Happenings 2

Back when it was still beautiful

Back to the trip: we finished two reports in Mangalmé, which is a fascinating little town, home to the minister of roads and transportation who dedicated himself to paving the roads in his little village. There are actual stop signs that I feel compelled to stop at because they are in logical places where you would stop to check if any traffic was coming. While in town, most of the traffic that I saw was the kind that eats grass and pulls carts and does not respect stop signs but there were a few beaten down old lorries that also did not respect stop signs. If you are wondering, I can think of 2 stop signs in N’djamena that I pass by regularly—one that is in the middle of a road on the way to my office, which if you stopped at it, you would definitely be rear-ended by a motorcycle. The other is on the way to Modern Market, also in the middle of a road, just after you get out of a roundabout, and again, no one ever stops there EVER even me when the driver’s side door of the rickety old truck I was driving last week popped open while I was on my way to buy groceries to take out to Claire in partial repayment for her being an amazing friend to me all the time. No, I managed to quickly jerk the steering wheel to the correct side of the road while grabbing the shifter with my right hand and down-shifting, as I caught the door with my left hand and tried to slam it shut while still driving and not hitting a motorcycle that was trying to pass me on the wrong side. I realized that the door was not shutting unless I locked it, so I slammed it again and jammed it down with my elbow, which hurt because I still had stitches in it at the time. But it worked! And now I know that when I drive that truck, which also struggles with many other issues, locking the door is key.

I felt compelled to stop at the stop sign.
I'm pretty sure the chill dudes on the side of the road would have been
unbothered if I hadn't adhered to international traffic rules though.

And back to Mangalmé-but actually we are done there. We dropped off Job’s kids, had lunch and then booked it back to Mongo, stopping on the way to do another report (3 out of 4). The wind and clouds of the impending storm made for some dramatic photos, most of which Nesie took because I was busy playing with a group of kids who were hanging around. They kept sneaking up towards us and when I would turn around, they would run away screaming. Then I kept hiding and jumping out at them because it was more fun that watching Nesie slowly type up the report, but they thought it was really funny, so soon Nesie was doing all of the reporting while surrounded by a crowd of laughing, shrieking children.  We finished JUST before the rains (ok fine, Nesie did), and we carried a few old people in our car back down to their houses so they could get home without getting soaked. When we got to the place where we were staying, it was pouring so hard we couldn’t get the guard’s attention, so we just sat in the car for about 45 minutes waiting for the rain to slow down. Fortunately, I’d bought some Pringles and sodas and a chocolate Swiss roll cake at the petrol station where we’d filled up with diesel in preparation for our trip back the next day so we had sustenance. This was all we ate that night because even after we finally got the attention of the guard and got into the house, it rained ALL night and we couldn’t get back out to buy anything to eat. Job and Nesie were super cool about this, something I’ve noticed almost everywhere I’ve worked in Africa: sometimes you have to skip a meal, but people take it in stride. The only times I’ve skipped meals when traveling with Westerners has been when we’ve been stuffed with food multiple times already for days and we are just full. Usually they have a few (roughly 25 each of all possible flavors) protein bars stuffed away in their backpacks, so they survive easily. We carefully divided up the chocolate Swiss roll cake (the Pringles having been demolished earlier in the truck while waiting for the guard to open the gate) and drank some tea and coffee that was provided in the guest house where we were staying. After I worked on the application on my computer for a bit, we watched the first episode of the Chosen, which I’d downloaded months earlier after 15 people recommended it to me but never managed to convince myself to watch. I probably would never have watched it except that I knew that Job and Nesie would enjoy it, and I thought it was like a new version of the Jesus Film so I wouldn’t have to be translating the whole time. I was wrong and I did have to translate the whole time, but they still enjoyed it. Anyway, the last time I stayed in that guest house, I was with Emelie and we watched movies I had to translate for her, and then I let her read Pride and Prejudice on my phone in French (she was a fan!). So I guess that’s just what I do in the Mongo Guest house.

Playing games with kids

Peaking over the wall

Pretty fun crowd

Car snacks, but before the rain. Actually this was maybe the previous day.
Anyway, it sets the mood.

