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!

Guinebor II NADIF

We have a busy couple of weeks since I last blogged! All our mock exams are now over, we are slowly getting our results back, so far we have both been pleased. We’ve still got plenty of homework as ever but are finding more time to do fun things… I read my first book for month last weekend, I’ve found time to write a blog and Ruth’s been looking at uni stuff for next year (she’s got 3 offers now!). We also have been doing more fun things at school. My project on solar energy in Chad will be handed in next week (if you fancy practicing your French, you can visit our website at http://heliostchad.e-monsite.com/).

Our two solar cookers



Helios Tchad!

Last Saturday, our school organised an open day for “la semaine de la science” (Science week). Groups of pupils from the 3 highest years presented different experiments to teachers, parents and year 11 classes from other Chadian schools. Today, they are doing a quiz at the cultural centre on what they learnt. Unfortunately, today we couldn’t go but I took part in the experiments, presenting solar cookers from the chado-swiss organisation PROMOSOL and one we made ourselves from a tyre. My friends presented a solar dryer, an experiment with a photovoltaic cell and games still on the theme of solar. 




The photovoltaic cell experiment

We did this as you might guess for our project on solar energy; a big part of it is about getting people interested and teaching them about solar energy. We had great fun, especially me standing in the sun for 2 hours talking non-stop! It was tiring but good, people seemed very interested and the whole day was a success.



Heading out

Afterwards, you might think that I went home and had a rest all afternoon after the hard work but actually we had our Teen’s Bible Study litter pick! Mum’s been doing Teen’s Bible Study for a random group of missionary children, once a month for about a year. Lately we’ve been studying Acts and the early church. Thinking about this led us to wanting to do a sponsored “act” for the community, so we decided to do a sponsored litter pick in Guinebor II. We’re to be paid a certain amount per bag of rubbish.

Guinebor II NADIF and our helpers

 

The money raised will go to the hospital, we wanted to do something concrete so will buy some sort of equipment the size of which depends on the amount of money raised. Last Saturday afternoon we all went out into Guinebor with plastic gloves and bags. We ended up being helped by a large crowd of enthusiastic children and collected more than 40 bags! We could have stayed for hours (or perhaps days) but actually ran out of bin bags! Afterwards we burnt it all in the hospital incinerator. It was a fun afternoon, we all really enjoyed it and the villagers all seemed pleased if a little surprised to see us bothering to pick up rubbish. We even came up with a name for a group: Guinebor II NADIF. Nadif means clean in Chadian Arabic and is the name of the group of street sweepers of N’djamena. As it went so well, we hope to do it again someday!

 

 

Burning the rubbish

 

I hope this weekend will be slightly less busy… On Sunday afternoon we’re going to the baptism of the new-born child of Dago, the driver who takes us to school each day. Though totally different from last weekend, I’m sure it’ll be just as fun!