When life gives you lemons, make lemonade. I know this is a good philosophy. But there are times when the lemon tree's leaves look dry and crispy and the lemons dark yellow and shrivelled. And today was one of those days.
After a New Year's Eve full of friendship and merriment, and two weeks spent rafting on a wine river of farewells, the crash was bound to happen. It has been a weekend and half week of weeping. With a dry throat, sore back and a nausea - all a throwback from the boarding school tri-monthly pack-a-thon, our soundscape has been the noise of unhappy suitcase zips and a wailing Lozenge and Rashimi, and dare I say, myself. It was Nayara the Brazilian cleaner who set me off. All she did was stand at the ironing board and say, 'I'm going to miss my boys' and out spouted the tears which have barely stopped. There have been rare moments of mirth such as Rashimi lifting up the Tshirt of the waitress with a greasy mozarella hand when we went for pizza in the pub, saying 'tickle tickle' on her tummy, and the Lozenge saying, 'are we finally going to Jordan today?' But other than that. Mostly weeping.
Every two hours J has had to run out and buy another suitcase from the shop down the road, and when he gets back, log onto the Orange Purgatory to book another 30 kilos on our luggage allowance to avoid an angry moment with an Orange Ogress. (This should really be a plug for cheap flights to come and see us. Yes, EasyJet flies to Amman).
An ever emptying house has been unsettling for the little people in our life. Similar to the dog hopping in the back of the car when you're filling it with luggage, the Lozenge's sticky hand been attached to mine for 12 hours a day, trotting by my side like a shaggy Shetland show pony in the ring, even up and down stairs or to the shop. His games have been all about packing. So when I mumbled to J that I was sure the 20 adaptor plugs I'd ordered on Amazon had been in that pile there, and J took zero responsibility for its disappearance, I realised the packing dwarf had been at work, and discovered all 20 plugs, neatly zipped up in the monkey backpack. Leave something lying about. It'll get packed.
The problem is, we're not leaving London because we don't like it. And after three years of growing some baby snowdrop roots here, it already feels very painful to rip them up. Our neighbours for one, have been some of those types you don't get the opportunity to live next to often. As you can see from this little photo film. It's only 6 minutes. And these two men really are two pieces of treasure one door down.
So it's been because of all this, that I've wondered to myself why exactly we're going to all this trouble to uproot a happy, already interesting life, to learn one of the world's hardest languages, and live in one of the world's most unsettled regions. Honestly, we must be crazy. What on earth are we doing? Why, oh why, did we decide to do this?
Yesterday we sat at home in the dying afternoon light of a winter afternoon eating lamb and rice with our Arabic teachers. Two of the ladies are from Syria and and I have always marvelled at how they stood at the white board, explaining five different plural formations to me, never giving away the pain they must be feeling about their homeland being ripped to shreds by internal hatreds. Never talking unless prompted about family members they wish they could rescue from it. And there they were in our sitting room eating and chatting away, bright and cheerful as ever, teaching the Lozenge some numbers and Arabic greetings, one of them expecting a first child, herself.
Watching and laughing with them, it reminded me why we are doing all this. But the irony of heading to Amman, so close to all the turmoil in Damascus and beyond, as London is to Birmingham. So close and yet, still, so far. Who knows what the fate of Jordan will be as it sits in the doughnut hollow of relative tranquility, south of Palestine, West of Syria, North of Saudi Arabia. Who knows. Yet we at least have a home to come back to should it turn. We, for the moment, seem to be the lucky ones.
My doubts about what will happen when we get there also emerge at moments like these. (Having realised I was invincible and could survive on 4 hours sleep and red wine for ever - it was J that suggested gently that although I did have more juice in my batteries than most people he'd ever met, 'just don't forget to top them up every so often'). But the doubts emerge at times, for example when I realised that flying on the Orange Purgatory, you could have only one piece of handluggage each. Which meant I could either have my entire camera kit, or my bag full of nappies, beakers and wetwipes. So I can be a fully functioning me, or just a Mum. But not both. And my lenses can't go in the hold.
So we finished packing up, and got ready to leave, trying not to think too hard about those walls which had witnessed so much of our funny little fledgling family life. All the people coming in and out, and the eating and the drinking, and the sleeping and the not sleeping, the laughing the sobbing, the happy and the cross. Let's hope it all stays in there, I thought as I swung my huge pack on my back, and an equally rotund Rashimi under one arm and staggered to the taxi where J and Lozenge waited, shutting the door behind and hoping the next people would feel it all in these walls still.
