Summertime at the Lake

This lake is not in Alabama

Once when I was in Alabama visiting the Neverthirst head office, I went with my boss and his family to visit the lake where they like to vacation occasionally. This was an interesting cultural experience for me involving RVs, fancy boats, and colloquial overuse of the past participle. I had fun swimming with my boss’s cool kids, though I felt a bit out of place since I’d forgotten to wear my American flag bikini with cowboy boots. For this most recent trip to Lake Chad, I again forgot my American flag bikini and cowboy boots, but I brought my hijab. Before leaving I was warned of the surrounding dangers by security people, who I’ve mentioned before often overestimate the dangers of certain places in an attempt to make their jobs seem especially relevant. I mean - but in fairness to them, it IS important to think about job security. As for me, I pay attention to warnings sometimes…when they don’t interfere with what I want to do. At any rate, I was encouraged to wear extra clothing, so I packed a long-sleeved shirt and my lifai/thobe (See, Mom—I can take advice!), but being the shameless exhibitionist that I am, I didn’t put the head-covering on until just before we drove into town. Once there, I noticed plenty of other women without head coverings and almost no one with long-sleeves. I took my cues from the natives and opted for shorter sleeves, helpful in the sticky muggy Lake side weather. I would have really appreciated an American flag bikini and a jet ski, but when I convinced some new friends to drive us down to the Lake shore we got in trouble with a local soldier. “This is a military area! Don’t you know?” (We did.) “You have to tell us when you are coming. We could have shot you!” (They didn’t.) Most of this conversation happened while we “yes-yes”ed him and continued to take lots of selfies. It’s important to use soothing words to people who carry guns.

Lake Chad--full of islands, at least on this side.

Herve's chosen pose with our driver, Ali Adam, photo-bombing.

The Assessment Team!

Lake Chad from behind where we were staying. You're not
supposed to be out after dark, so don't worry: we were just behind our
back yard.

The point of this trip was to assess the situation around Lake Chad, where there has been a large influx of displaced people, fleeing the islands of the Lake because of Boko Haram violence in the area. People are living in makeshift houses with some small support from various NGOs. Many of them are also suffering from recent rainy season flooding, which has destroyed some of the crops in the area. IAS would like to do some projects there (and possibly Neverthirst too), so Herve and I went up to check it out. (Now, when you’re reading this, I’m worried that you’re pronouncing his name like ‘Hurve,’ rhyming with ‘curve.’ But it’s actually pronounced ‘Er-vay’. It’s French, guys. Come on. And no, I’m not going to put that accent on the last letter because it takes too long, and I don’t feel like it.)

Sometimes camels ride in cars.

So bright and early Tuesday morning (“Definitely, I’ll be there before 7am,” said the driver who came almost an hour after that), we headed out. I love road trips and getting out of the office and visiting new places and large bodies of water, so I was in high spirits. The first part of the trip bumps over potholes and involves much dodging of livestock. I wasn’t driving this time, so I could just admire the fuzzy animals, but my most recent experience with donkeys has made me distrust them for life. I gasped once, à la my mother when my father is driving, after a particularly close shave with an unconcerned ass (literal use of the word, don't freak out, Mom), but after that, I just put on my seatbelt and stopped paying attention to the cattle, unless they were camels because camels are super cool.

Some photos from the various travels:

Riding camels makes people happy!
Or maybe being photographed by drive-by foreigners...

Run, run little donkey and you can catch up!

Love this father and son outing. :)

Camel butts.

Mirror selfie!

I also had a revelation: I should probably make it a point to wear extra sunscreen even when I’m anticipating a day in the car. Because often I will convince people to open the windows so I can stick my arm out and wave at the camels. Because of white girl privilege and Chadian chivalry, I’m usually forced into the front seat. I don’t mind this because I can see better where we are going and sometimes get good pictures. I usually end up with one arm slightly pinker than the other, though. This recent trip, I could have gotten really sunburnt if I hadn’t grown up on the equator, building up a resistance to prolonged exposure to UV rays. But even I can burn if I’m standing for hours in a pile of sand trying to dig out the car. Because since the second part of the trip involves off-roading it through deep piles of sand, that definitely happened.

