Friends and Family

Good Morning, everyone!

It’s a good morning indeed – a cloudy, slightly humid, not scorching Saturday. These days are one in a bajillion around here, so go ahead and gloat, all you Midwesterners.

Okay, now to describe my friends and family here in Bol. First:

Host Dad - “Papa” used to be the mayor of Bol, appointed by the president. But back in December the president replaced him with someone else and papa laid around the house in a dirty bubu (the white robes Arabs wear) watching Sudanese soap operas. But happier times have returned and papa is now employed as the prez of the commission that supervises elections for the Lake region. Papa is a short, self-important little guy. He has refused to marry off his daughters until they’re ready, but he gloats when we watch game shows and a woman loses. He’s been nothing but great to me and loves to explain Chad to me. He’ll swing himself sideways in a plastic chair so that his little feet dangle over the armrest and tell me about Chad’s climate or the history of his ethnic group, the Tunjours. He has 14 kids (with one wife!) all of whom have completed or are still in high school. It doesn’t sound like a big deal, but it is huge here. Plus, everyone in town still calls him “Monsieur le Maire” and are scared of him, so I don’t have to deal with people coming to hassle me.

The Boys: Ibrahim, Abdramane and Adoum (all 16 or 17) are the high school boys around. Only Ibrahim is actually Papa’s son. The others are nephews or cousins that live with us. I don’t really hang out with them much, but they’re always nice and would probably stab anyone who messed with me. Seriously. Moussa Haroun and Mohammet Nourd are 7 and 9 ish. Someone is constantly screeching their names to send them on errands or give them a chore. They’re very cute and I can’t tell them apart at all, because they look alike and wear each other’s dirty outgrown clothes. When they’re not trotting off to the market on an errand, they’re playing contentedly with sticks and old sardine cans. They’re cute little guys though relentless in their demanding of bonbons from their adopted nasara sister.

Maman – that’s French for mama, not “ma” “man”. Haha. Maman has popped out 14 kids and is showing the effects. She is always fatigued and generally speaks just above an exhausted whisper. I’m sure working daily in the family’s fields doesn’t help any. There are always voile-covered old women coming over to drink tea and hang out with Maman. They’re generally thrilled and erupt in laughter when I greet them in Arabic, but then they start talking to me in Arabic, thinking I know it, which is far from the truth. Maman is always concerned for my health and wants to make sure that eating boule every day doesn’t give me diarrhea, which you’ll be happy to know, it doesn’t.

My sisters: Oh, what would I do without my sisters? From the beginning, they have been the loud, funny, annoying, crabby, loving wind beneath my little Chadian wings. I’ll go in age order.

Fanta: Not really a sister, but a cousin from N’Djamena who was sent here by the government to work at the hospital. Lab technicians like Fanta are government employees and are moved all over the place, as I explained in an earlier letter. Fanta’s husband is also a lab technician and was sent to the waaaaay southeast of Chad. They hope through paperwork and bribery to get placed somewhere together. Fanta is about 25 and fat, a surprising trait in Chad where most people are as twiggy as my host sisters. She loves to dance and is always yelling at me to get up and dance with her but I much prefer the southern music with its happy guitars and bouncy drums to the northern crap with its yowling warbling Sudanese singers and keyboard synthesized drum beats. Guess which type Fanta likes.

Safia - seventeen-year-old bucket of sass. Of all the girls, Safia bugs me the most because she can be bossy and extremely demanding. It’s never, “Kate, could you maybe go see if you have some matches? I need some to start lunch.” It’s “Go get me some matches from your house!” I hide all of my food in a locked trunk because if this girl sees it, she will grab it, tear it open, eat it all and drop the wrapper on the floor. But she is very funny and sharp-witted and will help me whenever I need it.

Mariam (Bebe) – seventeen-year-old niece who lives here to go to the high school. She is from the eerily silent, clean, and tiny village of Mondo, which also happens to be my friend Darren’s site. She is quite the “villageoise” in public – the equivalent of a farm kid in Des Moines – all timid and polite and bashful. She and I have a special bond because she misses her family in Mondo and I miss my family in America. She admits to me when she has a dream about her family or cries herself to sleep and gives me knowing looks when I’m on the verge of tears because the phone line keeps cutting off during my weekly phone call with Mom. I have promised her that when the school year is over, I’ll travel with her to Mondo to meet her family and hang out with Darren, the long haired surfer from southern California. Bebe also calls me her sister in law because she is going to come to America and marry Aaron. (Kate’s brother) When she’s playing mad at me, she’ll say, “That’s it! I’m not marrying Aaron! Achta can have him!” She pronounces it “Arrowan.”

