Quarantine Catch-Up

A couple of months ago, I had a blog post started. I was going to talk about a trip I had made across jagged, muddy roads to Dourbali to report on a bunch of finished water projects. Naturally I went in a car that had no spare tire because I like to live life on the edge. As you know, having recently been in a car accident, I should have been more prudent, but I did make sure to drive slowly, and I had no tire incidents. I did get stuck in the mud twice, but Victor got me out. 

 I was planning to tell you about convincing nomad women to stop for photos, driving out to a new water project that we had worked so hard on and being surrounded by laughing happy people and new babies named after me and after the water, taking a sick old man to the hospital in the back of the truck and giving him my second to last Turkish airlines pillow (it’s the best airline pillow, if you travel Turkish Airlines, please get one for me to replace my devastating loss)…that trip was pretty fun, albeit exhausting.  

Then when I got back to Ndjamena, I found out that I had shingles. Claire was super psyched about this because she correctly diagnosed me, and it’s always nice for her to be reminded that she is a medical genius. I was relieved that it wasn’t one of those crazy African bugs that lays eggs in your skin. So anyway, I had to recover from that… 

I was very proud that I drove through this mess and didn't get stuck.

Pride goes before a fall. I got stuck here twice.

Just sitting and waiting for Victor to come in his truck to pull me out.

Preferable means of transportation in rainy season.

Kadidja shows me how she used to travel for hours to get water,
but now she has it right near her house.

She almost smiled! She and her friends
from another Chadian nomadic tribe, passed by a hand pump
that we upgraded into a solar pump. They all stopped to drink and fill up their jars.

With my friend Fatima and another girl whose name I didn't get.

 

This is the hospital in rural Chad.

More photos at the end! (I have several blog posts' worth of photos)

 Once I recovered from shingles, Joe and Flip suddenly got sick one morning. I called the vet, and tried to figure out what was wrong. The same day, the owners of my house were fixing the cement walls that were cracking and crumbling. They told me that the British vet was in town, and she came over to check on the dogs. If your camel needs medical attention, you definitely want the Chadian vet. If your dog needs medical attention, you want the British one. Katie (British vet) agreed. I don’t actually want to tell this story because it was really painful. Joe survived the sickness, but Flip died. It was really horrible, and I stayed up all night holding Flip while he screamed in misery, and I realized that I was also getting a fever. The next day I was miserable, the dogs were miserable, and I called the vet to come and I called Abiner, Antani’s youngest brother who loves my dogs. He really helped save Joe’s life. He helped give them water, injections, and all the care I couldn’t give because I couldn’t get up. We thought that Flip was going to pull through but he died later that night. I was pretty devastated by it. Flip was such a sweet little dog. I’d trained him to sit and shake hands. He followed me everywhere. Just a lovely sweet boy. I really miss him. But I’m so thankful that Joe is doing better. He’s back to normal now, and I’m down to two dogs. York went back to his owner. Joe and Pika are still with me. Though Moussa continues to call her “Kakilé”, Pika is now the official name of Tiny Puppy. Antani’s kids came over a lot with Abiner to play with the dogs while I was sick, and Pika is now the name that she answers to. 

The last photo I took of my pack of dogs.

I would always bring Flip and Joe to work with me.
Flip jumped in the car any time I opened the door--
was always disappointing for him when I opened it just because I forgot something in there.
I brought Flip and Joe to work and left York and Pika because Flip and Joe will sit quietly.
I think they somehow got rat poison or something while they were at the office,
as York and Pika were fine.

I pulled out the guest mattress for the sick puppies.
Abiner is helping take care of them.
Pika wanted to photo bomb the photo.
I was lying in bed when I took this photo.

Now it's just Pika and Joe and me, but Pika loves Joe
and Joe tolerates Pika and sometimes condescends to play with her.