I'd like to thank Herve for this photo of me taking a photo of the car.

Had to let some of the air out of the tires in an attempt to
wiggle free, but it didn't work and he let out too much, so we
had to change a tire when we finally got out.

Villagers and kind passerby stop to help push.

Posing for Herve.

While digging under the car with both hands, reminiscent of a dog in a flower garden, I managed to burn the top of my arm on the “something” part of the car that apparently gets really hot when stuck in the sand. Don’t worry: I’m not going to include any gross photos of bubbling skin, but here is a photo of my arm covered in toothpaste. “Why?” you ask. Because Herve says that’s what you do for a burn. He grabbed his from the top of his bag and squirted it all over my arm before I could protest. Not sure it made much of a difference, but the last scab just fell off yesterday and now I have only a shiny pink patch of new skin.

After I took this photo, I started helping.

Toothpaste heals everything.

Somehow, after dodging camels and potholes and scraping through the sand, we made it to Bol. We spent the next two days in meetings and searching for fish to eat (Herve’s request—he ate it for breakfast one morning too).  We popped over to Bagasola for a bit too and saw gazelles and monkeys on the way. I was hoping for elephants (Herve saw some back in February in the area), but I knew it was a long shot, as rainy season means animals don’t have to go near humans to find water.

Lake fish. This one was my favorite.
I think that is because of the chili powder.
Anything is good with that stuff.

I have eaten more fish in this desert country that I have in
my entire life, and twice I lived by the beach.
But these Chadians love their river fish--
or in this case, their lake fish.

I uploaded the wrong photo where you can't really see
the gazelle antlers, but it took me several hours to get these photos up,
so just look up gazelle antlers on the internet, lazy person.

We had some good meetings with other NGOs and UN agencies in the area. We also made sure to take some time to talk to the local population, including government officials and health practioners. My favorite time was speaking with local IDP (internally displaced people) communities. I took notes in three languages and learned a couple of words in local tribal languages. People love when you make the effort to learn something in their language. There was screaming and laughter, so good
times are possible even without a bikini and a jet ski.

Talking to IDPs, mostly in Arabic. Translating the numbers
into French for Herve, who speaks decent Arabic,
but gets confused with the chiffres.

Some of my notes. If you can't tell which is
Arabic and which is English or French,
that's normal. My writing is always terrible in every language.

The health center worker plus me. Thankfully the hijab is
hiding most of the car hair.

Herve and I spent our evenings being eaten alive by mosquitos and watching French dubbed movies on his computer until his battery died. We occasionally had moments of electricity during the day, but nothing during the night. We watched a movie entitled “Le Prince de New York,” which is the one where Eddie Murphy is an African prince looking for a bride. I have never seen it in English, though I know it is a famous movie. And I can’t remember the English title.  I do remember that Herve and I had a long conversation about how the female lead in the movie had a pretty face, but was way too skinny to be truly beautiful. “Amanda,” he said to me, “if you gain some weight, you could marry a Chadian man. We like to know that we are holding a woman when we have our wife in our arms.” So…I guess I better eat all of these gummy “sedans” that Leif brought me—Sveriges mest köpta bil! (Go find a Swede to translate.)

One of the evil spiders lurking in my room.
Fortunately, we had no electricity so I wasn't trying
to turn on the light. Herve killed him. Perks of traveling
with a man.

In conclusion, I was writing this in between writing the Needs Assessment and editing the proposal and discussing various aspects of the trip with Herve. Everything is done now but the question remains: will the internet be strong enough to post this?

Please enjoy the following photos that prove to you that occasionally my life is pretty entertaining:

Camel parking lot in Bol.

Flooding in village. Malaria is a huge problem right now.

Cool kid who rode up and insisted I take his photo.
I think it should be published.

Fortunately, Herve captured this whole moment on camera too.

Chad and America--international community.
People mostly like us here.

Selfie with the driller's daughter and niece.

My new friend, Paluma, a Kanembu IDP from the islands.

Firewood for sale.