The next morning we got up early and were frustrated that we couldn’t get ahold of the pastor that we were trying to meet up with, so we decided just to drive out to where we might get better reception. Fortunately, we passed him on the road on his way looking for us. That was probably the most fortunate we were all day, but it was a nice moment.

A solar powered pump that IAS installed nearly 10 years ago,
still in use!

The drive out to the last village was mostly off-road, and as it had rained for hours the day before our visit, the road was a mud-hole. Four-wheel drive engaged in the Land cruiser truck I was driving made the whole car sound like it was about to collapse into pieces. So I just kept the car in low gear and powered through. We made it to the village without getting stuck!

On our way out, we passed an IAS foot pump installed nearly 10 years ago-
also, still in use.

Non-muddy part of the "road"

At the village, we found that they were having a wedding. We arrived as the parade of people carrying household goods to the new bride and groom (a bed frame, pots and pans, woven mats) was disappearing into the compound where the celebration was going to be had.  This concerned me because I wanted to get in, do the report, and get out and drive 500km back to N’djamena and reach home before dark. I had the best of plans prepared! But our reports need interviews with women, who were all occupied with wedding festivities and a photo with as many community members as would like to be in it (usually a lot). So after meeting with the village chief and explaining the situation, we went down to the water point (a bit outside the village and down a small hill—farther away than most people wanted, but in this region where you can find water is where you drill and that is usually at the bottom of the hill, and not at the top). Nesie started doing the basic reporting while I became chauffeur to the stars—shuttling women and children from the wedding prep to come be in the photos and back. They were so excited this! And I am happy to report that it did not hurt the wedding prep at all, and people got to ride in a car, which they thought was very exciting. I impressed them all by learning 3 words in their language, which shows that they are probably way too easily impressed and also how much people appreciate any effort at all in learning about their culture. I wonder how impressed they would be if they heard that now I can only remember one of those three words? (I’m really not that impressive.) I had fun laughing and chatting with the ladies (in Arabic, which they also understood-most have never been to school and are illiterate, but they are bilingual and strong enough to carry 50L of water up a hill, so I think they're pretty impressive), and we got the report done. Then we spent 15 minutes convincing the people that we really couldn’t stay for the wedding, and we couldn’t stay to eat because I had people waiting for me in Bitkine.

Coming down the hill with the ladies. 

We made it out of the village and back to Mongo at the time when I had been planning to be in Bitkine, but Bitkine is only 50km from Mongo, so I was still feeling pretty good about how we were on time. We had to fill up the truck with diesel and buy some snacks. Nesie also had some errands.

Job looking good while the storm rolls in behind him

Here’s a story about Nesie: Nesie had some land in the outskirts of N’djamena. He bought the land. He had the papers. When he went there to start working, he found that other people had built houses on it. They told him it was their land. His friends and family told him to take them to court and Nesie would win. This is the logical thing to do when someone steals from you. Nesie took the radical Jesus-way. He went to the thieves and told them, “You can keep this. My God owns all the land.  He can give me anything He wants, better land than this and even free. I will trust in God.” His friends were shocked. His wife was annoyed. The thieves likely congratulated themselves on their easy win. Fast forward a few years and Nesie had the opportunity to buy about 12 hectares of land (29.6 acres) for almost nothing. It’s good land for farming. There is water nearby and it isn’t far from the road. The land is good and clean and better than the land he had before. He said, “Look what God did! I want to use this land to start a farm so that I can support my family and Chadian church workers who don’t have enough money from the church. I want to bring boys living on the streets in N’djamena doing drugs and get them out here in fresh air, teach them how to plant a garden, give them education and love and a home when most of them have been kicked out of everywhere else. I want to bring in prostitutes who want to leave the life and give them a new chance to start over in a safe place. I want to use this land to bless the most vulnerable people, and share the love of Jesus with them.” It’s important to note that Nesie is already doing this in his life right now—his faith in the Lord never wavered and he started following his dream to help the least even before he had the land. A former prostitute and her baby live with him and his family. Every week he meets with street kids to give them food and water and love on them. Just a thought: it's easy to say you'll do something for others when you get that high-paying job or that new, bigger house. Sometimes people do actually do what they say they will when that happens, but you can usually be sure that people who make a habit of loving and serving others before they have anything are going to continue doing that even more once they have more to give. Anyway, I'm sure of Nesie.

