THE WISE FROG DOESN’T PLAY IN HOT WATER

Tags

Africa, Cameroon, Chad, Humor, Nonfiction, Peace Corps, USAID

As a Peace Corps Volunteer in Chad working on a USAID funded project, I’d spent a good bit of time in the USAID office in N’Djamena. Also we mixed a lot socially. One of the senior USAID guys and maybe the best of the breed, Ed Costello, had been to my house for pig roasts, and I had been to his house to watch recordings of football games. So my interview with him near the end of my three years of service went smoothly. At the end he said that they probably had something for me lined up. He smiled, “But George, don’t go out and buy a cadillac yet.” So as soon as I was a free man again, I was hired on a short term personal services contract to figure out where the money they’d spent on a big multi-donor agriculture project had actually gone. Apparently they didn’t have a clue, or at least they pretended not to have one. I suspected that it was a bureaucratic hot potato thing. That project was a complicated mess and way too far gone to rectify. The folks back in Foggy Bottom must have demanded accountability or closure or something, and nobody wanted to have their names attached to that final ugly post-mortem report.

Since the project was potentially career tarnishing, the responsibility for supervising it had drifted down to the least common denominator, Stephen (don’t remember his real name). Stephen was the youngest and least experienced USAID direct hire employee in Chad. Let’s define that further to just one of the least experienced human beings anywhere period. He had spent some years as a monk in India (I think). I believe he even mentioned having taken a vow of silence for awhile. He was a likeable guy, academically smart, who exuded pleasantness and calmness and blissful ignorance about all things Chadian. Unfortunately he had become infamous in Foreign Service circles when he’d had some special honey shipped to him through the diplomatic pouch. A jar had broken, and from one stop to another the package had leaked the sticky stuff. Apparently the pouch had made several stops along the way to Chad, each one generating an angry cable. The ambassador was not amused. The point here is that sending Stephen up to the project site in remote Bol would have just been cruel. So they hired me, a rough and tumble well driller with language skills who knew his way around up there.

I spent a few weeks in the USAID office going over all the project files and learning to navigate my way through that bureaucratic sea. If that sounds like an exorbitant amount of time, then you have no idea how much paper a USAID project can generate in four years or so. USAID might be the preeminent bureaucracy in the entire US Government. If not it’s a contender. Until Jack Anderson wrote about it, they had an actual official job title: The Administrative Assistant to The Assistant Administrator for Administration, United States Agency for International Development. I mean when an agency’s “handbook” surpasses twenty-five volumes, that pretty much tells the story. We wells vols used to goof on USAID. When we wrote the subsequently approved two million dollar extension to our current project, we stated in it that once approved the first thing we needed to do was to go out and take a PISS (a pre-installation site survey).

A word about the Ag project. The polders are finger-shaped valleys at the edges of Lake Chad. Lake Chad has no observable outlets but it remains fresh water. It floods in the winter months when the accumulated water from earlier rains much farther south finally reach it via the Chari River. The river pours fresh water into the lake, and the higher salt content stagnent water is pushed to the fringes, flooding the polders. When the lake recedes again, shallow pools are left in the polders to evaporate during the dry season. There are also other ways the lake sheds salt, like natron formation and harvesting, that are not relevant here. Since the water table in the polders is near the surface, pumping up fresh water and flooding them to desalinate them if needed is not a big deal. Then build a little earthen damn across the usually narrow entrance to keep the lake from flooding it again, and you have a very fertile easily irrigated little valley. Traditionally when irrigation in Chad’s hot dry climate built the salt content of the soil back up, the locals would break down the damn and flood the polders again. The polders have been used for local agriculture for thousands of years, however up to that point never on a grand mechanized scale.

When that huge multi-donor project was conceived, in most years for a few months the open water reached Bol during the fall and winter, and then barges could navigate the lake and river between N’Djamena and Bol. So the idea was to grow wheat on a large scale and send it by barge down to N’Djamena to be processed and turned into delicious baguettes. Seemed like a great idea. Then the great Sahelian drought of the early to mid seventies hit just as the project was getting underway. The open water no longer came within miles of Bol, and never has since, even in wetter years. Lake Chad shrank. And tropical vegetation soon filled the void. Given the significant infrastructure investment and the lure of the fertile polders, they looked for solutions. For years at great effort and expense they kept a channel open through miles of vegetation, but the barge thing never panned out. So they decided to grow vegetables in the polders and ship them by truck over sand pistes (just tracks in the sand) and rough roads. Vegetables sold to expats at the project store in N’Djamena generated cash. Useful stuff cash.

In the beginning of Thor Heyerdahl’s Ra Expedition, he writes of his trip from N’Djamena to Bol to study the papyrus boats on Lake Chad as a great harrowing adventure, fraught with danger. I found his hyperbole amusing. At one point I almost fell out of my seat laughing as he described his acute anxiety at being surrounded by “swarthy bedouins.” He was talking about Kanembous. In N’Djamena the street vendors carrying bright colored towels and scarfs on their heads who insistently tried to sell you cigarettes and heart-shaped sunglasses were Kanembous. Also Kanembou ladies were renowned for friendliness. En brousse I found them to be generous, hospitable, and quick to laugh, but stubborn at times. Once a bunch of young Kanembou men piled into the bed of my pickup and refused to budge until I drove them to a not too distant village for a wedding. A fellow wells vol compared them to the Hekawi Indian tribe in the TV show F-Troop. Honestly I never for one moment felt threatened by Kanembous, annoyed at times, but never threatened. I’m sure they found me annoying at times too. Anyway a trip to Bol was just a day at the office for me, albeit a long dirty one. I must have made that trip thirty/forty times. Still and all, it was difficult enough that I knew it couldn’t make economic sense to ship perishable vegetables that way.

Other than some cement and construction materials which went into the project infrastructure in the early days, the USAID part of the project consisted of underwriting the costs of improving and maintaining roads in and around the polders. The Chadian governing agency, the World Bank and the UN were really the major players. So it was my job to find out if the USAID money had gone and was still going where it was supposed to go. USAID did ask me to try and find out exactly what their construction materials had been used for. However, short of any authority to access the files of the other project participants, that was a fool’s errand, water under the bridge, and I ignored it. Within two days up in Bol I had confirmed what I’d suspected from the files, that the USAID polder road maintenance funds were financing nearly all of the operating costs of transporting vegetables to N’Djamena by truck, including fuel, vehicle repairs, even driver salaries. I stayed up in Bol for two weeks anyway. I had friends up there, fresh vegetables aplenty, and as long as you had shelter from the mosquito swarms coming off the lake at night, Bol wasn’t a bad place. I was in no hurry, earning some real money was nice.

One of my friends, Mike Bouchard, was a PCV mechanic in Bol working on the ag project, and whatever else they asked him to do. He was the youngest vol in Chad, and very unusual for Peace Corps didn’t have a college degree. Apparently he had been in college and had been questioning if it was really the thing for him at that time, sitting around in a dorm with some buddies (maybe drinking, maybe stoned, I don’t remember him telling me that part), when they saw a Peace Corps recruiting ad on TV that enigmatically asked if the glass they were showing was half full or half empty, call this number to find out. He called. The recruiter never answered the question, but she did ask Mike if he had any skills. Mike figured that electric guitar probably didn’t count, so he answered with his other main skill. “Well, I’m a diesel mechanic.” There was a pause. “Hold on, let me get your information.”

Once during what passed for the rainy season up there, when Mike had been in Bol over a year, I stopped the landrover on top of a dune, and we looked out over an expanse of small dunes sparsely covered in light green cram cram grass. Cram cram is a burr grass, and where even cram cram no longer grows is considered by some botanists as the demarcation of the true desert. If we gazed at the most distant dunes, they appeared to be totally covered in a light green fuzz, but closer you could clearly see the sand beneath. Mike turned to me: “It kind of reminds me of the Shenandoah Valley.” After I took that in, I replied, “You know Mike, perhaps you should consider going home for a visit.”

Mike worked with David Girven, one of the true Chad legends. David had been a Chad vol back in the early days when Peace Corps did fun things, like teach new vols the wrong language and dump them without a structured job in isolated villages. Psychovacs were not uncommon in those days. David had stayed on in Chad working for the Chadian Government agency running the ag project as a mechanic. He fixed everything that needed fixing, and invented things like a plowing shield to put on the bow of the boat that cleared the papyrus blocking the channel to open water. He had a Chadian family, lived in a humble mud brick compound, and was bigger than life, a Chadian Jeremiah Johnson, liked and respected by Chadians all over that region. He was a humble, compassionate, and generous man.

Since a good portion of Bol used our wells, we vols were up there fairly frequently. Many a night we’d camped out in David’s compound, huddled under our mosquito nets. You didn’t walk around much in Bol at night. The massed whining of mosquitos coming in off the lake at sunset compared to a big jet preparing for takeoff. One night David stood outside the nets and held out his bare arm until no skin was visible, just mosquitos. David was not loquacious by nature, but it was a real treat when we could coax one of the old stories out of him.

So after a couple of weeks I went back to N’Djamena, spent another couple weeks in the USAID office slugging through the bureaucracy, and then turned in my final report. I was still being paid to hang around while people digested my report, in case they had any questions. The initial reactions had been favorable, and I had hopes USAID would find something else for me to do. At that moment all hell broke loose in N’Djamena. It was a civil war, fighting in the streets, a total breakdown in order. Leaving the war stories to be told separately, after several days when the fighting had diminished enough to risk it, I made my way out to the airport. All non-essential personnel were being evacuated to Yaounde, Cameroon, and from there to the states. Baggage was limited to two suitcases per person. Apparently some of the “essential” personnel decided that my language and practical skills could come in handy, so I was asked to stay on and help with logistics, first and foremost the loose packing of abandoned homes. I accepted.

IDRIS AND THE RIVER PEOPLE

Tags

Africa, Bagirmi tribe, Cameroon, Capitaine Fish, Chad, Fable, French, Slave Raiders

This story takes place sometime in the nineteen twenties. It is about a young fisherman named Idris who lived in a village on the east bank of the Chari River between the city of Fort Lamy a little ways to the south and Lake Chad much farther to the north. A member of the Bagirmi tribe, his family was poor because his father had lost an arm. They depended on Idris who was an excellent fisherman. His best friend Moussa came from a wealthier family. In fact Moussa’s family was distantly related to Sultan Moustapha of the Bagirmi Tribe. Most days, especially in the dry season when the river was shallow everywhere but in the very center, Idriss and Moussa would go out on the river in a fine pirogue that belonged to Moussa’s father Aboubakar and try to net or spear fish in the shallows. Aboubakar spent his days tending his herds of cattle and goats and riding his handsome horse. Idris’s family owned an old leaky pirouge that he used only in Moussa’s absence, for fear of it sinking. Their prize catch was the large capitaine (a.k.a. Nile perch) so highly valued by nasaras (white people, mostly French), who lived in Fort Lamy. One large capitaine would sell for enough money to feed a family for a week, maybe two.

It had been the Bagirmi Tribe that had appealed to the French for help against the Arabic slave raiders. We sometimes think of slave raiders as small gangs of outlaws, but in those days some commanded what amounted to small armies. In fact in Idris’s day many of the older Bagirmi women had plugs in their lips intended to make them unattractive to the raiders. Idris was happy that girls no longer had to do that. A few years before Idris was born, a combined and badly outnumbered but better armed French and Bagirmi force had defeated Rabah, the last and greatest of the slave raiders, at Kousseri, a small town on the Cameroonian side of the river across from the eventual Chadian capital city of Fort Lamy, named after the commanding French officer who had died heroically in that battle. Many years later it would be renamed N’Djamena following Chad’s independence from France. Idris’s father had lost his arm at Kousseri, and from then on could only fish with line from the river bank. In addition to his father’s arm, the price of that victory had been that the French settled in to govern that vast area known as The Chad, the last significant area in Africa to be colonized. And now the Bagirmi were less than they once were, just one of many tribes, but they no longer had to worry about slavers. Whether things were better or worse under the French was something the old men argued about over millet beer.

