 Letter from Paul Jeffrey, Missionary in Chad
From: Paul Jeffrey <pauljeffrey@earthlink.net>
Sent: Wed, 4 Jun 2008 9:35 pm
A letter to my supporting congregations
June 2, 2008, Eastern Chad
Dear friends:
I’m writing this from Abeche, a town in eastern Chad that looks like
the set of some old film about the French Foreign Legion, yet today the streets
are filled with stolen Toyota pickup trucks heavily laden with rocket propelled
grenades. Children carry Kalashnikov assault rifles, their desert camouflage
head scarves protecting them against the swirling dust. It’s difficult
in this land of shifting ethnic and political allegiances to know which is
a Chadian soldier and which a Sudanese rebel. The French and other European
soldiers here are easier to spot; it’s just not clear whether
their job is to protect refugees and humanitarian workers, as they
claim, or to
make
sure the giant old fields operated by ChevronTexaco continue to pump
oil to the west.
I’ve come here to photograph the emergency work of Action by Churches
Together (ACT) with Chadians displaced by the overlapping wars that plaque
the region, and which seem to escalate weekly. I was headed to a place cal
led Koukou Angarana but instead spent the first ten days waiting in N’djamena,
the capital, because rebels were moving near where I wanted to go and people
feared another assault like that which came close to toppling the Chadian government
in February. That in turn provoked a tit-for-tat attack on Khartoum, the Sudanese
capital, in May, and everyone has been waiting for the next shoe to drop; ACT
made me wait in the capital, which drove me absolutely bonkers. The old shade
trees that lined the capital’s main street were cut down in February
to make it easier to shoot the attackers, so today the decrepit facades of
the former French colony seemed even more forlorn and dysfunctional than ever.
I quickly finished the two novels I’d brought with me, caught up on some
writing, watched lizards in the patio and walked once every day to a Korean-owned
internet café with a maddingly slow connection.
Once things seemed calm enough to let me travel, it took me two days
on United Nations flights to get to Koukou Angarana, a village
near the Sudanese
border
surrounded by thousands of displaced farmers, people for whom the
word “poor” hardly
suffices. Driven from their hardscrabble villages in the desert by a storm
of ethnic violence, they sought refuge on the edges of the town where the UN
High Commissioner for Refugees could set up operations and give them a tarp
or a tent. International humanitarian organizations such as ACT joined the
UN in keeping them alive, digging wells for safe drinking water and providing
a cooking pot and a little bit of food. Mosquito nets. A few seeds. Not much
else. Over the last year the families have replaced most of those original
tents, which didn’t last long in the desert sun, with small huts of
sticks, dried mud and thatch. Similarly to the displaced in Darfur, they
cannot go
far from the relative safety of the camps lest they be assaulted.
I was in Koukou Angarana when the first real rain of the wet season
fell, and the next day the women–in this culture they’re the ones who do
all the work, with the exception of making war–were excitedly planting
sorghum seeds in the spaces between their huts. When the rain came again they
huddled in their huts, and I was invited in out of the rain, ducking into the
darkness as children giggled about the kawaja–the local Arabic term for
a white person. What struck me about their huts was how they had almost nothing
inside. A woven mat sometimes served as both flooring and bedding. A couple
of buckets, often branded with the name of the NGO that provided them, served
as cupboards for the little food they had. They often had no clothes other
than what they wore. If they were slightly better off, there’d
be a goat in the corner.
In February I was in the Philippines, and while working on a
story about Filipina women who had gone abroad as domestic workers,
I
visited a family
early one
morning in Bag uio, in the north of Luzon. I wanted to photograph
the husband and two sons of a woman working in Hong Kong who
had sought
refuge in a
United Methodist Women-sponsored ministry there after being severely
mistreated in her job. The ministry was helping her demand back
pay from her employer.
Meanwhile,
back in Baguio, her family was having a hard time without her
remittances. The husband’s earnings as a porter in the market didn’t
even pay the monthly rent on their small two-room shack.
I was planning to interview the mother later on in Hong Kong,
so I arranged ahead of time to come really early one morning
to photograph
the father
and boys in their normal routine. After breakfast at the hotel,
I hiked
with
my translator up through the shacks that line the mountains on
the edge of Baguio.
I arrived in time to photograph the boys getting out of bed and
getting ready to go to school. I then said it would be good to
have images
of the three
of them eating breakfast before the boys went off. They must
do that as part of
their normal morning routine, right? But the father looked troubled
by my request. He and the translator talked for a minute or so,
and then
a neighbor,
who’d
been standing at the doorway observing us, said something to
them and then disappeared. The translator finally told me that
the family had no food for
breakfast, and when I said I’d gladly buy them some, he
explained that the neighbor had already volunteered to go get
some thing for them to eat.
He came back a few minutes later with some crackers, saying the
nearby store was all out of bread. So the father and sons sat
down at a rickety table
in one room and ate their three small packages of crackers while
I photographed them.
My favorite table grace in Central America
is a song in Spanish
that asks God to grant food to those who hunger, and hunger for
justice
to those
who have
food. It’s not an expression of cheap grace that asks God
to magically feed the hungry–an ever more challenging task
these days as food prices soar around the world. Instead, it
recognizes that it’s the task of
the larger human community to insure that all have enough, and
that ultimately only justice will bring food to all those who
hunger.
I give thanks for our communities of faith,
which all over the world fight misery while also proactively
struggling against
the systemic
evil that
exploits the poor, champions greed, and breaks families and communities
apart with
violence. Whether it’s where you live or the desert of
eastern Chad, as we continue to celebrate Pentecost, we say “Come,
Lord Jesus,” knowing he
brings us both mercy and justice.
Paul
Paul Jeffrey
pauljeffrey@earthlink.net
www.kairosphotos.com/pauljeffrey
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