On Saturday April 16 we met Uncle Dave outside the Sharp senior’s little SIL house at 5.45am. With 6 people and all our gear, we were packed in at a squeeze by around 6am. Uncle Dave, Katie & John sat up front, while Elie (one of Uncle Dave’s translators) and two relatives of David Oumar (the Chadian SIL Centre Manager) occupied the second row.
We were accompanying Uncle Dave on his trip East to the Guera region where SIL was running a weeklong translation workshop on James for the various local language teams. Our destination was Mongo, the main village in the region, where SIL’s Guera offices are located.
N’Djamena-Mongo
The first hour or so out of N’Djamena was somewhat disconcerting. Whenever we drove at or attempted to drive faster than 70kph, the front end of the car began violently shaking, making it difficult to retain control of the vehicle. Uncle Dave was forced to quickly work out that stepping on the brakes and slowing down to second gear was the only way to regain control of the car, steering included. After many attempts at accelerating up to a decent speed and some contemplation of an extremely long day driving at a pace suited to the Friday afternoon grocery run, we eventually managed to drive through the shakes. There didn’t seem to be much rhyme or reason to it, but if we accelerated quickly and steadily through our bogey speed without hitting any bumps that would help to trigger the car’s fits, we seemed to get away with it – which was the (not always immediately successful) approach for the rest of the journey.
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| Why this photo? The mountains you can make out on the horizon through the dust haze are the first we saw in Chad! |
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| Uncle Dave at the wheel as we pass through Angoura, the village at the foot of the first mountain range. |
At about 10am and around halfway to Mongo we stopped for a quick toilet break. This turned into a lengthy toilet break, as Katie didn’t seem to be able to control her bowels after a decadent meal the preceding evening...
Or perhaps a story closer to the truth would reveal that the car simply refused to start J With the motor turning over, but the anticipated kick and roar of the ignition conspicuously absent, we decided to let the motor cool down before we drained the battery. Apparently the car had some history of trouble with its diesel injection system, caused by the low quality dirty fuel that is often all that is available here. Particles in the fuel coagulate as the engine heats up and begin to block the injectors (that was Uncle Dave’s plausible enough sounding theory anyway – the car had been beginning to lose power too). In high 40 degree heat cooling takes a while. We pottered around checking fluid levels (both for the vehicle and its passengers), cleaned the air filter, decided to give the half empty fuel tank a good squirt of the injector cleaning fluid we found under the back seat and, we waited. We waited in the heat under the shade of a scraggly, leaf-less tree beside the road for around 40mins. With the decided wait time elapsed and the decision made to push on if the motor started, we gave it another go. This time, the engine successfully leapt back to life and we were on our way again!
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Stray lady in the African bush |
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| [Apologies for the blotchiness of some of the photos, we had quite a dirty windscreen!] This orange truck would have been commissioned to transport the UN truck back to N'Djamena from the far East in order to save it from the wear and tear of the harsh drive in. We don't think piling on a full load of timber would have been part of the contract - making the most of it! |
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| Entering Mataya, the first village as you come to the mountains near Tchelme: 20mins before Bitkine, where you turn off to go to Mukulu. This mountain is very sacred and believe it or not, has a colony of pelicans that live on top! Apparently there is a lake not too far from here that teems with life in the wet season. |
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| Pot |
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| Camels in the dry river bed near Bitkine on the way to Mukulu |
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| The church in Mukulu (the Sharp's old concession is ~25m further to the right) |
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| Trying out the kid's entertainment after eating lunch! |
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| L-R from top: Sharp's old concession from the back (in rainy season you cannot see the concession from here as the rocky ground is covered in head-high crops); entering the concession (office on the left, carport on the right, guest hut straight ahead; guest hut; back of house; looking down the side of the house to Aimee's hut; cooking shelter (the Chadians now living here prefer to cook outside); looking at the main outdoor space between the house and the sleeping huts; front of house; looking between Aimee's (L) and Dave & Elly's huts (R) at the classroom/Tim and Campbell's room; the concession from behind the guest hut, looking toward the mountains. |
Mukulu is at the foot of Mt Guera and is surrounded by a rugged mountainous landscape, which was a beautiful change from the flat river plateau of N’Djamena. All up, we rested in Mukulu for 3 or 4 hours. Finally, late in the day we headed off on our last leg to Mongo, pulling into the SIL centre as the sun was going down.