This migrant village was moving to a new location.
We passed by them on the road and Herve bought some of the mats
they have rolled up on their heads.

I wish I could pull off this nose ring look, but the last time
I pierced my cartilage,  my ear swelled up and I had to get the earring chopped
out by a doctor. I really don't want to risk that happening
to my nose, which is already big enough.
Anyway, I like this Kanembu style.

Testing the water quality from some locally drilled bore holes,
no need for IAS machines, the terrain here is much easier to drill.
Sometimes the water is salty if not drilled well.
This water tasted fine to me--not salty at all.

Again, Herve photographing me photographing others.
But I like these little girls' smiles. :)

A funky new kind of hand pump, designed by an American man
who lived here for years, but caught some disease
and went back to America and died.
Legacy still strong in Chad, though!

I'm going to make this photo large because I love it.
I love how excited all these serious-looking men are to see their photo.
And I love that guy sleeping in the background.

Yeah. That's about right-Amanda talking to a bunch of men.

Herve to capture this important moment.

The final really important moment captured by Herve:
me picking the burrs out of my skirt after a bathroom break.
In the desert, if the only tree around has burrs, you still
squat behind it to pee because desperate times...

J'ai fini! Enfin!

Faking It

So I was in West Darfur this weekend visiting projects and people, eating lots of sand, and collecting stories for this blog. I mentioned before, but for foreigners to be allowed to travel outside of Khartoum, we need special government permission. For the Darfur states, you need permission to travel to the state and then permission to travel around the state. You also need police escorts to travel outside of the main town or you risk being abducted by various peoples with grudges against various other peoples who like to use foreigners as bargaining tools and/or sources of income. As soon as I arrived in Geneina, I dumped off my stuff at the guest house and headed over to the local government office to register my permits and arrange for the police escort, and that's where this story starts...

Geneina--it's a nice little dusty desert down

Note: Words in italics were spoken in Arabic.

In my thobe, ready to Darfur

Majid: When we go inside to talk to the governmental officials, don’t speak any Arabic. Just let them talk to me. If they think you speak Arabic, they will ask lots of questions.

Me: OK. I will only speak English….starting now.

So we went into the tin-walled office/people oven, and sat down in chairs that looked fancy, but had clearly defined butt-imprints from where many people before us had sat and waited for hours until those chairs would never be able to forget them. I will also never be able to forget the chair that I sank into…

Walking in was pretty awkward for me because in Arab culture there are a plethora of greetings that one must give upon entrance, each of which has a specific answer. Allow me to give you some examples that, if you don’t speak Arabic, will mean absolutely nothing to you. But it will be cathartic for me.

Person 1: Salam 3alaykum

Person 2: 3alaykum salam

Person 1: Allah ya5tik al-3afiya

Person 2: Allah ya3fik.

Person 1: Alhamdulilah 3asalama

Person 2: Allah yasalmak

Person 1: Keyf halak?

Clay pots for storing water--they keep it nice and cool

Person 2: Tamam wallah… And then at this point everyone is talking all over each other and it doesn’t matter what you say, but it should probably be a bunch of questions as to the other person’s health and the well-being of his family. You should also be slapping his right shoulder with your left hand while gripping his right hand with your right hand and telling him how great you and your family are—the Sudanese way is to say you are all 100% great (miya-miya).

