A week in Istanbul

I'll let the photos say it all.  I recommend the city for a visit, a vacation, a conference, a layover, an excursion.

The Blue Mosque

A Wednesday in a park, with tons of locals out and about.

The Grand Bazaar

The New Mosque

Mosques and palaces line the Bosporus

The Hagia Sophia

The library in Hagia Sophia

The altar and mihrab in Hagia Sophia

The Basilica Cistern

A red moon over the Old City

The Bosporus Bridge and Asian Side

Cars are not allowed on Prince's Islands

The New Phenomenon of Vacation

My ADD-style career has never before left me with a traditional "vacation," until I started working with MSF.  

In theater, you don't have a job; you have a gig.  You work until the show goes up, or comes down, then you find more work.  Or go do something else.  Or go have an adventure.  

On cruise ships, you work 7 days a week, for 6 months straight, then you leave and have 2 months of unemployment before your next contract.

I have never before left a job/project, gone and taken a break, then returned to take up the same job/project.  It's a luxury never afforded to the theater world or the ship's company.  But with MSF's non-emergency missions, it's a necessity.

So I'm bound to Istanbul for a week, with nothing in particular planned, with no grand itinerary or ambitious adventure ahead of me.  I'm off to Istanbul because there is a direct flight from Ndjamena, and I'm pretty interested in traveling the least amount possible.  I've never been to Turkey, and it sounds like an amazing place.  I'm sure the Blue Mosque, Hagia Sophia, and all the other wonders, along with a new-to-me culture, cuisine, and language, will make my stay memorable and adventurous.

Maybe I should look up how to get to the hotel from the airport...

To get to my lovely, easy, hassle-free direct flight, I would normally take a 4-hour car ride in a 4x4 vehicle over dirt roads to get to the nearest city with a large landing strip for the domestic humanitarian aid flight up to the capital.  The ease of this route is denied me, however, due to the end of Ramadan, which conveniently cancels the flight Monday.  We think.  I'm still looking for the moon.

That means that it's a delightfully-easy two-day car ride from the project in Moissala up to the capital.  14 hours in a 4x4 is not how I pictured my vacation starting...

But the countryside is interesting, and different as we head north, closer to the Saharah Desert.  Less malaria-belt tropical vegitation, and more open plains and yellow, clay-y soil.

Dessert

My frozen guava smoothie is the closest I'll come to ice cream in a 6-hour drive. I'm blissfully happy as I tuck into my teacup-sized portion.

Dinner tonight was spaghetti with a meat dish in red sauce. The meat I think was some relative of cow (ebu?). But it wasn't trying to be spaghetti bolognese (that's Thursday nights). This meat was still on the bone, demanding constant vigilance for hard bone flakes with each bite. The sauce was a slow-boiled all-day investment, like most traditional Tchadian sauces and meals.

Our self-catered selection of desserts includes my hidden teacup of guava smoothie that I tucked into the freezer at lunch, some Haribo bonbons, and chocolate. I get wired on caffeine, so I pop a few twice-melted gummie shapes (this one might have started as a rocket, or a swordfish, or maybe a mirror ball) in my mouth, grab my mock-sorbet, and head to my room.

Rainy Season

The rainy season has arrived here in Moissala. With its arrival, the dusty, hot expanse of road with cattle ambling along it, running die-straight to the office, has turned into a jungle path, lush with greenery, wandering past tethered goats and neighboring huts.

Happy Father's Day

Dear Dad,

So sorry I missed father's day!  There's no such thing here in Chad, and I'm a little detached from North American traditions right now.  I really tried to send an email on Sunday, when I realized it was Father's Day, but didn't have internet connection for the weekend.  I resolved to get an email off during the week.

I went into the office early today (Tuesday) to send you an email, because last night when I tried to write I realized I had left the internet key at the office (again).  Instead, this morning there was an issue with the transport board so I had to straighten out the days movements, then I got side-tracked updating the project's contact list to send to the capital.  Then I had the daily 7am manager's meeting, then it was 7:30am which is the start of the work day, which means approximately 50 people want to speak to me at once, which takes about half an hour to get straightened out.  Then I signed a contract for 3 788 000 XAF (approximately 6000 euros) to build a house, then I settled receipts, invoices, and payslips with admin, then a new expat and a flying biomed technician from Bordeaux arrived, and 4 people needed me to validate receipts, so of course right then a watchman came into my office to find the days that he filled-in as a radio operator in 2012.  I had to backup and re-image two computers in the middle of this, so I got to leave my office to check up on them.  But that took me into the middle of a whining argument about one of the receipts I validated, which pissed me off, so I went to check on the other computer.

