This contained a dozen RPGs, a fragmentation projectile and high explosive rocket
A dangerous, 'live' projectile found by nomads tending their camels
Handing out mines risk education leaflets to children in villages near to battles
Before I begin talking about Chad, I have to mention a humourous incident involving somewhat less-than-honest house staff. Our house servants in Delhi, John and Mary, cooked a wonderful chocolate cake for us when we first moved in. Astounded by the quality of the baking, and with raptures of appreciation from three friends that were staying over at the time, we decided that we had acquired the best possible house staff in Delhi. As time went by the gloss came off their performance with Mary spending more time giving our puppy baths than cleaning and John trying is level best to produce items fit for human consumption. Then one late July day, Helaena and I were walking around Vasant Vihar and stumbled across a great confectionary shop. Inside we found the following.
It looks like our cook might not have whisked up that choco cake after all
Someone leave a comment- is this a desert orchid?
Where is Chad? In the north-centre of Africa, with Sudan to the east, Libya to the north, Central Africa Republic and Cameroon to the south and.. I'm not sure who is to the west, possible Niger or Nigeria. It's flat and sandy, though with the current wet season patches of green abound.
Ships of the desert
The work is a UN project for emergency explosive ordnance disposal (EOD), which means that we are clearing up the shells and rockets etc. from fighting as recent as three months ago. Chad is a volatile country that has seen battle this year in many places; the capital N'Djamena was nearly overrun by rebels last autumn.
A spearman on horseback
In the first week I met the other expatriate on the project, John 'George' Owens, who is good company in this rather barren place. I'm also supervising a team of 12 Chadians. Their boss is a 41 year old army officer called Rama Inne. He carries a .357 handgun and an AK47 variant. Sometimes he takes potshots at birds but has missed so far. I've made a note not to piss him off.
George - 'vous parlez Geordie like?'
Rama Inne (left) and crew
The Chadians I am working with are moderate Muslims of black African stock although there is some Arab in a few of them. They are a hostpitable; when I first deployed on our long roadtrip to the east, Rama gave me a pillow cushion made by his wife and a comfortable mattress and the team plied me with tea (hot, gingery, sickly sweet stuff) and plenty of goat dishes.
George and I each have an interpreter each but most of the time George and I speak French directly to the staff, and I am trying to learn a little Arabic. George's Geordie-infused French, with no attempt at the colloquial accent and spoken literally, is amusing but it works! One of the interpreters is old, dresses like Jarvis Cocker at the Brit Awards and we use him for odd jobs. The other (mine) is good, cheerful, dresses in bright western garb but sings badly- in French. They love their '50s French love songs here, especially when you are trying to get to sleep.
Bullets, rockets, tank rounds.. not in very good nick. Best we blow this lot up before it does naturally!
Our first job, after a hurried (and far too short) handover with a 62 year old former Royal Navy officer, Richard, and an ex Kiwi SAS chap called Paul, was in the capital. The military had a store they wanted us to inspect. We were presented with some poorly kept ammunition. None were dangerous however the storage facility was far from ideal and to avoid another 'Battambang' (where a store exploded in Cambodia in March 2005, killing dozens and spreading ammunition up to 20km away) we took over a tonne of rockets, bullets, shells and mortars away. We drove 75km to an army training ground and left them overnight, driving back in a sandstorm.
A sand and rain storm menaces in the distance
And arrives!
The next day we returned however had been beaten to the range by a military convoy. A General wanted to test-fire his new Chinese 14.5 cannons, which were mounted on Toyota pickups. What ensued was a wait of over 5 hours and a show of the different types of weapon employed in African 'scrub' combat- i.e. pickup truck warfare on open, flat plains with only scrub and wadis for cover. Firstly the 14.5mms fired, then some 20mm cannons and finally some small tanks fired their 90mm guns. The soldiers started to fire their AK47s and RPGs to the side of the range. When they slaughtered a goat, ate it and started to leave, we proceeded to the items we had taken the previous day. Our cache of ammunition was in the firing range and had not been hit (otherwise work would have finished early that day!). To our amusement it did not look like any of the targets had been hit by the 90mm tank rounds. The craters were a long way from the broken vehicle targets. Then, as we dug a pit in which to blow up the items, we heard the crack and whizz of small arms fire again. The Chadian army was firing to our left and right but they were aiming away from us so we carried on. This was very far from the controlled, planned range days that anyone in a western army will be familiar with. At about two in the afternoon we set light to the safety fuse which would take about 4 minutes to burn and drove off behind cover. (EOD spotters- we don't have electrical dets that do the job for bulk dems here.) The detonation was about 20 seconds late but satisfying- our first tonne of ammunition had been destroyed. We heard the familiar sound of fragmentation whooshing overhead and then came an unsettling noise - a whirring, getting louder and louder meaning something sharp was heading our way. We all ducked behind the cover, a large sand bank, as a metal piece the size of a tennis ball, red hot and and sharp as a razor blade embedded itself into the protective sand bank the other side of where our interpreter's head was. All in all it was a good day and we drove back through a different shower, this time of huge flies which splatted against the windscreen for over an hour, almost completely obscuring vision.
