Birthday and Other Types of Traveling

Already my traveling life is blurring, and I’m barely a third of the way in. I like traveling, and I like being in the field, so these are good things. I also like long road trips. But sometimes my life decisions are tiring.

 

On my birthday in the past, I’ve enjoyed taking time off and going on adventures. Number 30 was in Spain, 31 in Hungary, 32 just back from Nepal, making Mexican food for the office in N’Djamena (they liked it). This year I didn’t get a chance to plan an adventure, as I was informed early on that the donors were coming on that day. Naturally, I then informed them that it would be my birthday. With the generous openness natural to most Americans (really that is our reputation out here, I don’t know who thinks THEY hate us—we are much more lovable than most of the French), he offered to bring me a present. “What do you want from the US?” I asked him for a tub of that icing that you can buy in the supermarket. Simple, small, hopefully with funfetti. But I’ve noticed that men often smile and nod like they are hearing the words that are coming out of my mouth, though they have already made their own decision. He brought me Starbucks coffee and lotion. I’m sure that any other 33 year old woman would have been very happy with that, but I’ve already been open and honest about the maturity level of my taste buds, and I never drink coffee by choice. But they redeemed themselves by giving me a box of Little Debbie Valentine’s Day chocolate cakes, which fits into my nutritional system.

Gibraltar on my 30th.

Budapest on the 31st-same scarf, which was
stolen by the SPLA a few months later.

Driving face

The rest of the day was mostly uneventful, though I did drive from Massaguet to Bitkine (about 400km). I dodged potholes masterfully this time and punctured no tires. I did, however, hit one speed bump full on, and after that people kept jokingly reminding me of all the up-coming bumps. Then, after Tamadji took back the wheel, he immediately pinged a goat, and he became the brunt of everyone’s new jokes. He also never relinquished the driver’s seat to me again, but I think that was because he didn’t want to be squished in the front middle seat, straddling the shifter. It was an awkward position that I accepted because being the smallest, I was really the only one who fit there, though Tamadji managed to squeeze in and take over half the driver’s seat while I was driving. I think T didn’t love my driving style. He gave me a few pointers like, “When you’re going around the holes in the road, why don’t you slow down?” and “You can wait for the animals to go by instead of honking at them until they move faster.” Sadly, for the goat he offed, he didn’t take his own advice in this. I also got a tiny bit defensive and asked him how long he’d had his driver’s license. “Fourteen years,” he said. “I’ve had mine for 15,” I remarked casually. Of course, we won’t talk about the years living abroad when I drove at most once or twice when forced. The point is, I don’t need your middle-passenger’s-seat driving. If I don’t want to downshift to 4^th to get around the potholes, hold on to your door handles, there will be swerving, but as long as there are at least 2 points of contact between the car wheels and the ground, we’re probably good. I have not yet flipped a car. And I definitely got us to Bitkine in time to see the view in my favorite Chadian town.

Remember how I can never leave Bitkine area without chickens?
This time we brought a goat (and chickens too).

 Donor trips can be exhausting because managing expectations is hard, but I successfully treated a dehydrated donor (“drink ALL the water”-I’m basically a doctor), I crashed a wedding (I danced, I ululated, I took photos and gave the bride who I’d never met before money), I lectured little children standing in the road soliciting money from passing cars about road safety, I climbed up the water tower ladder in a dress, I read the book Marian sent me on Kindle while everyone else was watching the Jesus Film, and generally, it was a good trip.

Wedding crasher!!!!

She wanted to take a serious selfie.

Little girls showing me the clay toys they made.
I almost bought the tea set for my teapot-collecting grandmother,
but I was squished in the seat and was afraid they'd break on the road.

Jean Pierre, Herve, and The Author.

