UNHCR Compound, Farchana

Slight gap in our blog here - It's an oddity of the UNHCR that they have excellent wi-fi facilities in all their regional offices, but not at UNHCR HQ in Abeche. So I'm playing catch up here:
We are now in Farchana, about 2 hours drive due east of Abeche and close up against the border with Darfur. It's Wednesday evening, and our group is now in two parts, with half going "down south" to Goz Beida (Jeremy will update on this later in the week) and I'm with the other half down in Farchana. Today's blog will be posted separately, but here is yesterday's.....

On Monday evening we had a de-brief with the head of the UNHCR mission in Iriba – we finished about 7pm, upon which he learned that Medecins Sans Frontiers (MSF) had just lost one of their ambulances, hijacked barely 50 yards from our compound. It's another reminder of just how difficult a job it is for aid agencies to work in environments like this. The UN and its agencies come in for a lot of criticism at times, but I’d defy anyone to have seen the job they do here, 24 hours a day, 365 days a year and fail to be impressed by it.

The cockerel woke us all up again this time at 3.30am – We think this was his way of getting revenge on us for singing “I feel like Chicken Tonight” ever time we passed him. His cacophony, at painfully regular intervals, was interspersed by the winner of the “Noisiest Cleaner in the World” contest who decided to drag all the chairs across the dining room floor, drag them back and then, having decided that this was simply too much fun, really went to town dragging the table about as well. This was at around 4.30am.

We were all up and about ready to head back by plane to Abeche at 8am, but got word that the plane was delayed. In true “Spirit of the Blitz” style we broke open the packages of table tennis gear which we had been eyeing curiously for some days lurking beneath the coffee table. I’m not sure that a low coffee table conforms to international table tennis standards, and I’m fairly sure that on the limited number of occasions I have watched the sport on TV, I’ve seen players standing up, not seated in armchairs, but it whiled away the minutes.

Eventually we got the call to move, ride out to the airport and it's goodbye Iriba. And within a few minutes we landed at Guereda, although not before we’ve spotted lots of animals in the landscape below, many drinking at some of the fast-drying patches of water resulting from the rains.

30 minutes later and we are back in Abeche, and re-acquainting ourselves with the novelty of running water at the GTZ guest house. Pictures of the Rhine-Rühr coalfields on my bedroom wall seem a little incongruous but I’m clean for the first time in days and there is a beer in the fridge. All we have to do now is wait for the generator to come on and it might even begin getting cold.