Fishing on the Chari was dangerous. Hippos would sometimes overturn pirogues and kill fishermen. Drowning when the river was flooding was always a danger, for very few people knew how to swim. It is easy to learn to swim in a nice swimming pool or a safe little lake or pond, but not so easy in swift rivers or in ponds infested with poisonous snakes. And once in a while a large crocodile would slip down the river from the endless reeds on Lake Chad or the seasonal swamps and ponds on the west side of the river in Cameroon. In fact the west bank of the river was a favorite place to fish. Lines on paper drawn by nasaras didn’t mean much to the Bagirmi. Also Idris and Moussa were always on the lookout for the river people, not that they saw them often. In fact Idris had seen one only twice in his life. The river people looked something like nasaras, with their pale skin and long flowing blonde hair. They also had angled emerald-colored eyes, many small pointed teeth, gills, narrow heads, and webbed hands and feet. That they were seen so rarely was thought to be due to the magical powers that some thought they possessed. No nasara had ever seen one, at least as far as anyone knew. They doubted that the river people existed at all, believing them to be folk legends. But then no nasaras spent days on end searching the river for fish. Seeing one of the river people was considered to be an omen of some sort, whether good or bad was a matter of debate, probably because hippo attacks sometimes followed sightings. Some thought that the hippos were like cattle to the river people.

Now Idris thought more deeply about the river people and things in general than Moussa and the other young men in his village. Except for their long blonde hair everything about the river people seemed designed for swift movement in water. That bothered him, so one day he asked Hussein about it, the wisest old man he knew. Hussein said he didn’t know for sure, but the hair could just be vanity. He’d seen many a strutting bird and preening animal, so why not river people? However he then asked Idris to think about how few times river people had been spotted. Hussein smiled and said that with the sun shining down and his hair fanning out above him as he sat on the sandy river bottom, a river person might be pretty hard to see. Also since the river wasn’t deep all year long, often Idris had wondered where the river people lived. Moussa’s father believed that they lived in cavelike villages under the banks of the river, although no one had ever seen such a village. Others said that they lived under the reed mats floating in Lake Chad and only came down on occasion, which is what the members of the Kanembou Tribe around Lake Chad claimed, but then the Kamembous were known for telling tall tales. Anyway no one knew for certain, not even old Hussein.

One day while Idris and Moussa were fishing, a giant crocodile broke the surface holding a struggling river man in its jaws. Moussa wanted to paddle away, but Idris stood up and threw a spear that pierced the crocodile’s eye. The crocodile released the river man and disappeared beneath the water. Although bleeding violet blood from several wounds, the river man stared at Idris, as if memorizing his features, then he’d nodded once and rolled beneath the water. When the villagers heard the story, they were amazed. No one knew whether it meant good fortune or ill fortune for Idris, but everybody agreed that it had to mean something.

Now it so happened that all the sultan’s daughters had been married off one by one, save for his youngest, a gazelle-eyed beauty named Aisha. Whenever Idris and Moussa encountered Aisha, Idris thought her shy smile drifted his way more than Moussa’s, but perhaps that was wishful thinking. For each daughter in turn the sultan had held a contest to determine the lucky young groom. The first had been a horse race. The second had been the longest crocodile skin. And the third had been a hunt for meat for the bridal feast. A renowned hunter had brought in a magnificent antelope cheval, but the prize had gone to a handsome younger man who had brought in a warthog. Turned out that the Sultan just loved roasted warthog. Who knew? That night at the feast, although his portion was small and not choice, Idris discovered that roasted warthog really is delicious. Later he watched as the daughter in question gave a quick sly wink to her husband to be. For Aisha’s contest the Sultan had decided on the largest capitaine. The suitors were given one week with prizes measured every evening. That gave Idris hope, for everyone knew he was the best fisherman for many miles around. Briefly he wondered if maybe Aisha had had something to do with that.

Over the first five days of the contest Idris and Moussa fished together as usual. Both had caught capitaine, but Idris had caught the largest. It was part of the contest ritual to gut and clean the fish in the late afternoon with all the villagers present. On the sixth morning Idris discovered that Moussa had taken his pirogue out earlier by himself. So Idris took his old pirogue out that day. He didn’t catch anything. In fact Moussa had left in the middle of the night and paddled the ten miles or so against the north flowing current all the way to Fort Lamy. There in the fish market he had spent all his money to purchase the largest capitaine he could find, one larger than the one Idris had caught earlier. He thought Aisha was a fine looking girl, but really for him it was all about marrying the sultan’s daughter. Paddling back with the current was much easier. When he presented the fish there were murmurs because the fish had already been gutted and cleaned. Moussa explained that he had caught the fish early in the morning and was afraid it would spoil laying ungutted in the pirogue all day. Idris was suspicious, but he had no proof.

He decided to go out by himself the next and final day of the contest, his old pirogue notwithstanding. He no longer trusted his friend. He fished vainly all that day and began to despair when suddenly the water around the boat began to roil. That frightened him because that often happened just before a hippo attack. But soon the water on both sides of the pirogue filled with river people. That was frightening too, but there was little he could do about it, so he sat quietly. The river people on one side grabbed the pirogue and held it steady, while the river people on the other side hoisted up and dumped over into the center of the pirogue the largest capitaine that Idris had ever seen, maybe that anybody had ever seen. The fish was so heavy that the pirogue sank down until only a couple inches remained above the water line. It would later measure out at just under six foot and three hundred and sixty pounds. And it was beautiful with silver scintillating scales blue tinged in places and black eyes surrounded by bright yellow eye walls. When he looked back up all but one of the river people had disappeared. Of course it was the one whose life he had saved. The river man smiled. That was a pretty scary too with all those little pointed teeth, but a smile is a smile for all that. Idris smiled back and this time the river man nodded his thanks. Then he turned gracefully and slipped beneath the water.

When Idris returned oh so carefully in his pirogue, he became the toast of the village. The sultan himself came down to gut the fish, quite an honor. Idriss heard some old men mutter that it was the biggest capitaine anyone had caught since the days of their great great grandfathers, which made him smile. In his experience when it came to fish stories, great great grandfathers, great grandfathers, grandfathers, and old men in general were not exactly wedded to the truth. When the sultan sliced the fish’s belly open, a large emerald fell out. After some oohing and ahhing, the sultan announced that much of the money from its sale would be used as a dowry for Aisha. He bought them a plot of land on a hill overlooking the river, with a nice mud brick house that had a real tin roof, and he gave Idris a fine new pirogue. The land behind the house was flat and fertile so Aisha could grow spices and hot peppers and gumbo and ground nuts among other things. In the years that followed, Idris and Aisha had four healthy children. Surprisingly they all had green eyes and just the tiniest bit of webbing between their toes and fingers. They loved the water and were all fine fishermen and fisherwomen. His two girls were strong limbed and fished as well as the two boys. As for Moussa, from that day on he had no luck fishing. He became a herder like his father.

Moral: You know, every great once in a while, just to keep the universe honest, a good deed really does go unpunished.

THE DOGS BARK BUT THE CARAVAN MOVES ON (INTERESTING CHARACTERS I’VE KNOWN — USAID BOSSES)

Tags

Africa, Benin, Burkina Faso, Chad, David Wilson, Humor, John Lundgren, Mali, Nonfiction, Peace Corps, Togo, USAID

I first came into contact with John Lundgren when I was a PCV well driller. Our project was funded by and required a good bit of contact with USAID. In addition living in N’Djamena there was a great deal of interaction in general between PCVs and embassy/USAID personnel, far more than most places I’ve lived and worked. It was the mid-seventies and things were decidedly less uptight than now. Characters abounded, people were allowed to be a touch eccentric. And John, the USAID Director, was a five star character. Everybody knew he was a nudist. Usually he drove to work without a shirt on and put it on in his parking space. Once in later years when I knew him better, I asked him what he thought about going to his new post as AID Affairs Officer in Djibouti. He replied, “Maybe I can find a beach where I can walk around naked.” Also in later years a female consultant friend told me she had stayed at John’s house once for a few days. She’d known about his nudist proclivities, but it hadn’t bothered her. He wasn’t going to walk around naked in front of her. John had class. But one night she went down for some water and surprised John as he was getting something out of the frig. The refrigerator door was between them. They chatted a few minutes until she realized he was getting cold.

John had a pronounced theatrical streak. He never seemed to be off stage, but he was a likable guy. He didn’t have a mean bone in his body and he was loyal to his people. Somehow he was contacted by a guy named Pruitt from the University of Tennessee (I think). I don’t remember if he was a professor, PhD student or what. Anyway, from his ivory tower in Knoxville this guy had developed an elaborate and unbelievable project proposal to stop the spread of the Sahara. He wanted to build dykes along three to four hundred kilometers of the Logone river to keep it from its annual flooding, thus greatly increasing the water flow into Lake Chad and doubling its size. He postulated that that would greatly increase humidity and rainfall in a large area of the Sahel — a dubious assumption, there are desert islands. Also that annual flooding that he wanted to stop allowed for extensive rice cultivation. The funniest part was that he estimated the labor costs using the labor production and cost stats of the Chinese coolies who had worked on the transcontinental railroads in the nineteenth century. Everybody laughed at the project except John. Of course he knew it was total pie in the sky, but the grand scale of it appealed to him. Twice this poor fellow flew out to Chad convinced that John was pushing to get his project approved. If anybody mentioned the project in the USAID Office when John wasn’t around, a chorus of “Pruitt…Screw it!” was sure to follow.

John was the AID Affairs Officer for Togo and Benin, two small narrow adjacent countries, when I worked in Cotonou, Benin with a colleague, Sarah, on a potable water project. I worked on the technical side and she handled the health side. John’s office was in Lome, Togo which was a only a few hours drive from Cotonou. About a year into the project relations between the US and Benin deteriorated and the project was suspended. Benin’s UN Ambassador shouting “Vive Peurto Rico Libre!” in front of the General Assembly didn’t help matters. When a drunk American diplomat drove into and became “lost” inside a large military camp (at least that was the embassy line), things went south fast. Sceptics at heart, the Benin Government was in no hurry to release him. The resulting standoff threatened to become a major diplomatic incident, so the embassy ordered Sarah and me, the only non Peace Corps Americans without diplomatic passports, to leave for Lome immediately to avoid potential complications like house arrest. Since officially the project was suspended and not canceled, John kept us on the payroll for months until we could land other jobs. He caught considerable grief from USAID Washington, but refused to budge. I was and am grateful to him for that. However it made for a very crowded little USAID Office in Lome. John had a spacious office, but everybody else was crowded into small spaces. When John went on vacation, and without his approval, his deputy immediately called in a crew and created another office. Upon his return John wasn’t happy. They’d sawn his stage in half.

In order to relieve some of the crowding, I proposed to John that I take my project’s little 404 Peugeot pickup and make technical visits (cough cough) to some other wells projects in West Africa. John approved it with no qualms. I don’t believe any other professional bureaucrat in the world would have, but John danced to a different tune. Given the turmoil in Africa today, the idea of  an American driving by himself across three countries more or less on a lark seems incredible, but in 1982 I never gave a thought to my safety. I mean the road was paved the whole way, albeit a bit rough in spots. To someone used  to driving on sand tracks up and over dunes, that seemed like a piece of cake. I drove north all the way through Togo to Ougadougou, Upper Volta (now Burkina Faso) where I thought I could get a visa for neighboring Mali. I couldn’t. Relations between the two countries weren’t good. I did purchase a couple of nice Ougadougou bronzes.

I planned to meet my buddy Mark in Bamako where he was coming through on business. The USAID Director there, David Wilson and his wonderful wife Tatsie, old friends, had invited us anytime. Tatsie was a serious vegetarian. I once asked her if she ate fish. She replied, “I don’t eat any of my friends.” Dave had replaced John in Chad and had been the USAID Director during the civil disturbances when I was working on a USAID contract. He personally asked me to come back to Chad during an interim of nearly a year when things had calmed down some, before renewed fighting closed everything down for years. It’s an odd thing, but even intelligent people can become accustomed to abnormal conditions and totally lose perspective. During that false hope interim period in Chad we desperately tried to get the foreign assistance train back on track, convincing ourselves, all evidence to the contrary, that conditions had improved sufficiently.

