Kempinski Hotel N'Djamena Tchad

J ai pris une moto a partir de la ville de Maroua direction la frontiere du tchad pour voir une tribu qui possede des cases en argiles tres photogenique. Le periple vers la frontiere a été plus long que prevu soit plus de 200km A/R avec des pannes toutes les 50km. Mais on est arrivé crevé juste avant de ...

Ils savent accueillir les tchadiens. Douaniers, Policiers cela est normal mais je ne m attendais pas a passer par la case DST avant de rentrer dans ce pays. DST signifie bien la même chose qu en France, ce sont les services de renseignements qui bien sur ont du mal croire que je suis un touriste. Mais je fais bien l air ingénu même si j ai bien compris qu il me prenait pour un journaliste qui voulait enquêter au ...

Crossing the Chari river on the border bridge on foot, after making friends with the Cameroon immigration police, I arrive at the Chadian border post, and here it is African bureaucrazy at its best, stamps, registration with the security department, and 2000 CFA, around 3 euros, under the table money! N'djamena is not really prepared for backpackers, and to find a reasonably priced accomodation is really time consuming, since most of the foreigners here are expats ...

3/2 I have obviously not gone to Chad today ... tho this says it is FROM Chad ! I thought you might be interested in an update from a colleague on how the team here have been v occupied this last few days with trying to get the members of the Chad team who are in Ndjamena right now to safety. Very reminiscent of my time in Ethiopia in 1990/1 during "the change", but i didn't get evacuated ! Update from 2/2 Ndjamena: General situation: In the middle of the morning ...

"La charite et la bonte commencent avec la femme," (charity and goodness begin with woman) said my host dad as he passed me the first glass of tea. I had just finished a lunch of boule and a sauce consisting of dried okra, tomatoes, oil, and dried meat and was sitting on the mat with three other strangers, visitors from out of town, when my host sister, Fatime came in with 4 glasses. I was waiting for my host dad to call her back to bring another glass for me ...

I'm sitting at my desk, with my kerosene lamp and shortwave radio thinking that this is almost what I imagined when I tried to picture what it would be like in the Peace Corps. I'm also wondering what people back home are doing for New Year's, and whether or not I will ever be able to stay up to welcome in the New Year. I'll probably welcome it at 4:30am with the call to prayer. This is the settling in period, and I think I'm pretty settled as far as living ...

Happy Holidays to everyone! Maburuk al id (al maseet)! That means, "Bonne fete chretienne" in Arabic - which I learned in French so cannot directly translate to English. I seem to complain alot on this blog but it is only because I always become so overwhelmed when sitting down to type about my experience. Eight of us volunteers passed the holidays in N'Djamena, partly because of security reasons and partly because we wanted to get together ...

Today we swore in and became Peace Corps Volunteers! We had a brief ceremony this morning on the lawn of the ambassador's house. There were speeches in Arabic and French given by the volunteers, and the ambassador, our trainer Houroumtcho, and a minister of the Chadian government spoke. We all wore garments made of the same fabric, though some used more than others. The biggest trend was to have a cape. I had a ...

(Excerpted from a letter to my parents) I have been here for over a week but it feels like a month has already passed. It's partly due to the many changes in setting: first Philly, then the Paris airport, then SIL in N'Djamena, next Darda and the training site, and finally my family's house also in Darda. SIL is a walled compound with rooms that the Peace Corps rents. The people who live there and run ...

Well we have just come to the end of probably one of the hardest stretches so far. Seven long days from 7am to 7pm from Niamey, ***** to Ndjamena, Chad. The route took us along the *****ian bord** through remote villages and towns and then through the sahara des**t into Chad, around the dried up Lake chad to Njamena. The route through the des**t was without a road, a v**y rough ride across deep sand which rocked and bumped the truck non stop. We really felt like we w ...