I had one day at home before jumping back in the car again to visit an orphanage needing a water system in the southern part of the country. I was pretty excited about this, having never been to the south. As a general rule, I tend to like the southern parts of the countries where I’ve lived—south coast of Java=yes, southern Yemen=set them free from the evil dahabashis, southern India=masala dosa (though I didn’t actually go there while I was in India, YES to their food), and so on. I really enjoyed visiting Koumra with the wonderful Jean Pierre of whom Emelie said, “He’s so nice you would think he was American and not French.” He was born in Bitkine.

Jean Pierre showing us the moringa he is growing,
packaging, and distributing to malnourished women and children.
Look up moringa online to see how great it is.

At the maternal health center playing with a recovering malnourished baby

I also had fun traveling with Herve. Someday, if you ever have the chance to travel with Herve, here are some things that you can expect from the trip:

1.     He will bring more than enough water bottles. This is a good thing, as I’ve been on trips with others who do not bring enough. Herve jokes that he is a camel, but camels only drink about once a month. Of course, then they drink 200-500 liters, and he probably averages about that amount per month too.

2.     He will throw the water bottles out of the window. Don’t freak out about this. It isn’t littering. The water bottles will be picked up and used. Usually you can see people run to pick them up as you speed away.

3.     He will bring music. This is mostly good, except I want to take this moment to complain about francophone Africa. Everywhere else in Africa and Asia you only have to listen to some of Celine Dion’s English songs. Here you listen to those AND her French stuff. There is no escape. At least ABBA only sang in English and Herve doesn’t know who they are. DO NOT ENLIGHTEN HIM.

4.     He will stop and buy all the weird fruits and oils being sold by the side of the road. He will buy you some too, even if you tell him that you don’t want them.

Chadian sesame snack

Did you know that this is how cashews grow?
The fruit is not my favorite, and sadly, you
can't just eat the cashew right off the top like that.
You have to cook it somehow.

5.     He will talk about how the French are the root of all evil in francophone Africa.

6.     He will lecture you about getting married. Or maybe just me. We started out with a lovely conversation where he told me that I was one of the strongest women he knows. “And,” he said, “I know a lot of strong women. I have 5 older sisters and my wife is also a strong woman. But you are the strongest. And I like your simple direct leadership style. You are honest and open. That’s a good thing.” After all of these compliments, I was feeling pretty good about myself until a while later when he said, “You know why you don’t have a man? Because you are too strong. You need to be a little weaker so that the man thinks he can come in and help you.” “What if I don’t need him to come help me?” “He wants to think that he can,” he said. “You have to give him an opening.” I clearly don’t know how to do this, but he didn’t accept my protests that I am not going to change who I am to catch a man. The problem is that I haven’t accepted that my life will be meaningless if I never have any kids. And as my window of opportunity is shrinking, he is becoming more and more concerned about me. Therefore, he will spend several hours lecturing me about “openness” and “God’s plan for me to get married” and “your babies will be so cute” and “I know if you actually wanted to get married, you could get married. Why don’t you want to be married? Just find a man and get married.” And then we reminisced about the time that he told me that men are like mangos, and you just have to pick a good one that you can reach. And then we stopped and bought a lot of mangos.

7.     And he will share stories about his time as a child soldier that will haunt you for the rest of your life, even though a few of the stories will be kind of funny. But you’ll start to figure out where his deep animosity for the current regime and their European allies stems from.

At any rate, we had fun. The car suffered but kept going like the Little Engine that Could. She is an amazing car that can withstand Amanda’s and Herve’s driving (though he didn’t let me drive because he believes in traditional masculine chivalry).

I have a few more trips planned this up-coming month, but for now, I’m enjoying the comforts of home. And the giant box of gummy crocodiles and other assorted candies that my friends, who know who I really am, gave me for my birthday.

Showing off the new pants I got from Denis (though it looks kind of like a pregnancy shot)
And the mango pie I made for Djibrine's birthday.

Either I'm trying to convince him to try the pie,
or I'm trying to get him to explain to me why the car is still making that noise.

Superlative Moments

Isn't she the cutest?