At one point we went so far as to invite a UN and World Bank delegation to Chad to see about starting back up a multi-donor road building project. There were only a few of us at USAID Chad at that time, a skeleton crew, so I was unofficially handling the project management side of that and several other dormant projects, unheard of for a contract employee and against USAID regs — hence unofficial. They  arrived and we went to the USAID conference room and sat around the big table. As we were making our presentation, a few distance shots could be heard, a common occurrence. Then the shots got louder and nearer. I noticed some flinching. Finally an AK47 went into rapid fire just outside the building. I looked down the long empty table to Dave and shrugged. Our distinguished visitors were all under it.

FAP – Force Armee Populare FAN – Force Armee du Nord

It so happened that a couple, old Chad PCV friends, were living close to the Mali border, working on a water/health project. So I continued west across Upper Volta until I reached Scotty and Charlotte’s place. I asked around about the border and was told that there was only a little offset border station a few kilometers inside Mali where you were supposed to present credentials, but it was all pretty sleepy. The USAID logo on the side of a vehicle had proven useful to me in the past, so I decided to chance it. I blew right past the border station, no problem. I had some time to kill so I stayed in Mopti a few days and visited the Dogon country. The cliff houses were fascinating. On the way down to Bamako I took the ferry over the great Niger and visited the ancient city of Djenne with its truely stunning architecture.

I had a fun time in Bamako. One of the highlights of the trip was a party at the Ambassador’s Residence to which Dave and Tatsie insisted we accompany them. The US Ambassador was new, unusually young (maybe early forties), single, liked to dance, and not bad looking either. Unsurprisingly there were quite a few attractive women there. On more than one occasion Mark had stated that his greatest fantasy was to be in bed with a French woman and have her say “Ooh la la!” That night he spent some time chatting with an attractive French lady. He had a big smile on his face the next day. That round trip was some 1,600 miles across the heart of North Africa.

Recently I learned that John is an actor now, usually playing odd old men in music videos and strange cult movies, but lately branching out to more mainstream parts. He looks great for his age.

ONE DAY HONEY, THE NEXT DAY ONIONS (GREGORY “GROMO” ALEX’S STORY)

Tags

Africa, Beer, Cameroon, Chad, Gregory "Gromo" Alex, Humor, Nonfiction, Peace Corps

Gromo died young as the result of a fall at his home. I believe he was fighting cancer at the time. He was a truly great man, awarded for valor by the UNDP for his heroic efforts to save lives during the horrors of Rwanda. I wrote this story long before his passing and without any knowledge of his time in Rwanda. It reflects a happier time. The Chadian Arabic proverb translated for the title is: “Yom assal, wa yom basal.”

Gromo came to Chad as a Peace Corps Volunteer almost two years after I did. He was a big muscular English teacher, reminding me of Mongo in Blazing Saddles, not that he lacked intelligence, but rather he exuded an aura of placid strength. It was impossible not to like Gromo. Chadians loved him, especially children. He couldn’t go anywhere without attracting a flock of kids. For reasons known only to him, he chose to make Princess his girlfriend. Princess was the name we vols gave her, one of those contrary nicknames like calling a huge man Tiny. We knew all the street ladies, some better than others. Remember this was the mid seventies, before AIDS, or at least before anybody knew about it. Most of them had come to N’Djamena as runaway brides who couldn’t stand being married to a much older man, or a cruel one. Or they had failed to produce children in the allotted time frame. In Chad it was never the man’s fault. In general they weren’t callous hardened prostitutes. One older vol advised us to think of them as old-fashioned New England town tarts. That said they looked to establish a longterm relationship with a rich man. And to them all white men were rich, even Peace Corps Vols. They weren’t above using a trick or two to accomplish that task. A few volunteers had been surprised by eleven month pregnancies.

Most of the street ladies were delicate boned and lightish colored, from the northern Islamic tribes. Many had tribal scars, but these tended to be shallow scars on the upper jaw or under the eyes, more decoration than disfigurement. A smattering had blue tattooed lips, permanently appearing to be wearing smeared blue lipstick. The tribal scars didn’t bother me, but I admit to finding the tattooed lips a bit off putting. Princess was a big southern Chadian woman, not fat, but strong, big-hipped and very black. She was no wilting flower. I remember sitting at an outside table at a bar one night. None of the tables were far from the caniveau (concrete open sewer) that ran alongside the road. That perfume was part of a night out in N’Djamena. I heard a commotion and looked several tables away where Princess shouted at a French soldier. Suddenly she picked up a twenty-two ounce beer bottle and hit him over the head. Then she hoisted the stunned soldier on her shoulders and tossed him in the caniveau.

As a rule Chadian women were proud, jealous, quick to anger, and not adverse to violence. Nasaras (white people or sometimes foreigners in general) were strange creatures from a mysterious culture. Like most women they wanted to gauge the worth of their relationships. A friend of mine’s girlfriend made him so angry he smashed a favorite piece of furniture, which delighted her. He must have valued her highly. Another male vol invited a female vol to dinner, thinking nothing of it. When his Chadian wife found out a woman was coming, she broke every dish in the house one by one. Nobody was coming to dinner at that house. One night in the same bar where I witnessed Princess conk the soldier, Joe, another vol, publicly admonished his girlfriend because he had given her a scarf and her female Chadian friend was wearing it, not her. The girlfriend jumped across the table and bit into his well worn Levi’s thigh high. He tried to pry her loose, but she kept at it as blood began to run down his pants. Finally he punched her hard. That worked.

Sitting and drinking with Gromo and Princess at another outside bar one late afternoon, I noticed a fly in my beer glass. In the states I would have tossed the beer, but not a poor PCV. I fished the fly out. I was feeling magnanimous. “Fly on little buddy and live.” But I really should have known, you can’t fly with beer suds on your wings. Suddenly Princess stood up and walked to a table with four legionnaires. Soon she was laughing and flirting. Being the more experienced vol, I explained to Gromo how this was going to play out. She would keep at it until he walked away, in which case she would know he didn’t value her highly. Or he could intervene and probably get the crap beaten out of him. Four French Foreign Legionnaires were more than a match even for Gromo. Further I explained that I was leaving. I had no intention of fighting legionnaires over Princess. I left. Gromo took a beating. Princess was happy. Eventually Gromo went so far as to take her to the states. Not long after he attended a party a bit roughed up from a recent fight with her.

I finished my Peace Corps service in December of 1978 and immediately went to work for USAID/Chad on contract. Just two months later in February of 79 civil war broke out in N’Djamena. I was asked to stay on and help with administrative tasks. After a few days of fighting, when the firing had slowed enough to permit movement, all Peace Corps Vols and non-essential personnel were evacuated to Yaounde, Cameroon. Since I stayed on in N’Djamena, I heard the rest of the story from my Peace Corps buddy Mark. After experiencing that ordeal and being suddenly uprooted, the vols were in a fey mood. Their lives had been turned upside down. The afternoon after their arrival in Yaounde, they gathered at some welcoming function at the Ambassador’s Residence. Unfortunately the pool was under repair and dry. After who knows how many beers, somebody dared Gromo to dive in anyway. He did. He didn’t kill himself, but he bloodied his head badly.

That same night in the bar district of Yaounde, Gromo sported a bloody swath of bandages and suffered a severe headache. There was a disturbance in the street. A large long-horned steer had escaped its owner and was running free trailing a rope. A crowd of laughing and shouting people chased it. This was tremendous entertainment. Gromo stepped into the street directly in front of the steer. The steer stopped. For a minute or two there was a High Noon style face off. Then Gromo reached forward and grabbed both horns. His arm muscles bulged as he held the steer. Then the steer lowered its head and flipped him up and over the steer’s back. He somersaulted in the air, landing on his back behind the steer. Thankfully part of the fall was broken by the crowd. However, his heroics allowed the owner to grab the rope and control the steer. The crowd hoisted Gromo on their shoulders and paraded him up and down the street – the conquering hero. For reward a taxi driver offered to take him anywhere he wanted to go for free. Instead Gromo asked if he could just ride around with the taxi driver all night while he picked up fares. And that’s what he did.

YOU CAN’T FLY WITH BEER SUDS ON YOUR WINGS

Tags

Africa, Chad, Humor, Nonfiction, Peace Corps

Arriving in Chad was a shock that I enjoyed experiencing and subsequently observing in others. Chad defied anticipation. One night shortly after my arrival, my nascent French being close to useless in a common Chadian bar, I asked an older vol how to order beer in Chadian Arabic. He called the bar maid over and with a smile said: “Jiba lena Gala hamsa.” (Bring us five beers.) I figured the joke out, but used the entire phrase anyway the first time I walked into a bar by myself. Normally I am not superstitious, but for some reason I felt ordering the five beers would be auspicious. I made some friends that night.

At one point Peace Corps Chad’s doctor was a brand new, wet behind the ears, young for a doctor fellow stationed in Yaounde, Cameroon. He covered several countries, and on his first trip up to Chad he gave us an extensive lecture on the importance of boiling drinking water. In case worse came to worse and we had to drink bad water, he made sure we knew how to dissolve an iodine tablet in a gallon of water. We were all old hands by that time and had difficulty hiding our amusement. On his next trip up one of the wells vols interrupted him. “Doc, I just want to thank you. The other day I drank some of the dirtiest water you ever saw, but just like you said I swallowed a couple of those iodine pills and I feel great.”

Once I took our Chadian workers out with me to the airport to greet the new wells vols. I told them that “water, chicken, shoehorn,” was a traditional American greeting. I failed to convince them. They had spent years drilling wells with vols and were familiar enough with the words “water” and especially “chicken” to be suspicious. “Shoehorn” by itself might have worked. Mark and Doug were two of the new vols. After they completed their on the job incountry training, they moved into the house formerly occupied by another vol, Dague. Dague had given the old guardian (watchman) a radio. The old fellow would sit on his straw mat and listen to the radio all day, only turning it off for his five times a day prayers. That had earned him the nickname of Mr. Radio. Mr. Radio only spoke Chadian Arabic, and Doug and Mark were still learning French. Therefore communication between them was challenging. One day the new vols were feeling especially homesick for some American food. Mark had brought a large can of peaches in heavy syrup with him from the U.S., and they dug into it with gusto. It was a hot day, and they couldn’t quite finish the can. There was one peach left. They decided to give it to Mr. Radio. Mr. Radio had taken his shirt off and was readying to wash himself in preparation for prayers. They showed him the can with the peach in it. He looked at them blankly. “Yum, yum, yum,” Mark chanted. Still no reaction from Mr. Radio. Doug tried his hand at communication. He thrust the can toward the old man, while rubbing his stomach with the other hand and chanting, “Yum, yum, yum.” Mr. Radio looked toward the heavens beseeching Allah for guidance. Then he reached inside the can, grabbed the dripping peach, and mashed it into his stomach.

My first two years as a Peace Corps Volunteer in Chad we had no single female vols, hadn’t been any in years due to some ugly incident in the past. So they caused a stir when they started coming back in. Barbara was an interesting young lady with a fun personality (dam hafif – light blood, as the Chadians would put it). Attractive in a tomboyish way, the daughter of missionaries, virginal but not naive, she was fluent and literate in Classical Arabic, not the creole Chadian Arabic most of us spoke. She just seemed a cut above the average. All the new female volunteers were English teachers. Of course I was one of the hard-drinking, cowboyish water well drillers. Although none of the male vols ever got very far sexually with her, she seemed to like my company. It might have been wishful thinking but I thought there was a little Bogart/Hepburn chemistry thing going on.

New Year’s Eve party. Barbara was on the far side of the room, bent over, back to me, stone sober, playing chess with another vol, oblivious to the chaos behind her. I sat on the floor, back against a pillar, having lost the ability to stand for long periods of time. The Peace Corps Director, Bill, was feeling no pain, standing with a lampshade on his head singing Elvis Presley songs. Things were looser in those days, including Bill’s two front false teeth. From my vantage with Bill between me and the light, I watched as an especially enthusiastic version of Heartbreak Hotel ejected Bill’s teeth and caused them to arc upward and finally drop unnoticed by any but me down the gap in Barbara’s pants. An immediate search began. I tried to be helpful, but all I could say was “teeth.” Somebody patted me on the head. ”Yes, George, we’re looking for Bill’s teeth.” I staggered to my feet and looked at Barbara, still oblivious. It then occurred to me that this was a once in a lifetime opportunity. I meandered across the room and plunged my hand down Barbara’s pants. She screamed and whipped around, beet red, chess pieces flying, and yelled, “What!!!”. Sensing the urgency of my situation, I managed to double my vocabulary. “Teeth pants!” “What!!!” “Teeth pants!” “What?!” At that point someone intervened, “I think he’s saying that Bill’s teeth are in your pants.” To this day I thank whatever gods may be that when she reached back she found them.

