stuff...

I'm getting tired, to be honest.
I've told many of you this very thing when speaking to you on the phone.
Everyday I am part of some amazingly crazy story, some hectic piece of lawless Central Africa, and yet when I come home I want to write, but I cannot. I try to document what is happening sparingly so that maybe when I come home and regain some of my energy for this I'll be able to write about it.
This place is wearing me thin, and others as well.

The past two weeks have seen some interesting stories brew. Some are sad, some pissed me off to no end (actually most pissed me off to be honest), and some made me laugh. Elizabeth is gone again, evacuated to lovely Paris where she and CCF hope that her mental sanity will return. As for me, being a realist and all, I highly doubt that it will...she's a bit wacky beyond repair. Yet that's why I love her. The recent weeks gone past saw horrible events at CCF, with the military mysteriously targeting one of Elizabeth's assistants, murdering his innocent cousin and setting one of her guards on fire with diesel fuel. This place is beyond repair I think sometimes. In fear for her life (as I was as well) she stayed with us at AirServ for a few days before hopping a UNHCR airplane for N'djamena and subsequently on to Paris. To set her nerves on edge even further, a local figure of authority decided he'd taken a liking to her and began stalking her after mysteriously getting her phone number. Enter the future jealous husband...ME that is. The perpetrating perv in question actually works at the airport here so I had to pay him a visit, doing business the only way the Chadians are responsive to it seems, by me yelling violently. After loudly proclaiming that he had no need for another wife and that she was taken regardless, I demanded he delete her phone number from his phone right then and there...causing enough commotion that fellow employees peeked their heads in to make sure the scrawny white guy wasn't beating up on the boss. It was only after he ceded this request and said 'Ok, ok, ok...I don't see what the problem is...I just wanted to help her with her French!' that I noticed the smirking gendarmerie outside the broken windows with 50 caliber rifles at their finger tips. "Doctor" I think I said to one. No response was noted.





What else? The black day of Friday the 13th was just that. Mechanical difficulties left our airplane disabled on the runway in Abeche for 45 minutes in the morning (elizabeth's fault). While starting the engines up after the repairs were complete I got one of the biggest scares I've had in a few months. Both Lauren and I looked out the windscreen to see a large airplane about to land on top of us. In my periphery vision I noticed everyone running for cover in the scrub brush off the side of the runway. "Oh, crap. Crap, crap, crap!" went my thought process I believe. The airplane, piloted by a complete jackass that I've had run ins with before, missed hitting our vertical stabilizer (tailfin) by maybe 5-8 feet and landed over the top of us. We taxiied the aircraft back to parking once my blood pressure had diminished fairly enough that I wasn't on the verge of a catostropic stroke, and I continued to jump out and run to fight the captain of the other aircraft. Screaming on my part(again...I said I need to leave this place, I'm becoming a bundle of hypersensitive nerves) was greeted by "what? We were cleared to land." Cleared to land is not necessarily synonomous with cleared to swipe the back end of another aircraft off, killing everyone on board. At least it wasn't the last time I checked. As my voice became hoarse I realized this was a wasted argument. I was, and still am in, the NO LOGIC ZONE.




Meetings. More fights. More meetings. Another fight when Lauren and I disarmed the governor of Ouadii Region who felt the unwaivering need to carry his old Berretta on board our flight. He was part of the John Negroponte (Deputy Secretary of State, and a bit of a prick) delegation. Seems we embarassed him when he was forcefully disarmed by a woman. Jackass.