How the ladies of the villages here fetch water

And so when Nesie wanted to stop in Mongo to buy peanuts to plant in the garden, I took a detour and lost 20 minutes. Then before Bitkine we stopped at market day to try to find some cassava roots to plant and lost 30 minutes. At this point, I was losing patience, but still agreed to take a friend of Job’s the remaining 20km or so to Bitkine. And when we got to Bitkine, Antani, who I’d told to be ready to leave at 12, was ready to leave at 1 (I don’t mean she was late—I was late. She was ready at 1 when we got there). And we loaded up into the car and took off. Naturally, as I’ve mentioned a few times in past blogs, we brought a box with a couple of live chickens in it (I can never leave Bitkine without chickens in the car with me). Last time I’d transported chickens (from Dourbali to N’djamena) they hadn’t been properly secured, and they were unfortunately crushed by a sack of rice when I went over a bumpy stretch of road and I felt terrible. We made sure that the chickens were properly secured.

A beautiful lady who graciously let us interview her for our report.

Then it was my turn to make a few stops to take some videos for Neverthirst because the mountains are SO COOL in this particular spot and I always have to take a photo there. But it was a quick stop and then back in the car! The road was smooth so we could drive pretty fast and I may have hit 140kmph (I’m not putting that in miles because Mom) a few times, but I was the only one on the road, so it was ok. I don’t think I was at 140kmph when our tire blew out, and I know it didn’t blow out because of the road, which was lovely and smooth at that part. Fortunately, I kept control of the car, drove us off to the side of the road, and we all piled out.

It's so pretty out here!

Nesie and I jumped into action, digging out the jack and the other tools you need to change a tire, whose names I can’t remember in English. The tire was old and patched already and nothing would have saved it. But we had a nice new spare that I’d bought for the trip, so Nesie heaved that out of the back of the truck while I started loosening the bolts of the flat. Then Nesie crawled under the truck to find a place to put the jack. He was sweating and covered in dirt by the time we realized that the jack at full extension was still too short to get the car up where we needed it. We searched for rocks and were able to get it up enough to get the old tire off, but we had to dig a hole to get the new, fully-inflated tire on. And by the time we finished, we’d lost an hour.

WHY? The road is so smooth!

Definitely flat

It is not the better part of wisdom to drive anywhere in Chad without a spare tire, and we knew the road ahead got worse and worse before it got better. OK, really it never gets better. The best part was already behind us. So we stopped 100km down the road in Bokoro, the next “big” town to repair the tire. But it was impossible to repair. We had to buy a new (to us-it was secondhand) tire. Then after we found the right tire (that took a while) and haggled down the price (and that took a while), Nesie heard a leak in the tire. So they had to take the inner tube out and pour water and try to find the leak, and they couldn’t find it for a long time and that took a while. We lost another hour and a half in Bokoro, and at that point I was very tired and cranky. I hate driving at night here because people blind you with their lights and you can’t see very well because there are no street lights, and the roads are terrible, and it was just bad. We’d barely eaten anything since lunch the previous day at Job’s house in Mangalmé, and I had no appetite, but I also knew I should eat. I also knew there was nowhere else we could really stop before N’djamena. We had to make it home or else. So we got in the car and kept driving.

Team work
And if you were wondering how we dug a hole
so that we could get the new tire on--we chiseled it with a hammer.

I'll probably post the rest of the story later, but these posts do get oppressively long sometimes. If you made it this far, good job! Sorry I don't have a prize for you, but I do promise to show you a good time if you ever come visit me in Africa, so that's something.

Weeks of Happenings, Part One of However Many Parts I Decide to Make This

Ready to road-trip

Sometimes I sit around the office, writing, reading and doing emails and wasting time on the internet before going home to a pack of dogs that I really need to do something about (I have too many!), and chatting to friends and family on whatsapp/messenger while entertaining myself in various ways before finally falling asleep early so that I can wake up early and run before the streets are too crowded. It’s not usually very interesting to write about, so I’m pretty sure it wouldn’t be too interesting to read about either, so I try not to bore people with that stuff. Other times, I get to travel around or do various projects that let me leave the office or just experience regular life but with a nice twist that I think is unique to where I am. Then, if I can have fun writing about it, I hope that someone (hi Mom!) will enjoy reading about it.