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| Mt Guera is out of shot to the left, this is one of the smaller 'foothills' but the light was nice |
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| Old school building (literally) - Mt Guera is the centre peak |
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| The only sign we could find with Mukulu on it (yes the spelling is different to how the locals spell it) was at a well on the way back out of the village |
The SIL centre in Mongo is much smaller than the main centre in N’Djamena. It is another walled concession (as is every concession in large Chadian villages) belonging to one of the local churches in Mongo. There is one main house, the SIL offices, a small workshop/guard’s area and two recently built smaller guesthouses. We stayed in the ‘green’ guesthouse and Uncle Dave stayed in the slightly smaller ‘yellow’ guesthouse. The main house is currently occupied by a couple of the single girls: Caroline facilitates literacy work throughout the Guera and Andrea is currently working with one of the local translation teams. The other SIL staff families in Mongo live in other houses in concessions within walking distance.
Mongo doesn't have electricity at all other than that supplied by solar setups and generators here and there. There are no sealed roads, there is no running water, and you need to filter all of the water that comes in on the backs of the water boys' donkeys before drinking it.
Mind you, the capital city N'Djamena (where we are) isn't much better. Constant electricity is extremely rare and there is no running water in most places here either. On the SIL centre here, we do have electricity most of the time thanks to a big generator and we do have running water as we have a 30m bore which pumps to a water tank and gravity feeds around the centre.
Mind you, the capital city N'Djamena (where we are) isn't much better. Constant electricity is extremely rare and there is no running water in most places here either. On the SIL centre here, we do have electricity most of the time thanks to a big generator and we do have running water as we have a 30m bore which pumps to a water tank and gravity feeds around the centre.
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| SIL front gate (the inside of it) |
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The main house is basically two large huts, connected by a rectangular living area. |
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| The guesthouses |
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| The workshop/guards area |
Sunday April 17, 2011
On Sunday we spent the day simply relaxing: trying to sleep in the heat and reading. It was nice especially for John who hadn’t had such down time in quite a while. We were invited with Uncle Dave to the Sauer family’s house to share a nice meal for lunch before returning to the SIL centre for siesta. At 4.30pm the Sauer’s came by again to pick us all up and take us out to a favourite spot in the range directly behind Mongo. We clambered up some very slabby/bouldery slopes as the day began to cool off – it was great to get outside and see different scenery. John couldn’t believe the uncanny resemblance of the landscape to parts of the Northern Territory in Australia. After about a 20min walk up the ridge, we relaxed in the shade with some chocolate milk and cookies and played a game or two of Uno.
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| Gorilla rock |
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| Chocolate milk and Uno with a view |
We headed down through a valley around 6pm. Toward the bottom Jonathan Sauer showed John a particularly smooth rock surface where they found the remnants of plastic pieces the local kids use to slide down it. John was game, so Jonathan showed him what to do and in the fading light they tried it out themselves a couple of times. The short drive back to the compound was also a bit of fun with the boys enjoying themselves up on the roof rack. We arrived back at SIL and had time for a quick bucket shower before supper at Andrea’s (Caroline was away).
With so much heat inside the guesthouses, we tried sleeping on stretchers outside, but only lasted a few hours, as Katie wasn’t getting enough rest. While we lay awake outside, we appreciated the beautiful breeze drifting about, doing its best to cool us down without any real conviction. The full moon was something to admire, glimpsed through the rustling leaves of the big tree we lay beneath.
