凯拉吧 关注：26,181贴子：112,572
脸蛋都粘胶布 平胸K快点捐钱！
原来KK(3.26日生日后第二天)3.27就飞去Chad，
题外话：没来得及看原文，其实能在生日后做亲善探望是一件很有意义是事。
27 March 2012
It’s the day after my birthday and I’m on a plane to Chad.
Chad is an African country somewhere near the middle and totally landlocked. I know that because the UNICEF pack says so and not because I actually know. I had no idea where it was when they first told me I was going. It seems rude not to know where a country is. I feel like I should apologise as soon as I land.
Why are all these people going to Chad? There’s a family of very loud Americans sitting behind me on the plane all coiffed and suited. Voices brash and hair blonde with jewels jangling and I can’t quite make them add up.
Why Chad? What are you going to do there all dressed to the nines? It’s going to be 40 degrees and dusty. I think we’re seeing immunisation programmes but there’s a potential food crisis coming so we could be diverted. In my plane safe in the sky I don’t know what that means. Seems impossible people could be dying of malnutrition when the lady with the clattering jewellery and pink lip gloss is behind me. Who are these people? What do they want? What do they do in Chad?
I can see sand dunes.
A vast desert sprawls out below the plane. A sea of sand.
All this way up, I can make out sand dunes. Vast cloudless sky and the patterns, snakelike in the grey sand below.
Flying over somewhere called Twheas...Tozener....no idea....
What looks like a stream but is probably a river, glints with white sunlight. The only light in the sea of grey. Haze all around. I’ve never been to the desert.
Gopea, Gabes, Djerba, Spax.
Vast never ending desert dunes like waves rising up from the ground. Right now flying over, it seems impossible there’s anything else on earth but this ocean of sand. My heart’s beating and I can’t figure out if I’ve drunk too much coffee or I’m nervous. Nervous of what’s here.
I can’t figure out how to fill in the landing form so that must mean I’m nervous. I must have asked the stewardess the same question three times and I still can’t remember the answer. Heart thumping, words don’t make sense when I read them. What are you scared of? Nothing but black out the window now. Stars above and dark below. What does ‘address in the country mean’? My country or Chad country? How are you meant to know?
Lonely plane in the ink black sky. Sitting on my own, I felt someone brush my hair back off my face. Gave me goose bumps. Welcome to Chad.
题外话：没来得及看原文，其实能在生日后做亲善探望是一件很有意义是事。
27 March 2012
It’s the day after my birthday and I’m on a plane to Chad.
Chad is an African country somewhere near the middle and totally landlocked. I know that because the UNICEF pack says so and not because I actually know. I had no idea where it was when they first told me I was going. It seems rude not to know where a country is. I feel like I should apologise as soon as I land.
Why are all these people going to Chad? There’s a family of very loud Americans sitting behind me on the plane all coiffed and suited. Voices brash and hair blonde with jewels jangling and I can’t quite make them add up.
Why Chad? What are you going to do there all dressed to the nines? It’s going to be 40 degrees and dusty. I think we’re seeing immunisation programmes but there’s a potential food crisis coming so we could be diverted. In my plane safe in the sky I don’t know what that means. Seems impossible people could be dying of malnutrition when the lady with the clattering jewellery and pink lip gloss is behind me. Who are these people? What do they want? What do they do in Chad?
I can see sand dunes.
A vast desert sprawls out below the plane. A sea of sand.
All this way up, I can make out sand dunes. Vast cloudless sky and the patterns, snakelike in the grey sand below.
Flying over somewhere called Twheas...Tozener....no idea....
What looks like a stream but is probably a river, glints with white sunlight. The only light in the sea of grey. Haze all around. I’ve never been to the desert.
Gopea, Gabes, Djerba, Spax.
Vast never ending desert dunes like waves rising up from the ground. Right now flying over, it seems impossible there’s anything else on earth but this ocean of sand. My heart’s beating and I can’t figure out if I’ve drunk too much coffee or I’m nervous. Nervous of what’s here.
