When Animals Attack 2

Can you spot the difference in the two photos?
Me neither.

I had just achieved the perfect introvert day. For 24 hours, I had neither seen nor spoken to another human person. I mean, there were some whatsapp conversations, but no phone calls, no visitors. I watched TV shows illegally downloaded on my computer while reading a book at the same time and eating all the junk food in my house. I also made up a creative new recipe for stuffed lasagna noodles I had left in my house that included enough red peppers to make me cough and sneeze through the whole cooking part of the meal prep. I did some other exciting things too, and eventually ended up in bed with my newly fixed AC slightly working, but mostly blocking out the sounds of the music blaring from the nearby bars.  I also took some sleeping aid meds that someone gave me, just to test the possibility of sleeping through the night. I discovered a few hours later that the medicine does not work.

Doesn't that look delicious?
Warning: if you don't like spicy food, don't try to eat it. You will die.
Also, I've started sending photos to my mom whenever I cook dinner for myself.
It gives her a bit of hope for my survival. 

I mean, if the medicine was really making me sleep, shouldn’t I sleep through fluttering whooshing sounds in my room? It wasn’t super loud like the mice in my house in South Sudan who chewed through plastic containers to get to food. In fact, first I thought it was a piece of paper, loosened by the fan and the AC that had flown off the wall where I had duct-taped it. I heard it crash into the wall over my head and looked up to see if the paper I thought had fallen was still there…and it was. So then I chalked it up to some weird mechanical AC noise.

Since childhood, I’ve had this fear of being stabbed in the back while I’m sleeping, which actually, wouldn’t be a bad way to go because you’re dead before you know it is coming, and anticipation is always the worst part. But to protect myself from sneaky night-time back-stabbers, I usually sleep with something behind my back. But when I’m concerned that there is a serial back-stabbing killer in my house, I lie flat on my back, for protection. And then I think of how I should be sleeping with that giant kitchen knife I never use in bed with me—just in case I need to fight back. But this time I knew there was no one in the house with me because I would have heard the doors open (they’re loud) and there is no other way to get into my house, unless you remove the bars from the windows (also loud) or, in this case, you come in through AC.

Me, in my night-time tiara, sleeping on my back,
kitchen knife ready by my side for protection.
I am thinking about growing out my bangs, though...

 It was while lying on my back thinking about knives, that I noticed a big black thing fly right above my over-sized nose, causing me to yell and flip on the light. At least now I knew what I was dealing with. And I have precedent for this, so I knew what I needed to do—run out of the room screaming. This I accomplished, slamming the door behind me and then standing in my living room trying to decide my next move. Did I want to sleep on the couch for the rest of the night? If I did that, how much damage would the evil bat do in my bedroom before I could get someone to come remove him? Technically, I could have removed him myself, but I’m not good at killing vertebrates.  Invertebrates I can do, as they are more easily smashed with a shoe and they don’t have gross blood. Still, as a female, I believe that if there is a male around, the rules of chivalry call for him to take on the role of hunter AND gatherer (yes, clean up that dead squished body and flush it, that’s a part of your job!). I, in turn, promise to scream and jump around and make him feel like a true hero. But with bats, rats, and other mammals, I’m not even going to try. I feel like earning less money overall than the men, having monthly periods, and the anticipation of menopause and other unfortunate side effects of having two X chromosomes means that I get to find someone to rid my house of rodents.

