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.