 As for me, after Flip died, I accepted being miserably sick and just went to bed. Claire stopped by and went against her principles of requiring a malaria test before giving malaria meds. She saw that I was pretty feeble and just gave me the pills. The meds we use here are for 3 days—one tablet in the morning, one at night. It was Wednesday that she gave me the meds. They tend to work fairly quickly, but by Friday when I should have been improving as I was on the last day of pills, I was worse. Claire came back into town, driving through a huge rainstorm, to bring me into the hospital. The storm was so bad, my whole yard was like a swimming pool. I had to wade through water over my ankles to get out to Claire’s car. Once at the hospital (a 20-30 minute miserable bumpy ride for me despite Claire’s best efforts at smooth driving—the road always wins), she took me to the OR where the docs immediately tried to hook me up to an IV. I’ve got pretty pokey veins and it’s usually not hard to get in one, but I was pretty dehydrated, and it took many pokes in both hands before they got one in. They took some blood and did the malaria test and it was positive as soon as it hit the slide. Dr Tom told me that I have a serious case of severe malaria that is resistant to the tablets, so I had to have medicine in an IV. He said I was also very dehydrated and that is why I was suddenly freezing and not because it was a rainy day. I also had symptoms of typhoid, but Tom said there is no point in testing because almost all typhoid tests here always come out positive whether you have it or not. He gave me antibiotics anyway. It’s great that I have a friend like Claire who strongly believes in the efficacy of modern medicine. Left to my own devices, I probably would have tried to treat my illness with the power of my mind and/or some green tea and chocolate. It’s also great having a friend like Claire who lives on the hospital compound. She put me in her spare room, IV bag hooked up to the mosquito net pole. I was there all weekend, and everyone took care of me. A bunch of the MKs on the compound drew me pictures and made get well cards for me. Abiner took care of Joe and Pika. 

Positive malaria test, attempting to smile for the camera.
I was freezing here and Claire went and brought me a pillow and blankets 
from her house because I had to get 4 bags of fluid in me before they would let me leave.

When you're constantly sick or in recovery, you don't run as much.
It's spider season and they staked their claim on my shoes.

Once Joe was better, he desperately wanted to go for his walks.
Here he is getting closer and closer to me to demand I take him.
Unfortunately, I was too sick to stand up and the vet said to make him take it easy
for at least two weeks.

I’m very thankful to have wonderful friends who love me and help me when I’m alone and in need. While sometimes I feel like God doesn’t answer the deepest prayers of my heart, the ones that I bring to Him all day/everyday, I can’t say that He hasn’t consistently provided for my needs during difficult times. It’s a tricky thing because in this world I constantly see people in need around me, and I wonder sometimes—why hasn’t God provided for their needs? He has everything. But just like He used people to provide for my needs, I’m someone He can use to help others. If I’m not paying attention to the needs of others that He puts in front of me, or if I’m too selfish or lazy or caught up in my own comfort, I can miss the needs of others. I’m not saying that God relies on me to do His work-He doesn’t need me, but I think there are consequences to my actions, and that might mean someone doesn’t get the help that they need in particular moment when we were supposed to step in. We have a responsibility as the Church to be the hands and feet of Jesus around the world—if you remember, in the Bible, Jesus’s hands and feet were constantly serving the poor and needy right up until that moment when He gave up His life for all of us. If you say you love Jesus, you don’t get a pass on this. Going to church on Sunday, praying before you eat, reading a few verses of the Bible in the morning—all nice things. But if your life isn’t transformed to serve others in the name of the One who gave us everything, you’re missing it. We are not going to fix this world, not in our lifetime, not ever. This world is broken. But we are supposed to work to bring good, peace, life everywhere we can (i.e. the Gospel, the Good News-in word and deed). A little village in the middle of nowhere Chad got a desperately needed water source because people all over the world obeyed—giving money, moving to a new town and reaching out to the people around them, taking a pay cut to work with a new organization that wants to bring clean and living water to the poor through the local church. But there are many many more villages like this one that haven’t gotten access to water. More people are going to have to step up if we are going to help them too. God can do miracles, and sometimes He does. But miracles should be rare, otherwise they’re just normal, not miraculous. Usually He works through His people to do amazing things. Don’t you want to be a part of seeing amazing things happen? 

They're happy babies!

The village gave us a goat in appreciation of the new well.
Sadly, we ate it the next day for breakfast. It tasted good though.