I did get one feel good day. Ok I get many feel good days, but one really struck me. A month and a half ago we airlifted a twelve year old boy who had gotten in the way of a dispute in one of the camps. He had been stabbed deeply in the chest, ripping a gaping hole through his left lung. Onboard the aircraft that day everyone was sure he'd succumb to internal bleeding in no time. We were wrong, and I'm so glad we were, because he made me realize how cynically I've been looking at so much of this. A week ago a boy approached me smiling and beaming with joy. It took me a second but I realized this was the stab victim. We shook hands and he giggled. His father came to Lauren and I and thanked us profusely in Arabic. The anger towards the cluster f*#$ of the local world around me faded and I couldn't keep my eyes off of this child. Here was a kid who was alive and just happy to be that way. We were sending him back to a dusty, mud hut with a thatch and tarpulin roof in the middle of one of Afica's biggest refugee camps. Yet he still smiled, and so did his father. In a world where there seems to me to be no hope...some still find shreds of happiness to fill their hearts. A boy's smile filled mine for the day.



On the flight back to the camp I gave him a headset so that he might listen to the jibber jabber of an incomprehensible foreign language being belched from two bleached figures. He just kept smiling, and so did I.

EGYPT

Concerned emails flood in after I write something negative, as I did the other evening. I appreciate it, because it shows me that people care about me and are keeping up with what is going on in my strange, sometimes foggy head. That being said, everyone has to understand that: 1. There is so much negative around me here that it is hard to stay positive all the time, and I need to vent here and there, and 2. I do, everyday, find the beautiful, funny, sublime, or just smile inducing things in everyday life. I am not a large ball of static negative energy roaming the streets of Chad looking for something to get pissed off about or come close to get myself shot about. A guy deserves to get angry, introspective, or annoyed sometimes, right? Right?


Sailing the Nile River by Aswan...notice the massive sand dunes behind the boat!

So, now its out of the way and I can share with you the brief synopsis on our trip to Egypt. Amazing. Amazing but far from restful and reinvigorating. Egypt is a place of constant chaos, hustle and hustlers. You are a constant target for this or that...vendors, taxi drivers, tour guides, camel guys, tea-hookah-falafel and jewel salesmen...they all see you walk by and seemingly get dollar signs in their eyes. "My friend, welcome! Where are you from? Colorado? Aaaah, my brother lives in Denver! Come in, come in!" It's amazing, the geography knowledge these guys have. I think I went through 40 of the 50 states, and the various hawkers could always come up with some city in the state in question. Always there was a brother, sister, cousin or nephew there, usually studying. Sometimes they were just a little too much in your face, preventing you from moving, crowding your personal space, being that Seinfeld close talker (you know who I'm talking about Andy!). In these cases I prayed that I could open my mouth and convince them to move before Elizabeth unleashed a maelstrom of direct, brutally honest, and jaw-dropping explanations on why it was that she would not go into their shops, and why it was that they were annoying her beyond comprehension. After such brutally honest attacks some would look at me and ask "what's the matter with her?" or "what's her problem?", to which my response was usually, "judging by what she said I'm going to go out on a limb here and say YOU. It'd do you good not to stare at her breasts while slipping your hand towards her ass as you try and sell her perfume. Did you here what she said about castration? Have a good day!"


Slaves awaiting smiting from Ramses II, carved into the walls of Abu Simbel

Upon arrival in Egypt we found a travel agency to make our train reservations and wound up being booked for a 9 day long tour of the country. And a tour it was. Everyday our itinerary was laid out and we were shuffled from tomb to tomb, palace to palace, bus station to bus station, hookah bong coffee house to, well you get the point. It was busy. Some nights we only had 4 hours of sleep, and when we politely complained, they looked at us like we had four heads, "don't you want to see all the amazing sights? Is it not beautiful enough?" and suddenly we were guilt tripped back into napping on bus rides and cooperating with the hectic shuffle.



We went from Cairo to Aswan to Abu Simbel, to Luxor to Hurghada, up the Red Sea coast, under the Suez Canal and down the Sinai penninsula past Mt. Sinai to Dahab. By the time we reached Dahab we felt we needed a vacation from our vacation, and we were grateful for the two days spent lounging, eating, snorkelling and diving. And then we went back to Cairo and bought what will hopefully prove to be real gold wedding bands in some crazy hectic inner city market. It's amazing what you can get in a vending machine in Cairo!