Shortly after that party civil war broke out in Chad and all volunteers were evacuated. Eight years later I landed in Khartoum on a job for a private voluntary organization, only to find that the US had bombed Libya the night before and there was anti-American rioting in the streets of Khartoum. One American had been shot. I was restricted to my hotel until the embassy could arrange an evacuation of non-essential personnel. The next day in the hotel I chatted with a missionary who turned out to be working with Barbara at a mission outside of town. He wasn’t under the control of the embassy and was heading back to the mission. I asked him to say hi to Barbara for me. The next day Barbara showed up on a mobylette, a risky thing to do, and we had lunch together. It was nice to see her again.

MY WILDLIFE ADVENTURES (OR GOOD NIGHT RAMAR OF THE JUNGLE WHEREVER YOU ARE)

Tags

African Widlife, Birding, Cameroon, Chad, Gameparks, Humor, Kenya, Peace Corps

“So geographers in Afric-maps,
With savage pictures fill their gaps,
And o’er uninhabitable downs,
Place elephants for want of towns.”
(Jonathan Swift)

The gameparks in Kenya are grand. I enjoyed several of them while visiting dear friends stationed in Nairobi. It was wonderful to have use of a vehicle and driver thanks to them. However I wasn’t there long enough to develop many stories. There was one that is worthy of note. Nairobi National Park is just seven kilometers from the city. You can see skyscrapers. They had to put up a fence on the city side. Surprisingly it has a wide variety of animals, some like chetahs I had not seen in West Africa. It is a beautiful thing to watch a chetah run. I happened to be in Nairobi at the time of the annual animal census in which my friend Paul and a friend of his, both Foreign Service Officers, regularly participated. They invited me to go along, but the lady who ran the thing was a class conscious Brit. There were still colonial remnants in Kenya and apparently the gamepark census was one of the them. The participants had to be vetted by her. Paul solved this problem by introducing me as Doctor Branson. “Yes, yes, delighted to have you aboard Dr. Branson.” It was a fun day. No doubt the gameparks of East Africa were where to go for a tourist in those days. They had more animals and were far better organized. However the rough and tumble gameparks of West Africa, where I had the great fortune to spend significant time, had their own charms. I mean who gets the chance to live in a gamepark for months on end, an obscure little park to be sure, but quite beautiful in its way. There was an unpolished beauty in those less traveled environs.

My first visit to a gamepark occurred before I was officially a Peace Corps Volunteer. Peace Corps has a trick. They don’t count training or vacations as time served. They put me on a plane to Africa in July, 1975 and officially mustered me out in December of 1978. They credited me with three years of service. Not that I’m complaining, it was a great experience. Just before my fellow wells project recruits and I finished our on-the-job training, we took a trip to southern Chad, the city of Sarh, to a small project spin off where one or two of us would be posted. Manda gamepark is just north of Sarh and on the main road. We decided to camp out there and go into Sarh the next day. In the park they had a raised platform for such purposes. Fortunately the park didn’t have any big cats. We arrived just before dusk and barely had time to set up camp before dark. Extremely excited, when the night animal sounds started up a strange feyness overcame us. We grabbed flashlights and ran out into the elephant grass looking for animals. The park had elephants, hippos, buffalo, and poisonous snakes, among others, stumbling upon any of which could be fatal. Hippos come out of the river at night to graze and are particularly dangerous. Perhaps God does look after fools or the noise we made drove everything away, anyway we didn’t find anything. The next day herds of antelope leaped the road in front of us as we drove around the park, and a buffalo even gave the door of one of our two Land Rovers a head thump. Very satisfying that.

As a PCV my gamepark experience was limited to a visit or two to Manda when I was stationed in Sarh for some months. However while drilling wells in the north, on rare occasions we would run across gazelles, warthogs, jackals, and majestic roan antelopes (antelope cheval in French), among others. A few wild animals like monkeys and lizards were ubiquitous. Interestingly our Chadian counterparts used one word “laham” (Chadian Arabic for meat) to describe any edible animal we encountered. Even though our counterparts save one were not Muslim, a few of the Muslim dietary restrictions had become more or less generalized in Chad, with the notable exception of pork which they ate with gusto. They refused to eat carrion eaters like shellfish, not that dry Chad had a lot of shellfish, and animals that had hands like monkeys or even appendages that vaguely resembled hands. One of the night guards at the Peace Corps Office did a favor for an Air France pilot. The pilot repaid him with a bucket of shrimp, a rare and expensive treat in Chad. The guard approached me with bucket in hand and explained that he hadn’t wanted to hurt the pilot’s feelings, but he couldn’t possibly eat those creepy little things. He asked me rather doubtfully if nasaras (white people) really ate them. I recalled the old line about it being a brave man who first ate an oyster. In my best Lewis Carroll Walrus voice, I replied: “Yes, yes, indeed we do, as disgusting as that may seem. My good man, I will gladly take them off your hands. I mean what are friends for?”

In the spring of 1979 everything changed for me. While working on contract for USAID Chad civil disturbances broke out. My experiences in Chad are covered elsewhere. After a few weeks, with the airport closed and bridges blocked, I was assigned to northern Cameroon to provide logistical support to the US Embassy in N’Djamena, chiefly transportation of personnel. My expenses were covered generously. I could have stayed anywhere I wanted between Maroua and the Cameroonian border directly across the Chari River from N’Djamena. There were three nice hotels in Maroua and one at Waza, the big gamepark between Maroua and N’Djamena. Over a period of roughly five months I tried them all out from time to time. I enjoyed the amenities they had to offer, hot showers, AC, excellent meals. However after years of simple food as a PCV, I appeciated rich French restaurant cuisine more as a sometime thing, not everyday fare. From my visits to France, probably the average Frenchman feels the same way. They don’t eat like that everyday either.

For the most part I chose to stay in Kalamaloue National Park, located just ten or so kilometers from N’Djamena. As a consequence I ate a lot of sardines and crackers, but I could always buy baguettes and basic supplies in nearby Kousseri. The park had one round hut with no electricity and only cold water that the park guards would pump up to barrels on a tower. Actually when the sun had been shining on the barrels all day late afternoon showers weren’t that bad, but morning ones were best avoided. Because I paid my modest fees in cash and stayed so long, I was their cash cow and they treated me like royalty, useful since they weren’t about to question my iffy credentials. The park was so strapped for funds that the guards were issued only three bullets each annually and had to strictly account for them. Kalamaloue was a tiny park as these things go. I’m not sure of the exact measurements, but having walked it I would estimate the size at thirteen thousand acres give or take, which is extremely small by African standards.

My hut had windows without screens or glass, just wooden shutters that you could prop open. The beds had mosquito nets. The hut sat on the only hill in the park and looked out over a plain. I suspected that the hill’s origin was not natural, most probably the result of successive habitation. Not far to one side was a steep decline to a water hole where a large crocodile lived. He would often crawl out on a sandbar to sun with his mouth gaping open. I nicknamed him Walter. We were friends. We played games. I would walk around the top of his hole, and he would sink down with just his eyes showing and stalk me, hoping I would come down for a drink. Toward sunset with the heat retreating somewhat, I would pull out the metal table and chair and sit there looking out over that plain at gazelles, kob antelope, waterbuck, jackals, warthogs, and whatever unusual treat that would choose to show itself that day. As a kid I was a big fan of the TV show Ramar of The Jungle, a show way too politically incorrect to ever be shown again except on youtube. OK I didn’t get to live in a neat treehouse like they did, but this was about as close to a childhood fantasy as it gets. An hour or so before dusk the park’s three guards would go home, leaving just me and the animals. Usually I could manage a glass of wine or perhaps Ricard as the sun drifted downward. Those were moments of profound contentment.

Sometimes for a few days here and there I would share my hut with Joel, a PCV assigned to the gameparks in northern Cameroon. He worked alone, but when I was available I would help out with various projects. This was before Caddy Shack, but anyone who’d met him after seeing that movie would have compared him to the Bill Murray character, the main difference being that Joel wasn’t mentally slow. He had been a grunt in Vietnam and bore the scars. He was awkward socially and half deaf. He was taciturn at times and talked incessantly at others with the loud voice of the hearing impaired. He was best taken in small doses, but he was a really good guy. I liked him.

Joel asked me to walk the park with him while he did an animal inventory. We were unarmed, but Kalamaloue wasn’t supposed to have any of the more dangerous mammals except for the hippos from the river, and they stayed in or near the water during the day. Nevertheless there were dangers on foot, snakes, feral dogs, and such, and it was safer with two people. We walked systematically the grid Joel had developed. At one point we heard frenzied yapping and approached a jackal raising hell at a big bush. We walked around the other side and came face to face with a lion. That was a come to Jesus moment. He was an old male and from his belly it looked like he had just eaten. Lucky us. We backed away slowly. Another time Joel was in the park when a troop of elephants migrated through, a ragtag troop, a mere remnant of the vast numbers of bygone times. Somehow Joel talked me into climbing trees along the likely trails and dropping paint on elephant butts as they passed below. He wanted to document their migration. That lasted until a female became annoyed and made a mock charge toward my tree. At my insistence we called it a day.

I was blessed to be in Kalamaloue during the summer rainy season and able to help Joel with bird counts. Fortunately that could be done from my vehicle. I was pretty good at identifying birds, but Joel was way above my class. We would come across temporary ponds that were chock full of all kinds of birds, some resident but most migratory — spoonbills, crowned cranes, sacred ibis, four or five different duck species, kingfishers, and marabou storks standing like a row of undertakers. Maybe en route we would watch an Abyssinian roller with its electric colors, in tumbling flight one of the most beautiful birds in the world, or possibly spy a majestic African fish eagle. The rainy season in off the beaten path Kalamaloue was one of nature’s great secrets, a once in a lifetime birder’s paradise.

One night by myself at Kalamaloue, sleeping with the shutters propped open, I heard some noise. I picked up my powerful flashlight and illuminated a civet in my hut. Now a civet is about the size of a very large domestic cat or a small raccoon, which it kind of resembles although it is not related. The poor thing panicked and began running around the perimeter of the round hut, which included jumping on my bed and stomach and bringing down my mosquito net. I was afraid to make a sudden move for risk of getting bitten. Rabies shots were no fun in those days. The civet made three round trips total, landing on my belly on every lap. Eventually I gathered my wits about me and turned off the flashlight. Then the critter lost no time figuring out where the exit was and departing out the open window.

WHAT LIES BEYOND BEING BORED TO DEATH

Tags

Africa, African Bees, Chad, Humor, Non-Fiction, Patas Monkey, Peace Corps, Swiss, Termites

My first year in Chad I spent a good bit of time living in Sarh, the most significant city in southern Chad. Apparently Sarh was built with delusions of grandeur. Maybe the French were planning to make it a capital of something in the early days of colonization. In the words of another Peace Corps Volunteer, it’s largely unpaved but nevertheless extremely wide streets seemed to be waiting for a parade that never came. The French liked to call that region “Le Tchad Utile,” because the comparatively wetter climate permitted the cultivation of cotton, peanuts, and some rice along the rivers, with cotton and beef being Chad’s only important export commodities. Cattle could walk across many miles of borders in a country more than twice the size of France, but the harvest and sale of cotton lent itself to central control, and thus it was the most significant cash crop and a major source of tax revenue. Sarh was a medium sized city, maybe 40,000 give or take, with a largish expat community that disappeared during the rainy season, although the rainy season was really no worse than a summer in Florida, albeit one without paved roads. Just before he went home, Francois, the former wells PCV in Sarh, had advised us: “In Sarh you’ll discover what lies beyond being bored to death.”

