N'Djamena Marathon

 

Jesse wanted a photo of us under the sign that said "Marathon de la Paix"
What a marathon it was!

A few days ago I saw an ad on Facebook for a race to be held in my city on the weekend in solidarity with Sudan put on by Sudanese youth living in N’djamena. It was advertised as a “marathon 5k.” I figured the distance would be 5km because Chadians usually say “marathon” to mean a running race of any distance, but you never know. The advertisement was sufficiently vague on other information as well, but it had a start and end location, a beginning time and a date. In the comments people were asking for more information about how to run, and the response was being sent a screenshot of the same advertisement that we were all already looking at. I decided to send a message, and I was sent a phone number to call. I don’t like calling numbers I don’t know, so I sent a text message. I got no response and I forgot about it until I had a call later that night. Usually I don’t answer numbers I don’t recognize, but I did for some reason. Our conversation was as follows:

Me: Bonsoir Salam Allo (because I didn’t know what language to speak when I don’t know who is calling).

Him: Bonsoir.

Long pause….

Me: Uh..excuse me, but can you please tell me who is calling?

Him: Mohamed Idriss. (This doesn’t help me much—including being the name of our current president, it is a very common name here). Who are you?

Me: Uh…yeah…but you called me?

Mohamed Idriss (not the president): Oh yeah. I’m calling about the marathon.

And then the rest of the conversation was about how to register (give name, age, and contact number) and also he mentioned that they had met a guy who is really great at organizing races and the race was going to be 10km. I signed up and signed up Jesse, my friend from Nigeria who has run with me a couple times. The first time he ran, I was thinking he was going to be miserable and stop early because last time I had guys tell me they wanted to run with me and that it would be no problem because they play football a lot, they died after 1km. Jesse had said he wanted to run and 5km was no problem because he plays football, but he is also a good runner, so he was fine, and I had to keep up a faster pace than I wanted to the whole time to make sure I didn’t embarrass myself. I did also try to remind myself that he is 10 years years younger than me and that helped sooth the ego a bit too.

Hissein, Jesse, random vertically challenged nasara, Tresor

The night before the race, my evil Cameroonian neighbors decided to have a loud drunken orgy that made everyone miserable. They were still going, screaming and drunk singing and peeing all over everyone’s houses when I left at 6:40, and I was not in a great mood. I knew there was no point in getting to the race on time, but I did anyway. My friend Tresor who is a great runner and runs all the N’djamena races told me that it was for sure 10km and he had gotten there at 6:30am and was already texting me about it. 

Jesse and I got there and found a group of people looking for their race numbers. At one point a line formed but then the organizers started yelling out names (Mohamed Idriss, Mohamed Abdullah, Mohamed Issa, etc) and the line system fell apart quickly. Eventually we found our numbers—pretty quickly actually: we were 002 and 003 because I was one of the first to register for the race. We were also given a couple of little vest top things, which we were told were for advertising. Jesse had “American cola” (a local coke brand) and I had “Planet” which is also a type of beverage. We asked about pinning the numbers on our shirts, and were directed to the guy with a stapler, who was stapling numbers to people. Two minutes later, the stapler was broken. Were there any spare staplers? No. They started breaking off bits of staples and handing them out so people could pinch them with their fingers and mold them into pins to hold the numbers. I was not good at this and Jesse and Hissein helped. Hissein agreed to run in Steven’s place because Steven wasn’t feeling well, but he’d told me he would run. Steven, Hissein, and Tresor are deaf friends of mine who are all great athletes and helping to film a dictionary for Chadian Sign Language. (We want to make a dictionary app, so if you know anyone who can help make apps, please tell me.) Tresor is well known in the running community because he is an excellent runner and he trains people. Hissein and Steven prefer basketball to running, but wanted to come along for fun.

Stapling by hand

At 8am, the race still hadn’t started and it was getting hotter. By 8:30, just before we lined up, an announcement was made: this race is not going to be 10km. It is going to be 2 kilometers 300 meters. (According to my watch, it didn't even end up being 2km, and I didn’t cut off the corners like other people did.) 

Post-race with Tresor and Hissein laughing as they bent down
to be in the same photo with me and Jesse.
Jesse said he bent down too to have some self-respect,
which is why it looks like we are the same height when actually he is taller than me.

So everyone is lined up, now ready for a short sprint to Place de la Nation, and the start line happens to be right next to the city morgue. So as people are jogging around and pumping each other up, cars are driving up full of mourners with photos of the deceased precariously perched on their roofs. It was an awkward juxtaposition. 

This is the starting line where we kept having to move over
to let mourners through

The guy who informed us of our race distance change clapped two wooden blocks together and we all sped off. While there were a couple of policemen at one corner, the other roads we were on weren’t really blocked off and motorcycles and cars dodged us as we dodged potholes and it was all very exciting. 

