How I Got to Moussoro

(Photo: A typical cross-street of dusty Moussoro)

October 29, 2005
So somehow I've managed to squeeze a bit of logic or rationale from the strange path my life has taken of recent. Somehow it made sense when I received a packet of information 5 months ago that said I'd be heading to Chad for 2 years. I guess it made sense because the packet was awful offical, endorsed by the US Government, and personally addressed to me 'after carefully examining my application'.
And somehow it wasn't strange that once in Chad I'd be sent to a northern city called Moussoro, where camels are the primary mode of transportation, and temperatures regularly reach 130 in the hot season (or so I'm told). I guess it makes sense to me that I'm here because the Associate Peace Corps Director, a man with an official acronym (APCD), a man who interviewed me personally about two weeks ago, decided that this would be a good fit. So Moussoro it is.
Well all logic, all rationale, and all semblance of anything reasonable was thrown to the camels this morning as I stood next to my Peace Corps Volunteer (PCV) sitemate (named Chad) and watched the mayor of Moussoro flip a 100 CFA coin into the air to decide who my family would be for the next two years. If the 3 antelope heads came up I would be living across town, in a different house with a different father. As it is 'tails' was the winner and Ali is my new host father (pere adoptif), his two wives Fatimah and Zahra are my host mothers, and their ten children Kadija, Usuf, Mallumah, Abdraman, Ashta, Abdulaye, Nidah, Ousman, Adum, and Abakar are my new host siblings. I guess it was as the mayor (rather officially) prepped us as to what the meaning of the flip was going to be, and I desperately struggled to translate his Frabic (French-Arabic) statement in my head, that I realized how arbitrary this all is. There is really very little rhyme or reason as to why I am sitting on the veranda of my first very own house, as part of a concession of huge family of 15 plus, in a sandy city at the edge of the Saharan desert. I'm not complaining, nor am I trying to be melodramatic; I'm just trying to give you an idea of where my head's at right now... my head is spinning. But of course I have gotten way ahead of myself, I inevitably do when 'the next 2 years' are laid out in front of me.
To back up a bit, the last couple of weeks we've all been back at Darda keeping to our regular training schedule of language, TEFL, cross-cultural learning, and bad food. It's been great, the group is good fun, but I think we're all getting a bit anxious to move on. Training is a bit like summer camp in the sense that we're kind of held in a little bubble, surrounded by a bunch of people 'just like us', and lights go out at ten (actually all of the electricity is shut down at ten). Point is, it's not what we signed on for...
...So I was quite excited when we had site assignment interviews about two weeks ago with the APCD Djimessa. In the interview we talk a little about what what the different sites are like, what we're looking for personally, and any specific requests we might have. My only specific request was that I be at my own site (not with a sitemate), but we also talked about the fact that I haven't had a chance to study arabic (like the trainees who are already proficient in French) so it would be best if I went South (where they speak more French), and also that I was looking for something on the smaller side; a village not a city.
So jump forward a week; I'm sitting under the trees at Darda for site announcements. All the PC staff as well as several current volunteers have come out for the big day. There's a giant map of Chad placed on a stand in front of us. One by one our names are read along with a site name, we stand up amidst raucous cheers (even though we have no clue what the names mean), and we place a pin on the map. Me; I place my pin on the name Moussoro, a small city in Northern Chad (actually its central, but its northern in terms of habitable land), right next to my sitemate Chad. Right... so not exactly what we discussed, but as I've come to learn that's just the Peace Corps way.

The remainder of training looks like this: We have 5 days at site for a visit (where I am hand-writing this entry from right now), then we return to Darda for three weeks of Model School. For those three weeks we'll be commuting into N'Djamena to teach full size classes at schools in the capital. We'll each teach about 10 classes a week as well as observing quite a bit, and on our days off we'll continue our language instruction. After that we have a couple of days to wrap-up, swear-in's on December 2nd, and we're off to site around the 4th.
And I'm ahead of myself; to come back I've prepared two brief lists of things I love and hate (thus far) about Chad (Darda really):
I LOVE: Daily games of volleyball (Americans vs. Chadians); the unobstructed stars and moon; the energy, smells, and colors of the market; Chadian pizza made specially once a week for the nasaras (foreigners); Nido (powdered milk) mixed with sugar in warm water; mosquito nets; bugs that smell like green apple and wild cherry; eating with my hands; burps are polite; minimal cell phones; houses made of mud; Chadian clothing (incredibly comfortable and colorful); Darda bird calls (I've come to love the melee of sounds I once hated); poker in Africa (I'm the big winner in the group), as I'm up 7000 CFA.
I HATE: Fish-head sauce; okra sauce with the consistency of snot; frogs that jump out of the turkish toilet; sweating profusely... doing absolutely nothing... in the cool season; bleached water that tastes like its straight from the pool; green lumps of stagnant water; the way kids throw rocks and bricks at dogs; turkish toilets; the incessant whine of mosquitoes; feeling trapped in a little part of a big country.

Much more to come about Moussoro shortly.