Farewell January!

Every new year I set my expectations high and think that this will be the year I master blogging! It seems such a simple concept, just share what we are doing in easy little snippets so people can share our journey. Only most of my life is the daily mundane everyone does everywhere in the world which doesn’t make for very interesting reading!! So my aim now is to try and give some more regular updates of our highlights, low lights and the completely unexpected things that cross our paths here in Chad. Let’s see how long it lasts!

So, we have now just bid a very sad farewell to January - it is our cool month and it is lovely (bar the sand storms and incredible amount of dust)! The nights can drop to the teens and the days at times struggle to reach 30C. It makes daily life so much easier and it is so comforting to have to snuggle under a light duvet at night and wear a jumper in the mornings. But, as February arrived the dial was spun. We hit our low of 20C  and our high of 40C this week and we probably won’t drop back to below 20C until early December!

As you may be aware from our last newsletter, at the beginning of January we moved house. It is great that our team is finally expanding but not so great that we only have limited housing available on the MAF compound. So, for now we decided to move off the compound and found an apartment block with modern apartments that were ready to move straight into. House hunting here is hard work as the price is either astronomical, or you need to do so much work to make the house liveable. So we decided to opt for this apartment which needed very little work, is furnished, and is comparable to the standard of housing at MAF. We are still working on making it homely and unpacking but so far we are all coping well with the move. The girls obviously miss the freedom of the MAF compound and being able to run outside and play with friends any time of the day, but they are doing well with spending more together and we pop over to the compound very regularly.

Becca in her new
school t-shirt

Another highlight in January was that Becca started school. We had tried to get her into the French international school for this academic year, but it is oversubscribed and English speaking missionaries don’t seem to come very high up on the criteria! So we had thought Becca would stay at home with me. At the end of last year we then heard of a Tchadian Canadian school that was just in its second academic year. So we took a look at the beginning of January and decided to give it a go. The school is Chadian run and is aiming to teach all children English as well as French from age 3 and so we thought this could be a good mix for Becca. She goes 4 morning a week has loved going, adapting to it very well.

So 3 weeks ago when Becca started school I was suddenly faced with 4 free mornings a week child free. What was I going to do with all this time? Well fear not, I have not been putting my feet up…at the exact same time the city descended into an outpouring of frustration and anger at the rising prices of commodities and yet cuts in salaries. So for the last 3 weeks we have been negotiating school closures and assessing each new day to see whether the roads are safe to venture onto. Unfortunately, as the protests hit the streets they were met by a very strong resistance and so riot police en mass were a regular site. Now strikes are in place with many schools, hospitals, offices etc shut. Both girls are finally back to school today after Becca being home all week and Rachel only having Wednesday at school.  Please pray with us if you can for the people of this country and for safety as we move around.

Finally the unexpected…well we do live in Chad so I guess this isn’t completely unexpected but its not a daily norm. We rode camels!!! We have had a visiting engineer from Madagascar who has been supporting our team over the last 18 months while we haven’t had a permanent engineer in post. He has come for month long stretches at a time to help us with such an important part of our work – keeping the planes flying! But this was potentially his last visit for a while as we have a permanent engineer family arriving next month (hooray!). Michel had requested to ride a camel, so as a thank you we had a team outing…it was so much fun if not just a little uncomfortable! Enjoy the photos…