The drive to Oum Hadjer

Up at five, and after brief ablutions went down to wait for the others, sitting next to the guard on the door. There are often two guards, one with an AK47 and the other with a useful looking club. After some milling about we all boarded the Toyota, a squash with the five expeditionaries and Tchang our translator and the driver all in one car. Another Toyota took other members of our team, and all our luggage. Including our leader Passiri who ensured safe passage through the roadblocks in our journey.

Some of us feeling pretty ropey. I was convinced I was going to be sick or have diarrhoea at any moment, but we all seemed to perk up as the journey commenced through the morning traffic of N'Jamena made up of animals, a man carrying goats on his scooter, weaving cars and bikes into which people nonchalantly strode without a glance at the oncoming traffic.

Once outside the town, the journey really began, we drove for hours. Between 8-900km was a good estimate. Having looked at it on the journey on Google Maps, the journey had looked to be one through ghastly aridity. But we took a route that wasn't a straight line, and went a bit further south than I had thought looking at the google map. Actually there were scrubby trees and vegetation as far as the eye can see all the way, and I hadn’t expected Chad to be beautiful. Shortly after leaving N'Jamena the road passed several ponds and water holes, full of waterlilies and the occasional tree by the water's edge full of white cranes.

Once you got your eye in, there were little villages and people everywhere at work in the vast country as we sped through it. They were driving cattle and goats, mostly riding donkeys but sometimes horses or camels. We spotted several herds of wild camels. A constant threat to road safety were the donkeys wandering into the road, and refusing to move even though cars thundered towards them. Goats too capering comically. Sometimes cattle blocked the road, usually attended by small boys whacking them viciously to keep them from harm.

Every now and then we passed through a road block, but we were waved through. One made me feel particularly nervous. I looked out at the soldiers sprawled about and the enormous machine gun mounted on the back of a truck and felt it wouldn't take too much for them to start thinking about using it.

Eventually the flat land began to get a little more rugged, with extraordinary mountains that were often piles of great smooth boulders like knobbly castles rearing up from the flat land. Some of the boulders stood proud like Easter Island statues.

Everyone fairly cheery in the car. Wedged in and chatting. Matt and Steve reciting vast tracts from Withnail & I, for Matt had brought along the script.

I also hadn’t expected rain. For about half an hour towards the end of the journey there was a torrent from a dark sky, and we were wondering for a moment if this might ruin the story we were here to tell about drought.

We stopped off here and there for wees. Then at a market halfway in our journey were we ducked into a tented restaurant where goats were being grilled. Flies everywhere. Matty’s face a mask of thinly veiled alarm, but he was asked to say grace by Passiri anyway. We prayed, as the flies happily explored our food: a shared platter of the grilled meat, with bits of onion and a salty hot sauce which I dipped my slightly entraily morsels in to mask the taste.

Slightly after sundown we reached Oum Hadjer, driving off the road on the outskirts of town, across a dusty field were about 50 boys were playing football, into a compound. The doors swung open and we drove in. We had a formal welcome and another security briefing. On Passiri’s instigation we English had to introduce ourselves to the compound’s staff in French. I deployed my one French quip about speaking French comme une vache Espagnole, which got a general laugh. We were shown to our rooms too. Matt and I sharing a room, with a wicker divider. Boiling hot inside. My room had a bed with a mosquito net and a table onto which I piled my stuff.

Managed to phone Lorraine to find out about her interview. She has been appointed as a new head teacher. This is amazing news, and talking to her I felt at once very proud of my wife and a dispiriting million miles away from her.

The ladies of the compound readied a meal. A chicken stew, served with rice and a kind of harissa sauce and a mucussy okra dish which I luckily swerved. After supper and there was nothing to be done than go to bed. Once the distant lightning had moved on, we looked up into the hot African night at the milky way.

Below goat on a bike in N'Jamena, cattle in the bush, me astride the one road for hundreds of miles; small boy keeping his cattle in line with a stick; a goat on oil tanker; a girl selling what our colleagues said was 'cow fat', Pete Caton in the background; people on donkeys and goats; Matty; girl on a donkey; outside the goat restaurant; girls selling 'milk fat' still not very sure what that is, and mountains from the road.
















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