Prayer Letter

We have been in Chad 6 weeks now and have been very well looked after by our new colleagues, with home cooked dinners and local phone sims on our arrival, we have been made very welcome. We spent the first week while settling and getting used to our surroundings. It's a very humbling experience to find yourself somewhere that you can't function without help. Everything is so different. You need people to tell you where you can buy food, how much things should cost, how to put credit on your phone.. the list goes on…

One of the big tasks at the beginning was to learn the route into the city centre, primarily to be able to do the school run! The hospital is about half an hour north of the city centre, with roughly a third of the journey off road. Getting used to driving a 4x4 Landcruiser on sandy/dusty track through a maze of newly erected houses without road signs, followed by the chaotic paved roads and often erratic driving in the city centre, has certainly been an adjustment. We're no longer surprised to see camels running the wrong way down the dual carriageway or people transporting goats on motorbikes, and you must always be ready for another vehicle or a person to move into your path unexpectedly!

In terms of setting up the new Prosthetics and Orthotics (P&O) department, we are currently assessing the needs of the current patient population, particularly those that attend the physio department at G2 hospital. From this we can have a clear indication of the needs of the area to inform the department set up and provide more detailed, local information for funding applications. Whilst doing our training in the UK and France, we were able to make contacts and gather information specifically on African P&O workshops, and hope to refine this further so that building plans and costings can be done over the coming year. Starting something from scratch, particularly in a country like Chad, is going to be a very slow process. It will be worth it though. You don't need to go far here to see the need: young amputees on crutches and disabled people pushing themselves dangerously down busy city streets on skateboards to get from place to place (the pavements are usually far too bumpy for them). Our P&O department will become the third one in the whole of Chad, a country of 18 million people. By contrast, most major towns and cities in the UK have P&O provision.

We have, again, been amazed at how quickly the children have adapted to their new environment. There were some tears on the first day of school, but after a few days they were both walking into their new school without needing persuasion. They have loved playing in all the outside space in the residential part of the hospital compound, and making friends with the other kids onsite. Unfortunately, the American family that were here when we arrived have gone on home assignment for 6 months. Their 3 kids will be very much missed by our boys, but thankfully there is still the grandson of the hospital director here, so they still have one friend here to play with after school.

Praise God:

For safe travel to Chad

That the family have been settling well and the boys are enjoying school

That hospital staff have been welcoming – Chadian and expats alike.

Prayer Requests:

That we can form strong relationships with the Chadian hospital staff and that the preparations for setting up a prosthetics and orthotics department run smoothly.

That we all continue to settle in this new climate and environment, particularly as the temperature increases to mid to high 40s in the next couple of months.

For safety driving in and around N'Djamena.

For our continued French language study, and the new endeavour of learning Chadian Arabic.

Thank you everyone for your prayers and support, we are so grateful for all of you.

Next time we write, we'll be well into the hot season here. We're grateful to be here but from the stories of others, we're a little daunted by the prospect life here when it gets hotter!