At this point, it was time for lunch, so I walked home in the 110-degree heat (it's only half a mile).  I finally talked to the biomed technician to learn the point of his visit (sometimes explanation emails get lost) and schedule our meetings and trainings for the week, then I ate and thought to send you an email during a quick 15-minute break that I had.  But then someone called me on the satellite phone to report movement updates, so I relayed them to the radio op, but then the radio op called back to request permission to go to a court hearing, so I had to find a temporary replacement.  So I didn't get a chance to email at lunch.

After that, I went across the street to our warehouse compound, and found that the contractor building the roof structure for the new garage had done it completely wrong.  After explaining how it should be, without any drawings on site, and taking the opportunity to cross check fuel quantity in our stock (oops, we're desperately low; I need to order fuel ASAP), I headed back to the office (I was hoping to go directly to the hospital to check on construction there).  

At the office, I checked the plans to confirm that, yep, everything was very very messed up with the garage, and would have to be rebuilt.  I sent that information off with my assistant, who was less than pleased to go back there with the contractor, so I called the contractor to deliver the bad news.  Then I got bogged down with those receipts again (I'm still trying to get to the hospital), and the transport board was still an issue, so I kindly asked the external activities team to finally all move into the same office please that we broke our backs all weekend to have ready by yesterday that they don't seem to care to move into, which means they don't communicate with the people in charge of the transport board when they're supposed to be in the same office anyway.  At this point, the contractor arrived in my office to re-check the plans, so I called the construction referent in the capital, who speaks the fastest french I've ever heard, and spent a half an hour explaining the situation to him and trying to use words like rafter, cross-piece, rail, roofing, corrugated sheeting, supports, cross-bracing, overhang, and cantilever--in French, with a poor cell phone connection.  We agreed I'd take pictures and send them along, then we'd talk again tomorrow.  At this point, everyone else had stopped working and started playing soccer (it was the end of the staff's work day), when one of the computers I was supposed to reimage didn't complete its backup.  I sent the contractor on his way, grabbed a bike (the standby car was making a trip to the hospital) and raced the fall of night back to the garage, to take pictures of the construction site during daylight.  While I was there, the watchmen radioed to say that the generator at the hospital had stopped.  "You're kidding, right?"  It's the new one that was delivered and installed last week. I told them to switch to the backup and jumped on my bike back to the office to grab the standby car to head to the hospital.

Everyone wanted me to play soccer, but I caught the car and went to the hospital.  There, the new gene was overheated, but the fan belt was fine.  I'll leave it overnight and investigate the coolant level tomorrow.  The backup is running fine.  But I did find out that the stand-in mechanic who took over for our mechanic during his two-week training course didn't understand or follow the policy on generator use.  Nothing to do while the gene was 83 degrees celcius.  So I did rounds of the hospital, checking on bed occupancy rates, pharmaceutical storage, furniture deliveries that weren't made, grease traps that weren't cleaned, and the stalled state of construction as we wait for more materials.  Heartening.  By the time I was headed to check on the pit that the Ministry of Health dug for latrine emptying, the Project Coordinator and the Admin caught up with me.  We gave two warnings to the watchmen there for sleeping on duty a week ago.  After some tears and the fall of night, we headed back to the office, just in time to beat a short rainstorm.

I was going to write you then, but my keys were locked in my office because I had left them when I ran to take pictures of the garage, and my assistant had left for the day, locking the office behind him.  I sent a driver to borrow my assistant's key and redid my to-do list for the next hour.  I stopped after filling up a whole post-it.

When I opened my office, I immediately downloaded, commented on, then sent the pictures of the garage.  Then I checked off the three remaining pressing items on my list, shared a gripe and a chuckle with the new admin (who's american) and finally got dragged out of the office at 9pm.

So I'm finally getting the chance to write at 10pm, after dinner.  So I'm wishing you a happy belated father's day, and I hope you understand when I say I was a bit busy.  I kept trying to write you earlier.

Love,
-Kim

Views of Construction

Some views of the three construction projects running concurrently--waste area and wastewater treatment area at the hospital; garage; three-bedroom house.

Constructing a viewing point for a long run of pipe

The WATSAN office and stock

The kitchen area, with trenches open for the pipes to install faucets for the newly-constructed washing area.

Evapotranspiration trench opened in preparation for receiving filtered water from the kitchen's grease trap.

Connecting the showers to the plumbing system.

The waste area, under construction.

Our blocks of latrines and showers.

Redoing the plumbing to route wastewater to grease traps.

Protecting our borehole.

Delivery of a container that will be the structure and shelter of our new garage.

The roof structure for the new garage.

Steel delivery for our roof structure.

Ready for roofing!

Laying out the design for the new house.

Foundations dug--that was fast.