Club de la Paix

Maddie (another SALTer) works at Village Altonodji school, teaching English to the students there. But Village Altonodj is called a village because it is just that. It is a school, bakery, orphanage, medical clinic, library and chapel. Within the walls of Village Altonodji live about 100 orphans and 12 widows who are affectionately known as ‘Mamas’. Maddie also lives in a guesthouse at Village Altonodji during the week and has the opportunity to play, sing, dance and be around these children in the evenings.

Peace club is something that MCC Chad was hoping to being at Village Altonodji. In many countries around the world peace clubs are run by MCC staff to teach children about conflict, conflict resolution, and how to be peacemakers and peace activists.

Maddie and I decided that we really wanted to try to start a peace club at her school. We decided that we would work with children in 6e and 5e (equivalent to grade 7-8). It was planned to have peace club in the chapel as there is electricity in the chapel in the evening.

Two weeks before the Christmas break we decided to give peace club a go, but were stopped short when the electricity stopped working at the beginning of our club. The second week we had a number of students but they arrived very late and were not very participatory. Then after the break we were ready to start off strong only to have three students show up more than an hour after we were supposed to start. Needless to say I was starting to get a little discouraged.

Last Wednesday when I arrived at Village Altonodji, I soon found out that there was again no electricity in the chapel. Maddie and I decided that we were going to try it in her living room. So when the time came, slowly but surely children began arriving. We started off our introductory activity with about 10 students and ended the night with 18 children signing our attendance.

We sang Peace like a river in English and in French, and challenged students to come back next week with a version of the song in their native language. The evening was focused around differences in perspective.  We began by showing a couple of images where you can see two images. We showed the image of the young woman/old woman and another.

Then I told a story about a woman (Fati) who looked out onto her neighbour’s house and noticed that her neighbour was hanging up dirty clothes after they had been washed.  Fati thought to herself that her neighbour was dirty. The next day when her friend came by, Fati showed her friend the dirty clothes and her friend exclaimed that it was not the clothes that were dirty but her window. The students loved the punchline of the story.

Our final activity involved putting students in a variety of places around the room and having them draw four central objects. But depending on where each person was in the room, they might not have been able to see all the objects i.e. different perspectives. Also students got different writing utensils, different sizes of paper and different opportunities to see the objects.  We wanted to demonstrate different starting points and perspectives and that it is important to communicate with each other as conflict can arise when we have different perspectives that are not heard or understood.

Overall, I felt that it went very well. I look forward to tonight when we will be discussing about cultural differences and stereotypes!

Tourist in Chad

Chad is not a country where I would recommend coming if you want to be a tourist. There is one safari park but it is a two-day drive away from the capital. Needless to say, Chad is not a tourist destination. But when I was in N’Djamena for a week over the holidays, I was able to ‘play’ the role of tourist by visiting the National Museum of Chad, the artisan market, and riding on a camel.

1) The National Museum of Chad was a lovely museum with sections on Islamic culture, ancient Chad cultures and traditions, and even some fossilized bones. I really enjoyed learning about the different types of money (metals formed into different shares) that were used in the past as a way of trading goods. Each area of Chad had a different language and a different group of people (eg. Sahra people, Ngambai people) which meant different money forms were used.

There was a section that showed some traditional musical instruments with different horns, and drums as well as a type of xylophone. Another section of the museum showed traditional tools and clothing that was worn by Chadians. I really appreciated getting the history through artefacts of different aspects of Chad.

When we went upstairs, we came to a room with fossilized bones dating between 1.5-7 million years. There were bones from the ancestors of lions, crocodile, elephants, and fish as well as many others. While we were looking around, we peaked behind a blocked off area to see many other old bones that had not yet been categorized sitting in cardboard boxes! Someday I’m sure they will also be out for display but we enjoyed looking at them in their boxes.

2) The artisan market is an area where there are about 30 vendors selling different products from paintings to cards to fabric to clay sculptures. The different items that they are selling come from Chad as well as countries nearby. It was good to see the different things, but I felt that during our time there all the vendors wanted us to come into their little kiosk and by the end, my ears were practically ringing from the nagging encouragement.

3) My final and most exciting tourist activity was riding a camel. We contacted someone from the Canadian consulate who had a connection with someone who set it up for us. We arrived at a nomad encampment where there were 5 camels waiting for us. After taking some pictures we got on the camels as they were sitting down. When they stood up, I realized that camels are a lot bigger animals than I had previously imaged. We walked around for close to half an hour with a few 10 year old boys as our guides. Then at the end of our trip, we thanked the chief of the encampment and went on our way. It was a neat experience but it is not very comfortable. I can’t imagine riding on a camel for hundreds of kilometres at a time!