'Invincible'

"As drought spread across the Sahara, I finally had the opportunity to roll up my sleeves and get into the field, to abandon my role as a bystander and make a difference."

There's a major boulevard in N'djamena that must have been beautiful once. Amid the gutted buildings and tarmac pocked by mortars, some peach archways have survived. They stand in the shade of trees, a pastel colonnade, lining each side like so many French roads. Relief workers who had been to Chad before the Libyan-backed civil war confirmed N'djamena's former beauty. Like Beirut used to be, they told me.

For a long time, I wasn't scared when I drove down this avenue. Impressed, excited even, but not scared. I was in my mid-twenties and had already spent a year in N'djamena as a contractor with USAID, writing cables and reports, before I was drafted into its Food for Peace Office in 1985 to assist the U.S. relief program in Chad. It was an assignment I wanted badly. I'd been interested in relief and development issues for several years and had majored in African Studies and Political Science in college. I wanted to help, to do what I could to improve the livelihood of people in need. A summer working on an archeological dig in the Ivory Coast had already convinced me that I could live in - and explore - Africa indefinitely. I'd spend my career in development or relief work; I was sure of it. As drought spread across the Sahara, I finally had the opportunity to roll up my sleeves and get into the field, to abandon my role as a bystander and make a difference. Driving down that boulevard, weaving around the craters, I experienced the exhilaration of adventure, and the certainty of my fortitude.

I was one of three members of the Food for Peace Office. Our work was varied. We monitored the use of American food aid to ensure it was being used and distributed as intended; reported on the famine's developments and the efforts by international relief agencies to alleviate it; lobbied for and procured additional funds from Washington for assistance that ranged from plastic sheeting for displaced persons' camps to manpower for food aid distributions. I traveled a lot, often for stints of two or three days. I always had a driver, usually Moussa, who drove over the sand for hours following only truck tracks to remote villages. Though golden desert stretched as far as the eye could see, we never got lost, and I never expected we would.

I checked warehouses, listening for weevils in food aid sacks and noting rodent droppings. I scanned the marketplace for potentially diverted food aid. I kept my ears open for word of unauthorized distributions. I visited supplementary feeding centers to confirm the numbers of frail, sunken children needing assistance. Many of them walked miles through sand and thick, hot air for their rations. They'd line walls made from mats, all of them holding their plastic mugs, waiting patiently. The sicker ones were taken to a different shelter where a doctor tended them.

At a woman's wail, I wheeled around to discover that her baby had just died. She cried and cried, and we were unable, truly helpless, to relieve her grief.

Following protocol, I visited the local officials before I roamed their villages. Over heavily sugared and minted tea, I'd hear their complaints, their pleas for more assistance. Though they spoke to me in French, they made side-comments to assistants and servants in Chadian Arabic, a language I depended upon Moussa to translate. Most officials treated me respectfully, but others were verbally aggressive. One official, a man rumored to have shot several men, slammed his hands on the table and shouted for more food.

USAID instructed relief workers dealing with American food aid to take military escorts when they traveled in the south. There was fighting there, skirmishes, or village slaughters, depending on whom you believed. Some workers refused the escorts. If they were ambushed, better to show they were innocent helpers. To have an escort surely provoked a shootout. One of the Jesuit priests had been caught in an ambush and shot, someone said. He was fine. But that was just a rumor, maybe.

I usually flew into the south in a Cessna flown by two French pilots. I'd travel with members of other relief agencies, so I was never alone, though this didn't make any difference. I'd always loved to fly, to watch the ground drop away. Though I'd experienced turbulence during flights, it didn't bother me. One morning, we took off in soft, easy sunshine. Clouds, scattered, then thick, closed in, surrounding us. The plane lurched and bounced through the sky. The pilots were scared. Though their smiles were reassuring, their shoulders were set with tension. A stream of water ran down the windshield. I focused on it, certain the water was seeping inside. At that moment, with the deepest terror, I believed the windshield would rupture, the plane disintegrate.

I collapsed when we landed in Sarh that day. I'd been in Chad for almost eighteen months by then. For the first time, my legs deceived me and gave way. From then on when I flew, I became nauseous. Pins and needles pricked my arms. I got hot, as though the airplane's thermostat were pushed up and nobody felt it but me.

The city of N'djamena, my home base, was supposedly safe, part of a secure zone between the hostile sections of the country. Though some fighting continued in the south, most of it was far away, north of the 16th parallel. The 16th parallel - as though a huge red line had been painted across the Sahara and the enemies had agreed to contain their battles on the other side. But even in N'djamena there were limitations on where I could go and what I could do. I was expected to follow rules: Don't go to the movie theater - a grenade could be thrown over the wall. The local 'Westerner' nightclub, aptly called the Booby Bar and considered a terrorist target, was guarded by French soldiers until midnight. When they left, I was expected to leave too.

