The mean streets of NDJ

It’s hard to believe it’s already Thursday. In a way it feels like I’ve been here for much longer, especially considering the long hours we’ve been working. In another sense, though, it’s hard to believe it’s been four days since my last entry. And here I thought I would have more time to blog than I did last fall!

Yesterday was an adventure. Part of my task here involves meeting with all the various UN agencies and NGOs, so my colleague and I spent much of the day just driving around N’djamena. Our organization’s vehicle was in use by someone else, so we had to take one of the “private taxis”, basically a guy with a car that would be impounded as un-roadworthy just about anywhere else in the world. Most organizations have one or two of these guys on standby, since it’s too dangerous to hire a driver you don’t know.

Normally I don’t like driving around, especially in shriveled shit heaps with no door handles, no shocks, no air conditioning, and no seatbelts. (The latter is particularly vexing in NDJ, where car accidents are depressingly frequent.) But yesterday was fascinating, not least because we mainly took little side-streets. These are actually not so much streets as they are spaces between buildings, where the dirt and sand is packed down just enough to drive with bald tires.

Here in these nooks you find the local factories, which consist of a single office-sized room filled with men and sewing machines. These are informal operations that tout themselves “haute-couture”, and they are the ones behind the long patterned dresses, burkhas and ankle-length tunics everyone wears here. Everything is made locally, which is why you see so many people in the same patterned fabric. It’s interesting that in Chadian culture, it is men who do the cleaning and sewing.

The side streets are also filled with livestock, in particular donkeys, mules and chickens. The goats tend to cluster in the ditches where the garbage is gathered. This is their grazing pasture, and there is plenty of it. (I guess that’s somewhat efficient, when you think about it.) Whatever the goats don’t eat is burned, sending oily black smoke into the sky to join the curling wisps of sand. Naked children play in their midst, supervised to the extent possible by milk-eyed old women whose vitamin deficiency has left them blind, or stooped men whose childhood polio has left their limbs twisted. Those who are too sick or otherwise enfeebled even for this task simply sit at the roadside with their backs against the mud walls, mouths with empty gums hanging open, eyes wide and cheeks cadaverous, like an ancient Egyptian mummy freshly uncovered. It’s a disquieting sight.

At dusk, we came upon a skirmish. The driver swore quietly as we pulled up into a crowd of soldiers blocking the road. Fists were flying and bodies heaved, and those of us in the car slid low in our seats with deep unease. I found myself recalling the Advanced Security in the Field training I had been required to take before coming here, and how we were taught never to shelter from gunfire behind car doors. (They are far too flimsy to stop an AK bullet; better to hunker behind the engine block.) We felt naked and exposed, forced to move at a crawl because of the crowd. Thankfully nothing happened, but it was a tense experience.

More later, I hope. For now I have real work to do.