The beautiful and amazing Fraida

We crossed the finish line and went to chat with Tresor and Hissein who were way ahead of us (note that Jesse and I are also half their height) and unfortunately they didn’t win. Our friend Fraida (not deaf but still very cool) who also runs in our neighborhood won for the women—not at all a surprise. She is a badass runner who has run in competitions around the world. She went to train in Kenya a few months ago, but told me it wasn’t worth it because it was too easy for her. We took a lot of photos, and as the only nasara, I was invited to be in many photos. I was also asked to do an interview for a radio station in Arabic. I specified that my Arabic is a mishmash of multiple accents and grammatical patterns, but they were happy. I refused to answer a question giving my honest opinion about the current president (Mohamed Idriss) and his Sudan policies because I am a foreigner and I don’t want to get kicked out of the country. I was able to say how great the organizers did (I mean is it really important to have decided on a route before the race day?) and how I’m sure they will do other great things. I should note that there were some Chinese guys there as well. I chatted a bit with one of them, but they don’t usually speak French and so people don’t often try to speak with them so I doubt they got too many interview requests. When I told this story to my friend Naomi, she said it reminded her of the time I was interviewed for Chinese TV when I accidentally joined the communist party, which was funny because I was remembering it too. I always managed to look really gross and sweaty when I’m interviewed for the news and usually have nothing important to say either. I don’t think I wrote about that for the blog because it happened before I started blogging, but I have it in a journal somewhere. Maybe I’ll publish it one day.

All miked up and waving my hands around for a radio interview, as one does.

Anyway, we planned to leave after Tresor, Hissein and Steven left to go to work. But the nasara effect worked against me and I was stopped by a sweet young Sudanese girl who asked me please to stay for the presentation about the desire for unity for Sudan and Chad. I didn’t feel I could say no and Jesse graciously stayed with me. He was really fun to have around because we could joke around in English and he was very careful to take lots of photos of me in awkward moments. 

Post-run with Jesse

Our lovely Sudanese girl found a couple of t-shirts for us, which was nice. Jesse got one in French and I got one in Arabic. Then we were handed bottles of red soda (Planet brand!) and little boxes of food while speeches started. They were long and flowery and I enjoyed the heckling from some guys sitting behind us, one of whom I’ve also run with in my neighborhood.  He’s actually caught me at the end of a couple of my runs when I was planning to stop early and dragged me home. Finally speeches were over, and it was time for awards. They handed them out to the 3 fastest women and the 3 fastest men. The average time to complete the race for them was 5 minutes something. 

Then they announced two more winners: the veteran category. This was a nice way of saying the winners for the two oldest competitors in the race. Guess who won for the women? That’s right—I won best geriatric woman runner for the Marathon. A truly remarkable achievement. I’m sure you’re all very impressed. And if any of you are slightly older than me, pat yourself on the back because anyone could run 2km and if you ran and were old, you won. 

Surrounded by the press who were there to note my achievement

With the Veteran Man winner
whose face shows how honored he was to receive this award.

Finally we were able to leave after the awards. Jesse dragged me away saying I talk too much, but I mean, I was an award winner. People wanted to be near me to bask in the glow of my success. Jesse and I decided just to walk home, as my house is not far from Place de la Nation. I think in all, including our 2km race, we didn’t even go 8km by the time we got home. And also—while Jesse was taking photos of me getting my award, people took our food. Oh well—they can never take my Veteran Medal from me. I earned that. By being old.

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.

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* 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.

What Do You Do For Fun?

It looks like we are just chilling, rocking out
to some Swedish tunes (not ABBA),
but actually we are having a Whatsapp meeting.
This is not an example of "what I do for fun,"
but hanging with Leif is always entertaining.
FYI: don't share earphones with him-
he can't sit still.

“So what do you do for fun?” many people have asked me. Ok, one person asked me that one time. It was a Royal Air Maroc flight attendant who slowly worked up the courage to talk to me one day while I was at the pool at the Hilton. When he first got to the pool, he kindly sat a polite 4 lounge chairs away from me. Every 20 minutes or so, he moved one chair closer. Unfortunately for him, by the time he ended up in the chair next to me, I was already leaving, so when he asked me what I do around here for fun, I was able to mutter something about having to leave without actually having to have a conversation.

Truthfully, I’m a really boring person. I do love adventures, but an average best day is one where I can hide out alone and not have to speak to any other living being.  This is called being an introvert. There are many of us out there, but we hide a lot so you don’t always realize it. For me, the more I’m alone without having to talk to other people, the less I ever want to see anyone else ever again. I know this is not a healthy way to be a human being, so occasionally I make myself crawl out of my cave and interact with other carbon-based life forms that communicate using verbal and nonverbal language skills.

OK, so it's not exactly the little skirt uniform,
but I have pompoms.
And it took me like 10 minutes of feeling
like an idiot to get this photo, which
definitely make me look appropriately ridiculous.