I have a new niece! And that was a superlative moment, of course. Also, it means that I can get photos early in the day while everyone else is sleeping, but Marian is awake feeding a hungry baby. But that’s not what I meant by superlative moments.

The other day as I was backing out of my driveway, I nearly hit a horse pulling a cart stacked with firewood, and I thought, “That is the Chaddest thing to happen to me since I’ve been back.” Then while we were eating lunch, the local news did a hard-hitting exposé on how most people don’t stop for red lights, and I changed my mind because THAT is clearly Chadder. I don’t mind ignoring red lights myself—that is the freedom of Chad. Also, slightly related moment that still makes me smile: when I was able to successfully cut off a soldier on a motorcycle in the middle of traffic and he was so mad that he hit my car. But then I was gone and he was stuck and HA. Sometimes I really like Chaddy driving.

If that little red car is me backing out of my driveway,
then my adorable nephew walking behind me is a horse cart,
and everyone else (including the dog) is a reckless motorcyclist,
zipping around, trying to do serious damage.
And this is what it is like backing out of my driveway.
But picture it with more sand and no grass.

Then there have been the IAS-est things that have happened to me. One reason why I get along so well with IAS, or with Leif at any rate, is my general attitude towards planning ahead. One way to define ‘ahead’ is ‘up to or possibly rarely exceeding one hour in advance.’ So when I got the return ticket information for our drilling chief, coming back from Kenya the next day, I was ready to pick him up at the airport that night. But I got to the airport and no one was there—I don’t mean that he didn’t show up on the flight, I mean no flights came. No cars were there to pick anyone up either, so apparently everyone else but me somehow knew that the flight wasn’t coming. But don’t blame this on Chad—this was the Asky Airlines fault. Since I couldn’t get a hold of Emmanuel, as he was still presumably traveling, I called Leif, since he bought the ticket. The ticket was all in Swedish too, so I couldn’t really help. Leif had no idea and no further information, so we agreed that Emmanuel is a grown man who can take care of himself, and we would wait until he contacted us. I went to sleep. At 2:00am, I was awakened by a phone call from Herve. Startled out of a rare, deep sleep, brought on by gummy melatonin vitamins, I answered in Chinese. He didn’t notice, assuming that I was just speaking my usual poor-quality French.  Apparently Emmanuel had arrived at 1am (though the guy at the airport had told me there were no more Asky flights arriving until the next week). He had taken a taxi to the office, but didn’t have keys to get in (they were with me). His phone was dying so he asked the guard to call someone. The guard called Emelie, who said she could not go out alone on her motorcycle in the middle of the night (she makes good choices). Then Emelie called Herve who was leaving the next morning at 5am to go to Abeche and should have been sleeping. He called me, and I stumbled out of bed, woke up my guard as I noisily opened the gate and drove to the office to hand over the keys, sign and stamp some papers, and hand over money.

Me and Emmanuel during the waking hours

But was that the IAS-est thing? I think probably the IAS-est thing was after Leif arrived and informed me about this team of Americans that were stopping by. Suddenly our office was in charge of getting all their paperwork together and arranging housing and transportation and visits and translation for a team that we had only the vaguest idea about. Of course we were amazing at it, but doing a lot of work on short notice just to be nice to people who are loosely connected to us is very IAS.

Then there are the Amanda-est moments—was it eating poptarts in bed while sick? Or going to the pool in sub-33 degree temperatures? Going for a run to test how sick I was? Honking the horn at all the other drivers on the road?

No. It was probably getting into a boat and convincing its surprised owner to take me across the river so I could touch Cameroon. I would have gotten out and stayed a while, but we were in a rush to get several water samples in to the lab for testing before they closed for Friday prayer time.  Next time I’ll bring a picnic lunch and a harpoon to stab at the hippos—just in case.

In the meantime, I’m preparing for a month and a half of crazy domestic and international travel, which will likely provide fuel for more exciting blog posts than this one, but the sisters (one of them anyway--or was it Claire?) were restless, so here’s this mundane look into my platonic life.

