17 December 2018

I stood at the gate in the Addis Ababa airport, passport and boarding pass in hand, waiting to board a bus to the plane headed to N'djamena. A couple of women brushed past me to stand at the front of the line--the middle of three loosely-formed lines. They were dressed in long, dark, flowing robes, heads covered. Soon a few similarly-dressed women greeted them, pushed past and joined them. They seemed to know each other already, all conversing in rapid and enthusiastic Arabic and greeting each one. As we continued to wait, one of the younger women in the group turned and greeted me. She wore a lighter-colored, sequin-dotted robe and had braces on her teeth. She greeted me in French and asked if I spoke French, if I was going to N'djamena, where I was from, and if I was staying in N'djamena. For the rest of our short journey to the plane, she and her group were friendly--invited me through to the moving line when our middle line turned into a dead end and offered me a seat once we were on the bus. Their conversation continued in Arabic, and they did not speak French at all among themselves.

One of the last units we studied while I was in language school in France covered "la politisse," politeness, and the associated vocabulary and verb conjugations required to communicate more politely (I suppose we mist have been rather impolite for our first 2.5 months in France before we reached this unit in class), but we found many similarities between French and American culture on the subject of how to be polite (except restaurant tipping, of course). In the airport in Ethiopia I was reminded that, while France and Switzerland were a new language and culture for me, all Western cultures seem so similar to one another when compared with other regions, including Tchad. I was also reminded that I'll need to keep learning languages beyond French if I want to communicate well in Tchad.

The bus ride from N'djamena to Kelo showed me how much French I've learned since my last visit to Tchad. I was able to make some small talk in French with my seatmate and with her friend across the aisle. She shared an orange and a piece of a starchy vegetable. The woman across the aisle was excited to meet a doctor from the US. She had a doctor friend in Washington D. C. and was herself an epidemiologist in N'djamena, visiting her grandmother in Kelo. They wanted to know if I had a ride already from Kelo to Béré and helped me find a stall at the bus stop to buy phone credit. By contrast, in 2017 my bus conversations consisted almost entirely of gestures and the word "Kelo." Alors, merci beaucoup, tout le monde à Collonges et IFLE!

The last leg of the journey to Bere was probably the most interesting, definitely the most surprising. Olen suddenly stopped the SUV, "The tire is flat again. That's ok. We're close enough to hitchhike!" Though it was about midnight now, a cart pulled by two oxen, draped in Christmas lights (yes the oxen were also wearing lights), pulled up alongside the supposedly-stranded SUV. I joined the two-oxen open sleigh welcome party and we rode home under the moonless sky with a bright Milky Way and a shower of shooting stars overhead ("shooting AND falling!" as Addison described them). The sign at the gate says, "Welcome Andrew and Megan," (other visitors who just left on the same plane that brought me to N'djamena) but I feel pretty well-welcomed!