The wells project in Sarh was the poor stepchild of the well financed project up north, and my fellow wells vol Scotty was often up in N’Djamena trying to secure some funding. My Chadian workers were all blue collar guys, friendly enough, but not much for in depth conversation. I did take them out for beers on occasion, but they felt they had to return the favor by having me over for billy billy, the local home-fermented millet beer. The next week I’d spend a good part of it in the bathroom. I went to work at our warehouse workshop on time every work day, but Scotty had the only functioning vehicle, and the workshop like much of the town only received intermittent electricity. I’d sit there in that dark warehouse until I couldn’t stand it anymore, then hop on my mobylette (French moped) and ride around town some before heading back, hoping that the lights had come back on in my absence. I always felt guilty about doing that. My Chadian workers could sit for hours in a hot dark warehouse doing absolutely nothing, didn’t seem to bother them at all, but I had my limits.

Scotty and I shared a house in a three house compound. One house was occupied by two Swiss vols, Hans and Giscard, and the other by a male French Canadian vol. There was a great looking female French Canadian vol living elsewhere in town who would visit her compatriot. She was cordial, but clearly she hadn’t come all the way to a French speaking country in Africa to date an American with still rudimentary French. The Swiss vols said Americans all smelled like milk and put ketchup on everything. Not wanting to disappoint, if I saw them coming I would put ketchup on anything I was eating. The compound was heavily shaded by dense-leaved mango trees. Occasionally, perhaps it only seemed like always in the middle of the night, a mango would drop on my tin roof, sounding like a bomb going off.

I find the cultural myths we all have amusing. The noble fight at the Alamo is one of ours. I eventually learned that war was really all about slavery which was illegal in Mexico. The well-to-do southerners there wanted to cultivate cotton on plantations, and for that they needed slaves. One day in discussion with Giscard, he revealed a Swiss myth. He honestly believed that the Germans hadn’t invaded Switzerland because they were afraid of all the old Swiss men on bicycles in the mountains with their long rifles. Every able bodied male in Switzerland received some military training, and apparently that terrified the Nazi panzer divisions. That is what he’d been taught since childhood. I laughed and suggested that perhaps the Germans had had other reasons. I couldn’t convince him. It reminded me of a lady I knew who was jogging along the beach one day just registering things she passed, crab, gulls, dog, driftwood, peanut butter foam. Suddenly she realized that that tan foam everywhere couldn’t be peanut butter foam. When she was a little girl she had asked her grandmother about it. No doubt with a smile, her grandmother had explained that it came from ships at sea washing out their peanut butter jars. Maybe one day Giscard would recognize his peanut butter foam. Some of us never do. The Arabs have a proverb: That which is learned in youth is carved in stone.

Inside the compound Hans had some duck and turkey pens, and Scotty and I had a patas monkey that we had inherited from the former vol. Patas monkeys are fairly good-sized reddish brown savannah monkeys. The female monkey was tied to a mango tree off to the side of our house. I hated that, but I couldn’t keep her in the house. She would chew through her rope from time to time. My house wasn’t all that far from open land, but she never left the compound. Instead, since she never bit anybody, I would let her terrorize the compound for a couple days. If someone left a door open, she would steal food. When she was loose, mine was often open with a convenient bowl of fruit on the table. A bit riskier, from time to time when the lady fruit sellers came into the compound with their platters on their heads, she would leap out of a tree on a back scattering fruit everywhere. Of course I would pay for the fruit. After the initial shock, the Chadian ladies would laugh good naturedly about it. When I decided it was time to put her back in her tree, I’d buy some chocolate bonbons. She loved chocolate. She was female. So I would stand by her tree and noisily eat bonbons, until she gave up and came over for some.

As the rainy season moved in, with Scotty in N’Djamena, the expats all leaving, and the electricity becoming more problematic, boredom settled down over everything. The house did have quite a few books, but I’m a fast reader, and soon the only book left was The Book of Mormon. The three page introduction, I believe called The Testimony of Joseph Smith, is actually a nice piece of creative science fiction. However Twain aptly described the main text as “chloroform in print.” I won’t critique it further. It is easy to mock someone else’s peanut butter foam. It was a mark of my desperation that I read it all the way through anyway.  Around that time the last of my expat acquaintances, Hans, left for vacation. Before he left he asked his cook to do something about the bee’s nest under the overhang of his tin roof. To paraphrase what Eldredge Cleaver said about Rosa Parks: That day somewhere in the universe a gear shifted.

The next morning I awoke to ungodly screeching. I ran to my front door and looked out. It was snowing, at least that was the first thing it looked like. Then I realized that bees filled the air. Most of the noise came from Hans’ duck pen, but some came from the monkey. I saw Hans’ cat running across his roof, swatting at bees. It backed up to the edge and fell off. Landing of course on its feet, it saw me and made a beeline (pun intended) straight for me. I opened the door. The cat ran in and cowered under the coffee table. I decided I had to try to save the monkey, so I donned layers of clothes, sunglasses, work gloves, and a motorcycle helmet and headed out. I’d made it about five steps when I was stung at least ten times. Worse, the bees kept going for my eyes. It was only a matter of time before they got around the side and under the glasses. Plus it was obvious that I would be stung several hundred times before I could free the monkey. Be they African or American, honey bees don’t pack much venom punch, but several hundred stings can kill you. I turned and ran back in. I was swatting the bees that came in with me, when someone pounded on the door. The monkey had chewed through the rope and wanted in. She ran under the coffee table too, grabbing and hugging the cat. I surmised that the thick leaves of the mango tree must have provided some protection. Still I half expected her to go into shock, but she survived, none of the blinded ducks did. And there we sat all that day and late into the next before the bees disappeared. Later I learned that that entire section of town had been shut down.

When the air cleared shortly before sunset on the second day, I decided to get out of stir and find a cold beer. There was a Chadian bar on the far side of town that I liked. I’d gone there once with my Chadian co-workers. So I headed out across town on my mobylette. I stopped on top of a rise to view an accident scene below. There was an ambulance and policemen and a victim. The victim was one of the ubiquitous thin old white-bearded men of Chad. He lay on the pavement beside his smashed bicycle. He was smashed too. Even from a distance I could see the odd angle of his leg, and jagged bones, and blood. The policemen were busy drawing a chalk outline around him. No one seemed concerned by his serious injuries. The old man had propped his elbow on the pavement to hold his head up. While he watched as the policemen chalked away, he had a look of utter disgust on his face. To me he seemed some Old Testament prophet prophesying doom. And I knew, as he knew, whose doom it was he prophesied.

I detoured around. As I drove, a full moon peeked above the horizon. Fitting. Although the phrase was not original to him, one of the older volunteers was fond of saying that one day in Chad they would discover immense deposits of time. On occasion I’d felt like I’d slipped into some alternate universe where the rules of time and space were slightly different. I called these “Fellini moments.” This seemed like one of them.

I walked through the enclosed bar to the brightly lit courtyard behind and ordered a beer. The tinny repetitive electric guitar music of West Africa played through bad speakers. I sat at an empty metal table and looked to the east. A huge yellow-orange moon rose behind a picket of kapok trees. The tall stark trees were eerie enough, with their broad fluked trunks near the ground. The full moon completed the scene. As I drank my beer, it started to snow again. I had a moment of panic before I realized that the air was filling with termites, not bees. Whenever the termites struck a wall, a chair, me, they dropped their wings and began to crawl. I looked around the courtyard. The Chadians were picking up termites and eating them. I was adventurous in those days. I tried a couple. Not much flavor, but they crunched nicely.

“Tonight is the night of the termites,” said a deep voice in booming French. At my side stood a big broad Chadian. From one of the southern tribes, he bore three large raised scars on his face, three arcs, one on each cheek and one on his forehead, suggesting a circle. “Tonight the young queen flies toward the full moon. She is bigger and stronger than any of the males. Only the strongest most determined male can fly as high as she can fly. When they collide they lose their wings and tumble leaflike back to earth, making love the whole way down. Where they land they form a new nest.” Then he waved his arms dismissively and gazed out with disdain over the termite filled courtyard. “These termites have mistaken bar lights for the moon.”

ACCIDENT PRONE (GREAT CHARACTERS I HAVE KNOWN — DAGUE’S STORY)

Tags

Africa, Beer, Chad, Humor, Nonfiction, Peace Corps

 

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Le gout de bonheur

 

“Dague, it rhymes with vague,” was how he introduced himself. He came from Minnesota and looked it, broad-shouldered, square-jawed, tall. After a few beers he might tell the story about the time he fell off a tractor facedown in a field. The metal spikes of the trailing equipment had planted him two inches deep, breaking a bunch of bones in the process and leaving him with a back that looked topographical. Then there was the metal plate in his head, the scar on his abdomen, and the faded burns on his forearms, each with its own story.

He served four years in Chad as a Peace Corps Volunteer, working in N’Djamena’s parks and gardens, such as they were. A normal tour of duty was two years. Extensions for one year were fairly common, but serving four years was unusual. He was in charge of a small crew of Chadians who worked daily to ward off the encroaching desert and create little, usually temporary, pockets of beauty. He fit the city’s Beau Geste ambiance. He would have looked good in a kepi. Buildings were made of either earthen or concrete blocks with a plaster finish, often painted in dull pastels like smoky blue or leaden yellow that tended to fade gracefully. Since independence all of Chad’s infrastructure had deteriorated, but N’Djamena’s architecture had worn rather well. Visitors often mistook Dague for some unfortunate foreigner condemned to swing a pick on a work gang, but the people of N’Djamena found his indefatigable work ethic uplifting. Towards the end of his service the Chadian Government held a special ceremony to award him a medal, the only PCV ever to be so honored. A week later he received a bill for the medal.nexplicably, N’Djamena produced one of the world’s great beers, Gala. It was as if the universe decreed that if we had to endure the horrible dust storms in winter and unbearable heat in the hot season, we would be given some boon to balance things out. Gala was ambrosia. Blond men with Teutonic accents brewed Gala, importing everything save the water, and that came from a deep well, a well that tapped the ancient water trapped beneath Chad, water from pristine rain that fell long before the industrial revolution. Gala came in serious twenty-two ounce bottles which sold for about thirty cents, a price even volunteers could afford, at least for a good part of the month. Toward the end of the month many a vol was limited to eating Peace Corps sandwiches (bread and mustard), but still washed down with Gala if they could afford it. I once heard a rookie volunteer ask an older vol, “How about we split a beer?” To which the older vol replied, “Let’s split two.” It changed some with the seasons, but the Chadian Government favored a split work day for employees involved in manual labor to avoid the worst of the heat. It became a ritual for wells vols and Dague and a few others to break at midday, meet at Moustapha’s store for a beer, then go home for lunch and a siesta. After several hours of lying on your back in the dirt, trying to coax rusted bolts loose from an old land rover transmission, a cold Gala tasted mighty good.

 

Mr. Natural At Door, Dague On Right

 

Moustapha made an interesting character study. Casablanca-like, he was a dark-haired, olive-skinned, slightly built, obsequious, shrewd fellow of indeterminate age and origin. Arabic seemed his native language, though he spoke several others nearly as well. He had his hand in pots on both sides of the law, while giving the impression that he would never dream of cheating his customers, unless the amount involved was substantial, and even then he would have the good grace to feel badly about it. He did what he had to do to prosper in a hard land, and he kept his beer cold. His store sat right in the middle of town on the main street. It was rather small and cluttered, however a high ceiling and two open arched entrances gave the illusion of space. Vols would sit on coke crates and observe the passing scene.

Me on left at Moustapha’s with my late buddy Roger Jones

N’Djamena’s indigent knew where they were at noon, and though vols had but little, that little was a lot in Chad. So every weekday at noon a procession of the blind, the crippled, and those touched by the gods passed by Moustapha’s to garner a few coins. Dague’s favorite was an old man that he had nicknamed Mr. Natural. Mr. Natural wore “a twisty piece o’ rag” that just might have been a uniform once and ancient combat boots, invariably balancing a nearly empty burlap sack on his head. Rumor had it that the sack contained memorabilia from wartime service with DeGaulle’s Brassaville garrison of Free French, where Rick and his friend went at the end of Casablanca, but no one would compromise the old man’s dignity by looking. Mr. Natural had strong rough hands, a grizzled beard, and eyes that looked into places others couldn’t see, vast empty places. He always smiled and shook every available hand while mumbling strings of greetings and thank yous in Chadian Arabic. He demonstrated the same effusive gratitude for gifts worth pennies as for larger amounts. It was all the same to Mr. Natural.

