By land and lake

It's been an eventful week since I posted. First I attempted to get on a UN flight from Gore back to N'Djamena, but a heavy rainstorm got in the way. The summer rains turn the dirt roads in southern Chad to rivers of mud, and passenger vehicles -- including those of the UN -- are barred from the roads during storms. As best as I could understand, this was to protect people as much as the roads themselves, which the local authorities were in the process of grading, and they didn't want 4x4s mucking up their work.

As I raced to catch the last flight of the week, we were stopped at roadblocks about every 30 km, where we waited while the driver gauged whether it would be possible to bribe our way past. This usually took 20-30 minutes of the driver saying that I had a plane to catch and the police officer insisting that he couldn't bend the rules, but a bribe was always accepted.

In the end, however, we lost too much time in the song-and-dance and I missed the plane by about 20 minutes. Fortunately a team from the German charity group GTZ was driving back to N'Djamena, and they graciously offered me a space in their car. By the time we reached the capital I had been on the road for 12 hours -- plenty of time to gauge that the paved roads in impoverished, middle-of-nowhere southern Chad far outclass those in Kenya -- a fact that will surprise no one who's ever been in a car in Kenya, but a fact that should embarrass Kenya nonetheless.

The final leg of my trip was a journey to Lake Chad, formerly one of the largest lakes in the world but now shrinking rapidly for a variety of reasons, including climate change. A fisherman took me and my translator in his 20-foot motorboat out into the lake, to an island that, until recently, didn't exist. The lake is receding so fast in some places that new islands are cropping up. The fisherman lived on this island with about 200 relatives, all of whom eke out a desperate living from the thin, sardine-like fish they manage to catch. Even that population is dwindling, they say, as the shrinking lake region becomes less hospitable for humans and animals alike.

When we got back to the mainland the local police commissioner had me and the translator over for a fish dinner, which we ate in the pitch dark because there was no electricity in town. The rotund commissioner didn't eat -- he was on a diet, he said, patting his enormous stomach -- but said he had never met an American before and couldn't let me leave without a proper meal. Grateful, and fully sated, I and the translator set up a couple of mattresses in a clearing and fell asleep in the open air.

I was fine there until about midnight, when I woke up to a huge thunderclap and gusts of whistling wind. It looked like a storm was coming. So we spent the rest of the night sleeping in the car, and I cursed myself for forgetting my tent in the office back in Nairobi. And as luck would have it, the storm never came.