Japanese vehicle, Chinese weaponry, African warfare
The ubiquitous PG7 fired from the shoulder of a Chadian soldier
A South African? French? made armoured car fires its 90mm anti-tank gun
Just about caught on camera; our first demolition of over a tonne of ammunition at the Massaguet army firing range
In the second week we deployed to Biltine, a quiet municipal town in the East of the country. It took two full days to drive there, only three hours of which was on tarmac. The roads between the two main cities in Chad are nothing more than sand or laterite dirt tracks, levelled in some places but difficult and boggy in others.
Sleeping outside on the way to Biltine
Dawn in the scrub
The wet season makes for difficult going in the sandy scrubland of easter Chad
The long road to Biltine; this was a good stretch
Biltine had three fatal accidents in the past month with most of the casualties being children. In each case they were tampering with items of unexploded ordnance (UXO) which are very unstable when armed and fired. The local people have taken extraordinary risks with UXO. For example if they find something, they would not know if it is safe or not but will still move it, burn it or bury it. Some of these items are designed to kill people up to 200m away, so toasting it over a fire or chucking it into an animal hole is not safe.
Give us a lift mate
An PG7L (RPG) found after being buried by local people; this one posed no threat as it had not been fired and was in reasonable condition so we moved it to be destroyed elsewhere
French made mortars left lying around for 16 years after the truck carrying them broke down
Unfortunately it looks like the people who are supposed and paid to educate against the risk of mines and UXO have not visited the places most at risk. They have not gone to the villages near the battles but have opted to stay in the comfortable towns. As such we have less information; normally we would obtain a lot of knowledge from these 'mines risk education' (MRE) teams as they do their rounds and interact with communities. That laziness has cost our time and they may have otherwise have prevented accidents. Not all people will change their risk taking after MRE, but it does reduce casualty rates by raising awareness of those risks and also of professional EOD teams whose job it is to deal with dangerous items. In northwest Cambodia, people would still eek out a meagre $0.75 per week by hunting for bamboo shoots in a minefield with a prolific accident history.
Most of our guides are children; most of the accident victims are children
Local people have ripped open this RPG and taken the explosive- not good
Children at a basic mudhut village read our education cartoon pamphlets
Most of the work time is spent driving around, either with a guide or in search of local farmers who might know of the location of dangerous items in nearby fields. Many of our guides have been children. Some have been nomads, who ply the desert with scores of camels on which they ride in brightly-hued carriages with their flocks of goats and sometimes oxen. On average, each hour a guide will take us to find something. Sometimes it is not dangerous, most times it is. There are signs that local people are taking risks such as cutting open armed and fired ('blind' or 'live') RPGs to get at the explosive inside.
J'ai un cadeau pour vous! An EOD operator hands me a safe OG7 projectile across one of Chad's rare water obstacles
Using a pyrotechnical charge to disrupt the fuse on this live OG7 projectile
Bulk demolition at Bogbog village
In the night times we live in a decrepit building which has a leaky roof and open veranda so when it rains we have to 'batten down' somewhat to prevent our equipment and clothes getting wet. And when it rains it absolutely chucks it down for hours and hours! We wash in the open from well water buckets and poo into a hole (long drop) filled with flies that come out in their hundreds if you go at dawn. There is no booze here, the only things that you can buy are bread, onion, tomato paste, mobile phone cards (this is the only town in the District with reception) and Pepsi- and goat. I have already had my fill of goat.
Dinner before..
.. and after. Idriss (in white) looks like he has just followed through
Most of our cutlery appears to have been half inched (pinched- stolen for you yanks) so George and I are eating from one plate and the only saucepan, which isn't big enough to cook rice or pasta. The forks and spoon (singular) are so soft they would probably bend in a strong wind. So far we have been engorging ourselves on tinned fish, tinned fruit, tinned pate, tinned pasta and tinned.. okay you get the picture. My favourite is potato and ham a la tin.
Myself eating like a king after our plates were half-inched
Despite the rain waterlogging the road, some nice photos abound in the post-rainfall dusk
Yesterday I flew back to N'Djamena with our Belgian emergency evacuation pilot in his Cessna 172. It was a nice flight and he let me take the controls for a while. Flying is something I might get into in the future, having earlier in my life disgarded the option of becoming a pilot thanks to colour-blindness and short sightedness. The flat plains of Chad are quite boring to look at for 3 hours but at the end of it was an air conditioned room, cold beer, good food at one of the French restuarants and hot, running water- and silence at night.
That's all for now. In the next few weeks we will remain in Biltine and that general area before heading to work in a larger city, Abeche.
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