Last week a Palestinian architect I interviewed told me he used to convince his clients he would take their house and make it a home, and it's the people in a house that make the home. This is what I'm hoping as we head off to re-plant our snowdrop roots in a strange place. And without the Lozenge or Rashimi noticing that I'm a little afraid.
Something made me stop writing this a while back. After a hastier departure than I'd have liked from Afghanistan, things got a little sad in Chad, though I'm glad now for having had the experience, and we were lucky that we got close enough to warm our hands on the fire in Afghanistan, and not be burned by it, as so many others have been.
So after a solo six month trip to Niger and Chad, accompanied by someone who I now know was the Lozenge, I returned to London, a bit worried the adventure had ended at the edge of the Sahara; determined that motherhood was not going to change me; and that Cath Kidson and Emma Bridgewater would not get a look in, in our kitchen. I wondered how we would manage to avoid the suffocating Western vibe towards creating an image of something known as perfection. In my eyes back then, children seemed to bring on anarchy (I was right) so why not become more anarchic than try to perfectionize? Camden helped. Not much perfection here I thought as I wheeled a diminutive Lozenge along the towpath and watched a valiant goose negotiate between a shopping trolley and empty bottles and cans floating on a Sunday morning canal. Our playmates were initially the drunks on the towpath and the lights out the back of our house at 3am were certainly more Rear Window than Mary Poppins. The imperfections and quirks saved us from feeling our lives had been tamed and claimed by the forces of grown-up-dom.
And in all its dirty beauty and complexity, Camden has chipped a place in our hearts, so I can only imagine that other places might do the same. Perhaps that's why I want to keep this blog going. Not least for ourselves because we are leaving our row of neighbours who would be the ones to say: 'I remember the time when you...'. But also for our tiny travel companions to be able to read back when they are bigger, and perhaps understand why we made these strange life decisions on their behalf. Thirdly, because I feel the need to build and create some kind of permanence in an itinerant life.
My above-brow-niggle is that our energies enthusiastically expend; the words we hear and use puff into the air; experiences we share alone and with others fade as a Polaroid picture and things we learn are used and then replaced with more topical knowledge as the years go by.
For those of you we love and will miss immeasurably, we hope this blog might be a way of following a life that isn't your own, and because of distance may become disconnected with your own. We'd rather be sharing it with you in a real sense. But this might at least keep us in tune as we squeak and hoot away on our individual instruments in this hotch-potch orchestra of life.
Please feel free to post comments. We like to know you're still there even if we're not. And most of all, please come and visit for real (although the caveat remains, that I have no idea where we will end up or how many times we'll be forced to move on before we're ready.)
Below is what I wrote before J and I started out in Afghanistan in 2007. I think it still holds its values for this next chapter. But this time, the people reading to the end might also be our 2 little travel companions, who might ask themselves one day why they never had one place called, Home. Here is why.
And of course, this is still for you, Mum. Just because we chose to live far away, doesn't mean we don't dream of chatting to you every morning over the garden fence at some point in our lives.
The small print
It could be because an adventure isn't an adventure until you've had it. Or maybe it is because relating your experiences many times over can run the risk of remembering the stories you tell and not the truth.
This is not a literary masterpiece. It probably won't make you cry and might not make you laugh. It may not give you any more of a picture than you had already imagined.
But I have been given the opportunity to live in a foreign country because of someone else. It feels like a clean sheet of paper that I can put anything down on. I'll have enough regrets when I'm 80 without wishing that I'd written a few notes on our time in unusual places, and since I can barely write anymore after typing for all these years, and Wifi is often easier to find than a pen these days, my solution was an online diary.
My journalism tutor once said, 'Make sure you get all the important bits in the introduction - as the only person that will read to the end is your Mum.'
So this is for you Mum.
Been busy...
Back soon.
