Postal Systems

A quick note to alert you all to the fact that we just figured out how to backdate our blog posts…

Previously we had been adding date subheadings within each post (if the post spanned several days) while the date at the top of each post reflected the day we actually put the post online.

From now on the date at the top of each post will reflect the date that is actually relevant for that post. So if we post to fill any gaps, these posts may not appear at the top of the blog. For consistency we will also apply this retrospectively to most of our old posts (maybe not the mega-posts).

Summary: Make sure you skim the blog for updates further down the page (possibly beyond posts you have already read).

Construction Update

We'll mind it

A German couple has recently left for furlough and before their departure, they were looking for people to mind some of their things. One of these being ‘Oreo,’ a cat they were minding for another family on furlough and the other, their moto. Well needless to say, it’s the moto we’re minding – much to John’s excitement and Katie’s hesitation. The cat ended up downstairs J

John has already spent time brushing up on his riding skills around the centre and given the bike a good clean. He has also restored the wheel lock which has apparently been stuck (unusable - the lock, not the bike) for years which he was quietly pleased about. More recently, John has been looking into engine maintenance and tuning (gotta get the most out of that massive 100cc's!) with the help of Scott, a young Canadian lad working with AIM who knows a thing or two about motos. It has been a long time since anything mechanical has been looked at and there are plenty of things to fix up. Now John just has to find the time to work on all they found!

  

Unfortunately, getting a license has proved more difficult than first thought. No licenses are issued to those with 3 month visas, so we'll have to wait another month until our visas are extended. It seems our driving adventures of both the 2 and 4 wheel kinds will have to remain inside the walls of SIL for now. 

Katie at school

Katie has been volunteering at Wellspring Academy 4 days a week. While she is still busy in the library, more and more time is being spent helping in the classrooms. Her main role has been to assist one child in particular from the early years room who struggles with reading. While still following the normal routine of the day, she is there to help at certain times particularly with reading and writing activities. This also involves some one-on-one time for reading.

After finishing the loan cards for all 2000 + books (plus 3 other boxes), Katie is now in the process of labeling each book. This is found on the spine or bottom left corner of the front cover and makes finding and re-shelving books much easier. It even makes the library look like a real library! So when she is not assisting the younger children, or listening to stories whilst colouring in in the upper grades’ classroom, she can be found in her little corner in the library labeling books.

The school has actually been on vacation this week, so Katie has had a week at home. It’s always nice when unexpected holidays pop up! Next week is homeschooling week: children who are homeschooled join the Wellspring children (at school) and spend the week learning about a themed topic. This time it’s Africa.

The children are put into 4 mixed groups. Throughout the week they rotate around different activities and then at the end of the week, they put on a performance for their parents. The idea is to not only give homeschooled children the opportunity to socialize with other children but to facilitate learning through different means and methods than that of the regular school curriculum and routine.

On Fridays Katie has not been working at Wellspring. She stays home to rest, re-couperate and work on the little things we don’t seem to have much other time for. This can include visiting the veggie man for fresh fruit or veg, drafting blog entries, or general email maintenance. She also gets to enjoy meeting with SILers and other staff at coffee break time. More recently, she spent some time experimenting with the camera around the centre.

From this week onwards, Katie will begin spending her Friday mornings looking after a 5 year old Fijian girl. Her parents are with another mission and as their daughter is so young, often one of them must stay home to look after her while the other visits Chadian families in and around N'Djamena. Allowing them both to be free for a morning has been an answer to their prayers. God works in crazy ways!

Construction Update

Jack & John

It’s been a real treat having ‘Jack’ on centre for the past week. While John has a natural connection with most dogs, this bond has been made even more special for a couple of reasons. Firstly, there are no men John’s age for him to hang out with here on centre (not that there is anything wrong with both the younger and older ones that are around – but you know what we mean!) so Jack has been great company. Secondly, Jack belongs to an Australian family (who are currently on furlough)…so he’s practically an Aussie! The family who are minding Jack were in town from their village and brought him along too.

As you can see, these two liked having each other around…so it was sad to see him go.

Side note: This is the same family’s troopie which Katie goes to school in every second day… nice Aussie touch!

Construction Update

Camera Problems

John’s camera lens stopped working last week. It had been playing up intermittently since not long after we got here. After hours of research on camera forums (thanks largely to the net speed) it became apparent that there are many people who have suffered the exact same fault with the same lens – in fact the fault is specific to this lens (prior knowledge of that fact would have been nice). The frustrating thing is that the part that has failed costs all of $12, but for Canon to do the repair would cost around $200!

In Chad there is no chance of Canon doing a repair anyway (no Canon repairers here) and there is no way we can find the part here either. Thankfully, it turns out that the director of SIL Chad also has a Canon DSLR and his lens fits John’s camera body! Although not ideal, we are not completely stranded without any way of capturing any of the passing days.