In the end, the best offer I received for Elizabeth was 6 million camels, honestly, (I'm not making some snide racist remark) and I seriously debated. I mean camels are fetching a decent price on the Middle Eastern commodities market lately, and well, that could have been a lot of boats and toys. But I kept her. I'm still open to offers though.


Bedouin Camel Herder by Dahab


Backstreets of Cairo...and the area that specializes in wedding bands.

<

I need to go catch a trout...

Each time I leave this corrupt sandbox I find it harder and harder to muster up the motivation to come back. I find myself tired of experiencing and shrugging of the recurring problems that mire Chad, in fact I struggle greatly now not to lose my patience in a violent way when they occur. I'm both ashamed of this and also cognizant that I'm not alone in feeling this way. Elizabeth and I spent many an evening recently discussing the many reasons why we'd never miss this landlocked pit of despair.

If I were reading this right now I'd be thinking the same thing. The two of us are feeding off each other's negativity thus compounding the problem, one-upping each other's annoying story to a degree that we both are at a fevered pitch of aggravation, right? Well maybe, just maybe. However, the problems that we moan to each other about are I think worth moaning about.

About a month ago it became obvious that if either of us wanted to take vacation before our contracts were up we'd have to do it quickly. We planned an impromptu trip to Egypt, a place we mutually longed to see. I was put in charge of tickets. AirFrance...$3,456,234.97 for a roundtrip. Ethiopian...$450! Sweet! Let's go...click! After pressing the BUY button on their website, Ethiopian drops on you the taxes and surcharges, the highest in the galaxy I might add, turning a $450 ticket into a $950 ticket. All well we thought, at least we'll get out of here for a week and unwind. All we had to do now was pick up the tickets in N'djamena and we were free to explore. Two days before departing a colleague went to retrieve the tickets only to find that the reservation had been cancelled. We arrived the next day and spent hours arguing for the seats, and thankfully finally won, just as the power cut out, causing the system to crash and forcing me to return later for the papers.

I returned 4 hours later, parking with other cars along N'djamena's dusty and busy main street, a gravel covered road surrounded by dilapidated archaic buildings and hordes of beggars and peanut selling children. Weaving my way thru the throngs of beggars and falling prey, as I do every time, to one of the peanut selling girls who is absolutely the cutest little girl I've seen here, and who remembers me and hunts me down each time I visit the capital, I finally made it to the Ethiopian Airlines office. I emerged minutes later victorious and gleeful, text messaging Elizabeth that we were on our way to a great vacation. Little did I know, while I was in the airline's office, someone had written in black ink across my forehead, in big letters I never got to see most likely because I sweat them off, the words "Please, Please, Fuck with me!!!"

Hopping thru the traffic and clouds of blue smoke belched from exhaust pipes I came alongside my truck, keys in one hand, airline tickets in the other. A deafening yell came from 3 feet behind me, startling me and causing me to turn around quickly to find a man in full camouflage uniform, a blue beret, and a large automatic rifle strapped across his back, angrily gesturing at me as he stomped his feet. I ignored him, turning my back, knowing all too well that what he wanted was a quick buck. He chose to ignore the fact I was ignoring him, and kept on screaming in my ear, forcing me to turn around and scream back at him. My French is far from adequate, but I understand more than I can vocalize, and so I understood his claim that I was parked illegally, in a spot marked by white lines, alongside 20 other vehicles all parked exactly the same way. 'Hmmm, how strange' thought I. I told him in English to 'Go piss off and find someone else to fuck with', to which he responded 'what is this???!!! what is this????!!!' pointing at my tickets, and before I could do anything else he'd snatched them from my hand and shoved them down his shirt front. The inner voice began begging for calm, and for the most part I followed it's suggestions.