So standing in my living room at 2am, I considered my options. Calling my colleagues in the wee hours of the morning to drive over to my house to kill a bat seemed like an imposition. I do have two perfectly good night guards who sleep through the night outside the house, in spite of the loud music from the bars, who theoretically would notice if someone jumped our fence to try to steal the tires off my car. I thought it would be a good time for at least one of these guys to earn his keep by helping me out. The problem is that I was in an unfortunate state of undress and my clothes were in the room with the bat. This is why you should never put away your laundry. Sadly for me, basking in the glow of the perfect introvert day, I’d mustered up enough energy to actually put all my clothes away, something that rarely happens. Now I didn’t have any lying in a pile on the couch, as I usually do. Let this be a lesson to you: tidiness can be dangerous. Obviously, though, I can’t go down to the guards without being mostly covered because requesting their help to remove a bat from my room at 2am is already going to raise questions about my morality. "So…she’s asking for me to help remove a bat from her room at 2am? Riiiiiiiight….she clearly wants me. We all know foreign girls are easy…"

So I took a deep breath, ran back into my room, grabbed my sarong, ran back out and slammed the door again. I made myself decent and then went downstairs to break my 24+ hours of non-human contact to humiliate myself by asking a man I only slightly know (I can’t remember his name even) to come up to my bedroom and hunt a bat.

A rough sketch of the bat that I did from memory

I flopped as loudly as possible down the stairs in my flipflops, hoping to give them some warning. Then I stood awkwardly by my car, willing them to wake up, using the power of my mind. I think it worked (I’m so powerful!) because one rolled over and blinked a few times while I asked in a pathetic voice if he could come up and help me kill a giant bat in my bedroom. In the interest of full disclosure, I wasn’t 100% sure of its size, but the larger the bat, the greater the need for outside help, clearly. He repeated back to me what I said a few times, clarifying the animal and its size, “Une chauve-souris? Une grosse chauve-souris?”* Then he confirmed that he would come up and help but continued to sit there, looking at me pointedly. “Right, so, I’ll just go up and wait…” And he put on pants and a shirt before coming up to my house, like a gentleman.

See? I even spelled it right.
You probably think I grew up in American now.

Meanwhile, I grabbed my broom and this spider web cleaner thing that I never wanted, but the ladies insisted I get as a crucial part of my house-keeping tool kit. It looks like a fuzzy koosh ball on a long stick. It’s for cleaning spider webs out of the corners of the ceiling. I maintain that a broom could do that just as well, and refused to get one until they asked me one day while I was preoccupied and handing out money indiscriminately, and now I have a spider-web-cleaning-koosh-ball-on-a-stick. Years from now if I ever have children and if they ever learn how to read and decide that their mother’s life isn’t too horribly un-cool to read about, it might cause problems that they learn they can get money out of me if I am suitably distracted. My nieces and nephews have learned to open their eyes wide, tilt their heads and smile, and they get everything they want out of me. I’m hoping I don’t have children with those powers.

Anyway, I had the sticks as protection from the bat, and also, if it should come up, the night guard. NG came into my house (well-lit, all doors open) and I showed him into the bedroom where we spent some time looking around for the bat. I think we probably only looked for a couple of minutes, but I was a bit panicky that we wouldn’t find it, and NG would get a different idea of why I invited him up in the middle of the night. I also knew that the Thing was there, and would torment me for the rest of my life if I didn’t get him (I'm pretty sure bats are immortal like vampires).

While running around the bedroom, beating at the curtains and the backpack on top of the closet, I finally noticed a leathery wing peaking out of the top drawer of my dresser, which happens to be where I keep my underwear and bikinis. The drawers don’t close right. Dressers are inferior pieces of furniture, they never seem to close right unless you open every drawer and close them all at the same time while jiggling the bottom drawer’s handle with your foot—not worth it. So in my house, drawers always remain slightly open. The Bat had taken advantage of this and decided to burrow in that drawer.