John managed to find a tutorial someone (in Australia!) had put together when he decided to take on the repair himself. The page had a link to an Ebay seller in the states who sells the part and so he has ordered it. Apparently he can expect the repair to take a good 6-8hours, but the lens is currently worthless, so he thinks he might as well give it a go. We’re not sure when the part will get here, but prayers for a steady hand in dismantling such a highly refined piece of equipment would be appreciated. Actually, probably pray that it does manage to turn up here one day first!

Construction Update

The first bricks go down as the walls start to go up!

Monuments

It seems Chadians have a penchant for glistening grandeur. Whether gifts from foreign governments, tributes to important figures (past or present), or displays of power, monuments are a very common site when driving around N’Djamena. In fact, the centre of pretty much every roundabout (and these are becoming increasingly prevalent) is adorned with some sort of monument!

We finally had our taxi tour last Friday after 2 postponements due to the water situation at SIL. John brought the camera on our tour, but he was extremely frustrated with the lack of opportunities to take photos. This was in no way creditable to the tour, but rather as (a directed) precaution against serious reprimand – especially in areas with a lot of people. The camera spent most of its time on the floor of the taxi, hidden beneath his feet.

Much to Katie’s nervous displeasure, he did try at every opportunity to snap discrete photos of interesting sites. Usually Katie has quicker with her hands than John was lining up his shots, so wifey normally won out and the camera was thrust below window level before he could get a shot off [insert annoyed glare from husband here]. Funnily enough, as it was the monuments that were least likely to angrily react to being the subject of photos, the few photos he managed to take were indeed of monuments. Here are the few that weren’t too blurry to share...

The 100yr roundabout - constructed in the early 2000's to commemorate 100yrs since French colonisation

Sponsored by banks? This monument seems to have been built with water
features - maybe they run in the wet season, when there is water. 

This massive new arch [one level of scaffolding would be as tall as a man with his arms raised] was built in the brand new palace
 parade ground for the 50yrs of independence celebrations. They didn't get it finished in time, so the red, yellow and blue you see
 is the remnants of the crepe paper they wrapped it in to achieve the originally desired effect!

Not sure what the story is behind these fellas.
Golden calves? 

These two also reside at the new palace parade grounds. They face the main palace gates.

Pompe à eau

It took around a week to resolve the water crisis at SIL. I’ll (John) write this one in first person, as I’ve tried in third and it’s a mission! It’s pretty much the biggest situation I’ve had to deal with so far and I wouldn’t have managed without some bizarre examples of the Lord’s timing and the input of a couple of key people. The sequence of events went roughly as follows:

Tuesday morning the submersible pump in the bore that supplies all of SIL’s water failed. The circuit breakers were burnt out and no amount of fiddling was looking like getting the system going again. I was pulled off the construction site mid-afternoon as no progress had been made all day and the workers had tried all they could think of.

A Swedish guy called Leif happened to visit SIL that afternoon as he was in N’Djamena getting ready to head East to Mongo for a year to drill around 30 bore holes (some coincidence!). Leif and his team should have already left town the day before, however maintenance on their vehicle had taken longer than anticipated – thank you Africa!

After working in the mission field in Sudan for many years, Leif had tried to set up projects in Chad once before, only to be thwarted by unprecedented levels of bureaucracy and red tape. During his first attempt, SIL had allowed him to store his drilling rig on the compound while he tried to sort things out, so he was keen to lend us a hand now we obviously needed it!

So in the dark on Tuesday night, with the help of Leif and another guy on his team from Malawi (he had also been a missionary in Sudan for some time), we pulled up the pump and the 27 metres of pipe it was attached to. Thank the Lord for His circumstantial timing; we would have been in a precarious situation without the help of these guys.

Wednesday morning: new day, same problems! David, the Chadian Centre Manager at SIL arranged for the supply of water to the centre from the local water cart dudes. There was a barrel to keep full at each of the three accommodation buildings and we were contracted to supply water for the construction of the new building, so we also ensure there was a constant flow of carts for the construction site. I can’t remember how much we had to pay, but each hand-pushed water cart carries twelve 20L plastic jerry cans and maybe filled 2 of the accommodation water barrels. Construction slowed right down due to the water supply rate.

In the meantime, David and I spent all day driving around N’Djamena with our purchasing lady Halime trying to find a decent quality submersible pump and new piping to replace the deceased version now lying in the dirt at SIL. Eventually we found a guy in the main market who said he could supply us with a new pump (no such thing as specialty stores here, or even hardware stores for that matter). We jumped back into our Hilux (apart from sitting and driving on the wrong sides, the vehicles are familiar here) and followed our robed guide and his buddies in their beat-up ute to a random side street, then on foot down a dusty back alley to an equally dusty small mud-brick warehouse type building (I guess you would call it that). This was a fascinating little adventure really and sure enough, there were warped shelves full of pumps and associated gear covered in, you guessed it, layers of dust!

