Day 1

I have been in Chad less than three hours, and already it has been one of the most intense experiences of my life. It’s just so… cinematic somehow, in the sense that it’s everything I had expected, hoped, even feared it would be.

The flight in was a good introduction. There were few Chadians on board, few Africans of any nationality. Business class was full of foreign aid workers, foreign oil executives, and a couple of Africans who were most likely officials of some sort in their home countries. Not a lot of variety, but then there aren’t that many reasons to come to Chad.

It was late at night by the time we landed. It was disappointing not to be able to see the terrain. In fact, you couldn’t see anything – not even lights. The airport was virtually the only source of electricity in sight, even from a significant altitude. Here and there an occasional spot of light dotted the blackness, like a lone sailboat on a vast sea. It struck me that there could not be many capitals in the world with so few lights.

After a hair-raising descent down a rickety, unlit metal staircase propped against the aircraft, we exited into a hot, sticky, mosquito-y night. Chadian soldiers with off-kilter berets and impressive epaulettes loitered languidly around the aircraft. Grasshoppers flopped on the pavement and against my knees as we ascended the bus. The bugs were everywhere, and that’s when I recognized Mistake #1: I hadn’t started my anti-malarials, and my bug spray was in checked baggage. Dammit.

What happened next was vintage Africa. My two colleagues had not yet been issued their visas. They had been told by the local office that it would be OK – the visas would be issued at the airport. But the driver who came to pick us up had not been informed of this little snag, and had no idea what to do. He ushered us into a tiny, grimy room marked “Poste de Police”. There, we waited for over an hour while six Chadian gendarmes lectured us and the driver about official policy, and how our invitation letters should have been sent to the Ministry of X, followed by the Ministry of Y, which then needed to cross-check them with the Director of A and the Prefect of B. Once we were suitably impressed with all this official procedure and understood who was In Charge Here, they grudgingly issued the temporary visas. We then passed into the long-empty lounge, where the luggage guard demanded to see our claim tickets for the three remaining suitcases. We were the only people in the entire bloody airport.

When we got back to the hotel, I recognized Mistakes #2 and 3: I didn’t bring any bottled water off the plane, and there’s none to be had in my room; and I didn’t bring my own pillowcase, and let’s just not elaborate on that. (I am currently sucking back a bottle of Fanta as the only source of liquid available to me. It’s not quite cutting it, I’m afraid.) The hotel looks impressive from the outside, but the room is filthy and it’s costing me almost two hundred bucks a night.

Welcome to West Africa.