Sometimes that happens when I’m invited to a birthday party for a really cool person that I would have preferred to celebrate from a small crudely-fashioned canoe on a hippo-infested river. Sadly, no one else preferred to celebrate that wonderful person’s life in the same way, so instead I had to attend a “Murder Mystery” birthday party in the assigned character of a cheerleader. This is amusing to people who know me well, especially my family who enjoyed my mocking rendition of the cheerleaders in the high school I attended for one semester of grade 10 in my mother’s small hometown in middle Tennessee. Did you know there is a thing called a “Pep Rally” that students are forced to attend in lieu of school? I propose that this could be one reason why American students are so far behind the rest of the civilized world in terms of academics. It could also be why we consistently out-perform most of the rest of the world in athletics, though.  Anyway, I did not know what Pep Rallies were, anymore than I knew that “going Greek” meant joining a sorority in college and not taking a joint trip to Greece, which I was totally up for until my American father kindly explained. Thankfully, he got to me before I attended the session and embarrassed myself by asking if there were Greek language classes involved to prepare for life in Athens. I didn’t have to embarrass myself at the Pep Rallies. I just got swept along in the current of school-spirited students heading for the gym where I was able to watch and take notes as a third-party observer, marveling at this cultural aspect of American high school life that outsiders are not always privy to.  The few months while I was in American high school, I said almost nothing at school but came home, bouncing off the walls, full of amusing observations that I hadn’t been able to share with anyone, as the Indian girl who sat with me at lunch wasn’t that good at speaking English yet and my Gujarati was limited. I did not have a literary outlet like this blog at the time, as it was not even this millennium (see how old I am?), so I had to wait and share my jokes with the family at home. I got pretty good at being a fake cheerleader with a southern accent, and my kind family laughed in all the right places (they still do that most of the time, bless their hearts).

This is how I had to leave my house.
I think the hair and the make-up still
made the men who sit across the street from my
house all the time a bit concerned.

 So I got to be a fake cheerleader again, which was not too bad, as I got to wear my tiny shorts and shirt in public (aka the house where the party was held). A kind friend bought me pom-poms, which have since been donated to the drama department of the little MK school here in N’Djamena. The downside was having to wear make-up and a side pony-tail (80’s party), which always makes me feel lop-sided. Symmetry is important to me. I don’t like one-shoulder dresses or skirts that are longer one side than the other. It has been pointed out to me that my ears are pierced in two different places, and that was mostly intentional, but I do have an equal number of piercings in each ear, and that is what counts. Anyway, I’m digressing from the point of this, which is that it is kind of exhausting to be a cheerleader in your 30’s. There is a reason why you get that kind of behavior over with at a young age.

Emelie came to the party too,
and was only slightly concerned
for the crazy foreigners she hangs out with.

The party ended up being fun, but my favorite part is still that when everyone was assigned something to bring to the party, Amanda was assigned chips. CHIPS!!!! This has been my dream! I may have ranted on this blog before about how annoying and sexist I find it to be when you get the following instructions for potluck parties:

           

            Girls bring a side dish.

            Guys bring chips or a drink.

Giant bag full of chips.
I was not going to fail at my one
shot to be a "Guy." I brought 10 bags.
Only about 3 were actually opened.

I HATE that. First of all, what qualifies as a ‘side dish’? Second, I don’t make side dishes, whatever they are. I make peanut butter stuffed brownies or ginger coconut hot pepper mango pie. I don’t make quinoa salad. I’ve only a vague idea what quinoa actually is. And you know what? Maybe I don’t have time to make something, and I just want to stop by a store and buy a bottle of soda on my way to the party. And also, in the interest of fairness, maybe one of those guys really wants to make a great side dish like seven layer salsa dip or a salad of gummy bears mixed with M&Ms. And if you know that guy, please make sure he is single and in his 30’s and looking for someone to wander the world with for the rest of his life and then send him my way.

And speaking of wandering the world, I snuck into anothercountry again. It has been itching in my mind ever since I touched Cameroon a while ago. This time I went without a pressing engagement, so I got to climb up the bank and wander around for a while. I visited a little village, tested some hand pump water to that I could have a reason to give if local authorities came by asking why I was in Cameroon without an entry stamp in my passport (it’s important to always have a reason, no matter its basis in veracity), ate some oranges from the orchards around the village and tasted a very hot red pepper from a local field. All the while we were followed around by a large group of young men, who seemed very amused by this tourism of their side of the river. And by ‘we,’ I mean ‘me,’ of course, because no one else would have considered going on this slightly not-legal adventure, which could have negative impacts on one’s future lives and career paths and such, though I did suggest it as a possible location for a birthday party. I have great ideas. I don’t know why people don’t get that.  Just because they aren’t exactly “legal” doesn’t mean they’re not awesome.

So excited I can't handle it. Here's the awkward laugh-squint face.

So if you ever want to come have fun with me, we can cross borders without passports, ride rickety boats down the river, avoid being hit on by Moroccan flight attendants, and of course, consume copious amounts of junk food. It will be fun. Please bring enough money to bail yourself out of Cameroonian prison, though, because I probably won’t have enough money for 2 people.

The view from Cameroon.

The entourage

Native Cameroonian kids.

Hot pepper field of spicy goodness.

Ladies washing clothes and dishes on the Cameroonian side.
I really need to start the biosand filters over there too.
Who wants to donate?!

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