Home sweet home

One week ago I moved into my new home in Dembe market, N'Djamena, and began my work at Ethics Peace and Justice. This first week has been a time of ups and downs and many changes, from the excitement of arriving in my bustling neighbourhood, to food poisoning, to new customs and norms, and trying to get my bearings in a new part of the city (remember, no street addresses or road names to be found! I have a rough, hand-sketched map of key landmarks that I'm adding to all the time). Through it all, my host parents have taken me under their wing as their 7^th child, encouraging me to make myself at home as another sister in the house, teaching me everything (when to take my shoes off or cover my head or close the windows or greet people), and encouraging me that “petit a petit” I will get the hang of life here. My host father wishes that I call him “Papa Tchouadang” and has since introduced me to his friends and congregation as Michelle Tchouadang :) I could not have hoped for a warmer welcome into Chadian life. Four of the family's children are grown up and moved out, but 24 year old Olga and 13 year old Deli are still living at home. There are also many others who come and go from the house and so every day I am meeting more family and friends. Our home is in another walled and gated compound set back from the road. There are other buildings in our compound and I haven't figured out yet who lives there. The walls and all the buildings in our compound are concrete. Entering the house, there is a spacious living/dining area with several couches, a TV (with about 5 French and African channels), a large dining table and a china cabinet. Behind this living area there are three bedrooms (one of which I have to myself), a small indoor kitchen with a gas stove and sink, an outdoor kitchen (for wood and charcoal) where most of the cooking is done, and two western bathrooms with running water, toilet and shower (for which I am extremely grateful). The electricity cuts out often and apparently the water is also cut occasionally, at which point we'll depend on the well in our shared courtyard.


Hopefully I'll be posting pictures soon, but for now I'll try to describe my neighbourhood. In the Dembe area there are a couple of paved main roads, but the side roads throughout the neighbourhood are all dirt... actually right now they're more like swamps. Until the rainy season ends we'll do a lot of driving (even for short distances) in the family's 4x4 to avoid trekking through the mud. When driving through the streets of N'Djamena, nothing is really surprising... or at least the strange and surprising seem to be totally normalized. Over there is a man attaching at least half a dozen chickens to the handlebars of his bike, and there is cart carrying the leaning tower of assorted plastic containers, and up in that tree there is... no, no, not the tree with all the dangling backpacks and handbags for sale, that other tree with the man perched 2 or 3 stories up... is he a city worker? landowner? Either way, he seems to be doing maintenance on that tree in front of his home or shop by hacking away at the branches with an ax, the normal hustle and bustle of street life carrying on below... No problem. This is Chad. All the while the streets are FULL of people walking, women in colourful dresses and head scarves, children running around, people pushing two-wheeled carts full of every imaginable commodity, women in orange construction vests sweeping and shoveling piles of dust off the road, dogs laying by the curb trying to conserve energy, motos, bicycles piled high with cargo, cars, trucks, and the odd donkey cart all dodging in and out of one another's space like masters of some hidden level of Mario Kart! It's crazy; it's overwhelming; it's fun; it's unbelievable; it's home.


Over the past week many people have asked me what differences I see between Chad and Canada, and I've been trying to sort not only what is the most appropriate way to answer that question in the moment, but also how to answer the question in a broader sense for my own reflections. There is so much going on here that I think a lot of the time, you see what you're looking for. It's easy to look at the markets or streets of Dembe and see largely underdevelopment and poverty. Let's face it, as Westerners, it's an easy first impression that we are more or less conditioned to look for in Africa – mud or tin shacks, run-down looking storefronts, lack of electricity, children and people with disabilities begging in the street, trash kneaded thoroughly into every sand pile, and pools of still water breeding mosquitoes and flies and green muck that can't be healthy. This stuff is all here. It's real and it's problematic, and there are times when I haven't the foggiest idea what to make of it, let alone how to feel at home in the midst of it all. However, with a slight change in perspective it might be just as easy to see a very different reality. When we set out with the assumption that we have lots in common, we see a world full of people trying to make life and the world a little bit better, whether in Canada or Chad. With this lens I see ingenuity as people build businesses from limited assets, resilience as people rebuild homes destroyed by heavy rain, communities of people who take time for one another, take pride in their heritage, and dedicate themselves to building the best life possible for themselves and their communities. In all these ways, perhaps life in Chad is not all that different from life back home. We see what we're looking for, and here in N'Djamena I am looking for strength and possibility, and maybe a new feeling of home for this year. Petit a petit.