The action

 Once I noticed him, I jumped back, while screaming and backing out of the room. In a concerning turn of events, the NG also squealed and jumped back, not giving me much confidence in his ability to conquer the Bald Mouse. “Tu as peur?!” I asked him, and then insisted, “You can’t be afraid of it! You have to kill it!” He affirmed his bravery and took the broom and spider koosh and began whacking at the bat. The bat scrambled deeper into my drawers (both meanings of the word apply—Dad, that joke is for you), and the NG poked around, trying to pinch the bat in between the broom handles to get him out. I respect that move, not wanting to touch the creepy thing myself. (Bats have rabies.) I hid in the living room behind my yoga mat, which I intended to use to protect me from injured flying bats, dripping blood. I know about the puddles of blood that leak out of bats, grâce à Felix who loved leaving half-chewed carcasses around the house for my enjoyment. I heard lots of thwapping and hacking and bat noises (sounds like the sneeze of a jackal) and when I peaked around the door, I noticed my undergarments hanging out of the furniture. NG is probably wondering why I have so many sports bras and why most of my underwear is black. God knows he has seen it all now.

After about 15 minutes, he came out with the dead bat pinched between the sticks. He dropped it on the floor, and it clearly didn’t move—a good sign. Also, there was minimal blood. I guess not being chewed on by a cat keeps most of the blood in the body. NG nicely swept it over the balcony to the ground below and he must have generously cleaned up (CHIVALRY) because I didn’t see it when I left the house the next day.

The dead body. It looks small because it
was taken from a safe distance.

I went back to bed, but I have been hesitant to use the AC since then, as I’m pretty sure that’s how the bat got in. AC is dangerous, people. Sleeping with a frozen water bottle is good enough for me.

Clearly not bald.
Definitely ready to eat your head in one bite.

-->

* Interesting fact: in French a bat is a “bald mouse.” I don’t know why, as they both have equal amounts of hair in my experience (which is extensive), but whatever. Also, if you speak French, you will notice that we spoke of the bat as “grosse” (fat) not “grande” (big). But again, whatever. He said “grosse” first, and I thought it worked on a bi-lingual French and English level.

Bats and Cats

In sixth grade, I found baby bat on the wall at the school. He was alive. I decided I was going to keep him forever as my best friend, but I had to give him to Mr. Clark while we went to P.E. to play some dumb sport like baseball. I’m pretty sure it was baseball because none of my competitive instinct was aroused during that particular P.E. session. Instead I was planning how I was going to feed the bat with an eye dropper. Also, I was plotting how I was going to make sure that Kristen knew that it was going to be MY bat and not hers, because I think she was misunderstanding that fact. After what seemed an interminable amount of time (because baseball time is longer that Earth time—it steals years from your life span while you hang out in left field waiting for no one to hit you the ball because none of the kids in my sixth grade class were really devoted to the sport), we went back to our classroom to find—oh horrors! Mr. Clark had formaldehyde-ed my new best friend.  Permanently petrified in the fetal position, my fuzzy baby bat was now suspended in a jar of opaque liquid. I was devastated and furious, and if my mother only knew how close she came to having to tell me that she would not allow me to bottle feed a baby bat. Or if, on the very off-chance she had let me keep it, how close my father would have come to being the one to have to find a way to dispose of its dead body. Neither of them had to fulfill these parental duties because I was denied my pet bat in the name of Science. But in honor of this event, after I read the Harry Potter books a few years later, I decided that I would have a bat instead of an owl, and he would carry messages for me and be different from all the other boring wizards, and he would be called “Marley” because that is a cool name for a bat.

My dream. Note: Marley was not from "Bob" but from
the ghosts of the bad lawyers in Muppet's Christmas Carol.
"We're Marley and Marley, our hearts are painted black!"
which I thought was a catchy tune, and a great name for a bat.

Fast-forward a few years, decades, and I have done my fair share of disposing of bat bodies. Or unfair share of it. And I have left more to Antani who does not deserve that at all, but she is a mother and is less disgusted by horrible things than I am.  Why am I cleaning up bat bodies? Do I have a child with a desire for strange pets that she will inevitably accidentally kill? No. I have a borrowed cat with the malicious instincts of a hunter. He loves catching bats and frogs and lizards outside and bringing them inside to munch on. He also loves letting them go when they are half-masticated but maintaining a small spark of life and hope for a future free of cats. If he lets them go inside, it is harder for them to get away, but it is possible for them to get caught in the furniture and die. This is what I try to avoid. Also, he has a horrible habit of not finishing his food. Apparently, he’s never heard about starving cats in Africa who would LOVE to eat the rest of that lizard leg he left on the floor. Instead I have to sweep it up. 