I can’t figure out how to fill in the landing form so that must mean I’m nervous. I must have asked the stewardess the same question three times and I still can’t remember the answer. Heart thumping, words don’t make sense when I read them. What are you scared of? Nothing but black out the window now. Stars above and dark below. What does ‘address in the country mean’? My country or Chad country? How are you meant to know?
Lonely plane in the ink black sky. Sitting on my own, I felt someone brush my hair back off my face. Gave me goose bumps. Welcome to Chad.
【3月28日】
28th March 2012 - N’Djamena, Chad
6:20am
It’s hot. Really hot. Like the air is thick and sticking to my skin hot. The sun hasn’t properly risen yet. My room is baking.
Chad: population around 11 million. 1 in 5 children die before they’re 5 years old. 1 in 9 before their first birthday.
Oh noooo! Just realised it’s an hour earlier than I thought. Completely forgot to change my watch from French time. F**k! I've just robbed myself of an hours sleep.
So I sit for longer in the dining room... It’s filling with more men now. There seems to be a type. Men in their 50’s/60’s, mostly European and mostly in khaki shorts and polo shirts. Do I go for my third cup of coffee? Yes I think I do. Given I woke up at 5:20 instead of 6:20 I deserve it. Maybe this is the civilised way to wake up. This could be the way proper people talk about: getting up at a leisurely pace and sitting having a long breakfast. Will this make me any more awake than rolling out of bed at the last minute with a full hour longer to sleep?
My first adventure of the day. The solitary long breakfast. The Parisiennes make an art out of it, why shouldn’t I bring it to Chad. There’s a woman just come in. Hair ironed straight, lip gloss and an off the shoulder bright yellow top with butterflies on. What is she doing in Chad? What are they all doing in Chad?
Chad: 183rd poorest country out of 187 on the Human Development Index. Each year 57,000 children die before they reach their first birthday, the vast majority as a result of preventable diseases, many preventable with a simple vaccine.
Should I tell the woman in the yellow top? No, let her float around. The world needs butterflies.
UNICEF estimates that 127,000 children under the age of 5 in Chad's Sahel belt will require lifesaving treatment for severe acute malnutrition. Only 52% of people have access to clean, safe water, and the percentage is even less in the poorest parts of the country Epidemics of measles and other diseases hit every year. Yet only 30% of kids are fully immunised. One of the lowest percentages in the world. 70% of children aren’t.
Immunisation is not only a lifesaver from deadly preventable diseases like measles, tetanus, measles and polio, it is also the entry point for mothers and children into the health system. The beginning is always immunisation.
Currently the country has only 261 health centres, a further 500 needed. But even with these the Chad lacks crucial human resources. The country has very few doctors, very few paramedics. It has the lowest percentage of trained doctors per capita of the population in the world.
UNICEF set up a programme to take paramedics straight out of school and position them in communities. The government isn’t putting the money in. If UNICEF launches it, it will be very difficult for the government not to take over. That’s the plan.
28th March 2012 - N’Djamena, Chad
6:20am
It’s hot. Really hot. Like the air is thick and sticking to my skin hot. The sun hasn’t properly risen yet. My room is baking.
Chad: population around 11 million. 1 in 5 children die before they’re 5 years old. 1 in 9 before their first birthday.
Oh noooo! Just realised it’s an hour earlier than I thought. Completely forgot to change my watch from French time. F**k! I've just robbed myself of an hours sleep.
So I sit for longer in the dining room... It’s filling with more men now. There seems to be a type. Men in their 50’s/60’s, mostly European and mostly in khaki shorts and polo shirts. Do I go for my third cup of coffee? Yes I think I do. Given I woke up at 5:20 instead of 6:20 I deserve it. Maybe this is the civilised way to wake up. This could be the way proper people talk about: getting up at a leisurely pace and sitting having a long breakfast. Will this make me any more awake than rolling out of bed at the last minute with a full hour longer to sleep?
