A question : September 20th 2019, where were
you? And what did you do?
The evening before, we were in London drinking coffee with
Rebecca. When we compared plans for the following day, they couldn’t have been
more different.
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| Celebrating Mark's birthday at 35,000 feet |
She had made a difficult
decision to skip lectures from her course at King’s College London and join with
members of the university Students for Global Health Society and millions of young
people around the world on the Global Climate Strike.
We would have loved to
join her too but instead we had to wake up at 3am, walk to Terminal 4 Heathrow
and board an Air France flight to Paris then on to Abuja and finally Ndjamena,
a journey of at least 3500 CO2 emitting air miles.
Could we have done the journey in a different way? Horse and
cart, sailing boat and camel train would have made for an interesting blog, and
would have been quite in the spirit of Greta Thunberg’s recent voyage to the
Climate Change Action Summit at the UN. Alternatively we could have symbolically
delayed our flight, but in doing so we would have missed the special MAF
charter flight to get out team back to Bardai. In reality neither were
practical possibilities, we needed to get back to work supporting and
developing the health services in the Tibesti mountains- mid Sahara. However neither
we, nor BMS World mission, are ignoring the impact of our travel on climate
change. How could we? It is the poor and disadvantaged that we seek to serve
who will suffer the most from its consequences. Accordingly all our miles
travelled by air to and from Chad or on home assignment are logged and a
financial carbon offset is set aside for the BMS Eco-Fund. In an imperfect
world, this helps to reduce the unintended consequences of our travel.
The evidence can be seen in the
fossil record at the museum in Ndjamena and also carved on to rocks and cliffs
some of which are at just a couple of km from our house. When the Teda people migrated here, their
tradition says from Egypt in about 600BC , the tropical animals had gone ,
perhaps it was them that introduced the camel ( strictly speaking dromedary) to
the area. They may have seen however have seen some North African elephants on
their way through modern day Libya. (Hannibal’s hometown Carthage was nearby on
the Mediterranean coast). |
| Flooding in the wadi |
They settled in the
mountains mid Sahara at various places where water could be found, sometimes at
springs where water flow out of rocks and sometimes in places like Bardai
beside a wadi (a mostly dry seasonal river
that floods after rains come in the mountains) . In Bardai they found a place
where the water table would have been just below the surface of the sand along with associated small lakes and permanent wet lands. Each year the rains came the wadi would flood
and the life sustaining superficial underground water would be replenished. The
date palms, which need to be able to get into a water table at most four metres
from the surface flourished and much of
the local culture and calendar revolved around the dates, climbing and
pollinating, harvesting, using the trunks for housing, the spines as pins, the fibres
from the leaves to make ropes, the bases of the branches for firewood, the
branches themselves as supports for the long reeds growing in the wetlands
which are used for making partition walls and roofing.
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| An old well |
Now the traditional way of life in this rocky oasis is under
increasing threat. The palm trees are still there, producing plenty of dates,
but the water levels are falling. Forty years
ago there were many gardens and fields throughout the valley, water was drawn
from wells using the simple old technology of a counterbalance bucket and the
water poured into open channels that irrigated the enclosed fields. Vegetables
and amazingly enough wheat was grown to make the traditional Teda flatbreads.
Water must have been plentiful. Now there are just one or two of these farms
left growing lettuce, rocket and okra,
no one grows wheat. The disused wells
look dry, the wetlands have gone and the water table has fallen to between 2
and 3 metres. The local people say that it just doesn’t rain like it used to.
Climate change is significant but hasn’t been the only impetus to change, the
turn of the century rebellion that lasted about 8 years took a generation of
men off the fields, joining the rebels, or fleeing to Libya or Ndjamena. The
remaining villagers, the elderly, women
and children were obliged to live in the towns. Once peace came in 2008 the
discovery of gold and the open frontier with Libya have lead to an influx of
cheap flour and other foods, all this coupled with climate change there has
been no incentive to return to the old way of life.
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| After the floods at the hospital |
In the UK we are getting used to extreme weather events and
flooding. The Teda have lived with the risk for thousands of years as a nice
flat dry wadi can become a raging torrent. Presumably Jesus had experience of
similar events in Palestine, the wise man built his house upon the rock, the
foolish one built his house upon the sand ( The Bible Matt 7 24 onwards).
Villages and markets were traditionally built on rocky hillsides beside wadis.
Now in Bardai there are many buildings on the flat broad sandy areas at a
reasonable distance from the main wadi as it is so much easier to build there.
This year heavy rains have come and wreaked damage, the
walled hospital filled with muddy water and only avoided serious internal damage
when the gates were opened and the water could flow out. Abdoulaye, the
gatekeeper awoke to find his small tin shop flooded and lost a lot of stock. He
has been here since 2008 and had never seen rain or flooding like it. The same
flood waters shot through the town to get to the main wadi, destroying a number
of shops. In a nearby village there was much more damage and loss of livestock.
The eco system here is finely balanced, at times hot and dry
with temperatures of up to 45C in the shade in the hot months, at others overnight
temperatures approaching freezing at night in the cold months. There is little
local rainfall and the town is reliant on periodic flooding of the wadi from
water that falls on the vast areas of bare rock on the surrounding mountains.
Too little, irregular rain and the date palms will die, too much rain at one
time and the destruction of property and life is serious. This balance could be
jeopardised by even a small rise in global temperatures and accompanying changing
weather patterns.
You can see that there have been some important ecological
changes in Bardai, as in the rest of the world. Over the next 3 or 4 months we
plan to look at how we and our neighbours live here and how that impacts the
environment.
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