Once I saw him chewing on a lizard. It was firmly in his mouth. I yelled at him and picked him up to fling him out the door, and just before he was out, he let go of the lizard so that it ran in the house and behind the kitchen counters. I KNOW he did it on purpose to be mean. But that lizard was stuck and he couldn’t get it,  and he stayed in the kitchen yowling in front of the cabinet for hours until I got tired of it and pushed them out so he could catch the lizard. And I threw them both out again.

 

Three of Antani's kids who came over to hang out while she
working. Sefora (in blue) was terrified of me at first until
I gave her lots of candy. Then we became friends.
The others liked me right away, and I STILL gave them candy.
Except for the baby. She will get hers later though.
Aren't they super-cute???

I really hate it when he catches things and brings them inside because I really don’t like to see animals suffering, and I don’t like to clean up bloody carcasses, and I don’t like the gross crunching sound he makes while he is eating animal bones. The other morning, he came inside with a creature. I was not surprised at this, but I was annoyed.

The previous day my door lock had broken, and instead of calling a professional, we decided (myself, Marie-Françoise, and Narcisse) that we would spend the next two evenings hacking into the door ourselves to fix it. Well, they did. I watched and handed them tools after looking up the French word for those tools on my phone dictionary. We all failed. Except me. I know what a tournevis is now. But the door wouldn’t close. I didn’t worry about that. The cat had been behaving nicely recently and not doing much hunting. I didn’t bother to block the cat flap on the door. When I ignored his 4:45am yowling for food, he took matters into his own claws and went and got his own. Fine. Antani was coming that day, and I figured that she could help me deal with it, but he brought the thing right by my bed and was chewing loudly, and it wasn’t even 5am yet, and I still had another hour to sleep. So I grabbed my pillow and moved into the living room to sleep on the couch. I was not happy with this arrangement, but I didn’t want to fight because fighting wakes you up, and I still wanted to sleep.

I must have had about 5 minutes of shut-eye when suddenly something landed on my head!!! Screaming and jumping up, I dislodged the cat and the Thing from hair. They moved on into the kitchen where I got this photo:

The cat just sat there and looked at it, and it wasn't moving at all.
So you can see how it is impossible to tell if it is alive or dead.

But, as you can see, this bat seems to have no visible injuries, in spite of the horrible noises the cat had been making while chewing on it in my room. And clearly, it had been recently flying. So I stood there a few moments, taking photos for my nephews and nieces (they were impressed) and trying to decide if it really was dead so that I could sweep it out of the kitchen. After a few minutes of internal debating, I decided that I wasn’t brave enough to find out and risk a bat flying in my face. Bats carry rabies, did you know? And I don’t think my rabies vaccination is up-to-date. So I grabbed the keys, which were fortunately on the table in the living room, and exited that middle door (which had been closed) and ran for Narcisse, who I found in the act of rolling up his bed and getting up. Lovely, nice, wonderful hero that he is, he cheerfully agreed to come see if the bat was alive or dead and get him out of my house (dead or alive). He went in the house, walked towards the bat and found that he was very much alive, as he flew at Narcisse’s face (proving that I made the right decision not to test it myself) and then flew around my house making horrible barking noises that I could hear a little bit over my screaming from behind the screen door where I could watch from safety. Narcisse bravely trapped him over the pile of Naomi’s DVDs that people have returned to her and I haven’t put away yet. He held him by the wings and brought him outside of the house to where I was hiding.

“Do you want me to give him to the cat?”

“No!” I said, not wanting the cat to win this dispute after chasing his prey into my hair. MY HAIR. “Just let him go.”