I don’t always have those types of experiences, and that’s why they are noteworthy. I think life for most people settles into a routine or monotony sometimes and nothing seems exceptional, though to others not living your routine it might be. Those times I don’t feel the urge to write, and also, it’s been a tough year for me, so some things I might have written about had I been in a better place, I don’t write about because I don’t have the energy to enjoy them as I have in the past. And after that long, mostly unnecessary introduction, I will say that I’ve had a pretty eventful few weeks here—not always pleasant events, but definitely interesting ones. Events you have to recover from usually count as interesting, and if stitches are involved…well, there will be A LOT of medical consultations happening, but maybe that is because 50% of the people I hang out with here are in the medical field, and they insist upon it? Anyway, a few weeks ago I hopped in the car to drive 700km or so to do some reports. It happens to be one of my favorite places in Chad, and in the rainy season, it’s green and beautiful and I took a lot of photos.  I wrote down the events of the whole trip, but I don't know how to tell a short story, and it is oppressively long. So I've chopped it up into smaller pieces, and I'll share them over the next few weeks if the internet works. This first post will be about the beginning of the trip, and it is mostly an excuse to show off beautiful places around C had, a country that is not known for its beauty because not enough people know where or when to look for it.  

I wish the kid were not cut out of this photo...

 I started off the trip badly. I’d heard that in the direction where we were traveling, there had been some hijackings of vehicles. In the direction where we were traveling, but further on than we were planning to go. Still, I thought it might be prudent to leave my computer at home, and I thought I would send a message to the IAS Regional Director to let him know what I wouldn’t be in contact about the application we were working on that week. But it freaked him out and he contacted all the people with various stakes in my well-being, and they all freaked out and I had to download a map and use my impressive photoshop skills to draw where the attacks have been and where we are going, and then I had to complete a risk assessment, and then they all calmed down, and I brought my computer anyway.

Enlarged to show details: We traveled the green road. Red dot is hijacking area.
You can see Mongo and Mangalmé and Bitkine too if you look closer.

When I finally convinced everyone and finally left, I brought along Antani, who is my house helper and dear friend, along with her two nieces because the halfway point of my trip is her hometown, and she wanted to visit her mother. Her nieces were going to stay and visit their family for a while, and she wanted to bring her uncle home with us so he could go to the hospital in N’djamena for an eye problem he has been having. The trip was mostly uneventful, but the girls were miserably carsick the whole way. The road is paved for 900km across the country to another town called Abéché. We were only going to Mangalmé, which was 666km from N’djamena according to the sign. I don’t think that number was a bad omen because most of the trip was really good, but we did have the devil of a trip home (haha). There are various parts of the road that are riddled with jagged potholes. Tire-killing holes of death. It’s like a game with me to see how many I can avoid. I alternate between being really good at it, and somehow hitting every one in a row, so you can imagine how someone prone to carsickness would struggle. But really—swerving to miss holes gives you motion sickness, bouncing through holes ALSO gives you motion sickness. There was no good option for those girls. As soon as we arrived in Bitkine (their hometown), they were out of the car and said they would not be getting back in anytime soon. I was glad they didn’t have to return with us. They were glad too. Gladder now after what happened. Anyway…

This is the seat I sat in for many many hours.
It was not comfortable.

Stopped to get soda in Bokoro (it's on the map).
That's Antani smiling behind me-the girls were outside puking.

We dropped off Antani and the girls in Bitkine and picked up Job, who is one of my favorite people in the world—lover of Jesus and everyone, servant of Jesus and everyone, always smiling. He and Moussa have similar lovable personalities and are great friends. They met up once by accident in the IAS office in N’djamena and I always describe it as “an explosion of joy.” Their backgrounds and tribes are completely different, but both speak about 10 languages (each, not cumulative) that they’ve learned to be able to share the Good News with people in their own tongue, and both of them are passionate about helping those in need around them. And of course, both of them are always smiling, in spite of the difficult things they’ve gone through in their lives. I’m hoping that will rub off on me some day because I haven’t always been able to keep that joy this past year.

Job with one of the village chiefs

Antani's neighbor kids coming to watch the unloading.