My first adventure of the day. The solitary long breakfast. The Parisiennes make an art out of it, why shouldn’t I bring it to Chad. There’s a woman just come in. Hair ironed straight, lip gloss and an off the shoulder bright yellow top with butterflies on. What is she doing in Chad? What are they all doing in Chad?
Chad: 183rd poorest country out of 187 on the Human Development Index. Each year 57,000 children die before they reach their first birthday, the vast majority as a result of preventable diseases, many preventable with a simple vaccine.
Should I tell the woman in the yellow top? No, let her float around. The world needs butterflies.
UNICEF estimates that 127,000 children under the age of 5 in Chad's Sahel belt will require lifesaving treatment for severe acute malnutrition. Only 52% of people have access to clean, safe water, and the percentage is even less in the poorest parts of the country Epidemics of measles and other diseases hit every year. Yet only 30% of kids are fully immunised. One of the lowest percentages in the world. 70% of children aren’t.
Immunisation is not only a lifesaver from deadly preventable diseases like measles, tetanus, measles and polio, it is also the entry point for mothers and children into the health system. The beginning is always immunisation.
Currently the country has only 261 health centres, a further 500 needed. But even with these the Chad lacks crucial human resources. The country has very few doctors, very few paramedics. It has the lowest percentage of trained doctors per capita of the population in the world.
UNICEF set up a programme to take paramedics straight out of school and position them in communities. The government isn’t putting the money in. If UNICEF launches it, it will be very difficult for the government not to take over. That’s the plan.
9pm
There’s air conditioning in the room. I’m such a d**k. There was no need to boil last night. It’s the green button by the bed.
I don’t know what to write about today, don’t know how I feel. Maybe when you’re in a place like this and you have a job to do and a camera in your face you put a screen over your emotions. There’s a practical task to do and you do it: try and get this woman to talk about how her three year old will never walk again. I feel awful asking about something so tragic, so personal. I know they’ve agreed to talk and I know that’s what we’re here to do but the private nature of their suffering and the toll they bear just see***ike something a stranger should never pry into.
The desert. The desert. I’ve never seen a place like this. Sand everywhere with stone and shrub thrown in for good measure. A vast sprawling dust plane with camels and trees every now and again. Our drive out of N’Djamena, the capital city is full of nomads camped out at the side of the road and men manning tiny stalls of food. Women selling mangos. There is a family of hippos in the river Chari.
We had a security briefing from Mark, Head of Security at UNICEF Chad this morning. Everything’s pretty stable in Chad at the moment. 30 years of fighting ended 2 years ago and Idris Debby, the current president (of 10 years), seems pretty stable. I got the feeling if a coup did happen anywhere, Mark, who has been stationed in most of the world’s hotspots including Haiti, Ivory Coast and Afghanistan would be pretty handy to have around. Anyway that doesn’t seem about to happen, so the problem Chadians face mainly comes from their neighbours.
Chad’s landlocked and it’s mostly desert so very little grows here. They have to import almost everything.
To the east is Sudan: there is conflict from the rebels along the border with Chad (and a load of landmines) meaning imports can’t get in. To the south west is Nigeria, which, in the north is suffering from internal strife, again resulting in closed borders. Many refugees are fleeing into Chad. But hardly any imports are coming in.
To the north is Libya, where most of Chad’s imports came from. With the overthrow of Gadaffi and the revolution many of the hundreds of thousands of Chadians who worked and sent money home from Libya have been chased out. 90,000 of them. And very few imports coming in.
And finally to the south The Central African Republic (CAR), where private militia fight for control over the diamonds. No imports can get through.
In short Chad’s neighbours have locked-in a totally landlocked country. Makes you glad to live on an island.