My little pals.

Getting water from the new well!

Anyway, moving on from the sermon, I’m currently in quarantine in Ethiopia. Initially, there was no required quarantine for traveling to Ethiopia. I waited until the last minute to buy my ticket, and so I had time to add another week to my trip when they added a 7 day quarantine requirement. THIS IS WHY YOU NEVER CAVE TO PRESSURE FROM PLAN-AHEAD PEOPLE. Last minute ticket buying is the only way to go in this uncertain world. Lucky for me, it meant I was on the same flight as Claire from NDJ to ADD. We did covid tests together—Negative! And got to the airport together. We did not get checked in together. At the airport they discovered that I was not a man, in spite of the fact that l’Hôpital Centrale had put “M” instead of “F” on the form. Everyone was concerned. I was informed that Ethiopia would send me right back to Chad because of this grave error. Two MAF pilots were in the airport vouching for me, but no one was swayed until a tired Chadian official came over to check on the hold up. He glanced at the paper and said, “Technically we only need the full name as on the passport and a negative test. We don’t even need the passport number or any other information. Why are you complicating this unnecessarily? We don’t need this. Let her check in.” What an amazing guy. I don’t know his name, but he is a pragmatic genius who should probably be in charge of everything. 

Waiting to pick up our covid tests!

So excited that it was negative, I didn't notice that I had turned into a Male.

In the airport in our matching Chadian flag face masks!

Claire and I planned to watch the latest episode of the Great British Bake Off on the plane, but my computer is old and not working very well and we couldn’t get the sound to work. We had fun talking about everything and eating the less than impressive airline food. Landed in Addis and said our goodbyes…and I went through immigration where no one mentioned quarantining or the fact that I’m actually Female. Claire discovered that many airport shops are open and the internet was working due to the airport not being packed to the gills as it usually is. I’m now staying with Paul Murphy and his lovely wife Almaz, who is treating my cold (unless it’s covid) with ginger lemon tea, while Gladys Hayes who is also in quarantine in the Murphy house along with her husband and two children (it’s a big house), smiles indulgently. Gladys is an actual doctor. But Almaz will heal me with Eritrean/Ethiopian health secrets, lots of love and care, and sheer determination. 

I like to sit in the garden while I'm in quarantine here.
I have to be in the sun though, otherwise it's too cold.

 I may write more after my trip to the field when I am tasked with getting many many photos and videos for Neverthirst. But possibly I will be too busy. If you want to see photos and videos for Neverthirst, follow us on social media because hopefully I’ll get one or two images acceptable for the public. And hopefully our local partners will film me better than I filmed Claire for a 3 minute testimony video that she had to do—I cut off the top of her head in the last minute of the video. She was already stressed about the video, and I ruined her perfect first take. After multiple subsequent takes, we finally got an acceptable one with head fully in the screen, but the people chose the head chop one to put on social media, so I feel bad every time I look at it. I’m sure they did it just to spite me. But it was a great story Claire shared and people really appreciated it. If I get my voice back in the next couple of days, due to the power of ginger lemon tea, I’ll hope to do as well as she did, though her accent is way better than mine (Devon is class).

I drove out to see Nesie's land.

Riding a donkey

Cuddling a little boy named Almi (water).

Good friend with his new solar-powered pump.

Dog bunk beds

Moussa's daughter (red head scarf) is a nurse.
She's training young mothers in proper care of their babies.

Cows like to ride in trucks.

Moussa and friends.

My little namesake, Amina, came by with her mother to visit me.

Some of the men from the village

Two nomad men who were in town visiting. 
They heard about our project and invited Moussa to their village.

Nomad ladies passing by on their way to sell stuff in the market.
They stopped to get water at one of our pumps.

Face tattoos are common in this tribe.

Nesie on his land with the owner who sold it to him.
They're good friends now.

Moussa and Joe shared a seat in my single cabin truck
on the way home from the office. Pika doesn't like the office.

The village elders with Moussa.
The man in the middle started this village.
Many people are related to him.

Selfie time!