Sometimes if you just do something like it's
totally normal, people will respond as if it had
always been a part of the plan. And that's how you get in a boat
and cross over the river to Cameroon before your
project manager realizes what you were going to do.

I touched Cameroon! Next time, I'm getting out of the boat.

Boat selfie. I'm not very good at these,
but at least my hair is not flying in my face.

It's Christmas Time in the Desert

With my friend's cabbage patch baby

I’ve been especially lucky over the last few years to be able to spend Christmas with my family. It’s kind of one of my favorite things about working with Neverthirst, who actively encourage my Yuletide escape. By the end of the year, having diligently forgotten to take frequent R&Rs as recommended by psychologists and aid worker experts and concerned bosses, I’m ready to get out for a couple of weeks. More importantly, I really like spending Christmas with my family because I like them. We have fun, and I buy my nieces and nephews everything they want, and people generally have significant amounts of Amanda-appropriate food shaped like Christmas trees or Santa hats around their houses waiting for me to eat, so everyone is happy. But add in IAS work, and December becomes a month of go crazy until you collapse at the airport in Newark for 13 hours because you buy stupid tickets. Can I just ask that you all remind me to get others to help me buy tickets in the future? Because I make bad decisions. I buy the cheapest ticket and forget to check on how long the layovers are. But in spite of the fact that Asky Airlines wrote New York on my boarding pass instead of Newark, I made it. And I can use these 13 hours to read up on how to do a proper ECHO proposal, and when I realize that is horribly boring and only the fact that my fingers are freezing into icicles is keeping me from falling asleep on the papers I had Emelie print out for me, I can stop doing that and write this blog.  And really—if you’re ever traveling from N’Djamena to Newark and you notice that your boarding pass says New York, don’t worry. That’s just because Newark doesn’t exist as a city in their computer systems. It doesn’t really exist as a city in the minds of most New Yorkers either, interestingly enough. Don’t ask, though, how they happen to have the right airport code correctly programmed in.

He makes that bandage look good.

So December started off with a bang of me moving into my new apartment, when Felix’s lovely mum moved back to reclaim him. He made sure to get into a huge fight with the neighbor cat the week before she came back so that he was limping around with an oozing wound, leading her to believe that I cannot be trusted with small animals. So thanks for that, Fifi.

My new apartment is perfectly fine for me, except that my downstairs neighbor and I are in a feud. I mean, he’s kind of a skeevy guy, and I would have tried to develop a healthy frigidity between us, but his very inconsiderate parking habits have pushed our relationship into enemy territory.  Note: spell check is not recognizing “skeevy” as a word. I don’t think I made it up, but if the spelling is wrong, I blame learning French. It ruins your spelling. Is it “address” or “adresse” or “projet” or “project” or “apartment” or “appartement”? Nobody knows anymore.

I also had a couple of days without electricity, as we were trying to figure out the payment system for the electricity and it took us a while. I was disappointed in myself for being as frustrated as I was by that. I mean, I’ve lived without electricity in my house for more than a year in South Sudan, but I guess I thought I’d paid my dues or something. Frustrating things are really only frustrating if you weren’t expecting them. I got over it and bought some candles and nearly set my hair on fire a couple of times, so it ended up OK.

I don't know if this will work, but
this is the face of Evil.

Besides my Enemeighbor, I’ve also been harassed by a local pigeon. I’m working on a name for him. Robird Hitchcock. Pidgington Franklin. Beelzebird. I don’t know. But I do know that when I looked into his eyes, I saw Evil staring back at me. In the mornings, after I’ve come back in from my run, I often hear him diabolically pounding on my door, demanding entrance so that he can attack me on my turf. The first time, I thought it was my Enemeighbor coming up to talk about the parking situation. When I saw the Bird furiously pecking at the glass, I gave him a gentle kick in the face (against the glass, not his actual face, calm down PETA). He flew off, and I thought that was it, but he bounced back like a boomerang, this time landing on the handle beating the door with his wings.  He comes back every few days to make sure that I know he is still here and he still hates me. How did Daphne DuMaurier end all the evil birds in her book? I should have read the whole thing…or was it just a short story? I should have paid more attention in English class. I’m sorry Miss Searcy. I did not realize the important life lessons I could have taken away from your class, if I hadn’t been distracted by having to be the best at everything. But I can still recite the first few lines of Mark Anthony’s speech about Julius Caesar and that has come in really handy. But seriously—what is the Bird’s kryptonite? Clearly, it’s not being kicked in the face…

In case the video doesn't work.

