My life in Chad via Pictures

Here are some new pictures so you can "see" us in Chad. We wish you were here...really! (I'd put more, but the internet is too slow right now)

Rainy Season is Upon Us. It's beautiful at times, very wet most of the time, hard for the people who's mud houses are collapsing during the heaviest rains in 9 years. And our 5 mile drive to school can take up to 45 minutes (with a pretty sore tailbone and muddy car by the time you get there). We came upon this "traffic jam" for the second time in two days, when several cars got stuck in the mud and couldn't get out. The night before there was a line up of 30 or 40 horse drawn carts waiting to get through here. We encounter lots of interesting things on the way to school!

CEFOD is where we spend 4 hours every morning asking each other things like, "Do you have a dog? Is your dog bad or good? How are the people in your house? Are they sick? What did you do yesterday? Did you go to the market? How did you get to school this morning? Were the roads good or bad?" All in Chadian Arabic, and we ask questions like this for over an hour every morning, trying to use our new vocab from the day before. Then we learn 20 new words over the next three hours. There are now 17 people in our class. Several Cameroonians, a few Chadians, some Spanish volunteer workers, and the rest of us who are here for the same purpose, from America and Switzerland mostly. This picture is taken in front of our school, run by a Catholic relief organization. It's pretty cush, we even have two air conditioners in our classroom, and we only have to wear headscarves in the classroom, not a full veil!