The whole trip Nesie kept marveling at the beauty of the Guera Region (which is where Bitkine, Mongo, and Mangalmé are located, towns that I will talk about a lot in this post like you actually know where they are—my dad will look them up online and enjoy gazing at some nice maps, and you can too!), and I kept trying to get him to get photos we can use for social media posts. The Guera Region is a rocky mountainous area that is extremely difficult to drill in—and very expensive. Almost no one wants to do water projects in the area because it is so difficult. IAS has done the most of any NGO that I know of. But this trip we were reporting on 4 bore holes that had broken down, which Job and his organization had rehabilitated.

More unloading

Cracked windshield photo by Nesie of our fellow travelers on the Chadian  highway.

Everything went relatively smoothly for the reporting—the first two locations were outside of Mangalmé, not far from where Job lives with his family. He has 6 children and one niece who has lived with him since she was a child and her parents died. He said, “She’s really like one of my own children.” He has an adorable chubby baby who is thoroughly spoiled by everyone in the household from dad and mom to each sibling who all dote on her and bow to her every whim. I am the first nasara she has seen, and she allowed me to love her too. She was not terrified by me at all, unlike Repent’s youngest daughter in Uganda who can’t stand the sight of me. The older kids who aren’t in school (thanks, Covid) wanted to come along with us to the villages, and I said, “Hop in!”

With two of Job's daughters

Habiba is rocking my sunglasses. Incidentally, I don't think they made it through the accident.
I can't find them.

She is too cool for school.

Job's kids coming on an adventure!

I let the oldest boy shift gears in the truck for me, and he LOVED it.  I had remembered Aunt Jenny Townsend used to let Zach and Jarod do that for her when we were all growing up in Bandung, and I thought she was so cool for doing that and my mom was so not cool for not letting me. But gender stereotypes aside, Zach and Jarod were probably more naturally inclined to catch on quickly to the shifting, and I would have been distracted by changing the music in the car or trying to convince my mom that the air conditioning was too cold. And I’ve met so many American soldier boys out here who never learned to drive stick before coming to Chad, and I am shocked that we let people like that try to protect our great nation, but most of them seemed to catch on fairly quickly because they had no choice. Fortunately, Chad is great for learning stick—if you stall out in the road, people will honk at you and then go around you. They won’t line up behind you patiently, watching and judging you as you try to move your car like people would in the West (come on, you know you would). Of course you can also be a hybrid like me, who drives around someone while judging them and giving them annoyed looks as you pass by.

I will finish off this section with a few more photos of the beautiful Guera and the people who live there:

This is the village we visited the next day, but I got mixed up putting photos on,
and it's pretty, so it's staying.

Grace and Habiba in Portrait Mode,
thanks to the neverthirst social media team,
I now know that Portrait Mode exists.

Chief on his land

The lovely Hawa, who really wanted me to take her photo.
She kept saying how wonderful it is that their pump has been fixed.

I love all the colors, the strange rocky hills, and the current greenery all over.

Giving the Chief a ride, while Job's adorable kids sit in the back.

Kwaheri Marafiki Wangu (Swahili from Google translate--I did know the Kwaheri and the rafiki parts)

I just sent off two of my three Kenyan colleagues for the long, roundabout, UN flight that will finally get them home after nearly 7 months of Chad. We never meant for them to be separated from their families this long, but they were so gracious about it and patient as we waited for an opportunity to get them home.  

 I’ve worked with Emmanuel a long time, as he is our drilling chief here in Chad, and he is just a wonderful man of God with a servant’s heart. He works so hard with very few breaks, and his work is hot and dusty and sweaty and he never complains. He’s a hero to many across Chad who have water because of his hard work.

Old friends. 

Wearing the neverthirst Uganda shirt I gave him
a while ago, but standing in front of the majestic
flag of Chad!

Henry is a new friend and we’ve been stuck together pretty closely for the last 6+ months. He lived in the other house on my compound, and we hung out a lot due to lack of other company and proximity. He does an embarrassingly accurate impression of me driving, and he taught me Swahili insults to yell at the other drivers in my way so that I use less English profanity. He’s also been sucked into my hobbies a bit, now running 3 times a week and building up from being a non-runner to running 10ks on the weekend. He’s also taken on the most American thing about me and measures his runs in miles instead of kilometers. And he's thinking about getting a dog someday, after joining me most afternoons to walk Joe and/or one of the other dogs. They will all miss him. 