Monday April 18, 2011
Monday was another fairly slow day, which seemed to be the best way of coping with the heat. John spent time reading, processing photos and sleeping, while Katie also read and slept. We were really feeling the heat (like everyone else) and quickly started learning some of the strategies to keep cool. Sleeping outside is one option (which is obviously no good during the day) and John started draping wet towels over his stretcher and aiming the fan (which otherwise simply blasted you with the hot ambient air) underneath to create evaporative cooling (lying on top of the towel) which seemed to be very effective until the towel dried out.
The translation workshop had started and we joined everyone for coffee break at 10.30am. Afterwards we stayed on for an hour or so to observe the exegesis lecture for the next section of James. Everything was in French, so although we picked up bits and pieces, we didn’t stay once the lecture finished and the different language teams continued with their translation.
Each day we were to share meals with the teams in the workshop. At 1pm, we sat on mats in the shade and shared noodles and meat off a big tray, Chadian style. Chadian sweet tea followed before siesta.
A bit more reading and sleeping followed before John was dropped out of town to spend some time with Leif – the guy who helped when the SIL water pump gave up in N’Djamena not long after we arrived in Chad. Leif was in the area around Mongo for a day or so checking up on how his team was progressing with their bore drilling. Working under contract to deliver roughly 15 new fresh water bore holes to the area surrounding Mongo; the team had planned to finish work at the end of April. As they had only successfully hit water in 5 bores so far (having drilled many more) Leif had to sort out with his team a new plan of attack. John was simply interested in seeing the work in progress and spent the afternoon asking lots of questions and taking photos. There were many Chadians from the nearest village gathered around spectating as the little drill rig belched out exhaust fumes that mixed with the clouds of dust that spewed out of the ground when the drill bit went through certain layers of rock. Toward the end of the day, there were some interesting developments (including everything within 15m of the drill rig being covered with grey foam that suddenly erupted from the bore) and the team finished the day upbeat about hitting water the next day. While John was off doing his own thing, Katie spent a couple hours talking with Andrea about anything and everything…
After a couple of days chilling, it was time for John to get to work! On Tuesday morning he woke before 6am and walked over to Liz’s concession to take a look at her solar panels. A couple of weeks earlier two solar panels had been stolen from the main array at the SIL concession. Liz had found that the panels for her solar fridge provided ample power and had therefore volunteered to slightly downsize her array and provide two replacement panels for the main array at SIL. John worked until the roof was too hot to stand on (hence starting early), removing 2 panels and replacing them with one larger panel.
Through the heat of the day we read our books again trying to avoid the heat and consequent perspiration as much as possible. Tuesday didn’t seem as hot or humid as previous days. We joined the main group for coffee break again and afterwards John returned to the workshop to take some photos.
The afternoon was taken up with conversation about all sorts of topics with Caroline and then Andrea. Discussions about missionaries, university, bible college/seminary, archeology, anthropology, photography and probably several other topics with similar suffixes were very interesting and insightful. That night Uncle Dave came around and we started going through some photos from the Sharp’s ‘early days’ in Mukulu, Chad. A flat laptop battery brought the time to an abrupt holt around 8pm so it was time for bed, with a bit more reading interspersed by the killing of numerous spiders and insects.
Wednesday April 20, 2011
John was up early again on Wednesday morning and headed to Liz’s around 6.30am with Uncle Dave in the Troopy to collect his tools and the solar panels that were left from the previous day. He returned for breakfast before heading over to Andrea and Caroline’s house to take a look at their solar array and figure out how to mount and secure the two mismatched replacement panels from Liz’s place. Work stopped when John decided to modify part of the existing frame to fit the smaller of the new panels. With the section removed and the necessary (and very simple) modification explained to a local welder down the street, it wasn’t long before the new panels were temporarily fixed in place.