The uniformed bastard went with a smirk plastered across his face and sat down with his fellow cronies, who wore equally impressive corrupt smiles, on a bench in the shade. I followed close behind directing in perfect American English all of the most insidious insults I could muster, at this shithead. When this failed to produce results I moved on to broken French, demanding that he return the tickets that he had no right to, while throwing in an occasional F-bomb for good measure. He laughed and told me the cost for the tickets, which I had already paid for, was 75,000 CFA, or $150. My face grew red and more red and even more red still. I desperately wished a piano would fall from the tree above and kill every one of the soldiers sitting below. It did not. After waiting for about 10 minutes I removed 10,000 CFA from my wallet, had him arise and show me the tickets, and then snatched the tickets from him while throwing the money on the ground beside us both. This, in retrospect, was not the most cool headed thing to do, but I was beyond caring for some strange reason...something inside me had become tainted or broken.

As he screamed and gained the attention of the other soldiers I went for the truck, which was locked. It was then, and only then that I came to the regrettable conclusion that though the truck does lock, it does not unlock with the keys provided. Shit. I did finally get into the truck, but not before half of downtown N'djamena saw a white guy prying a back window open, sweating profusely, as belligerent soldiers with guns yelled at him in broken a mysterious slur of languages. I hopped in, smiled at them, muttered a few more combinations of F#$% you to them, and was off. It was then that I decided I am officially done with Chad.

Elizabeth, that day, also had an anti Chad epiphany. Her organization has taken on an amazingly challenging project, one that she is managing, to retrain and repatriate ex-child soldiers who were captured in last year's rebel attack on the capital. In a center just outside of downtown, 30 something adolescent boys, ranging from 11 to 18 are being taught, thru international pressure, to become normal functioning parts of an abnormal and corrupt society. CCF is trying to help these boys be boys again, helping them to salvage some type of a childhood, or in many cases, trying to teach them a skill that'll help them merge back into the masses peacefully and profitably. While their retraining is to be done by CCF and UNICEF, their nourishment is to be looked after by the 'Ministry of all things fucked' in the Chadian government, which ironically, does anything but keep them nourished. The boys, who are therefore hungry, do what they can to procure food, and consequently disappear, sometimes turning up a night or two later stabbed and mortally injured, which is just what happened the day before we departed. When queried the Ministry OATF shrugs it's shoulders and lets it be known that they care nothing for these small boys who have been enslaved into a war they know nothing about. In all likelihood, many of the boys have actually served on both sides of the conflict as well, being captured and forced to fight their former captors.

Days later, this topic came up in a press conference with the Chadian Minister of Defense or Interior. A woman in the audience of press members started by saying something like "Sir, it is a well known fact that the Chadian military uses child soldiers for its..." at which time she was interrupted and corrected by the Minister. "Madame, Madame, we do not use child soldiers. We do, however, have many midgets in our armed forces." Midgets. Midgets? Dear sir, could you not have come up with anything better than this as an explanation, or at least ignored the comment...because now you look depressingly inferior. Where is the piano dropping from above when you need it, damnit???? The woman was however ignored when she completed her question which she intended, inquiring where the masses of young girls who had also been enslaved as child soldiers by the rebels, and then captured by the government, had disappeared to? Its a morbid and depressing thought for me to consider what has become of these little girls, knowing what I know about Chadian men.

Before moving to Chad I held most fellow members of my gender in high esteem. I will admit that maybe I could have even been considered a bit sexist when I compared abilities of the sexes. I have always considered myself open minded, but when Elizabeth would talk of women running the world and why it would be a better place I would scoff it off as a bit silly. Chad has taught me something though that I'll never shake off. The male side of the human species is capable of some of the most despicable and shameful actions. I often look around me here in Abeche, at the way women are treated by ignorant and imbecilic men who claim their inborn dominance and feel angry, disgusted and embarrassed. 'Maybe her idea isn't so bad after all' occasionally pulsates through my brain.

I'll be posting some pictures of Egypt soon, along with something maybe a bit lighter.