One hot day the usual crowd gathered, plus Richard, a teacher vol down due to rebel activity from his remote post in a desert oasis, when Phil, the Assistant Peace Corps Director in Chad, and a middle-aged American walked into Moustapha’s. The stranger was a former Congressman who, having lost his last election, had received a Presidential appointment to some new position that had something or other to do with overseeing The Peace Corps. When he extended his hand toward a vol, Mr. Natural took it instead, and since the Congressman didn’t shake Mr. Natural’s hand, Mr. Natural didn’t let go. The Congressman tried walking to the other end of the store, but Mr. Natural just followed in tow, Harpo-like. Finally the Congressman yanked his hand away. Mr. Natural just smiled and wandered around looking for the next hand.

After introductions the Congressman started criticizing the wells vols for using “advanced” technologies. It should be noted that auguring wells is as low tech as it gets in the machine-driven well drilling business. It works on the Archimedes Screw Principle, which has been around, well, since Archimedes. Anyway It was an old tired song. Peace Corps loved the one man and a shovel concept. It was very Peace Corpsish. Dague represented the ideal volunteer, but volunteers driving Mercedes trucks with mounted drilling rigs made them very nervous. Never mind that for years, dating back to the mid-sixties, even though in those days it was done at an even lower tech level, the wells project had provided many thousands of villagers with potable water. It wasn’t quantifiable, but many children were alive that would have died from dysentery, and many women had avoided years of back-breaking labor because drilling closed tube wells allowed them to be located up on the dunes in the middle of the villages, not down in the ouadis where open wells had to be dug. Fortunately, the U.S. Embassy, the Chadian Government, and USAID (the funding agency) all loved the project. So there was little Peace Corps could do except lecture us from time to time on the evil of our ways. Not getting a reaction bothered the Congressman, so he escalated: “How can Peace Corps Volunteers afford to swizzle beer like this?” Now that hit a nerve. Dague finished his beer and approached the Congressman. For a second I thought Dague was going to grab his collar, but he just stared, then turned and walked out. The rest of us followed.

Dague and Richard hopped on mobylettes (French mopeds) and headed down to the Peace Corps office to check their mail. Dague exited the office grumbling to find Richard standing by his mobylette reading a letter. “What’s the problem Dague?” Richard asked. “First that Congressman jerk and now no mail.” “Well why don’t you punch your mobylette? That always makes me feel better.” And Dague did. Of course he only hit the cushioned seat and not all that hard, but there was a metal plate that ran underneath the center of the seat, and Dague hurt his wrist. They decided since they were at the office anyway, he’d better go on in and let Sue, the nurse, take a look at it.

Sue was a plump red-headed Boston-Irish force of nature, reeking of rubbing alcohol and cinnamon. She and her diplomat African-American husband had seven adopted children, a catholic jumble of genders, nationalities, and races. She tended her flock of PCVs with a sense of inexorable purpose, as relentless as a firetruck. The condom barrel by her door exemplified her style, seeming to shout, “Partake! That which I contain is crucial to your health, and I have them in abundance.” A few minutes after Dague had entered her domain, Sue’s piercing voice transcended brick and plaster, dominating the city’s competing sounds, like the muezzin calling the faithful to prayer. “You did what???” “I punched my mobylette,” was Dague’s matter-of-fact reply. Dague was long on honesty, perhaps, in this case, to a fault. “You moron! You idiot! You broke your damn wrist!” As her vocabulary grew more colorful, Richard slipped away, lest her attention turn to him.

There was a volleyball game at the Ambassador’s Residence after work that day. It was played on the driveway inside the security gates. It was informal, coed, and fun – a social event. Things were well underway when Dague peddled in on a bicycle. His wrist cast covered most of his hand, making it impossible for him to twist the handlebar accelerator on a mobylette. Of course he couldn’t play, but he cheered everybody on and responded good-naturedly to jibes about his broken wrist. When it became too dark to see the ball, the game ended and most people headed to a nearby bar. Dague peddled off. At some point Richard pulled up beside him. “Want to race?” he asked Dague. “Sure” Dague replied. They were both just kidding around, but Dague raised himself up on the pedals in pretense. That’s when the chain broke and Dague fell off the bike, tumbling down into a three-foot deep caniveau (concrete drainage channel) and breaking his other arm. They say Sue waxed poetic that night.

The following Saturday the wells vols used a land rover to transport Dague as they went bar hopping. He now sported a full sling type cast as well as his wrist cast. They wound up in a Chadian bar that they rarely frequented. The owner was delighted to have them. Crowds packed the isles just to watch Dague drink. He couldn’t handle a glass, but placing the bottle on the very edge of the table he’d squeeze the neck between his casts and slide down slowly in his chair, tilting the bottle ever downward until gravity transferred the beer to the general vicinity of his mouth. The excited crowd drew the attention of a passing beggar. Seeing some white faces, he decided to try his luck. He marched in waving a hand missing two fingers. “Life is hard!” he shouted in Chadian Arabic. “Allah has been generous to you white people, therefore you should be generous to me.” Dague took this as a personal challenge. He held up his sling, “See that”. Then he thrust his wrist cast under the beggar’s nose, “And that.” Dague jumped up, “Somebody help me get this shirt off.” Dague proudly presented a back with the texture of playdough that some child had left out in the rain. He pivoted, displaying the impressive purple saber-shaped scar on his abdomen Then brushing his hair back to reveal a ruddy scar, “In there is a metal plate as thick as a land rover fender.” The bar paused in absolute silence. Dague winked and began to fumble with his belt buckle. “Allah be merciful!” the beggar cried, breaking for the entrance and fleeing the bar.

THE THIN PARTITIONS OF SANITY

Tags

Africa, Chad, Humor, Nonfiction, Peace Corps, The Thin Partitions of Sanity

These stories recount my experiences in a fascinating time and place, as well as describing the wonderful characters I met along the way.

It’s dangerous to blur your borders. The things that confine us, also shape us. The British functionary’s traditional insistence on stiff clean-shaven ritual even in the remotest of places was part of his battle against spiritual devolution. Conrad would have understood Allen (not the real name). The villagers of Doum Doum told his story in hushed voices. “Yes, a Peace Corps Volunteer lived here years ago, up there, on top of the dune. Of course the dune was smaller then, before the sand ate the administrative office. Two Americans lived here at first, but one got sick and left. A volunteer named Allen stayed. He learned to speak Kanembou, and dressed and ate like us. He was often sick and lost weight. That’s when the dreams started. Allen said monsters stalked him at night, rattling the latch to his hut. And perhaps they did, although no one else saw them, but they came from his dreams, not ours. One day the Americans came in big white cars. He fought them. They tied him up like a goat and took him away.”

I heard the rest of the story from a former volunteer visiting Chad. He just rode into N’Djamena on a motorcycle one day. Always fun to meet one of the old vols from the days of legend, back when Peace Corps did fun things like teach new Chad vols the wrong language somewhere in the Caribbean, and then dump them without structured jobs or any material support into isolated villages. In those early days, by dint of great will and charisma, Peace Corps Volunteers were expected to create wonders out of nothing. They were Americans after all. Teaching someone the wrong dialect, well that was just another little obstacle to be overcome. He’d been posted in an even smaller village in that same area and knew Allen. I took the former vol with us on a wells maintenance trip. Traveling up there by yourself and without official sanction invited trouble. We couldn’t even find the site of his old village. The sands had taken it. He told me the trip had been good for him nonetheless, because it had reminded him of all the reasons why he’d left. To finish the story, Allen arrived in the US in a straight jacket and could or would speak only Kanembou to his parents. His mother had to be sedated right in the airport. Eventually Allen recovered and would go on to become a recognized linguist, specializing in Kanembou and related languages.

Early in my tour I was stationed in southern Chad, in the city of Sarh. The wells project down there didn’t enjoy the benefits and material abundance of the main project up north, but managed to bleed off enough resources to keep going. Chadians have a proverb: “Thanks to the chicken, the lizard drinks water.” It is hot and dry in Chad, and people put out saucers of water for their chickens. The ubiquitous lizards of Chad benefit from this also. Every now and then we’d get a hand-me-down vehicle or some equipment from the big project, and the US Ambassador had a thirty thousand dollar annual fund that he could dispense to worthy projects as he wished. We received a piece of that. My co-volunteer Scotty had taken our one old land rover to N’Djamena to plead for a few more dollars, and as customary he took with him all the outgoing volunteer mail from the surrounding area. Randy (forgot his real name) was an English teacher stationed by himself in a town not too far away. He had shown some minor signs of instability, but since he didn’t seem suicidal or anything like that, the decision had been made to let him finish the school year, only a couple months away, before sending him home. He’d sent a letter with Scotty to his stateside girlfriend Jeanne, arranging to meet her in Paris on his way home. Now it so happened that the Peace Corps Director in Chad was also named Jeanne. Jeanne was a decent looking woman, but the male vols were much younger, and in the words of Gilbert and Sullivan: “She could pass for forty-two, in the dusk, with the light behind her.”

The trip from Sarh to N’Djamena took ten to twelve long dusty hours on a good day. So Scotty pulled in at night after the Peace Corps Office was closed, and headed straight downtown for a beer, leaving the bag of mail in the land rover. When he came back, it was gone. Fortunately the thieves in Chad, probably street kids, weren’t mean-spirited, and after tearing through everything looking for money, they dumped most of the mail back at the Peace Corps Office. Not all the envelopes nor all the letters were there, but they managed to put most of them back together.  Apparently Randy’s envelope didn’t make it. Jeanne naturally assumed the romantic letter was meant for her, and that Randy was worse off than first thought. Jeanne isn’t that common a name. Since I was the only volunteer in that area with access to a vehicle other than mobylettes (French mopeds), if you call an old beat up Saviem truck a vehicle, I received an urgent communique via the local hotel instructing me to get Randy and bring him up to N’Djamena immediately. It cryptically added that I could tell him that once he arrived, Jeanne would be happy to discuss Paris. I had no idea what that was all about.

With serious misgivings, I did everything I could to get the old truck ready for the trip. Then late in the afternoon I drove to Randy’s town. He was bewildered. I helped him pack up. We started out well before dawn the next morning. The first leg of the trip was on a decent laterite road which bisected a game park. In Sarh’s modest rainy season (no worse than a summer in Florida) the softened laterite provided a smooth ride. Most of the year it formed a hard ridged surface, but was still far better than most of the dirt road between Sarh and N’Djamena. If you kept your speed up you could skip along the ridges of the washboard laterite for a smoother ride, although it was a bit like driving on ice. Occasionally we would catch sight of animals in the park crossing the road, especially at night like this, but that time of year the high elephant grass precluded seeing much else. I felt the call of nature, stopped and walked across the road flashlight in hand. There were some nasty snakes in Chad, cobras among them. When I started back to the truck I heard a sound like water under pressure exploding from a hose. It begins already, I thought, as I crawled under the truck. Suddenly Randy said: “George, shine your flashlight on the passenger side.” There was a giant elephant foot, and a stream of liquid pouring down. I must have inspired him. Anyway I stayed under the truck until the elephant moved on.

There followed breakdown after breakdown in the sweltering heat, and Randy seemed to deteriorate a little with everyone of them. I had to keep one eye on him while I worked on the vehicle, fearing he might just wander off somewhere. I didn’t look forward to spending the night broken down on the road with Randy. I’ve never considered myself a mechanic, but when you have to, you can do a host of things that you thought were beyond your abilities. I believe Twain said: “Knowing you are to be hanged in the morning focuses the mind wonderfully.” At one point the carburetor blew its gasket. I puzzled over that some, then I cut the tongue out of one of my shoes and fashioned a makeshift gasket. To my utter amazement, it held.

