A serving of leftovers

It’s been tougher to update the blog than I thought. Connections are slow, unreliable and just plain hard to get to. The schedule has been relentless, both in Chad and here in Dakar. I had visions of long, descriptive passages of prose and lots of photos, but I guess it hasn’t really turned out that way.

Hopefully I’ll be able to get a few photos up when I return to NYC. And I have no doubt that I’ll have a few leftover stories, like this one from Chad:

As we were hanging around the Abeche airport waiting to leave, my eyes were accosted by the sight of a lily-white pair of legs in hideously short running shorts. It would have been shocking enough to see such attire on a woman, especially during the holy month of Ramadan. Even worse, however, the legs in question belonged to a man. The shorts were khaki, standard French military issue.

The guy was lounging against an AU vehicle, a very self-satisfied smirk on his face. He seemed to think he was pretty great. All the French soldiers in Chad seem to think so; that’s why when they fly their sorties out of the NDJ airport in their nice shiny Mirage jets, they make sure to break the sound barrier right over the city. Because there aren’t nearly as many folks to impress in the hundreds of miles of uninhabited land surrounding N’djamena.

Anyway, I pointed the soldier out to my colleagues, demanding to know what in Allah’s name he was doing trotting around in something barely more respectable than a speedo. The colleagues smiled wistfully and noted that they hardly saw those shorts anymore, but that only a few months ago they had been ubiquitous. Seems there are few French soldiers still willing to leave the base wearing them – and here’s why.

A couple of months ago, the colonel of the local detachment went jogging in his teeny little shorts through the “streets” of Abeche. Let’s take a moment to imagine him, buzz cut and bronze skin, striding gazelle-like past the donkeys and goats and naked children, swerving every now and then to avoid the raw sewerage but otherwise undaunted in his course. Perhaps his wee shorts give the ladies a little thrill as he jaunts by. Or perhaps not.

Anyhow, somewhere along the way he comes across one of those impressive fellows on horseback one so often sees in Abeche, the guys with the AKs and the wrapped faces and the aviator sunglasses. Seems this scary guy is a bit of a colonel in his own right, from the local rebel forces. He takes exception to the scandalous attire of Monsieur le Colonel, barreling his horse into the Frenchman’s path and demanding that he return to the base at once, before any more of Allah’s children are offended by the [insert Arabic expletive] shorts.

Sadly, our hero Monsieur le Colonel does not speak Arabic, and is at a loss as to why this crazy black man on a horse is yelling at him in his crazy foreign language. Our hero ignores the crazy black man on the horse.

Let’s take a moment to imagine our hero’s Parisien sneer as he sweeps past the sweating animal, his determined blue eyes squinting in the Sahara sun. How those eyes widen in shock when the whip connects with his barely-concealed backside.

Yes, it would seem that the rebel commander was not accustomed to being disobeyed. Rather than waste any further words on this ridiculous infidel, he decided to let his whip do the talking. Aid workers throughout Chad still tell of the French colonel bounding back to base double-time, a man on horseback in close pursuit, flogging him while screaming in Arabic to never, ever leave the base in such scanty panties.

And to this day, dear friends, French soldiers are not allowed to jog outside the base. It’s all of our losses, wouldn’t you say?