I wasn’t sure if someone who doesn’t speak Arabic would know those things, so I just decided to completely feign ignorance of the whole ritual. I know that plenty of Arabic-less foreigners at least know “salam 3alaykum,” but if I said that with correct pronunciation, would it give me away? But then it feels bad mispronouncing something when I’m not, say, pretending to be an Australian speaking Indonesian or something like that … And you know how sometimes all you say is two words and then people go off about how well you speak their language—even if all you knew was those two words? I’d just been told by the lady checking me into my WFP flight that morning that my Arabic was really good and she was shocked because none of the Americans she knows who speak any Arabic can pronounce things correctly—which is actually pretty unfair, as I know plenty of Americans who speak excellent Arabic. I could name names, but I don’t want to embarrass them…(one of them, we'll call her "Emily" probably just got advanced-mid on her most recent Arabic test). Of course, the ones who don’t speak it well are often more memorable. I still remember a little blonde southern belle in my Arabic class at the University of Memphis who learned how to say “I eat” in Arabic, and excitedly exclaimed to the rest of the class, “Ya’ll! We’re speakin’ Ay-Rab-Ik!” She was also the one who informed us that her boyfriend, Musa Habibi, should not cause us any undue concern. “Ya’ll, he’s Palestinian, but ya’ll, he’s not a terrorist. I know. I asked him. I said, ‘Musa Habibi, are you a terrorist?’ and he said, ‘No.’” So there was that… and I guess if she’d been my only experience with Americans speaking Arabic, then I can understand the flight attendant’s surprise. I, personally, have no excuse for not speaking Arabic, having lived in 6 Arabic-speaking nations, though I have never had a non-terrorist Palestinian boyfriend either and I feel like that should be an advantage too…

Enjoying the view with Tahany

Pretending not to speak a language that you do speak fairly well, is not as easy as it seems. First, I had to really concentrate and not answer questions about myself that I understood, especially ones where I felt the need to defend myself (i.e. Why didn’t you get your permission renewed? Answer I wanted to give: we did, look at the form, moron!—probably a good thing I wasn’t talking…). The other thing goes back to the Arabic greeting question-and-answer issue, and not giving the answer to the questions feels like singing a song, but leaving out the last note. To relieve my feelings, I spent the rest of our wait-time secretly texting a bunch of my friends in Arabic, carefully hiding my phone from others sitting nearby.

We ended up sitting around for about an hour or so because the guy we needed to talk to wasn’t there. If we left for lunch, there was no guarantee he’d be there when we got back, and the next day was the weekend, and we’d miss them completely if we didn’t finalize our plans that day. When the guy finally got there, he was really polite and friendly and the first thing he asked me was, “Do you speak any Arabic?”

Donkey carrying water-system 1

I said, “Small.” I don’t even think I really perjured myself, because it is a grammatically incorrect not-really-an-answer to his question. It’s like if someone asked you if you like to eat chicken and you said, “Bob.” It’s not lying – it’s just nonsense.

As we walked out the door, I did decide to say, “Shukran.” I thought it would be something that my character (I was playing the part of ‘random foreign girl working for INGO in Sudan’) would actually know. But Majid gave me a look…so maybe I was wrong…

Donkey carrying water-system 2

Anyway, as soon as we walked out the gate, Majid turned to me in great relief (English isn’t his favorite), and started chattering back at me in Arabic about the whole ordeal and about what we were going to eat for lunch when we got back to the office. I was also relieved as I grabbed on to the handle of the truck to heave myself into the cab (all these NGO cars are so dang tall with their four-wheel drive tires). I was thinking that this no-Arabic thing could come back to bite us in our chair-imprinting butts. I mean, what if the nice man in charge asks some other IAS person about me and they talk about how I speak Arabic (it’s my one defining feature)? But then I found out from Majid that another guy from the same office would be joining us on our trips out of town, and I knew I wouldn’t be able to keep the cat in the bag at that point. I was planning to try to convince the guy that I learned Arabic quickly on Friday during prayer time (a miracle!), but then Majid said it wouldn’t really matter. The main reason he didn’t want me to speak Arabic at the government office was because he thought it would mean that we would get stuck there longer because everyone would want to talk to me. Since we were there for an hour and a half anyway, I don’t know that it would have made much difference, but I do sometimes like to show off, and I usually try to make a point of being extra-charming to security officers because you never know when that will come in handy…and that can be time-consuming.  

The important thing is that we made it out alive, with a police escort lined  up for our next two trips, and no slip-ups from me, the random foreign girl working for an INGO in Sudan who never broke character (until the very end when I said "shukran").

 This may be my favorite awkward photo--the man moved in while I was still talking to the lady.
Does this count as a photo bomb? Technically, I think I was the one not paying attention to the camera man.

Sign at the Khawaja Store: For breakfast, I'd like some sausaga and egges,
and for lunch - a purger and a bottle of carponated water, please.