It's 45 degrees outside, and the Saturday spectacles have arrived at le Meridien. They're here every weekend. They consist of a clutch of tattooed French soldiers in a technicolour array of banana hammocks, budgie smugglers, nut crunchers, whatever you choose to call them. They lounge on all four sides of the pool sunning themselves alongside the multicoloured lizards that also adorn the poolside paving. I guess it must be welcome respite from their military schedule during the week, but it does make you think twice about heading poolside. You have to breathe in to keep your eyeballs in place.The excitement of the week for the dwellers of N'Djamena has been a visit by George Clooney, and Mia Farrow who were here independently taking on the Darfur cause - to raise awareness in GC's case; and to record oral traditions on audio and video for a museum in Sudan, in Mia's. Since George was staying at the Meridien there were ripples of excitement everytime he wandered through the lobby. He must have lost half his body weight since he made Syriana. I hardly recognised him. President Deby has been on a tour of the country over the last week and is due to continue into next week. This means our trip to the desert to train the community reporters has been postponed for 2 weeks. The president on the move constitutes a force majeure in Chad it seems. Whole towns and villages grind to a halt when he arrives with his 200 strong military entourage, so we wouldn't have got much done had we decided to do our training this week. So it looks like I won't make it back to Niger for the time being. In a way I think it's not a bad thing to stay in one place. The team will hopefully benefit. I'm in the middle of translating a 60 page training manual on different formats of radio shows into French. It's like being back at university, but good for the vocabulary practise. It also keeps me away from those bronzing beauties by the pool; and dare I say takes my mind off living in yet another place where I can't run about outside or walk down the street to a shop and stop and chat to passers by. The trip to the provinces can't come soon enough. To see and talk to real people in a village and attempt to understand the challenges of life here. To meet our audience and contributors who will hopefully get some benefit from our radio programmes. To feel alive and involved.
When you first arrive somewhere you’re so aware of everything you don't see and don't know. It’s like a negative image – you notice the huge holes in understanding more than the chunks of comprehension. But you have to just keep moving forwards – invest yourself and your time, ask questions, ask them again in another way, listen and sometimes talk. Then hope it comes together – just in time to go home again.
The team I’m working with here has been quite a challenge so far. We have recruited two male producers and two female producers, who are managed by an impressive middle aged Chadian woman, Z who’s very tough, and due to the hierarchical nature of working conditions here, the atmosphere is formal and not altogether open or friendly.
I’m working in French all the time, as we try and sort out their contracts, work out a production schedule, train the team how to work with community reporters and make inspiring good quality radio on youth and good governance. They fought tooth and nail over their contracts, were totally silent and moody as I tried to help them come up with a workable schedule. I felt like the teacher in Ferris Beuler’s Day Off when he’s in front of the class of spotty students saying: ‘Anyone? Anyone?’ to a silent room of blank canvases. They looked at me – all the lights on but no one at home. If anything is going to make your French falter it’s that. And because most ex pats that come here are French speaking, people here don’t encourage you when you struggle. It’s just expected that you’ll speak it. No one really speaks any English.
I carried on regardless, but it required all the energy I had to get through the first ten days. I felt like there was a pack mentality in the room and that I was totally alone, and guilty until proved innocent.
After a few days I had reached desperation point. I also felt lonely and cut off. The phones don’t work to text out of the country; calling out is really expensive; the internet is weak and doesn’t work at all in the office. It’s agony being apart from J and the weeks ahead until we meet in mid March seem interminable. When we spoke we agreed it was a bad idea to lift our heads from the pages we were working on to look at the horizon ahead. The minute you start dreaming about the future and the excitements it holds – being together would be a good start – you waste the moment you’re in. So we’re trying to keep focusing on our jobs and do them well. Being away from everything you know and love makes you appreciate what you have back home so much.
I also found myself watching a programme about Iran on the BBC and a debate about Afghanistan and what should be done next, and realised I missed the relative familiarity of that part of the world – its language, cultures and people that I had grown used to and fond of in so many respects.
But you just have to be organised and methodical when you’re on your own or you end up wasting the time. You need to divide the day up into sections of work, exercise, rest - and you’ll draw the best from it. I’m hoping I might be able to venture out of the town and see the rural ‘real’ Chad at some stage. Being locked up in N’Djamena is worse than being locked in Kabul as I don’t have a life here as such – or a home. So I’m itching to explore. Rural areas are generally much friendlier and safer anyway.
I have been quite ill this week, and one night didn’t sleep at all. Seems like I have giardia or something of that description according to what I found on the internet. One night I didn’t sleep a wink for being sick, so I arrived at work like a rag doll and could only put in an eighth of what I’d normally invest energy-wise. Suddenly my team started making and effort and being a bit more charming. Perhaps I should put less in more often...?!