The engine was overheating yet again when I pulled into a roadside village and parked under a shade tree. Suddenly a group of fifteen to twenty nubile girls, bodies painted red with henna, beads covering their faces, bare to the waist, started running toward us. I rolled up the windows. The girls were in some sort of sexual frenzy, ululating as they ran. They climbed the truck and started rubbing their bodies against the windshield, trying to get at us. I had all I could do to keep Randy from opening his door. Finally four or five older women appeared and beat the girls off the truck with big sticks and herded them away. I guessed it was part of some coming of age ritual, perhaps involving female circumcision, and the girls were probably drugged or drunk. It was definitely weird. It put Randy over the edge. He began to spout non-sequiturs from time to time. Although he never became violent, he gave me the creeps.

Our final memorable stop came at a little lantern lit country store in the crossroads town of Guelengdeng, where the road that followed Chad’s western border defining Logone River split off from the Sarh road which roughly followed the Chari River in a more centrally southern direction. It was also for us where the hundred and fifty kilometers of paved road started that led on into N’Djamena. The store was owned by an Igbo named Nathan. The Igbo were the losers in the bloody Nigerian Civil War (remember Biafra) where upwards of a million people died, mostly by starvation and mostly Igbo. They are known as the Jews of West Africa because of their talent for commerce and tendency to wander far afield, which was greatly enhanced by the diaspora during and after the war. Nathan didn’t carry beer, but he kept his soft drinks reasonably cool in fast evaporating water. He had a framed cartoon on his wall which showed a fat wealthy man and read, “I sold for cash.” and a skinny poor man and read, “I sold on credit.” Nathan like most Igbo in Chad delighted in having someone to speak English with. As I perused his shelves, I spied a small purple dust covered sack way in the back. I couldn’t believe it, it was a bottle of Crown Royal. I bought it. If a man ever needed a drink. I used most of it to sedate Randy. Finally we arrived in N’Djamena in the early hours of the morning after twenty grueling hours on the road. Randy was shipped out soon thereafter. Everybody had a chuckle over the letter snafu. Maybe not Randy.

THE ZEN OF WATER WELL DRILLING IN THE SAHARA

Tags

Africa, Chad, Non-Fiction, Peace Corps, Sahara, Water Well Drilling

Take your desert dunes and sunswept sands, and pour them through your empty hands. (L.E. Modesitt Jr.) Thanks to Greg Greenwood for photos. I’m standing in front in the broken down landrover photo, and me staring off into The Great Void.

For a male, at least this one, a well organized atelier (workshop/garage) is viscerally affirming. The pungent odor of used motor oil and hot metal grinding is a working man’s incense; the merged bangs, thumps, hums, and metallic screeches a machinal susurrus; and an arc welder’s actinic flare, a piercing purifying light. We had such a place in Chad. Painted plywood draped walls, whereon every individual wrench and hand tool sheltered within its exact painted outline, a one finger salute to increasing entropy.

Outside land rover and land cruiser pickups escorted the battle ships of our fleet, two large school bus yellow Mercedes trucks, initially one with a mounted drilling rig and the other with a wood box built on it to allow transportation and prepositioning of fuel and materials near the villages where we intended to drill wells. Later both trucks would have mounted rigs. Hanging from the sides of the trucks were long strips of Marston matting. We simply called it tôle, French for plate metal. The strips were twelve feet long by one and a half feet sheets of perforated metal with hooks and slots along the sides, allowing the strips to be firmly attached one to the other. Perforations minimized weight and increased flexibility. Marston matting was invented early in World War II to enable the construction of temporary landing strips and roads, permitting planes, trucks and heavy equipment to function in the sands of the Pacific islands. When the big trucks bogged down climbing a dune we would lay it under the wheels. Those metal strips made ugly adornments to hang on our diva trucks, nevertheless to me they represented a triumph of human ingenuity — a perfect tool for a specific purpose.

The visible Tysen pump assembly on our wells was composed entirely of locally available materials, high density West African redwood (now critically endangered — oops!), plate metal, galvanized pipe, pump rod, nuts and bolts. We built them in our atelier, welding, grinding, cutting, threading, drilling. We soaked the redwood in used motor oil for at least a month to keep it from cracking in Chad’s dry heat. In later years I worked with hand pumps manufactured in Europe and the states. None of them held up as well, and all of them cost more per unit. More importantly that simple pump assembly was easily repaired with local materials. Notwithstanding the appropriate technology above ground appearance, down deep the wells were state of the art. A meter and a half to two meter cylindrical stainless steel drive point screen at the bottom, a gleaming silver spear, allowed water to enter but prevented sand. Above it a beveled brass cylinder housed the seated brass foot valve and the moving piston valve above, both one way ball valves. When immersed the chemically hardened leathers on the valves swelled and sealed tight against the machined smooth brass of the cylinder, allowing the moving piston valve to lift a column of water upward with minimum wear on the leathers, water that with every stroke of the handle ascended the two inch galvanized pipe casing above to the spout. The key inner parts were all imported from the states and expensive. Some things can’t be compromised.

 

Joe Mitchell & friends checking out new well

 

Those wells were the product of seven or eight years of trial and error by Peace Corps Volunteers in Chad manually auguring with limited resources. They required maintenance, leathers and wooden pump handles in particular had to be replaced from time to time. Anything with moving parts requires maintenance. Nevertheless, glossy brochures aside, exceedingly few hand pumps could withstand for long two to three hundred people, sometimes more, getting all their water from them everyday, as the Tysen pump design had proven capable of year after year.

Going en brousse (in the bush sounds way too upper class British) for a four to six week installation tournée required significant preparation. In those days land rovers and land cruisers were solid and heavy, mostly made of steel, which permitted us to build and weld on them sturdy overhead carryalls, which we would pack with jerry cans of fuel and enough water to last until we had the first well operational in a village, trunks of food, bags of local charcoal, tools, cots, sleeping bags, etc. The large heavy stuff like galvanized pipe, fuel barrels, and cement we’d prepositioned in makeshift storage huts, although local officials tapping the fuel barrels was a constant concern. Of course those overhead carryalls made the pickups top heavy, but in general the roads in Chad didn’t favor speed or fast turns, and when fully loaded we were usually plowing through sand in lower gears anyway. Flipping over wasn’t a problem as long as you didn’t get sideways on a dune, and we didn’t, always going straight up and over. If you didn’t make it on your first try, you would back straight down in your own tracks, and then use those tracks for traction on your next try.

 

Me in front

A typical installation tournée would include a Mercedes truck with mounted drilling rig, one or two pickups, maybe three vols, three Chadian workers, and a cook, something along those lines. You either put in a hard day working in the heat or you slaughtered and cooked chickens and goats, not both, hence the cook, and of course clothes had to be hand washed. Generally vols drove the vehicles. I remember driving a Mercedes truck with one of our workers, Djimtojingar Nadjitam, sitting in the passenger seat. It had the standard three rearview mirrors, although the middle one wasn’t much use with a drilling rig mounted on the back. I noticed that the passenger side mirror was badly out of kilter and asked Jim to adjust it for me. He shook his head and pointed, “You Americans. You have two mirrors there and there. This one is mine.”

If I were to tell somebody that I’d drilled oil exploration wells out in the Sahara, it would make a macho impression on them, not so much for someone who drilled water wells for the Peace Corps. Yet the opposite is true. We lived and worked out in the desert heat for 4-6 weeks at a clip, never even getting a cool drink of water, eating chicken or goat cooked in tomato sauce and served over rice, couscous, or pasta everyday. Sometimes we couldn’t even get chicken. I once ate goat meat for thirty straight days. The worst part was that unless we were in the Bol area where they grew vegetables in the polders, that tomato sauce was our only vegetable. Given the inevitable heat dehydration, bumpy nonexistent roads, and the lack of vegetables, our digestive systems turned into cement mixers. Once during the hot season I monitored my water consumption for a day. I drank 11.5 litres of warm water and didn’t urinate until three in the morning when things had cooled down some. Constipation was a serious problem. Canned imported veggies, even lowly green beans, were way too costly for vols.

Our project was well funded by USAID, so we requested that the project fund enough canned green beans so that en brousse we and our counterparts (Chadian workers) could eat them for three meals a week. USAID had no problem with that, however Peace Corps balked until Dr. Carey Engelberg, the PC doc, framed it as a health issue, which it was. Also, I doubt Peace Corps was aware of it, but he quietly issued us a syringe of morphine when we went en brousse, which we checked back in on returning. We worked with heavy equipment in the middle of nowhere, and he was afraid that the pain of a crushed leg bumping along on sand pistes (tracks) would result in shock and death. I asked him how to administer it. He said not to worry about the niceties, just jab it in the fat part of the thigh. We never had to use it. He was a good guy.

Sometimes we would stop off at an oil exploration camp on our way back to N’Djamena. They worked four weeks and then had some R&R off at a beach resort somewhere. They ate well-prepared imported food, and slept in air conditioned trailers. And they thought that we were completely nuts. The only reason we stopped off there was their ice cream machine. In fact USAID hired an old well driller, Lester Maupin, to work with us as a consultant on the design of a large follow-on project. He was in his early sixties, wiry, and seemed healthy; although at night in N’Djamena he was a hard drinker, about what you would expect from an old well driller. He went en brousse with us for several weeks, unfortunately during the hot season. Back in N’Djamena, the day after we returned and one day before he caught his flight out, in my old battered French colonial house dubbed White Trash Acres in honor of my southern heritage by my fellow PCVs, with a high ceiling and an overhead fan, the temperature in my living room registered 108. God knows what it had been up in the sand. The next day Lester went into a coma on his plane and died. We should have realized how tough that trip had been on him, even though he seemed fine, but one can only surmise that the stress and dehydration of the trip en brousse combined with some heavy whiskey drinking upon his return to N’Djamena may have been too much. We were young and as cured and dried as beef jerky.

The first leg of a typical trip north was on a pothole riddled paved road that ended at Massaguet. The next leg was a badly rutted mostly clay road that ended in Massakori. That is where the sand started, and where we stopped to let air out of the tires. The wider the tire surface, the better the traction. On the way back we used quality German-made foot pumps to reverse the situation. At times it seemed to me that nearly every town and village we spent time in had one character who defined it, someone who colorfasted my memories of the place. In Massakori an old bearded blind man with a wood staff would stand theatrically in the road in the center of the town, one hand on a child’s shoulder, white cataract filled eyes gleaming, dramatically thrusting his staff out from time to time like Moses parting the Red Sea. Instead of shouting the standard “Allah kareem!” (God is generous), meaning God has blessed you so how about return the favor, he would shout “Ar-a-bee-a kareem!” (generous truck). Given his life perhaps he’d had better luck with trucks.

From Massakori a mixed clay and sand road headed northeast to Moussero, then wound its way to the far north. The road followed the Bahr el Ghazal (Gazelle River). The Bahr el Ghazal is a long dry mixed clay and sand river bed, part of an extensive water system that once existed in the heart of the Sahara, the only remnants of which remaining above ground were ever shrinking Lake Chad and an oasis here and there. That road was navigable with difficulty by transport trucks. However our main area of interest lay to the northwest and north of Massakori, and that meant traveling on pistes (vehicle tracks in the sand) often up and over dunes. Double clutching a land rover over a dune was an acquired skill. Double clutching is when you shift into neutral, take your foot off the clutch and hit the gas pedal to rev the engine the appropriate amount to sync with the next gear, then push the clutch in and shift. That allowed you to downshift at high RPMs without sacrificing momentum, and thus power your way over the top of a dune. It is still used on big rigs with their many gears to save transmission wear and tear, and by race car drivers to slow without braking and maintain better control in turns. Our older vehicles required it, newer ones with synchronized transmissions less so, but it still put less strain on the transmissions, and was just plain fun to do once you became skilled at it. Hearing the motor scream at high RPMs and feeling the entire vehicle shake in first gear as you barely made it over a dune approached macho nirvana. Of course driving through sand in low gears at high RPMs was murder on the engines. It wasn’t unusual to have to rebuild an engine after thirty to forty thousand miles.

in the above photo, we’d broken down between Bol and Liwa. A bolt holding the gearbox to the clutch housing loosened and all the gearbox oil drained out, causing the gearbox to seize up. We had only 1st gear (H and L range too) but no reverse so there was no option to back down a dune if we couldn’t get over it. Greg Greenwood worked a miracle to fix  it so we could drive at all. It was a harrowing drive back to BolThe consequence of screwing up, not getting the double clutching RPMs thing right, was all too frequently a broken axle, although it was a broken transmission in the above photo. Broken axles happened often enough that we took extras with us, but changing a land rover axle half way up a dune in 108 degree heat with no shade anywhere was not a fun experience. The first step in my usual approach to most breakdowns was to crawl under the vehicle, the only available shade, and take a nap. Cosmically, problems were easier to solve when the temperature dropped. In fact some breakdowns were heat related and would just go away, unfortunately not broken axles. One of the odd things was that no matter how isolated the place, a Kanembou (the principle tribe inhabiting the area around Lake Chad and one noted for producing street vendors) would inevitably show up, wearing heart-shaped sunglasses and persistently trying to sell us odd gaudy things, like well, more heart-shaped sunglasses. That seemed to be one of the immutable laws of the Chadian Sahel.

