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Originally Posted by T50_Omaha8
Why did you go there? I had thought the east was basically off limits for non-official or NGO visitors.
This is probably one of the worst in the world though. Way worse than the parts of Africa I've been to. There's always Mogadishu, and some Congolese cities like Goma, but Chad outside N'Djamena has gotta be right up there.
N'Djamena was quite different and a very decent place considering standards of the country. One episode from that city though that I'll remember was when driving on a secondary road at night, near a village somehow. It is pitch black as always in this part of the world at night time, only guided by the headlights of our car. We see a group of men, around 12 if I were to guess, standing in a circle on the side of the dirt road. Slowing down, I see a man laying face down in the middle of the crowd with no signal of life. They are all standing there, doing nothing but lightly "kick" him to see if he's alive. They are just staring at him like they don't really care, nor know what to do. Being a medic, I immediately want to jump off our vehicle to help, being furious with the lack of education and desire to help. Yet with several nurses and 1 or 2 docs in our car, we could do nothing due to orders and rules of engagement. We silently kept driving and everyone was pretending it never happened and that it was fairly standard given the situation. Which it was.
I lived in Chad for 6 months working with the UN for peace keeping purposes. We were running a hospital there, by far the best equipment/standards in the country which doesn't say a lot. It was supposed to of course be free, accepting badly wounded soldiers as well as locals. When it came to seriously ill local citizens, they needed to be referred to us from the doctor of the area. However, anyone who understands what corruption does to a country would understand that only the richest would be accepted.
The heat there was crazy, I still remember doing physical work in what was measured as 52C/125F degrees. Water+salt was a constant need