I continued to a nature reserve in the north called Andy.
I started the trip there on a paved road leading to Abasha, the second largest city.
This is the only road paved during the 24 years of the presidency, Idris Debbie.
The French paved it in 2008 to move their tanks over asphalt and help Debbie suppress a rebellion.
But it does not guarantee much beyond that.
"Is there a hotel here?"
I ask the station staff in Abasha, when I get there by bus at night.
There is no hotel.
They suggest I sleep in one of the stalls at the station, and continue the morning trip north.
I throw the mochila on the floor and try to strike up a conversation with the workers, but they speak Chadian Arabic, which I can barely understand.
"She speaks Arabic-Jordanian," says a voice behind me, "talk to her slowly and she will understand."
I turn around and see Ismail there, who drove with me from Niger to Chad and got stuck with me in the desert two weeks before.
What are the chances...
Inviting to their home, women at a wedding in Chad,
Ismail invited me to his house, where he and his family sat in the living room and hurried to charge cell phones, in two hours of electricity allocated to the city of Abasha between 9 and 11 at night.
"After 11 at night the electricity goes out and another city gets electricity for two hours," they explained.
I was trying to figure out how they get along in a country where there are almost no hotels.
"We sleep with relatives and friends," they said.
"And who has no family in the city?"
"Everyone has. And if not - sleep on the street or do not drive at all."
In the heart of the desert
The next morning, I continued north towards Andy in a jeep I shared with a driver and four passengers.
It was the only means of transportation for Andy.
He too was disabled, and again I found myself stuck in the desert.
I abandoned the vehicle without demanding a refund, and boarded a ride that passed there and brought me closer to the north.
On the way we passed a stuck military vehicle.
"Do you need help?"
The driver asked, but the commander said, "We are fine, help on the way," and the soldiers continued to draw circles in the sand.
The soldiers drove in the opposite direction to us - they left Mandy where there is a military base, and also a school, and a hospital, but not a road.
Without road, school or hospital, settlement in Chad,
Two days later I was sitting in the office of Andy, whose staff offered me tea, and I asked them - "What happens if a patient has to be evacuated from here to the hospital in the capital?"
"There's an ambulance for that," they said.
"But the ambulance will get stuck in the sands," I said.
"Right," they patiently explained, "then they'll fix it and move on."
Nowhere Information Center - Chad
With the new ride I arrived at Andy Reserve in the middle of the night.
"I'll drop you off at the tourist information center," the driver said, "they'll help you find a hotel," and honked at a concrete cubicle from which a 20-year-old boy came out, rubbing his eyes, half asleep.
"There's a tourist here," said the driver, "she needs a place to sleep."
"Is there a hotel here?"
I asked the boy, who had taken my backpack to the warehouse, and unpacked a mattress there.
"No," he said, "but you can sleep here."
Hike Nowhere, Chad Nature Reserve,
It was the tourist center of the Andy Reserve.
They set it up to encourage tourism, in a town that has no hotel and no tourists.
The team was children aged 18 to 20+ who were exiled from the Ministry of Tourism in the capital Nadjmana.
They spent most of the day sitting in front of the TV and watching Indian and Egyptian films.
The TV was powered by a generator - a luxury in this area.
"What fun for Indians," said one of the children as he watched a Bollywood drama, "they are fat like that and they have a lot of food."
The children, on the other hand, were content with camel meat, canned sardines, biscuits, carbonated juice, noodles and coffee with milk powder, which is all the food that was in northern Chad, and they generously shared it.
They washed the hair with a mixture of Vaseline, salt and water.
Every day they recharged their black nukes and called their families in Nadjmana.
Sometimes we sat in the yard and spoke slurred Arabic and sign language.
"Can you translate this song for me?"
Asked someone, and played Lil Wayne, "Lick me like a lollipop."
I broke my teeth and explained, and he was shocked and said, "But he is a Muslim! How can he sing such things! Are you sure this is the correct translation?"
A trip to the information center
The children gave me a brochure from the tourist center, in French.
"Is there anything in English?"
I asked.
"No, but inshallah when there is money there will be brochures in English," they said.
"And you do not know English?"
"No".
"So how do you talk to tourists?"
"All tourists know French."
"How many tourists come here?"
"Twenty are coming this month."
20 tourists and lots of camels, desert view in Chad,
"Not bad".
"Yes, they come in one group."
"Ah."
"They come with jeep minjamans, because there are no jeeps here."
I saw what information for tourists looks like.
One day someone walked into the TV room, said to his friend - "Tourists have arrived and it's your turn", and the friend jumped into work pants, closed a shirt, combed his hair, went out, explained some things to a French group, and went back to the TV.
My trip to Andy was mostly within the confines of the tourist center.
I tried to get inside the reserve but on the way I ran out of water, the 40-degree sun knocked my head out, and the sand was so deep and boiling that there was no chance of crossing it all in the next few hours.
It's not just the children who said that "tourists only come in jeeps."
That day there was no living soul in the area except for a few camels, and I sat at the edge of the reserve, near the beautiful cliffs, exhausted and on the verge of dehydration.
I took some pictures and came back.
"You came back fast," the kids said, "well, watch TV with us," and so my Andy routine continued.
Local with a car in Chad, Tamar Bers
Mandy I tried to return to the capital, Nadjmana.