Most of the hardware here is Chinese or the goods that don’t pass quality control elsewhere. It is seriously hard to find anything that feels like it won’t break in a ridiculously short amount of time. I had tried to communicate a few decent pump brands, like Grundfos and Davey to Halime, but the only pump we could find that matched our specs was a Shimge (Heard of it? Nope, neither had I. Sound Chinese? I think so). We didn’t have the time to throw away more time looking for a better quality match, so Halime got us a decent price and we headed back to SIL with the pipes we bought at the Grand Mosque Markets and the new pump.

Late Wednesday evening, we gave Leif a call and he still didn’t have his vehicle back (thanks Lord!), so he came straight over to help provide us with the manpower to get this thing back in the ground (27m of galvanized pipe with a pump at the end is not easy to lower into a borehole by hand). By around 8pm Wednesday night, the pump was in position and there was a bird’s nest of Chadian electrical wiring still to sort out. Time for bed after two 13-14hr days!

Out with old (foreground - attached to rusty old pipe), in with the new - yeah Shimge (China some?)

All hands on deck to lower the pump and 20 odd metres of piping into the bore hole (yep I'm up the tower supporting the top end of the pipe) 

If you want to draw a crowd, apparently having a water crisis when the ambient temperatures are consistently above 40C is a pretty good way to do it!

I wish I took a photo of the electrical junction box before I cleaned it up. It was a scary piece of work. Thursday and Friday I basically worked on my own trying to figure out what else ran through the junction box and how to wire up the new pump properly so its cut-off switches worked and I didn’t fry the new system as soon as I flicked the power back on. I received a little input here and there from the other males on centre, but we were all in the same boat where electrical experience was concerned.

After cutting and reconnecting all of the old wires to tidy up the box so that the next person could actually make some sense of what was happening, I had the pump connected and it was time to flick the main circuit breaker back on. I called David Oumar, closed my eyes, held my breath and…click! The switch stayed where it was, check; no funny smells, check; the led for the pump switch came on, you beauty; time to try the pump switch! With a hum and vibration in the pipes, the pump came on and water began to flow – success, thank you Lord!

We realized after running the pump for half a day that the issues with the water system went deeper than a broken pump. When the pump is running, the centre has filter water for drinking, as water is pumped straight to a central filter unit and then around to the different apartments under pumped pressure. For washing, the toilet and any other non-drinking use, the pump also sends water from the bore straight up to a tower to a water tank which then gravity feeds water around the centre. Each apartment has one filter tap and the rest are from the water tower.

The SIL water tower

When the pump stops/fails, the filtered water stops immediately, but the water tank still takes around 24hrs empty, so the centre has limited non-filtered water for a short while. This wasn’t the case this time – when the pump stopped, all the water stopped. After pumping water up the tower to the tank for half a day we realized that the water was simply running straight back out of the tank and the tank wasn’t filling!

This problem was the last piece of the puzzle and no-one on centre could figure out what was happening – our best theory was that we had a massive leak somewhere and we were losing as much water as we could pump out of the bore. Think comic strip where someone is secretly pumping water over the wall at night into a water truck and then selling the water back to us the next day J

Lief had finally got out to Mongo, so he was no longer contactable. Thankfully John, the director of AIM in Chad was around and available to have a look at the system. John is definitely a handy guy to have around. As I guess would often be the case in Africa, if you have a role fixing problems of a practical nature, you soon gain a lot of knowledge about a whole range of things. John is one of these people.

It turns out that there is a non-return valve at the bottom of bore holes to stop water that is pumped out returning to where it came from. Having not dealt with pumps before, I didn’t know this, but it makes sense. Thankfully, you can add that little valve at the top of the bore and it will do the same job. So after one more day driving around N’Djamena with John to find the required parts, then install them (after a small lesson about the quality of fittings in Chad for me which nearly delayed us yet again [AIM John – just after pipe snapped off in T-junction] “you were pulling on that pipe like it was made in Australia John”) we were apparently done!

There have been a few little teething problems since, but the worst of those we managed to sort out in a day. We have essentially had running water ever since and for that I give God the glory – talk about being thrown into the deep end!

This A4 thank you card was organised and illustrated by one of the SIL linguistics ladies - after such a hectic week or so, receiving such thanks for my efforts was very moving (see if you can guess who Katie and I are)

Construction Update

Getting ready to pour the floor slab