“Well, he’s dead,” said Narcisse. “I’ll just throw him away.” (He did not add “far from here” but I could see that he was feeling concerned for me in my fragile state, and I think he did.)

It was 5:20am. All of this happened so fast. And there was no more sleep for Amanda.

Of course everyone enjoyed this story of my suffering. Look at this message I got from a friend in Sudan after I told him what happened to me:

Also, I don’t know how I got this reputation as being fearless. Sure, I don’t worry too much about driving roads where I may be hijacked, but there are plenty of things that I am afraid of beside being attacked by a bat and a cat in my own house. I’m afraid of dying in an airplane crash. I’m afraid of being invited to dinner at someone’s house and having to eat something horrible like bananas. I'm afraid of calling someone on the phone to make an appointment. I’m afraid of bugs that lay eggs in your body and also getting cut by coral that will take root in your bones and grow into a tree (thanks SO MUCH, Anders for making me watch that youtube video). I’m afraid of losing my hair and going bald. I’m afraid of those people who dress up in cartoon character costumes and try to shake your hand at amusement parks. Also, I am nervous about people who dress in costumes to go to movies or those movie conferences. Basically, anyone over the age of 12 who is wearing a costume at a time other than Halloween concerns me.

Anyway, we all laughed and after the professional came to fix my door (it took him 15 minutes), Marie-Françoise said, “You can close the door and sleep well tonight.”

That was the plan, of course. But at 7:30pm, I had not yet shut that door. I had just brewed a pot of cinnamon tea and was sitting down to watch a TV show marketed to young teenagers that I enjoy because I’m a very sophisticated person, when I noticed some commotion in the corner. Felix had more prey! (He also had food in his bowl, I might add, so there was NO REASON for this other than PURE EVIL.)

I couldn’t tell what it was, but in true Felix style, he let it go and it immediately started flying around the room. I could tell it wasn’t a bat, but I thought it was a small bird. I jumped around screaming, but no one was there to help me catch it, and I had to protect my tea. So eventually I smacked it out of the air with Naomi’s yoga mat, screaming obscenities at the cat, who was doing NOTHING to help me re-catch his prey, which was a giant fat moth the size of the mouse that terrorized me in Mundri.

After I had it trapped under the mat, I knew that I did not want to squish it, but I needed to get it out of the house. So I got the little broom and the dust pan. I thought it was mostly dead, but when I lifted off the mat, it tried to escape, so I slammed the dust pan over it, trapping it with a tiny bit of space under the rim. It was fluttering like crazy, so I thought that if I could kill it with insecticide, that could work and then I could sweep it outside. But I couldn’t find any insecticide. I did, however, find a large pink spray can of some strange perfume, which seemed like the same concept: smelly chemicals in a can that be squirted at offending creatures. If you were wondering, it did not work.

Tools of moth disposal, though I don't
really recommend the perfume because
it was pungent and it was not as effective as I'd hoped.

Eventually, I got brave enough (because I was worried that my tea was getting cold), and I squished the moth between the broom and the dust pan and ran it out of the house before it could wriggle free. I then slammed the door shut, thinking that the cat was outside. And Good Riddance.

But he wasn’t. He was hiding from me under the couch, because I had chased him around the house while the moth was trapped under the mat and I was trying to decide what to do with him.

I left the cat alone for the rest of the night, and shut him outside of the bedroom thinking that I could leave him in there to whine in the wee hours of the morning and sleep past 5 the next day.

It was a beautiful dream. But at 4:30am, I heard a noise that woke me up. Now, I, as you know, would wake up if I heard a butterfly flapping its wings in Hong Kong, but this was a rather emphatic thump. Then another thump. Then a thump and a creak. And then a psychotic MEOW. Felix had made it in the door. So I ended up getting up thirty minutes later to push him outside, where he wanted to go anyway (since he still had plenty of food and water in his bowls).

Felix sleeping on the couch with his butt on my water bottle.
Did I throw a bat at him and jump on his head?
No, because that's frowned upon in polite society.