The task that seems to face Chad is so enormous it made my head spin. Bruno, the Head of UNICEF in Chad briefed us. There is almost no infrastructure here. Hardly any roads, barely any running water, constant fuel shortages (ironic considering they struck oil a few years ago), very few schools, few teachers, very few doctors, virtually no access to medical attention of any kind. Plus conflict zones on all sides. Bruno explained about ‘the cold chain’ needed for vaccines to be transported. Vaccines need to be kept between 2 and 8 degrees centigrade which means they have to be refrigerated. Fridges need electricity or paraffin; the vaccines need roads to transport them and they need medical staff, properly trained, to administer them. Hardly any of that is here. The problems are massive and daunting but what’s so incredible about Bruno and his team and all of UNICEF is they’re ideas people. Instead of running away from it, as I would, they break it all down and focus on problems bit by bit.
We drive past the camels and into the suburbs of N’Djamena with buildings like I’ve never seen before, partially woven walls and bricks made of mud dug from under the sand. You see where they’ve dug it from in the centre of the development. In one of these half woven, half mud brick houses sits Chanceline, with her mother and grandmother. She’s got a pink dress on and her hair’s woven into spikes. She’s three and she has a killer smile. She also had Polio. She sits on the floor with her useless leg crossed under her, the paralysed limbs a constant reminder of the disease that ravaged her energetic little body. Her mother, the sole supporter of a family of 8, tells me about thinking she had malaria, getting medicine for that and then her slipping into a coma for 5 days. When she woke up, she couldn’t use her legs. How do you put the fear and terror of that into words? In the afternoon, in a different part of town we meet Houra, also three, a very shy little girl with big solemn eyes. She, too, was paralysed from the waist down. She had had a fever. Her mother took her to a local doctor who said it was nothing. Then she woke up and couldn’t walk. At one point she could hardly sit up. Until a few days before our arrival the parents still thought she might get better, not knowing about or having heard of polio. The grandmother talked of Houra being a happy lively girl before the disease struck. Both families left reeling from the shock and not knowing how or being able to afford to get treatment: physiotherapy to stop more muscle wastage or braces for the legs to help them walk. Both girls screamed with pain when they tried to use their legs. Chanceline gave her dad a huge whack for making her try. Good girl. It’s just so unnecessary. Accidents happen. There are so many diseases we can’t treat but to have these girls’ lives and their families’ lives ripped apart by something totally preventable seems criminal. If we’re all so global now, with global economics, global markets, I don’t see why we can’t have the very basics of global health for these children.
What struck me most about today, apart from this unnecessary devastation, was the amazing love and spirit from the families. Their openness in speaking so personally to a load of strangers piled into their homes and their - I can’t find a way to say it - community. They have nothing but they support each other, taking care of each other’s children. With Houra, so many people, family members and friends came in to speak about her and the impact of her illness on everyone. I remember when I was 18, walking through the slums in Addis Ababa on a charity trip and it started raining. At least 10 strangers invited us into their homes to have coffee and take shelter. These people were similar. They live in abject poverty, their children struck down by diseases but the kindness they offer to each other and to strangers is definitely unlike anything I’ve seen in London; anything I’ve ever offered or received. I don’t want to sound sentimental but it is humbling. Totally humbling.
What struck me most about today, apart from this unnecessary devastation, was the amazing love and spirit from the families. Their openness in speaking so personally to a load of strangers piled into their homes and their - I can’t find a way to say it - community. They have nothing but they support each other, taking care of each other’s children. With Houra, so many people, family members and friends came in to speak about her and the impact of her illness on everyone. I remember when I was 18, walking through the slums in Addis Ababa on a charity trip and it started raining. At least 10 strangers invited us into their homes to have coffee and take shelter. These people were similar. They live in abject poverty, their children struck down by diseases but the kindness they offer to each other and to strangers is definitely unlike anything I’ve seen in London; anything I’ve ever offered or received. I don’t want to sound sentimental but it is humbling. Totally humbling.