I traveled around the city on a third-hand moped. Colleagues cautioned me against purchasing it. A Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) woman had been struck and killed by a truckload of combatants while riding a moped. Her body had been on the flight that had been bombed on the N'djamena runway months before. I ignored their advice. It couldn't happen to me.

I'd heard stories of shoot-outs among combatants in the city bars, bars filled with joyous, pulsing music that swept Chadians and expatriates onto the earthen floor. We danced in easy groups, reveling together in the musical strains. I was at such a bar one evening when a combatant approached me and ordered me to go outside with him. He hovered over me, his pistol at his side, reeking of alcohol. François-Xavier, an Action Internationale Contre La Faim (AICF) rep I'd seen at several meetings, urged me not to make eye contact. "Ne le regardes pas," he said. Drinking his beer and sitting calmly next to me, he repeated it quietly until the soldier turned and left. I thanked him. He shrugged. It was no big deal.

Most of my friends were stationed in the field away from the city. In N'djamena I'd drive my moped home past knobby-kneed children in grayed, torn clothes, past one room "cases" built from "banco," a mixture of straw and dried mud, past traffic signs riddled with bullet holes. In the streets children's voices were everywhere, a constant, melodic chatter.

I hardly heard them in my compound. An arid stillness filled my house, punctured only by a woman pounding sorghum or the squawking of chickens. Perhaps that's why I went to the Booby Bar that Saturday night and stayed there after midnight. There were big meetings in town that week; many of the agencies had pulled their workers in from the field. They were there, kids, like me. We drank and danced until the gunshots rang out and the music stopped cold. For an instant, we stared at each other, restraining panic, wondering if the shots were real, before we hit the ground. French off-duty soldiers apprehended the gunman quickly, and we were soon free to return home.

I walked down the street amid fourteen-year-olds with AK47's slung over their shoulders. They hadn't bothered me much, but I started keeping my distance. I imagined a boy dropping his weapon, it going off, hitting me.

One morning, I turned on the BBC to discover that the Americans had bombed Tripoli and Benghazi, major cities in Libya, directly north of Chad. I stayed at my kitchen table, glued to reports speculating that Qaddafi hadn't survived, that some of his family were dead. I understood then that we - Americans in Chad - had become potential targets, marks for revenge. Perhaps we had been all along, but I hadn't felt it until that moment. It wouldn't take much to pick one of us off. We were advised to vary our routes, to stay alert, as if it could make a difference.

I saw more of François when possible. He spent a lot of time in the field working on irrigation projects, sometimes weeks on end. One day a young Chadian arrived at my office to tell me François was sick with malaria. I wasn't immediately concerned; malaria and recurrent cases of it were relatively common among the agency reps. As long as the person was basically healthy, they muddled through. But when a day went by with no word from François, I went to the radio and tried to raise him. He didn't respond. A Chadian, his voice anxious, got on to say that François was too ill to speak. He was in Doba, far in the south, a couple of days away by car.

We'd started readying a plane when we received word over the radio that the local Catholic mission had stepped in to care for François. He returned several days later, gaunt, still carrying the acrid smell of fever. He'd lost at least four kilos. He'd started to recover after the Catholic mission had given him a shot of Fanzidar. It was pure luck that he'd been near a place that had the medicine. Once again, he shrugged. As sick as he'd been, he hadn't believed he could die.

There were quiet times and easier moments. I made a couple of trips down south after the rains returned and drove by fields tall with red sorghum. The trees were lush green, so different from the brush and sand of N'djamena or the sweeping desert of the far north. I swam in the Logone river, sat on mats, drank beer, and chatted with locals. Children approached me, touched my skirt, giggled, and ran away. Even in N'djamena, there were times when I relaxed this way. There, at sunset, I listened as the call for prayer rolled over the city from the mosque. In those moments, I forgot about the work, the poverty, the sick children, the children with guns, the civil viciousness.

I started losing weight. Between the famine and destruction, the quantity and range of food in N'djamena was limited. Business was just creeping back into the city. There were a few restaurants, small stores selling canned goods and soap, but no supermarkets carrying chips and chocolates. I didn't think much about food preparation anyway. After a while, I stopped eating red meat. I couldn't stomach it. Sometimes, my gut would spasm. I ignored it, assumed it was nothing. On the weekends, I slept until 1 p.m., then dragged myself out of bed during the week to work. I forced myself to move, to find some energy to get through the day.

I went on home-leave for three weeks. At the N'djamena airport soldiers searched the passengers and checked all the luggage. They looked for bombs slipped on the plane at the beginning of its route in Bangui. One plane had already made an emergency landing in Algiers because of a bomb threat. Flying to Paris, I worried that I'd be blown out of the sky.