So I got up at 5am. And then at 11am, Emelie brought in the mail, with a package from the lovely and very contrite owner of Felix who feels terrible about her misbehaving baby. I immediately ate all the “strawberry cables,” which were great—Haribo-level gummy candy. I’ll save the cat food hearts for Felix just before I head out on this trip with the Chadian government officials so that he will have fond memories of me while I’m gone, and not stay at home brooding about how I robbed him of his prey and threw a handful of water from his water dish at him when the spray bottle didn’t soak him as fast as I wanted to after the bat incident (I was a little hysterical, but it gave me the super-power of being able to throw a handful of water at the little miscreant).

Thanks, Naomi, aka the only person who cares enough about me to send me packages.
Also, I know I look crazy. I never sleep anymore.

That Chad is so hot right now (OMG)

When it rains in Chad, you take photos.
This is from last week's trip to Oum Hadjar.
If your car doesn't have a faux-fur dash cover,
you aren't cool.

It’s hot season in Chad. It is the season that is spoken of by natives and foreigners alike in gasped groans. Expats share tips for “making it through” the hot season, and natives constantly ask if you are going to be OK, not being used to the hot season as they are. Years before I ever came to Chad or ever thought about coming to Chad, I heard someone talk about coming home from work while he was living in Chad and wanting to be able to open his head like a Pez candy dispenser in order to re-hydrate himself more quickly and efficiently. I thought it was an evocative image.

I, as you know, like the heat. I genuinely prefer it to the cold. People often say cold is better because you can always put on more clothes, but I don’t mind walking around the house in my underwear. I do, however, hate having to wear socks. They pinch and rub my toes and make my feet feel claustrophobic. But if I don’t wear them in cold weather places, I can never warm up. I especially loathe sunny cold days. It feels like the sun is lying to me, and I don’t like to be lied to. If it looks warm outside, I want it to be.

Post dust-storm clean up

I wasn't the only one in the car taking pictures
Even Chadians marvel.

Here in Chad, there is no deceptive weather. You look outside and it could either be sunny and hot or dusty and hot. It was chilly and dusty back in January, but I still was ok without socks. But I will admit to you that it is hot these days. It is hotter than most other hot places. Outside the sun pounds heat into your houses, turning them into crackling fire pits, without the fun of an actual fire. And we aren’t exactly an air conditioner type of country here. I have fans in my house and fans in the office that supplement our AC, which doesn’t actually work (but we leave it on anyway for morale). Without these fans, I am a sweaty mess. I mean, it takes about 10 seconds away from the fans to start sweating. You feel it first trickling out of the pores under your hair before it slides down the back of your neck and soaks into the back of your shirt . You notice every time you stand up that your skirt is wet and sticking to your legs. Actually, that is true even when you have been sitting in front of a fan, because your butt is blocked from the air by the chair you’re sitting in.

We ate mangos in this garden while visiting project sites.
It's a hard life out here.

Hot season is not all bad. I mean, it is also mango season, which I’ve enjoyed much more now that I figured out I could tell people I prefer the hard mangos to the gushy ones. People are happy about this because they all prefer the gushy ones. Also, I spill things a lot but never worry about slipping on puddles because they dry up in seconds. My hair also dries quickly coming out of the shower (aka bucket bath), which is great because I hate putting up my hair when it’s wet. Someone once told me that if you braid your hair while it’s wet, it will mildew. That really sounds possible to me, so I like to let it dry before I lump it on top of my head in a ball. And speaking of showers (or bucket baths because there is not enough water pressure here to make the shower work), they are always warm. Water that sits in plastic buckets is heated to the temperature of the room, which is usually 90-100 degrees (I’m skipping Celsius right now because let’s be honest: Fahrenheit just sounds hotter). And who doesn’t love a warm shower? 

But without the fans, life is tough.