Once we reached our destination, say Ngouri, we would shake hands with the local authorities and be assigned a mud brick hut. We used the hut for storage. If the nights were cold sometimes our workers would take their cots inside, but generally we all slept on cots with mosquito nets under the stars. I liked sleeping inside the optional nets even when there were no bugs to speak of. I had read horror stories about nomads in the Sahara having their faces bitten off by hyenas. Now I never saw a hyena in Chad, never even heard one, and I didn’t know how much protection a net would be anyway, but I still slept better inside that net, some primeval id thing no doubt. Sleeping out in the desert forces you to think about time, space and stars. One older vol was fond of saying that one day in Chad they would discover immense deposits of time. The stars hung over you like ripe fruit there. I became proficient at naming stars and constellations. Near the equator Scorpio can be seen in its full glory. Few constellations really look like what they are supposed to be. Scorpio is an exception. However even Scorpio failed with our Chadian workers. They couldn’t get the connect the dots thing at all. They just saw little lights in the sky. Once I described UFOs and asked Jean NGartobytorde and Nana Nabel if they’d ever seen them. They said that they’d seen them from time to time, but always thought it was just the crazy Americans doing God knows what.

In the late afternoon and twilight the harsh colors of the day faded into beautiful soft earthy colors, and quiet descended gently from the heavens. I’m sure it wasn’t original to us, but we often said that we could hear the mystic humming of the desert. I actually think I could. Morning was a different matter entirely. I liked waking in a Chadian village. The Greek poets wrote about rosy fingered dawn tippy toeing up the sky. Dawn in a Chadian village was more like a train wreck. Roosters crowed, donkeys brayed, horses neighed, cattle bellowed, goats bleated, and camels made the awful sounds that camels make that I can’t begin to describe. That is what giving birth to a new day is supposed to sound like. The world should scream its arrival. To get going in the morning we drank chai, the favored local drink, green tea, though not exactly in the style Chadians drank it. They would put tea, water, and most of a huge cone of raw sugar in a teapot and boil it until it approached the consistency of light syrup. Then they would make a big ceremony out of pouring it from distance into narrow shot glasses. We didn’t boil it all the way to near syrup or use quite as much sugar, but we made up for that and then some by drinking mugs of it. It was strong stuff either way, and did the job. It’s funny, because we Americans think of green tea as being weaker than regular tea, but trust me, not if it is prepared that way. A Chadian defibrillator, you could feel it jump starting your body. Chadians dismissively called black tea woman’s tea.

One of the big advantages of drilling over digging is that we could install wells on top of the dunes in the middle of the villages. Digging wells in sand is best avoided, so the traditional source of water was usually an open well down in a clay wadi, where they often watered livestock as well. In addition to the obvious sanitary concerns, women would have to transport heavy containers of water up the dune, sometimes with the help of donkeys, often not, and sometimes the nearest wadi suitable for a well wasn’t all that near, and some of those dunes were pretty damn tall. The number of wells in any place depended on its size. If memory serves Ngouri was a two or three well town.

When we arrived in a village, we were often given a couple of chickens or a goat, which was fine, chicken or goat cooked in tomato sauce and served over rice, pasta, or couscous was our standard meal. Chadian male cooks never cooked Chadian food, only nasara (white people) food. Chadian food was a women’s only thing. On rare occasions the women in a village would prepare a meal for us. A typical Chadian meal consisted of a soft mound of some cooked starch, which could be made from millet, corn, sorghum, rice, or even beans, and a sauce. The starch had different names in different parts of the country, usually esh or boule in our region of operation, and most often made from millet (petit mille) or sorghum (mille rouge). We would tear off a hunk of esh with our right hand, form a little spoon like depression, and then dip it into the sauce. I liked a lot of the Chadian sauces, chicken in peanut sauce being a favorite, but a few of them, like the dried fish sauce near Lake Chad, were just terrible. Sauce longue had to be seen to be believed. I grew up on okra/gumbo. I love the stuff. However they had a variety that could have been used to make an industrial glue. They made a bright green sauce with it, aptly named sauce longue, that would stretch in streamers all the way from the sauce bowl to a mouth two or three feet away. I had to suppress the gag reflex with that one. One of the problems up there was that they couldn’t keep sand out of the food. The esh was made outside by women pounding huge wooden pestles into tree trunk size mortars. That sand eventually wore teeth down. The further up we went the more likely we were to be given camel’s milk, horrendous pungent stuff that even our Chadian workers (southerners all) wouldn’t drink. Since we hated to hurt people’s feelings, someone burying camel’s milk in the dead of night was not unheard of.

Back to Ngouri. So we would drive the Mercedes to the chosen site, start the rig motor, and begin spinning augurs into the ground, being careful to keep the hole perfectly vertical, which was far easier to do with a drilling rig than by hand auguring. That was crucial because if the well casing wasn’t perfectly vertical, the couplings on the pump rod would rub against the side and eventually wear through. Auguring is one of the simplest forms of drilling. It works on the Archimedes Screw Principle, which has been around, well since Archimedes. The drill bit had no problem with sand. Layers of clay above the water table slowed things down, but for the most part were not a big problem. Once the augurs hit the water table we needed to find sand, our porous aquifer, as a rule of thumb a minimum of three meters below the water table to anticipate fluctuations in the water level and provide a sanitary buffer, although on rare occasions a clay layer would force us to settle for less. Unsurprisingly sand wasn’t hard to find out there. When we hit water, we would spin wet sand up to coat the hole and hopefully keep it open all the way to the water table, below which the hole always collapsed. We would carefully drop the drive point screen, brass cylinder, and pipe casing down the hole to the collapsed sand at the water table. We used the rig tower and a hammer, a sliding weight attached to the casing, to drive the screen down through the wet sand to the necessary depth.

 

Mark Palumbo & Djime checking sand in developing well

Then we developed the well. First by pushing the water in and out of the screen with a large piston, which brought the nearby small grains of sand into the screen. Next we pumped the sandy water out, and repeated the process until there was no sand in the water we pumped out, signifying that the coarser grains of sand in the aquifer, too large to enter the screen, were now arranged tight to the screen so as to block the finer sand from entering and over time filling up the screen. Next we dropped down and seated the foot valve in the cylinder, then the piston attached to the pump rod, and assembled the pump with the exception of the handle. Finally we put molds around the well and poured cement, leaving the wet sacks on top to keep the cement from drying too fast. After three days we’d return to remove the mold and attach the handle. As a rule, except for that final stage that made the well operational, we accomplished everything in two or three days.

In Ngouri as elsewhere we were the biggest show in town. Often I felt an irresistible impulse to play to the crowd, hanging off the rig tower by one arm making monkey sounds, just silly stuff. There was a sense of freedom, almost euphoria, that came from being surrounded by people whose expectations of you were not yet fixed. Conrad wrote about the dark side of that. Fanta was a young woman, maybe twenty-five, who had clearly been touched by the gods. Her front teeth were missing, but she had perfect bare breasts without a hint of sag, very unusual for a woman that old in Chad. Obviously her mental condition had placed her off limits for marriage, motherhood, and presumably sex. Yet she was giggly and fun and everyone seemed to like her. She loved to steal one of our bright yellow or orange hard hats right off a head and run around wearing it. Fanta was Ngouri.

Going further north in the area of Rig Rig and Nokou, sometimes we installed wells in villages where it was likely that the children had never seen nasaras. Up there the devils in their childhood horror stories were often white demons with flowing blonde hair and blue eyes who lived at the bottom of lakes and rivers, exotic frightening places to them. I had blue eyes and long blonde hair, almost white blonde in the Chadian sun. I remember sitting in the passenger seat as the big Mercedes lumbered through the sand up a dune into a village. The children started shouting with excitement and running close behind the slow moving truck. That was dangerous and we tried to discourage it. I opened the passenger door, leaned out long hair flowing, and yelled, “Ana nakoulakou!” (I’m going to eat you up!). The kids stopped in shock, then noticed the adults in the village laughing, then they laughed too.

On occasion at night sitting out on mats, we would be surrounded by three or four men playing long loud horns. I did some research and I think they might have been waza horns, traditional to The Sudan and Chad. Anyway the music was repetitive with subtle changes, and very exotic. Problem was it was incredibly loud and like Lambchop’s Song That Never Ends, it went on and on my friend. If we gave them money, they kept playing to get some more. And they wouldn’t stop until we gave them some money. A classic Catch-22.

The further up and out we ventured, the more likely we were to get lost. Now let’s define lost. As long as we were on a piste, vehicle tracks in the sand, we never really considered ourselves lost. All roads/pistes lead somewhere, maybe not where we originally intended to go, but somewhere. True lost was when the piste had petered out a while back, and we didn’t have a clue exactly where we were. When that happened we would scour the area for any habitation, a lone hut would do, and pray that whoever lived there spoke at least a little Chadian Arabic. Then after an appropriate greeting, we would get out our detailed maps and compass and begin interrogating our new friend. Chadians living out there had an incredible, even uncanny, sense of direction. We’d name a town and ask him which direction it was in. Without hesitation he would point directly toward it as if his arm was a compass needle, and we would take a compass bearing. Next we’d ask whether the town was near or far, and then try to define it even further to very near or very far. We would keep repeating that with other towns/villages until we had a good fix on where we were and the direction we needed to go. However, there was one thing to be careful about. Sometimes with Chadians it would be the thumb jutting out at ninety degrees from the hand that would be the correct direction pointer and not the arm. It was important to clarify those parameters. The method of payment for those valuable services was usually some tea and sugar, preferred over money. Particularly if we were heading toward the great void, we would never go directly toward the town. If we missed on the wrong side, we could get too far out in the real desert before we realized our mistake. Instead we would aim to intersect the main road/piste well before our destination, and then follow it on in.

Me

And finally on the very edge of the true desert in a small village that was more nomadic than sedentary, I watched two teenage orphans, a brother and sister from one of the far northern tribes, Gorans maybe. They lived under a tattered flap of canvas, yet they carried themselves with dignity. Long ago I had hardened myself to scenes of poverty and misery. I quickly learned that if I gave medicine to everyone who asked for it, I became a doctor and not a well driller. Still I can’t say that I never gave medicine or money or other assistance. Nobody is that numb. Hardening yourself enough to survive and be efficient and yet not enough to completely lose your sense of compassion, establishing that highly individual and precarious balance, is one of the defining characteristics of being a Peace Corps Volunteer. And like any balancing act, you are bound to slip a little here and there. I was told that neither of the orphans had either the funds or the sponsors for their well past due coming of age ceremonies or a dowry for the girl, which was probably the main reason she was still single. I went on about the well drilling I was there for, but those kids tugged at me. Finally I sent our only Muslim Chadian worker, Nana, over with some food, tea, and sugar. They refused the tainted nasara food, but took the tea and sugar. Frankly I was out of my comfort zone up there. I was familiar with Kanembous, Chadian Arabs, and the southern tribes, but Gorans were proud and fierce, and I knew next to nothing about their customs. I never considered giving money. If they took that wrong, I might wind up with a knife in the ribs, or worse yet married, and the last thing I wanted to do was fund a female circumcision ceremony. On our last day there I saw two men helping the boy shuffle to his shelter. The front of his ragged djellabia (in Chad a simple male gown resembling an oversized shirt) was covered in blood. He had taken a cord, tied one end to a bush, and circumcised himself with a knife. I don’t know what happened after that to him or his sister, just another sad story swallowed by the sands of Chad. But I’ll never forget them.