Giving them the leftover bones from dinner

Personally, I was a failure as a swimming student. I thought that the water was too cold and at least the last teacher I had that I remember the most was not a stereotypical Canadian nice guy (some Canadians CAN ruin lives, even if most are wonderful people). But it turns out that I’m a really good swimming teacher and Henry went from dog-paddling to breast stroke to front crawl to diving for coins in the pool. We discovered a mutual appreciation for the classiest of all film genres: the action comedy. If you laugh a lot and something blows up, it’s a superior movie. He made chapatis and mandazi for me. And I made pizza and chocolate chip cookies for him. I took him to the hospital to get some tests done when he was ill and he let me cry on his shoulder after a particularly hurtful day. And I will miss him, but I’m so happy he gets to be back with his wife and children. He was so excited to finally be leaving that he was giddy about it. But I appreciate that it is not because he doesn’t love Chad (he bought a Chad t-shirt and we did a photoshoot in front of the biggest national monument before he left), it’s because he loves his family so much and really needs to be with them. Long distance work away from your family is fairly normal in many parts of the world, but I hope we can find a better system next year if we can get Henry back that will allow him more time at home. (Prayers for this appreciated!)

Final photoshoot before leaving Chad

Waiting for tests at the hospital

Roadtripping to get photos and videos for neverthirst

With la belle Emelie who is also a wonderful friend

In other news from here, rainy season has arrived. My front yard has a perpetual giant puddle in it that the dogs are loving. Speaking of dogs, I’ve now got 4. I’m hoping to be back down to three in a few weeks if the Americans come back. Puppy/Kwach/Kakilé is no longer a Tiny Puppy. She has fattened herself on 3 pairs of my shoes, one pair of the guard’s shoes (I reimbursed him for his loss), a chunk of the sofa (I promise to replace it before I leave this house!), all of York’s chew toys that were brought from America (I’ll call it payment for all the food that I’ve bought for York this past month+, and York has helped with the chewing). She’s currently working her way through a baseball that I hope was not of sentimental value. I did not know what was inside a baseball. But now I do. It’s all over my house.

Should I have named Flip "Dobby" or "Wile E Coyote"?

Joe and Flip insist on coming to work with me every day.

My pack of dogs

I’ve also had some fun bringing trucks back from the field to N’djamena. Victor (our last remaining Kenyan who we hope to send home soon) and I were the nominated drivers. He would drive one truck, and I would drive the other. I told him I would drive the truck that was worse because he is a slow driver and I wanted us to stay together. If I drive the car that works well, then I will inevitably leave him in my dust. This is a joke we have about Victor driving versus Leif or me driving. Victor is slow and methodical and doesn’t even pass old lady drivers. Leif and I get competitive about how fast we can go, Leif doesn’t notice bumps until it is too late, and I pass anyone who dares to be in front of me.  I’ve been teasing Victor about this for some weeks, and I noticed that he started to tell me about all the times he actually did drive fast. Apparently he used to have a bad reputation for killing cars. Anyway, I apologized for teasing him too much, and he said he wasn’t bothered, but when we drove back together from Dourbali with the cars, he left me in his dust (rainy season hadn’t started yet). I had to follow the plume of black smoke that poured out of that car. In the end he had insisted on driving the bad car, and having recently driven that car after we had it “repaired”, I’m very grateful that he did, and I’ve sent it to be REPAIRED again. Anyway, Victor CAN drive fast, but he prefers not to in town. Noted. I remain grateful that traffic is a rarity in Chad, and road rules are optional--pass anyone anytime you like! And I will, while yelling "mjinga wewe!" at them. 

With Henry and Victor at our favorite Lebanese restaurant for Covid-pick up of course.

Emanuel telling me what was wrong with the truck
once I got it home and couldn't make the steering wheel turn anymore.
Apparently it's the hydraulic something.