So imagine my deep distress this week when not only did I lose electricity (which had been amazingly and impressively constant over the weeks since I’ve been Chez Naomi), but I also lost solar power. This means that I no longer had fans or the means to charge my electronic devices—two of the things that are an important part of my good nature.

We slept together.
I only pushed him off the
bed one time.

The first night I made do with the little battery fans, like the ones that I used in Mundri. Fortunately, I’d bought some batteries in Kenya in anticipation of a trip to the field with a Danish man who was worried about temperatures rising above freezing in a desert climate. That trip didn’t happen but the batteries definitely saved lives. I slept at night clutching the fan in front of my face. I still woke up more times than usual, feeling extremely dehydrated on soaking wet sheets. Once I woke up when the cat yowled and I thought he was going to get annoying about going outside, but he just was upset about getting hit in the face by a pillow I threw off the bed in an effort to have less things touching me.

If you are reading this
from your iPhone,
then this photo is
actual size for this fan.

 Without electricity or solar, it is also a lot darker at night, which I do prefer because I sleep better without lights, but it also caused me to be completely disoriented one night when I heard a cat fight that I wanted to break up, fearing the involvement and/or near-death of Felix. Suddenly I found myself walking into a door that I didn’t know was there. I spun around in circles, running into things and trying to figure out which direction I was walking. I had a brief moment of wondering if I could ever make it back to bed or have to sleep on the floor with the cockroaches (though Felix had eaten one earlier that night to prove his merits to me—it is a good merit to eat the roaches). After some time, I found the shelf and realized I was holding the little hippo knick-knack that sits on the book stand in the living room, and then managed to turn myself back into the bedroom where I found the bed and my phone, charged by the beautiful and hardy battery that I’d dropped on the concrete floor earlier and put back together later in the office. (Thanks Cherry for the Christmas present, and Kandos for fixing it, even though I kept gasping and telling him not to break anything whenever he snapped something on the plastic casing.) I flipped the light on my phone and saw Felix limp his way back inside, tail all poofy and bits of white fur stuck to his neck. I did a quick check of the kitchen to make sure that no foreign cats were inside and went back to bed, clutching my fan.

Bedroom solar fan, which
I initially thought didn't work
very well, until I compared
it to the battery fan.

Finally, yesterday, after many attempts, the amazing Rich brought over a new battery and hooked it up. So I had solar power that worked, and this time, it worked all night. Not like the time he’d fixed it and it had worked until 2:23am and then I had to go back to clutching my battery fans. This time I had real lights so that I could cook in the kitchen without a headlamp and see all the places I’d missed trying to shave in the dark for Pool Day at the Hilton N’Djamena (yeah, we’re fancy). And solar-powered 12-volt fans are a step up from battery-fans. But you know what is even way better than 12-volt fans? Actual fans, powered by electricity.

BURN ALL THE FOSSIL FUELS.

Because The Children are smart. They will figure out a way to make more powerful solar-powered fans by the time we have used up all the oil.

In the meantime, I’m sitting on the couch and the beautiful fan is blowing in my face. I’m not sweating. I am thirsty, though. (It takes a long time to rehydrate.) After 5.5 days of fan-clutching and darkness, my power is finally back on. I no longer hate everybody I hated before. Now there are one or two people that I can forgive while basking in the cool fan air.

So, in conclusion, I’d like to thank my fans. None of this would have been possible without you. You really are the best fans in the world. Never forget that. You keep me going every day. Keep it real, fans. Peace and Love.

And to leave you with a sermon, since I skipped church yesterday: my life is fine. It is way easier than most people's. And Antani's electricity STILL isn't back on, but at least we have access to clean water here in N'Djamena, while these kids in Oum Hadjer go out to the river bed to dig holes for water for their families. And it's hot there too. And I bet they don't have fans at home that they can go sit in front of. Tell Neverthirst you want to support a biosand filter project here. If I ever finish the budget for that project, it is coming soon. 

In a few months this will be a river again.
Next year they will find and dig-out these holes again.