Around coffee break time, Uncle Dave drove us up to the Mongo markets, as Wednesday is the main market day. We spent an hour walking through much of the fascinating network of semi-covered alleyways admiring the stalls. John carried his camera with the hope that someone might approach him for a photo, since like in N’Djamena; you basically can’t take any otherwise. We were quite surprised when a young stall owner asked us to take a photo of him in his stall almost immediately! John’s spirits were high after this initiation, however they dropped almost as quickly as they went up when it became very obvious that the general attitude was not friendly toward the camera. He had to resort to inconspicuously pressing the shutter release with the camera in carry position, without aiming the shots, simply hoping some may turn out ok.
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| The only guy that was actually friendly when he saw the camera - he asked us to take this photo! |
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You see piles of stuff like this everywhere - this is the first time we've been able to get a photo |
Thursday April 21, 2011
John rose early Thursday morning to climb the ridge directly behind the SIL compound together with Jonathan Sauer. Unfortunately the dust made for a hazy sunrise (not ideal for photos) although John enjoyed scaling at least one of the (albeit less impressive) peaks and capturing Mongo and it’s resident baboons from the mountain. They made it back at 7.30am, just in time for John to join Caroline and Katie on their visit to a couple of local preschools in small villages on the other side of the range.
Unfortunately, the class in the first village wasn’t on, as the teacher’s son was being circumcised and activities in the village had effectively stopped so people could celebrate. There were still a fair few kids hanging around the school building with their chalkboards and they looked keen to learn.
The next preschool was in full swing, with the children enthusiastically learning sounds, syllables and words in their mother tongue – Dadgo. They then repeated their two syllable words before break time. The teacher would say a word and the children would repeat it – in rote learning fashion. Children would then have the opportunity to go up to the blackboard, with the metre ruler and repeat the word alone in front of the class, pointing to the syllables with the ruler as they sounded out each word.
After all the photo fun it was time for maths. The focus was on number 8. The teacher counted to 8 in French with the children repeating what he said. He then brought four children to the front of the class and had other children count the legs and eyes of the first four. After going over the numbers in French, they also counted in their own language.
As the teacher proceeded to introduce the number 9, we left and headed back to Mongo. We stopped briefly at FAPLG, met the staff and took a quick look at loads of resources that had been donated for the schools. These resources included plastic dolls, cars, planes, beads, string, square wooden frames (for learning embroidery?), lacing material, pens and balls.
We returned to SIL around 9.30am and began getting ready to leave Mongo. Our destination for the night was Tchelme, which was only an hour or two back toward N’Djamena. The plan was to stay in Tchelme for two nights as the lady we were staying with had some things for John and Uncle Dave to install/construct for her while we were there.
After sharing our final lunch with the guys from the translation workshop, we packed the car and everyone piled in. After several tries, the car wouldn’t start again! This time the motor wouldn’t even turn over, so we thought we might have a blat fattery. A jump-start was all we needed and we were on our way an hour and half later than planned. After a quick stop to pick up some cokes for everyone, we continued out of Mongo.
Not even halfway into the trip we had a flat left back tyre. With the car emptied of people and some of the gear, the boys jacked the car up and changed to our better looking spare. 400m or so down the road the spare was making funny noises so we stopped again. Everyone jumped out again only to discover that the special security nut socket was missing and we couldn’t remove the wheel (there was one security nut on each wheel)!
Various attempts by various people using various tools were to no avail. By this time there was a crowd of locals, one older man lent a hand and also a military officer riding by. John and Marcus (another of Uncle Dave’s translators, riding with us for the first part of the trip) walked back down the road we had came from twice, looking for the tool without success.
Praise the Lord Liz (SIL’s Guera region director) was on her way back into Mongo from a meeting in another village and was able to help us out. We put some of the gear and most of our passengers in her car while Uncle Dave, John and Elie limped our vehicle back to Mongo on the slightly deflated, non-removable spare. They made it and managed to find someone who pumped up the spare and fixed the punctured tyre all on the way back to SIL. This whole time the car was kept running to avoid issues with it not starting again!
So we ended up spending one more (unintentional) night in Mongo. Uncle Dave came and shared some supper with us – bread, tuna, mango and dates before we wearily calling it a night.