I didn't do much at home. It was cold. I slept, wandered shops for clothes, non-perishable foods, tapes, sheets - supplies I couldn't find in Chad. I wanted to visit friends but didn't have the energy. I complained to my doctor about my stomach spasms and lethargy. He sent me for X-rays and gave me a standard blood test, but didn't find anything abnormal. I asked him if I should be tested for parasites, but he seemed uncertain how to even go about it. When I suggested hepatitis, he shook his head. "If you had hepatitis," he said, ushering me out of his office, "you'd know it."

I returned to Chad. Within two weeks, I started throwing up everything I ate. A colleague stopped me one morning and asked if I'd looked in the mirror. "Look at your eyes," he said. I went to the bathroom to stare at whites that had turned yellow. I weighed 98 pounds, a weight I hadn't seen since I was twelve years old.

I stayed in Chad for my recovery from hepatitis. Though weak, I could walk, talk, and care for myself. One afternoon, Moussa came by. His brow was furrowed and he tsk-tsked at the sight of me. I'd grown too thin, he said. His wife could make me a mixture, a brew. It had helped him.

It wouldn't be until years later that I'd fully appreciate how much Moussa had taken care of me in the field: He'd stocked the landcruiser, found us food and lodging, translated for me, always known where I was. He struggled to provide for his own family, yet he reached out to help me. I didn't take his brew. I wish I had.

Within a month, I was back in the field. My first time out was a plane trip to Mao with a World Food Program (WFP) representative. We'd hardly been there a couple hours before I felt weak again. I excused myself to lay on a couch in the compound. Lying there, I stared out the window at sand. It seemed to be everywhere in Mao - on the windowpanes, the floor, in my hair and clothes. At that moment I wanted more than anything to be in my own bed, to escape that place and find the peace of sleep.

Hostilities resurged in the north and the French military returned in earnest. By then, François and I were living together in a house about a mile from the airport. We listened all night to the drone of military planes flying in. But early one morning, another plane, faster, screamed in under the others.

The explosion shook the house. Dirt flew against the low vent in my bathroom wall. I tore out of bed. François had only just left. I didn't know where he was, whether he had been close to the explosion or not. Perhaps it was a bomb, the first of many, the beginning of an onslaught. Maybe a plane had crashed. I stood in the yard, uncertain whether to hide or search for him. Within minutes, a voice on my embassy radio announced that a Libyan plane had dropped a bomb at the airport. It fell right outside the control tower and missed the runway.

Startled chickens, that's all, had sprayed the dirt against my wall. Yet it had felt so close. François called me from his office. Driving, he had seen people running for cover but hadn't heard the bomb.

For what seemed like weeks afterward, French fighter planes - les mirages - roared into the airport in the early morning hours. As I took my shower, their engines whistled through the bathroom tiles. I turned off the water and listened, anticipating the shift in sound to the bomber's scream.

A few months later, as my contract neared completion, my boss asked me if I wanted to stay on. I refused. Whatever drive, whatever commitment, I'd felt two years before had disappeared. Try as I might, I couldn't summon it back. I wanted to leave, to return home where life was predictable and safe. François, however, wanted to stay. Though Chad had left me with a rattled sense of mortality, he remained unflappable. In roughly the same two-year period, François had discovered that he could stick with it and I'd discovered that I couldn't.

In the first of what would be many concessions between us, François agreed to come to the US. We moved to a small apartment in Philadelphia and married. He was interested in getting his MBA. While he did business school applications, I slept, read, took a few business courses, and generally procrastinated about my professional future. I was lost, didn't know anymore what I wanted to become, what to aim for. I'd abandoned one path and couldn't find another.

I finally focused on finding work that involved analytical and organizational skills, skills I was sure I wanted to continue using. I interviewed for a few jobs before it became clear that I needed an MBA to make that transition, given my background. The interviewers regarded my experience with curiosity. On the one hand, it seemed impressive, courageous even, they said. On the other, it was unconventional. They expressed concern about my suitability for corporate life. They questioned my motivation. Why would I ever want to go to Chad? Their perplexity frustrated me. Why wouldn't I? Why wouldn't they want to explore people, cultures, and issues beyond their own? In people I met, I equated international disinterest with self-absorption, consumerism with petty superficiality - presumptions that weren't always fair, I realized.

Several years later I was snug and safe at my desk in New York City when I read about the plane exploding between N'djamena and Paris, killing Peace Corps volunteers. It had happened to them. Sitting there, staring at the newspaper, I thought how none of them would have really believed they could die when they signed on. Perhaps they were told Chad was dangerous, just like I was told. But conscious as I was of the risks in my early days, I hadn't felt them. Feeling them made all the difference.