Achta - fourteen year old barely contained bundle of energy and laughter. Man, that kid is fun! She speaks a mile a minute with laugher and hand claps as punctuation. Achta always prepare the evening meal (Safia does bfast and lunch) and is incredibly slow. She can’t work and talk at the same time, and since she talks so much, naturally, the work loses out and we often don’t eat until 8 p.m. She is beautiful and for all of her bubbling energy walks like a queen. She has the most confident fashion model walk I’ve ever seen on a fourteen year old. In fact, all 4 of my sisters are beautiful each with a different mix of Arabic and African facial features.

Khadija – 13 years old and mentally handicapped, maybe autism. Maman explained to me that when Khadija was 3, she kept having seizures. They took her to a Russian doctor in N’Djamena but there was nothing the doctor could do. Khadija doesn’t speak but says “mba mba mba” and makes gestures. She is always laughing. Sometimes it’s disturbingly like an unpolitically correct movie or cartoon depicting a handicapped person, with her laughing and stumbling and making nonsense noises. She is very sweet and the family loves her and takes good care of her. Khadija still wears the leather amulets of a child. They’re verses from the Koran, wrapped in leather and strung on a string, worm around the neck to ward off sorcerers, an interesting mix of animism and Islam.

Friends

CaCA – CaCa is my English-speaking friend. She did all her schooling in Nigeria and speaks English with a great slightly Jamaican-sounding accent. Her house is on my way to/from school, so every day after school I stop in and she says, “Hello! You are welcome!” I think our friendship originally started because she wanted someone to speak English with and I was slightly desperate to speak my native tongue at least once a day but now we’re actually friends and have inside jokes and stuff. Her husband is my carpenter and one of those extended greeters who go on and on with the “ca va? Ca va la sante? La maison? Bien? Ca va? He’s extremely nice and never overcharges me when I have furniture made.

Josephine and the Proviseur - I know I already described Josephine in a previous letter but she and the proviseur deserve special mention. Back in March, there was a long string of knife fights and general anarchy at school and Josephine was talking about taking the family back to N’Djamena! Boooo! But things are calm again now so they’re staying. Yesss.

So those are the main characters here. Of course there are others but they’ll have to wait until another time. Have I ever described a typical day? I don’t think I have. On school days I wake up with the sunrise at about 5:15 because I’m sleeping outside these days. It’s a wonderful, gentle, gradual way to wake up. Then I get ready for school and eat my breakfast of bread and peanut butter and reconstituted powdered milk. Yum. At 6:40 on the dot, I trek off to school, savoring the morning coolness and greeting my neighbors. I normally teach until 11:15 or so (different schedule each day) and then go hang out with Josephine and rot my teeth with her delicious sugar tea. By then it’s plenty hot and I pop open my umbrella for the walk home. I stop by CaCa’s for a half-hour or so, by which time it’s hot so I generally trudge the ten minute walk between CaCa’s and home, trying to walk without getting sand in my flip flops because man, does sand get H-O-T!

Back at my house I grade homework or prepare lessons for a while and then lay down for a nap. Invariably, just as I’ve fallen into a sweaty, fitful sleep, Moussa Haroun or Mohammet Nour will pound on my door and yell in Arabic for me to come eat.

After lunch I hang out with my sisters for a bit and then head back to my house to continue working. In the afternoons, I generally sit outside under my hangar or under the tree in the yard and read or write or sit and think. I do a lot of reading and writing and sitting and thinking, which is cool because those are probably my favorite past-times, anyway. There are so many times when I think, “I can’t believe I’m getting paid to do this!” I mean, I’m not really getting paid but since I have so much more money than the people here it feels like I am. How many Americans wish they had more time to read, write, and sit and think? And I get to do it for, like, 8 hours a day! Pretty awesome. Anyway, around 6 I take my bucket and plastic cup shower and watch the clouds of sparrows fly overhead on their way back to the lake. I then go sit and talk with my sisters until Achta gets dinner ready (which is sometimes quite a while.) At 8:00 I say my goodnights, and head to bed. And that’s my day! It may be hard to believe but I don’t think my heart rate has ever been so low or my nerves so calm. I’m basically in a constant state of relaxation and it’s fabulous.