After moving into my new house, I went on a couple of trips to the field. One to Mongo/Bitkine with the lovely Rhyan and her father, as she had been begging me to take her out of N’Djamena from the moment I met her, and I wanted to oblige because I like making people’s dreams come true. I would make a great fairy godmother. Better than the Cinderella one because I don’t believe in enforcing curfews like a dictator. But Cinderella’s fairy G-mom and I did provide similarly fragile dream-transportation vehicles. Or at least I have the driving skills of a dog turned into a human. Two times in two days I popped the tire and had to change it and get it fixed. The first time, some chivalrous men drove by and helped. I allowed it because they didn’t really look like serial killers (though you never know and that’s why you should be able to change a tire by yourself) and because they had a fancy air-pump jack, and mine was particularly rusty and hard to turn. The second time, I did it myself. The first time it was a direct result of reckless driving, the second time it was a result of driving a vehicle over roads that were never intended for small cars. But they were troopers, and I think it just added to the adventure of the journey. I mean, if you never know when the driver is going to pop a tire, you can never fully relax. Or you shouldn’t, at any rate, because she will drive 140-150kmh if it looks like everyone is asleep and not paying attention to her…

Enjoying the view

Sewing teacher trying on the dresses.
He makes that dress look good. 

What's in the box? Oh, you thought I could
get out of Bitkine without bringing a live chicken back to N'Djamena with me?
HA.

A poster of animals in the guest house where I stayed.
I'm thinking one of these animals hopped a long way from home
or else Africa is getting way more exotic than it used to be.

After that trip, I had a few days at home, and I used one afternoon to bake Christmas cookies with my favorite Chadian kids. They helped for about 10 minutes and spent the rest of the time watching movies on my computer and eating candy and drinking soda that I bought them. Best day every for them, and they are so much cute.

BFFs

I think Sefora single-handedly
drank all the soda. You can see it in her eyes.
This is why we get along--mutual love of sugar.

These kids are my neighbors now and I love it.

The bakers!

Then I had a Christmas party for N’Djamena people before two of our expat staff went home to their respective countries for Christmas. We had Lebanese food (their choice) and cookies (courtesy of me and the Adorables) and candy (courtesy of Leif, who listened to me and did not send licorice. He is slowly realizing that normal non-Viking people do not like it.). Then I had to drive to Abeche to meet the drilling team there, share more cookies with drillers and by standers, have another end of the year party, and get into another feud, which I think I have amicably resolved now. Then there were several days of office work, involving lots of planning, lots of French meetings, and lots of signing checks and receipts and proposals. And now somehow I am in America.  I hope I will be able to get on a not-delayed flight to Nashville and fix my non-functioning sim card with minimal effort. I know I’ll have fun with the family, and I won’t write again until next year, so breathe easy. 

Christmas cookies and roasted goat meat. Festive!

These guys love a good Christmas tree-shaped cookie.

Radwan says, "I look like an American now, right?"
Exactly.

I interrupted this meeting to serve cookies because I'm a girl and I do that.

Party time.

See you in 2017. If you decide that you want to come visit me in Chad. Or if we happen to meet up in some airport or some other interesting country. Or if you invite me to come spend my R&Rs at your house. So many possibilities… Merry Christmas!

Amanda with Baby Amanda and
Emelie with Baby Emelie.
One of the perks of the job is getting cute babies named after us!
We are OK with that!

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