible to invent a low-cost filtration system that uses oxygen in the air to get rid of iron in the water and now I don’t get to/have to experiment in Dourbali.

The children at Pastor Moussa's house with the clean water!

The point that I am trying to make is that I am really screwing up here as I wing it. And if I were in this on my own, this whole thing would be a disaster. And these days as I’m realizing that I can’t do things on my own (and I never could even though I thought I could), I’m grateful that I’m not in control, and I’m not on my own. God had this plan for Dourbali way before I came into the picture. He led Pastor Moussa there. Pastor Moussa was praying for water. My “winging it” system was totally usable by God, thankfully. But now that I’m paying attention a bit more, it’s a lot more fun for me and a tiny bit less stressful. I can mess up small things, but the Big thing is going to go through no matter what I screw up. But it’s also good to learn from my mistakes—do more research before drilling!! Hanging out and having fun with people is great, but ask more and better questions!! When driving through mud, put the car in second gear and L2 and keep the acceleration steady. If the car gets stuck in 4WD, put it in reverse while pounding on the clutch and whispering bad words to yourself QUIETLY because people will sometimes ask you to translate English words you use that they’ve never heard before and that can be awkward.

What your window looks like after you drive through mud

What your face looks like while you're waiting for your colleagues to buy the watermelons already,
after you've had only a small amount of sleep two nights in a row and have driven all over the countryside.

Goats blocking our road! Can't go over them (too bad),
can't go through them, gonna have to herd them to one side
so you can go around them.

And now the Final Discussion. 

It’s toilet paper. Also it’s “new improved” so I guess the previous version of this toilet paper was just called “Discussion.” I’m also appreciating the lone camel silhouetted against the sunset. Possibly he is waiting for you to finish the Final Discussion so you can get back on and keep riding into said sunset…if your phone is charging and you need something to do in the bathroom, this toilet paper is for you.

Joe loves having company in the car when we are driving to work.
Denis and Jack are in from Uganda and Kenya to help us out in the office.
We are so grateful. We are loving us some East Africa here in Chad right now,
even if Denis and Jack say that I spoil Joe. Of course I do! Look at his face!