Happy Thanksgiving from a Chadian turkey.
Moussa is looking for a female now.
He's got flocks of chickens, ducks, and guinea fowl.
He wants to start with turkeys too.

Genuine African Tourism

Giraffe and Tree

Most of my African tourism has been accidental or on the way to somewhere else. But I finally did a real African tourist activity—I went on safari to Zakouma National Park. But in typical Amanda-fashion, it was a snap decision, based on little to no scheduling information without any input from outside sources. I was also super lazy about finding out anything about the trip. I let Annie run around and do everything because she is a grown up for real often and I mostly just pretend for the sake of societal expectations for women of my age.

In spite of my laissez-faire attitude towards the trip planning part of the program, I made it on the flight! Of course, as it was a friend of mine who was flying the plane, I would have had to be really negligent not to make it. I have the potential to be that negligent, but being raised by Peter Stillman, champion of prompt airport arrival times and Being Organized, has engendered in me a certain respect for airport punctuality that most definitely would not have occurred naturally. In the interest of full disclosure, I was a bit late for Naomi’s pick up from the office, as Joe decided it would be hilarious to make me chase him around the yard instead of getting in the car like a nice dog so I could drop him off at the office where he would spend the next few days. Not wanting him to be eaten by a lion he tried to make friends with, I thought it best to leave him in the big city.

To get to Zakouma National Park from N’djamena you have several options.

Option A) You commit to a very long day of driving, hoping for no break downs, flat tires or impassable road conditions.

Option B) You commit to driving for two days, with a stopover in Bitkine or Mongo probably. You still hope for no  break downs or flat tires, but you have some leeway to deal with those problems. Impassable road conditions are probably going to stop you anyway.

There is a giraffe in the middle of
this photo I took from the plane--
zoom in to see!

Option C) You hire a very expensive private plane to take you. This is kind of what I did. In fact, I jumped on a MAF flight with a MAF pilot and his family, celebrating their last trip to Zakouma before they move on to greener pastures. Literally. They are leaving Chad so pretty much anywhere they go will be greener than here. We were also joined by a South African pilot for a couple of days who was in charge of flying the plane back a bit early to pick up another client from a different town and fly them all over before coming back to pick us up. There was also another South African family who joined us, bringing all their Kruger National Park experience with them. And then there were Annie and Amanda, the tag-a-long ladies, unencumbered by children or husbands. We were also first-time safari ladies. (Note for the Indo people: I shouldn’t count Taman Safari, right? That doesn’t count because it was not real. Though we did have giraffes licking the windows and zebras blocking the road.)

Selfie with giraffes coming out the top of my head

We stayed in the slightly cheaper camp, which was actually quite nice. Annie and I shared a room with an enthusiastically loud fan that would have drowned out the loudest bar musician in the world. I wished I could have taken it home with me, though I sometimes worry about those kind of fans shaking themselves loose from the ceiling and falling on me in the middle of the night, maiming me forever.

Meals were included in the accommodation because there is no where else to buy food there. I know that French cuisine gets lots of accolades, but I’m not a huge fan. There is not enough spice in it and way too many creams and sauces with varying bland tastes and slimy textures. Annie nobly ate all her food, setting a good example for the children, but I was on vacation sort of and I felt free to refuse to eat salads dripping with mayonnaise-based sauces and covered in sardines, aka cat food. I also don’t like hard boiled eggs because they look like an eyeball and smell like a fart. I did say this in front of the children, which probably wasn’t very nice of me, but the youngest child learned how to say a new word (eyeball, not fart—he’ll get that one later as he has an older brother), and it’s always good to expand the vocabulary of young children.  At any rate, they didn’t bring me along because I would be a good influence on the children. That’s why they invited Annie. She is to blame for me. So indirectly it is her fault that I got some children in trouble for throwing rocks into the crocodile pond. No crocodiles were injured in the game. I just wanted to see how the green water would sploosh.

Fellow salad-hating TCK and a baby giraffe carcass

Enough about the accommodations and setting examples for children—we went to see the animals! And we weren’t disappointed. The best time to go to Zakouma is during the dry season. In the rainy season all the bushes and trees and elephant grass are good hiding places and the animals can find more remote sources of water to stay away from the few intrepid tourists that make it all the way out there to see them. February is in the middle of dry season, and usually not supposed to be hot. Hot season came early this year, though, and I’m ok with it.