And finally, we’ve completed a bunch of wells, rehabilitations, and biosand filters in all the Neverthirst Africa countries, and that’s been really encouraging to see in spite of the corona-restrictions. In one location that I can’t specify for security reasons, the villagers were desperate to see water in their village. People had tried to drill there before and all had failed. We didn’t know it at the time, but they took measures into their own hands to assure our success, calling witchdoctors to pray verses from their Holy Book over the drilling site, sacrificing chickens, and burying one near the location where we were going to drill. And soon EVERYTHING went wrong. The machines broke down for no logical reason. The water tanker hired to bring water to location would go to the water source and there would be no water, but when they drove away, the water came back. There were ferocious rainstorms. After drilling a borehole that he was sure would be successful, the driller was shocked when we found that the borehole was actually dry. He could think of no reason why there would not be water, and in his 20+ years of experience, this had never happened to him. We asked others for their opinions as to why it didn’t have water, and still no answers. Our local ministry partner prayed and then he found out about the sacrifices and the witchdoctors. So he prayer-walked the whole village. He preached from the Bible, and prayed over the new site. And our drilling partners drilled again. And this time we got a bore hole with a 7m3 yield  (very high yield) and the people in that village are saying, “Wow! Prayers in the name of Jesus are powerful!”

biosand filters

water from a new bore hole

If we hadn’t failed on the first attempt, the people would have credited their witchdoctors and sacrifices with the success of the borehole. But because it did fail and we drilled again, they got to see the power in the name of Jesus, which they would not have seen otherwise. It encouraged me to know that sometimes things that seem like epic failures in our lives might actually  be a part of God’s plan to amaze us with something that we never would have seen if our original plans had gone the way we hoped they would. We don’t always get to see the reason why hard things happen to us in our lives. Sometimes everything sucks, and it hurts, and we only ever get to see the mess this side of Heaven. But sometimes we get the Joseph moment, “What you intended for evil, God meant for good.” And I wanted to share that with you because sometimes we have to hold on to other people’s moments when ours aren’t coming, and trust that God is still good even when we aren’t seeing Him answer the deepest, hardest prayers of our lives. If we can’t see it in our lives, seeing it for others can be encouraging.  Honestly, in the ugliest parts of my heart, as I pray the hardest, deepest prayers in my life, there are some blessing stories that don’t really make me feel so much encouraged as resentful, but seeing the marginalized, the vulnerable, the forgotten people get a high yield bore hole in the middle of a dry and weary land, THAT is a story that I will hold on to. And you can hold on to it too, if you like.

OK-that’s my sermon done. Now I will inflict you with many photos of my dogs and my friends and my work.

Henry wanted to make sure to stop and get photos
of the town names in between N'djamena and Dourbali
to prove that he has been to Senegal!

And sometimes Joe made Henry sit in the back because he is spoiled.

Does your face mask match your dress?
It should!

Henry tries camel milk for the first time

Hanging with the men around the bowl of camel milk,
just before I started to feel miserably sick.

Even our nicest paved roads crumble

Thanks to Henry for this photo of me and my friend Fatima

I just really liked this guy!
He's got a cool hat and a great smile.

Another friend who drove us out to the village,
by that I mean that we followed him on his motorcycle
because there are no roads.
And he's holding a guinea fowl we brought back for Henry and Victor to have for dinner.
Tastes like chicken!

Antani and her beautiful daughters,
they are only a tiny bit screamy around Joe.
They liked Kwach/Kakilé though.

Emelie and Amanda Chad monument photo!

Emelie drove me and the boys home after work one day.

I let Henry drive the unpaved part of the trip back to N'djamena.
You can see by his expression how excited he was about this.
Note: we do not drive on the same side of the road as they do in Kenya
so it is even more impressive.
Although, having said that, when there is no road, the side doesn't matter.
But the stick shift is on the opposite side and it can be tricky to switch that.

I'm not sure what Moussa and I are gesturing wildly about here,
but thanks for this action shot, Henry!

Henry and the Dar Salam of Chad

A sprite that we found at the store
that is meant to be sold only on airlines.
I guess they had to sell it to stores with all the cancelled flights.

When there is no power in your office,
it helps that your HR/Finance Manager is an accomplished electrician.

Got to celebrate this wonderful woman's bday.
She is one of my favourite people in the entire world.

Another Henry photoshoot classic

I took Kwach swimming today. She scratched me in the face.
I thought since she insists on playing in her water bowl that maybe she would like it.
I was wrong.

The excited greeting of Joe on his return from the office.
Kwach loooooves him.