Today we arrived in Iriba. Having “slept” last night in Abeche, we woke early to catch the UN flight to Iriba. The 12-seater plane carried our team, which now includes Daniel Roger Tam, from the UNHCR Environmental Unit, as well as a representative of Internews. Internews is our partner with Equal Access for our new…
It’s hard to believe it, but today, 4 days after leaving Los Angeles, we finally arrived at our destination – Iriba. The town is home to somewhere between 3,000 and 6,000 people (there is no census so no one knows the population for sure). Of course, there are only a couple of dirt “roads” and…
Waiting…waiting…waiting. It seems like 90% of the time we have spent since arriving in Chad has been spent waiting. In the first 24 hours in N’Djamena our waiting time was split between the American Embassy, with whom we needed to register our presence in Chad, and the UNHCR, which was the designated agency to procure…
The most common comment I heard before we left LA was, “You’ll never be the same. This experience will change your life forever.” At that time I didn’t know what they meant exactly, and surely I didn’t think it would happen the first day of our journey. But I think it has. While “touring” the…
I’ve driven my children down Skid Row at dusk so they can see the reality of life in Los Angeles for people not as privileged as we are. Today I was driven through the capital city of Chad and witnessed poverty and squalor to literally turn your stomach. As we left the main road and…
Hello JWW Friends, It’s Sunday evening and we have just arrived in N’Djamena, Chad! The almost 24 hours of flights went fine and we are settling in for the night before we go to various government entities tomorrow to get the permissions necessary to continue our travel to Abeche, and then on to Iriba and…
How do you reassure your 7 year old that you WILL be safe, that you WILL return and that it’s not SCARY to go a place like Chad, when you’re not so sure yourself? As I’ve been focused on my never-ending packing list of water purification tablets and mosquito nets (we’re not at DreamWorks anymore…
I was thinking today that exactly thirty years ago this week my husband and I, as young twenty-somethings, stood in a passport control and “welcome to the iron curtain” line at Moscow’s International Airport; we had dozens of Zionist and Judaic books and other such “subversive” documents sewn into the linings of our clothes and…