We piled into an open vehicle and drove around the park several times a day looking for animals. We saw plenty of giraffes, lions, and even several elephants every day. We also saw ostriches, crocodiles, buffalo, baboons, civet cats, genets, mongoose, warthogs, and hyenas. And more, but I can’t remember the names of all the birds because there were a lot of them and they aren’t as exciting to photograph as lions.

This is what our open car looked like.
Lions could have jumped in if they were hungry.
We had snacks. 

It was fun driving around and looking at animals. Everyone was supposed to be really quiet so we didn’t scare them away in spite of the fact that the car was bouncing around. I think it could have been a parental rule so that children had to whisper-yell for their parents to give them snacks.

Annie was a bit perturbed by the nearness of various packs of lions eating their prey. Once when we drove past a lion on her side of the car, she dove into my lap, thinking I could protect her, I guess. I did. She is still alive today. I may have also traumatized her a bit taking her for a walk near our camp to the crocodile pond. We got a bit too close and one jumped out at us. There was screaming. We found an alternative route back to the camp. It turns out, crocodiles can climb rocks, though I’d assured Annie they could not minutes prior to the attack. After that experience she refused to come on the walking tour, though we had a guide with a gun.

Wildlife even in the bathrooms!
I can't get away from bats.

I really enjoyed walking around in the early morning. We never saw as many animals early in the morning as we did in the late afternoon and evening drives, but we did get to walk up to some lions eating a dead baby giraffe. We passed by some on their way to the kill and they weren’t happy to see us. They growled a bit and I noticed that the guide’s hand clutched his gun a bit, but sadly, there were no exciting attacks on the walk either.

In conclusion, you should go visit Zakouma National Park. It’s even better than Kruger National Park, according to the South Africans, because there are no rules! (OK, so they didn’t say that it was better, but they did say that there were more rules at Kruger, including staying on the road at all times and signing up a year in advance for a walking tour.)

Chad=Freedom

 And now please enjoy a selection of terrible photos I took because mostly I let everyone else with fancy cameras take nice photos. Anyway, why do you need nice photos of lions eating baby giraffes? That's why we have the internet!

Buffalos. Apparently one of the Big 5, but kind of boring.

Intrepid Walking Tour Group.

Walking Tour Guide with Gun

We interrupted the lions eating this giraffe carcass
during our walking tour. They left us to photograph
and then came back after we left.
We saw them again later when we were in the car a couple hours later.
It takes a long time to eat a baby giraffe apparently.
Interestingly, they were fine sticking around with their food
when we were in the car, but they left quickly when we were on foot.

Close up.

Hyena

Deer thing. We saw lots of the fancy deer/antelope.
I'm less excited by these various types of exotic cattle.

Giraffes are cool though.

Elephants are always cool

Lion. Ferocious. Violent. Yes.

Back seat selfie

TCKs become friends easily

Eating some South African sausage together. Good stuff.

Two giraffes. We saw a lot of them. They're cool
so your instinct is always to take photos.

Biawak/monitor lizard. Less cool because I've seen these a lot in Indo
and I've eaten them too. They taste gross. But slimy French salad is worse.

Lion under bush. She hates tourists.

Pregnant and cranky and not craving weird stork bird things.

The broken road where I confidently told Annie that crocodiles can't
climb rocks. Did I know this for sure? No. But I really convinced myself that it was true.
Then a crocodile jumped out at us from under the broken bit of road.
Annie doesn't trust me anymore with my Animal Facts.

She's smiling here because we haven't yet been attacked by crocodiles.

I made her take a million photos of me standing in elephant footprints,
which is what I'm doing here, to show the size. 

Here I'm sitting in a footprint

Here is my selfie in an elephant footprint.
You can't tell that I'm in a footprint though,
and that's why I made Annie take all the other photos.
Elephants are big. Sorry my photos are terrible.
Google "Zakouma National Park" and enjoy some photos taken by real photographers.