Termites Attack

There was a crackling sound in the walls.  It was subtle, but it was continuous.  Day and night.  It took me a few days to even realize that the sound was something to be noticed.  We opened the wall the next day.

Inside was an infestation of termites who had happily redecorated and made themselves at home in the only wooden wall in the compound (the rest are all brick).  They had completely eaten through the 4x4 support, and several of the 2x4 cross beams.

Holy wood vacuum, batman.

With new eyes, I looked around our compounds.  The shade structure for the garage was about to fall.  The supports for the floor were eaten away at the guard post at the office.  The frame for the screen door was no longer attached to the wall.  The doorframe of the generator shack did not continue to the ground.

The termites here are described as "très forts."  Yeah, you got that right.

Handover

My dad can juggle.  I don’t know why I never learned to juggle from him (ok, maybe because it’s HARD and when I was 4 my futile attempts did not invoke any desire to perfect the art), but I like to think that I took his skill for handling flaming torches, knives, apples, and anything else he could ferret away from the dinner table, and turned it into a metaphorical skill.  Maybe they’re not related at all.  But since I’m writing, I’m going to have myself a field day.

In MSF, the passing of a position from one person to another is fraught with snags, inefficiencies, miscommunications, last-minute advice, fatigue, social posturing, and general good cheer.  There are a lot of balls that can get dropped.

As logisticians, we have a hundred balls in the air.  Spell check never seems to identify the word logistician (try it), so I define it as ‘details.’  It’s a pretty good substitute in most sentences.  “I’ll figure out the logistics with him tomorrow.”  “Take care of the logistics of sending that down.”  “You cover the logistics of the air conditioner.”  I figure out the details.  Of everything.   Everything is my job, and everything is my problem.  From supply to electricity to movement to temperature, every detail is another ball in the air.  Us logisticians, and our teams, get a hundred balls up in the air, passing them between ourselves, managing their trajectories, and keeping our limited resources (our hands, in this metaphor) assigned to the necessary task only for the amount of time it takes (we can’t have our hands full.  Juggling with your hands full sounds pretty hard).  Each logistician can juggle a huge number of balls in a complicated pattern.

Then they have to hand it over.

So, I’m metaphorically good at juggling a lot of balls.  I throw them pretty high, touching them less often than normal, and I dole them out to my team.  I’ve got a pretty intricate pattern, with very fast hands, that I work well with (this is all metaphorical, people).  I bet no one else really likes my pattern.  I don’t particularly like other people’s pattern, either.  So handover is the time of blending the patterns, a time of collaboration and cross-pollination (wow, I like that wrist-flick, or, I didn’t think of behind the back!), but mostly a time of not crashing the two patterns to make all the balls drop. 

In reality, the two patterns never have to actually co-exist.  So handover is also a time of quiet head-nodding and teeth gritting.  The inertia of the balls and their current pattern is seen in the national staff, who have to go about changing a huge system of 100 juggling balls, pins, flaming torches, chain saws, and knives into something new, different, and not guaranteed to work.  Every 9 months.  Handover is not their favorite time.

Needless to say, some balls get dropped.  The important part is to drop balls, not chain saws, and to not toss the bowling ball to the baby.  I’m not sure what that last part translates to, non-metaphorically, but it sounds good.

Dusty Roads

Chad is a bit different than Malawi. The trees are bigger, there's more greenery and livestock, the soil is more sandy and less clay-y. All of this combines to give Chad a bit more wealth. Not in the standard of Western/Northern countries, but in the standard of "we've got cattle!"

I'm reminded of my time with Heifer Project International, teaching American schoolchildren about the 7 Ms of benefits that come from animals. Cattle are a 7-M animal. Some others don't bring all the Ms.  They run through my mind on my walk to work, as I'm passed by carts pulled by two cattle, and in turn pass small groups of grazing cattle left to wander freely where they will.

Meat, milk, muscle, money, manure, motivation, and materials. Food, labor, excess to sell, fertilizer, responsibility and wool/hair/skin. It all gets utilized.

The walk from our house to the office is flat and straight. It's a quick 5-minute stroll, and a good chance for me to put my thoughts in order. I get to breathe, prioritize, and, most importantly, not speak French. It's difficult to add one more mental burden to every single interaction. Not only am I giving instructions, receiving information, filtering my words and actions for cultural, gender, age, and ethnic considerations, but now I have to also find words and form grammar that I'm only mildly familiar with. It will get easier.

I'm looking forward to it.

Standing in the Shade

It's hot here in Chad.  I'm not sure what I'm used to, since I've been itinerant for the last couple of months.  When I left Malawi almost two months ago, it was the hottest part of the year, with the temperature reaching higher and higher, waiting for the rain to break the rising heat.  Temperatures were in the 40s, which was not too bad on the African scale.  But it was bad enough on my personal scale.

From there it was a couple days in Paris, right before the holidays, which was cold compared to Malawi, but nothing to write home about.  The next few days in New York, however, were legitimately cold.  There was snow on the ground.  But luckily, the weekend that I spent with my family was the one pocket of 'warm' weather in an otherwise flesh-achingly cold holiday season.

Then it was on to San Francisco, with its reliable 15-degree mix of sun, fog, wind and clouds on a daily basis, year-round.  It does drop down to about 10 degrees at night, but that just lets you wear a nice jacket.  It was good to put on different clothes from the 5 outfits that I had been wearing for 6 months.  I love jacket weather.

Then it was the reversal of that process, spending a couple days in New York, where the weather had managed to get even COLDER (I came prepared with a down coat, which is now mocking me in my African sauna), then through Paris for a 4-hour layover in the (completely climate-controlled) airport.  An easy flight to the field put me in Ndjamena for a nighttime arrival, and since I was braced for the heat, it was not at all bad.

Then the next few days happened, which were hot.  Nothing horrible, but hot.  Then I went about 500km farther south.  To the field.

Where it is hot.

And the hot season is about to start.

All of the fans are in storage, since it's not as hot as it gets yet.  I think it's time to bring those guys out.  Supposedly, it gets to be about 50 degrees here.  In the shade.

Did I mention how nice San Francisco is this time of the year?  But there's not much opportunity to do what I do there.  Not too much endemic malaria spiking in the wet season.  Not too many cases of meningitis threatening to tip the scales into an epidemic.  Not too many threats of cholera when it rains.

Departures

I had a very smooth journey so far.  That statement calls for the proverbial knocking on wood.

This time, I'm going to Chad for 9 months as the Field Logistician for a malaria project in Moissala.  The project is in its third year of giving a revolutionarily successful malaria prophylaxis, administered to children 3 months to 5 years old.  It is also entirely in French.

I flew from San Francisco to New York City for briefings (mostly everyone was in the field, so my briefings were very brief indeed), had an extra day in the city to hang out, then flew to Ndjamena through Paris.  I spent 4 hours in the airport in Paris, but didn't stop into the office.  It felt weird to not head into HQ, but the desk controlling the project is in New York.  So straight to the field for me, with two international flights.  Couldn't be easier!

Now it's 3 days of briefings in the capital, then I fly to the field in a little plane.