"When is there a bus?"
I asked the kids at the tourist center.
"No," they said, "but there is a rumor about a local with a vehicle traveling from here, maybe in two days."
The children arranged for the local with the vehicle to pass through the tourist center.
He planned to travel to the nearby town of Abasha, where there are buses to the capital.
On the way he planned to stop at the wedding of a relative, aged 30+, who married a 15-year-old girl (like 60% of couples in Chad).
Chad starred in the first places in the marriage of minors.
Chad starred in the first and last places in every possible index - life expectancy, corruption, human capital, GDP, GDP, infant mortality, number of telephone lines, number of power lines.
Its ranking improved as other countries got into civil wars and dived down.
We stopped at the wedding, and after that a few more times in the middle of the desert, to pray or extract a wheel from digging, until we reached the ground.
***
I arrived in Abasha at night, after the last bus to the capital.
Again I was looking for a place to sleep.
Luckily, a lovely family I met at the station “adopted” me.
When I was sitting at their house, I asked to "walk around the city."
"do what?"
They asked.
"go".
"where?"
"Just, go."
Then someone dropped the token: "The madam wants to do sports! Like the French do!"
We went out to the main street, to do "sports", and the girls kept giggling because the idea of sports was foreign to them and the tourist was too weird.
Public transport in Nadjmana, the capital of Chad,
From Abasha I continued to Nadjmana, the capital of Chad, to the hotel of Mike, the American aid worker who saved my trip.
In previous chapters I have described the arduous journey I went through from Niger, the neighboring country, to Chad.
To get out of Chad I had to repeat that arduous journey, back to Niger.
I told Mike I was "alive, but never going to repeat the overland trip to the Chad-Niger border!"
But then I saw the price of flights to Niger - $ 600.
"I think I'll be back the way I came," I told Mike.
I drove to Nadjamana Central Station, where the driver loaded not 15 passengers, as usual, but 18, on a small Toyota, and one more hitchhiker on the way.
I knew this journey was going to be R-A.
The van bounced in the sands towards the Nigerian border and one of the passengers fell.
The rest of the passengers said it was okay because "he was sitting in the back, so the wheels didn't run over him."
The van got stuck four times on the way to the border and one rescue was particularly lengthy because the driver forgot to take spare wheels.
Another vehicle passed by.
I asked him for a ride for a fee.
But the driver with the stuck pickup refused to release my bag, which was tied to it in the back, and the potential hitchhiker was abandoned.
The passengers, who were surprised by my insistence on reaching the destination as quickly as possible, laughed: "You will still catch a camel and ride to the border."
We continued to sit there, waiting for rescue.
Main road in Chad // Photo: Tamar Bers,
The rescuer arrived after three hours from the nearby village, riding a motorcycle to which a pile of wheels was attached.
Except he didn't bring enough wheels, so he retraced his steps to get more wheels, and it took a few more hours.
We continued driving, until boom!
All the wheels were punctured.
again.
It was clear we would spend the night in the sands.
"Why does every car I get stuck get stuck?"
I asked the passengers, who spread blankets on the sand.
"Maybe the problem is with you!"
Someone said, and they laughed.
The next day I rescued the mochila from the stubborn driver and grabbed another ride, despite his protests.
The passengers begged: "Do not leave us! We will be rescued soon!", But by this point I already knew what "soon" in Chad was.
The new ride was a small truck with jerricans.
As soon as I got on the truck, the passengers, all nineteen, joined me and left the truck driver alone in the desert.
Two hours later, the truck was also stopped.
"I ran out of gas," the driver said.
I cursed the world, abandoned the truck, and made my way on foot to the nearest town.
Then another lady stopped another car - it was the driver of the van, the one we had abandoned in the desert when the wheels punctured.
He found that the wheels move when they are not carrying twenty people.
"I'm sorry," he said, and we both knew it would happen again.
Sometime we reached the border.
By this point we already looked like sand cakes, and there was no point in checking if the IDs matched our faces.
In any case, the official found a problem in the documents of two passengers from Cameroon.
They were after a few days of travel and intended to continue overland to Morocco, and from there to Europe.
"There is therefore no valid visa for Niger," the official said.
Stunned, exhausted, with thousands of shekels less (travel and elderly), they fell on the sand, and their tears made their way through the layer of sand that covered their faces.
The driver left them there, to solve the problem where there is no reception, no transportation and no ATM, and I continued to Niamey, the capital of Niger, shrouded in guilt that did not help them.
When the media is interested in Chad
Years later, in 2018, Chadian President Idris Debbie landed to visit the Holy Land.
The media channels were in a race to find someone who knew something about Chad and was willing to be interviewed about it.
The searches they did on Google did not yield much, except for a color-letter for beginners that I originally published in 2014, shortly after my visit to Chad.
"I know nothing about Chad," I told the producers and reporters who called, "I was there for three weeks and hated every moment."
"But the unit that was there," they said, "do you know another Chad expert?"
Netanyahu and the late President of Chad Debbie, 2019, AFP
I did not know.
So I found myself being interviewed for TV and radio channels between bus trips, in a semi-focused mode.
To a journalist, these were "minutes of glory," only I did not imagine that they would actually come from Chad.
After all, from the time of French rule to the present day, no one has personally benefited from Chad.