But a few days later, I'm now seeing a clearing in the clouds. One day I arrived outside Z’s office which is like a little mud box with a tin roof. I stopped for a minute before going in and watched her typing feverishly at her little pink computer oblivious to the fan going ‘clack clack’ noisily above her head. There were flies everywhere and piles of budgets and empty tea cups on her desk; and a half assembled cupboard in the corner. She looked up and smiled at me over her glasses with her amazingly straight white teeth. And I suddenly saw her for who she is, what she’s achieved and what she stands for. I think she’s realised too that I’m here to support her, not to threaten her. It’s lonely at the top and her team are not at all easy and go out of their way to alienate her.
We have chatted quite a lot now and she has explained a bit more about her personal life. She’s probably about 45-50 years old and a Muslim. She was married, but she couldn’t bear that her husband wanted to take a second wife so when he moved to Saudi Arabia she stayed in Chad. She is renowned throughout the country as a formidable force in media. She owns her own radio station and like her or loathe her, she is making her mark. And you couldn't do that without being anything but determinedly tough in this country as a woman.
.
She made a film in the 1990s about female genital mutilation in Chad and the Muslim authorities in the country issued a Fatwa (Islamic death threat) against her. She was saved by activist communities all around the world sending faxes to the authorities demanding her pardon.
People in this country probably fear her for, or are envious of, her courage, intelligence and dedication and passion for what she does. It is truly impressive to witness a woman like this first hand in yet another society dominated by dogmatic religions and traditions which allow men to suit themselves and women to fit in around that.
We are exceptionally lucky to have her with us. I think part of my job will be to reinforce her position here in the hope that the other four members of the team see her light, and treat the chance to work with her as a golden opportunity - which it undoubtedly is. Especially for the women.
Although landlocked Niger has borders with 7 countries - one of them being Chad, it was bizarrely quicker and cheaper for me to get from Niamey to N’Djamena, the capital of Chad, via Paris than any other route. So I spent a night in the aeroplane and a day meandering around Charles de Gaulle airport making the most of the decent coffee and the nail bar, pouncing on the latest copy of the Economist to keep me going for the next month.
It was almost 10pm when I arrived in N’Djamena. A man in a floor length white tunic and white hat was there to greet me and within 10 minutes I had my bags and we were bumping our way along potholed sand streets in a 4 x 4 to Le Meridien – my home for the next month.
N’Djamena makes Kabul look like the Garden of Eden. The town is a building site – with Chinese men driving the Asian variety of JCB along potholed dust tracks, trundling over piles of rubbish which fester on every corner.
There is an edgy feel to the atmosphere and you’re not supposed to walk about, although no-one has yet been able to tell me exactly why. The people do not allow you take photographs of them, and one foreign girl was stabbed seven times last year for photographing a dog. Having heard that story, I felt more relaxed about being within the confines of a car, with my camera back at the hotel, saved for a rural excursion one of these days.
It is feverishly expensive here as everything is imported. The supermarket boasts nothing in the dairy section but the ubiquitous Vache qui Rit and powdered Nestle milk. But there are little street stalls selling mangoes, bananas and avocados, and young children sell rock-solid sesame balls and bags of peanuts from trays on their heads.
Part of the reason why the Chadians feel on edge is due to the rebellion which happened almost exactly a year ago. A few rebel groups joined forces and stormed the capital from the east with the intent of killing, or at least deposing the president Deby and his government, who has been in charge for nearly 20 years. They failed in their attempt but the city was completely ransacked and looted, most ex-pats were evacuated and locals fear a reprise on its anniversary. Since then however Deby has been amassing the suitable amounts of military paraphernalia with which to defend himself. His paranoia over the last year has extended to demolishing large areas of housing surrounding the presidential palace leaving hundreds homeless, and chopping down an entire avenue of trees in the centre after apparently being told by a marabou (holy man) that he would be shot from above the ground.
But there is reason to his madness it seems, since 8 rebel groups including one led by his uncle or nephew (no-one is quite sure) have recently agreed to collaborate and try to bring him down again. And that is what is making the residents of the capital so uneasy.
The other public issue at the moment is charcoal. Deby has forbidden it in N’Djamena for no apparent reason, meaning people have nothing to cook with and are increasingly frustrated. Gas is impossible to find, and most cooking equipment designed for gas would be far beyond the reach of a Chadian local.