Friday April 22, 2011
Everyone rose early (5.45am) on Friday morning in the hope of an early 7am departure. We still only had to travel to Tchelme, but time had been lost for the work that John and Uncle Dave had hoped to get done there. Katie got up and made porridge for Uncle Dave and us while Uncle Dave and John pulled the car apart searching for the missing tool, without success. After more brainstorming, they decided to take the car to the truck stop where they had the flat repaired the night before to see if the guys there had any tricks to remove the security nuts. We had to figure out how to do this before we left or we’d be up the creek if we had another flat on the way to Tchelme.
The guys at the truck stop had no idea as it became apparent they hadn’t seen anything like it before. Desperate to get moving, upon their return to SIL the men ended up going ahead with the most technical solution they had managed to think of. It wasn’t long before they had bashing a slightly too small standard socket piece onto each security nut with a big hammer and destructively removed each security nut. They replaced these with normal wheel nuts and we were finally ready to leave!
With the car loaded up again, we left Mongo mid morning and arrived at Bitkine (on the main road near Mukulu) where we dropped off Elie and Marcus at the market there. They would find their own transport to Mukulu from Bitkine.
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| Bitkine market from a distance - yes, most of the year it is this dusty in Chad! |
We continued on and arrived at Tchelme as it neared lunchtime. Cindy, the SIL lady hosting us, treated us with a chocolate flan and cold drinks for a late morning tea. We then drove to the Tchelme literacy centre for the Kenga language to measure up the room for which Cindy was hoping we could make and install some built-in shelves.
Back at Cindy’s place, the men started work on the shelves, cutting the timber and making the supports. They stopped for lunch and a brief siesta through the hottest part of the day, but it wasn’t long before they were at it again. Later in the day we drove back to the literacy centre to install the shelves. Although the work wasn’t finished until 7pm, the three sturdy shelves that were installed were a success, holding boxes of books and resources for the Kenga language group. John and Uncle Dave had also made up the bracing for another three shelves for when the storage space was needed.
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| We were told the pelican mountain was also known as the old man - from the approach on the way home, it was clear why! |
We rose around 6am Saturday morning, ready for the last leg of our trip back to N’Djamena. Once again our vehicle refused to start. After trying to jump-start the car on a couple of different batteries, we ended up unloading the car again and getting a group of people together to push start it! The local kids and even Cindy got into it and thank goodness it worked! There was no waiting around. With the car now running, it was re-packed for what felt like the millionth time and we left only an hour later than planned at 7.30am.
It was a long drive back to N’Djamena and the car protested most of the way. The same front-end shakes persisted but this time at 90kph as well as 70kph. This was also accentuated by the repaired but unbalanced left rear tyre and made for a shaky ride most of the way. We stopped a couple times to stretch and pee and also for some coke, all the time the car running.
The last 50km or so we drove 60km/h as the road was too busy and car wasn’t in any state to handle the acceleration/deceleration that was required to negotiate the slower traffic in front of us. It was a relief when we made it back to town around 1.30pm.
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| The Chinese and Arabs are working to seal the road to the Guera (currently the sealed road extends about half way to Mongo) |
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| Yep, he's carrying a mean looking spear - hyenas and lions roam these parts |
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| Traditional Chadian hut under construction |
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| Horses are used to draw up buckets from very deep wells in a very dry landscape |
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| Chinese petroleum refinery. After passing through traditional Chadian villages, often kilometres away from water and with no electricity whatsoever, this thing is an extraordinarily out-of-place site in the middle of Chadian nowhere - can you guess why they're happy to build the roads? |
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| The tallest bus and ute loads we have seen so far! |
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| Taxi 'rank' back in N'Djamena! |
This journey felt very 'African' and in being faced with so many car challenges, the Lord seemed to give us all quite a peace and patience in dealing with these. We enjoyed our time away – visiting Mukulu, seeing mountains and more of Africa amidst the ‘adventure’ of the actual trip.