Laffays, a handbag essential?

 

I wonder what you normally put in your handbag. Tissues, a pen, money, a mobile …a headscarf or a laffay… I don’t think what my Mum takes to church is high up on your priority list! As well as the usual mobile, pen etc. my mum’s handbag contains a fan, a water bottle, insect repellent wipes, a bible, a song book and a laffay.

Mum's handbag

You may be unsure about why some of these things are doing in a handbag or even asking yourself what they are. Some of these are more normal in Chad than others for example the water and the fan are a permanent feature wherever we go as at times Chad is not so cool as it seems… The song book and bible are essential for church as we all read the reading for the day in unison and sing lots of songs from “chants de victoire” a French hymn book. In case of an emergency, she also has insect repellent wipes so we don’t get bitten to death!

A typical patient at the hospital wearing a laffay

However, the day we took this picture was special. Mum and Dad were going to a one of the hospital guards, Hassana’s house after church, for his marriage celebration. Before going there after church mum put her laffay (which was in her handbag) on. A laffay is basically a big piece of thin material which you wrap around yourself on top of normal clothes. It is sort of like an Indian sari. Some of you may have seen me wear one when we visited churches last summer. You may have guessed it is a typical Muslim outfit. As Hassana is Muslim it was appropriate to wear one, as all the women in the area wear one all the time. They had a good time sharing a meal and so did we a week later when we went to the house next door for Dago’s baptism that Rebecca mentioned in our last blog!

 

Typical Chadian "fete" food

Talking about traditional dress has made me remember that we have just managed to get some photos of the traditional day we had at school. It was all part of the celebration of the last day of school before the holidays by some students in my class.


Rebecca's class : 1re S

 Having not been allowed to have a football match with acts in between, as we had just before Christmas where we both played our instruments, they quickly organised a day where everyone came in traditional dress and had a photo taken of the whole school at break time. Thankfully they specified that we had to come in traditional African dress, which means in material with African print or laffays (girls) and jalabias and scarfs (boys) as you can see in the picture of Rebecca’s class. However the sports teacher said the material is not traditional enough as they used to wear grass skirts before that! Imagine… If they hadn’t specified we might have had to go in Victorian dresses as we are English! We don’t own that sort of dress funnily enough! 


The same week our school organized a school visit to a Refugee camp on the outskirts of N’djamena. I was one of the four students from Terminale (the highest year) chosen to go with 2 teachers. All the women we saw were wearing laffays!  

The refugee camp at Gaoui, N'djamena

We went to visit the school that has just opened at the camp. 

A classroom at the school

It goes from Nursery to about the equivalent of year 11. There are about 700 students even though some of the children from the camp have gone to private schools as the school started late. We want to create a link between our two schools in order to help them with school materials. They don’t have many books and sit on mats as they have no tables and chairs. The refugees are mostly Chadians who have come back to Chad from the Central African Republic following the problems which started in 2012.

I have already made a little video and a PowerPoint in order to tell our school about their needs and how to help.



Reception class

As well as a school the camp has its own clinic and hundreds of tents each one with about 30 people living in it. We will now have to work out how to raise money ourselves as a school and all this in not much time. Apparently the other day the camp received lots of cows as a gift… I suppose that sounds funny. When my friend and I told the philosophy teacher (the one who organized the trip) he looked very surprised! I wonder whether they just killed them (yes they were probably alive!) or kept some of them to sell or milk.



I was meant to finish the video and presentation with some friends when we came back from the holidays, unfortunately there have been some problems. Despite going back to school as planned on the 9^th of March after the holidays we haven’t been to school since. There were some quite violent student protests in town about a new law which enforces the use of motor cycle helmets. All schools and universities in N’djamena have been closed since then though things are looking better as we go back tomorrow!

Please comment and tell us what you put in your handbag!

A Chadian artist's impression of women in laffays

Picnic, Policemen and Python

Ok, so the last one is a slight exaggeration but read on to discover the pleasures (and perils) of our latest holiday. We’ve just had our two week February skiing holidays (the French always have two weeks off because one is just not long enough for a skiing holiday!). Mum and Dad had the first week off. We spent it at Bakara, at a Catholic retreat centre.

Bakara

It was very pleasant and relaxing. The centre is on the eastern outskirts of N’djamena next to the river Chari. On the other side rather than being northern Cameroon you can actually see another part of Chad. We spent our time there resting, reading and bird watching. Being a lot closer to the river than normal we saw a lot of different birds like herons, open-billed storks and pied kingfishers. Unfortunately we forgot our bird book so we weren’t able to identify them all! As well as reading Ruth and I did some running. After the holidays Ruth has got her sports BAC. She has chosen to do demi-fond which means running 500 m as fast as you can three times while predicting your time. We did some practising as her teacher had recommended it.

Running! Well actually we saw that Dad was taking pictures so...we posed!

Whilst there we also went on an adventure! We decided to go on a picnic on one of the empty stretches of the river bank by Bakara. We set off and wandered a bit along the bank looking at the birds and river. Dad was just trying to get a picture of these beautiful green birds in flight when a policeman and a soldier pulled up on a motorbike behind us. They spent 10 minutes talking to Dad, asking us where we were from, if we had a tourism permission paper and if we had permission to take photos! They were surprised to hear that we had been in chad for 5 years, living and working at the hospital in N’djamena, and therefore hadn’t thought of applying for a tourism pass. As for the photos they let us off after checking that we had only photographed birds. The security around N’djamena has definitely gone up over the past couple of months. This meeting put an end to our wanderings and we headed back to the car to quickly eat our picnic and then go. Whilst we were enjoying tuna sandwiches, Mum suddenly spotted something moving in a pile of rocks behind us! She saw what looked like the head of a lizard, but it slithered out and lifted its head off the floor, no legs! A snake.  Before it came any closer we moved everything away from the shade under the isolated tree. We had soon finished and headed back to Bakara where we decided it was probably safer and more relaxing just to stay on the compound! Whilst picnicking we had been approached by the local village chief’s son who offered to take us on a boat trip to the island in the middle of the river to see hippopotami! In the end we decided it sounded a little too dangerous though we hope to see some again before Ruth leaves us. We did however manage to go on a last family camel ride!

The camels arriving

Ruth and I from the back of Dad's camel

Mum

We had failed to organise our usual three Wisemen Christmas excursion but Mum and Dad surprised us both by telling us they had organised one for that week as Bakara is very near to the golf course where we have ridden camels in the past! We spent an hour riding camels through the golf course which was full of young Chadians studying and people drying mats on the empty plains. No one was playing golf.  It was very fun though the camels seemed to have insatiable appetites and ate a lot of neem tree leaves! After the usual abrupt coming down Ruth and I thought we’d never be able to run again!

The camels

 Later in the week we were surprised to see more camels this time from afar. We were just eating a picnic (at Bakara this time) when we spotted a herd of camels walking along the long island in the middle of the river! There was one man with about 100 camels of various sizes!



The camels on the other side of the river

It was an amazing but fleeting sight as they had all soon moved on, on their way out of town. We’ve had a very nice break at Bakara; we finishing with a trip to the swimming pool where we all got thoroughly tanned!

Relaxing at by the river Bakara

Now Mum and Dad are back at work and Ruth and I will a quickly getting our homework done before school starts again on Monday!