Streets of N’Djamena
Most of our first full day in the capital was spent at the UNHCR (United Nations High Commission for Refugees) doing the paperwork necessary to travel through eastern Chad. After our driver picked us up at the hotel I got my first chance to see rush hour life in N’djamena. The streets were busier than I expected. Cars filled the roads and swarms of motorcycles filled any spaces between them, sometimes the bikes carried two or even three men apiece.
The first automatic rifle I saw came as a shock, not because it was being carried on a busy city street (post 9/11 New York is filled with such sights) but because of the casual style in which they were handled. Uniformed and plain-clothed men alike sling them around their necks like electric guitars or hold them across their shoulders and hang their hands off both ends.
We spent most our time at the UNHCR compound trading our passports back and fourth and discussing the educational situation in the camps we’ll be visiting. While there has been some progress in reducing class size and turning plastic sheeting classrooms into concrete and brick ones, there’s still a long way to go. Secondary school is particularly lacking and it’s one of the main reasons for our trip. The Sister School Program is helping build up the camp’s educational capacity one of the first steps in the project will be connecting classrooms in the camps with American schools using our CommKits. We’ll be showing the potential of this technology in coming expedition reports.
-James
Team Work
What Yuen-Lin and Eric bring to the team is hard to describe. As we get ready for i-ACT Expedition #9, they’ve been working late in to the morning, day after day, to send the Expedition team as prepared as possible. They do this in addition to their already more than full-time jobs, and they do this for absolutely no personal gain, besides what they gain internally, which I know is huge.
What they are doing is so ambitious, and they are doing it in an extremely compact time frame. Their technology will allow students that live in a place as remote as any place can be, refugee camps on the Chad-Darfur border, connect with students in American cities, creating mutually enriching relationships–for the Darfur Dream Team Sister Schools Program.
Katie-Jay, James, and I will take this equipment with us, departing from Los Angeles and New York this Saturday, December 4th, and we expect to make it to a refugee camp by December 9th, if everything goes well.
I am lucky and blessed to have such an amazing team around me.
