Farcha

As I step out of the plane the heat hits me smack in the face. The hazy, orange low lit airstrip of the Hassan Djamous International airport rises to meet me as I descend the portable stairs onto the tarmac. A brief passport and visa check later and I'm waiting for my bags which never arrive. Odei, Hans and Levi are there to meet us. The team from Florida is with us as well as my sister, Chelsey and, of course, Sarah. Everyone else's bags has arrived so we load up the truck and Rick, Hans and I climb in the back on top of the luggage for a dimly lit ride through downtown N'Djamena to the mission guest house at TEAM.

After some spaghetti and watermelon, I take a cold shower to try and cool down a little. By not drying off and letting the fan evaporate the water on my skin I am able to at least lie down and sleep fitfully. By 6:00am I can no longer sleep and the sheets are soaked with my sweat.

True to his promise, Odei is there to meet me at 8:30 to take me to his church in Farcha. The pounding rhythm of a homemade drumset fashioned out of various tin cans and scraps of metal welded together and covered with goat skins guides the three different choirs in their diverse African chants that course through the blood bringing one into an awareness of the divine.

Afterwards, Odei and I hop on his motorcycle and swerve through the dips and humps of the unpaved city streets towards the district hospital. One of his friends has been hospitalized that week. We first pull over to a shack made of woven reeds where a 12 year old boy is selling water in a bag. We rip open the edges and guzzle half a liter each down our parched throats.

To turn into the hospital we must carefully navigate a ditch filled with putrid water and covered in slime. A variety of bottles and cans struggle desperately to stay above the surface as the gook relentlessly tugs them under. We turn past a rickety, iron framed chain link gate hanging off a couple of badly attached hinges and into the small courtyard of the District Hospital of Farcha.

Peeling yellow paint, twisted hand rails and crumbly cement steps lead us past a few customers lounging on torn mats under the shade of a few gnarled bushes almost resembling trees.

The well-tiled hallway branches immediately off left and right while straight ahead is a tiny courtyard filled with plastic bags, IV tubing and littered with paper that has all tumbled off a pile of trash from an overstuffed metal barrel that has been cut in half. A few Chadians wearing white coats means that there are a few nurses present. Odei greets several of them and we are oriented down the dimly lit hall to the left. We peer into a dark room filled with a few beds, less mattresses and lots of visitors wearing brightly colored robes and head scarves surrounding a few patients hooked up to IVs suspended from windows, a couple of rickety IV poles and even the ceiling.

Odei's friend is outside we're told so we head to the back where some stray dogs scrounge through the piles of refuse around the smoky outdoor kitchen.
We finally find our man under a tree with a few buddies. After some extended greetings and joking around we discover that his malaria is being sort of treated but his chronic cough hasn't even been suspected of being tuberculosis. We give some suggestions, shoot the breeze some more and finally get up to leave.

The next day, after an early morning departure from N'Djamena, I find myself back in Bere which I suddenly appreciate so much more after the shock of the Farcha Hospital in the capital. And we're off...