How you know it's hot season in Chad

We’re hopefully coming to the end of Chadian hot season 2020 and will wave a very happy goodbye to the 2-month stint of day-time temperatures around 45C and night-time temperatures of 35C.  Here are a few tell-tale signs that it’s hot season in Chad!

You prefer to sleep outside on a stringy camp bed than inside on your roasting hot mattress

My trusty camp bed

It’s not the most comfortable thing to sleep on but I find it far better than sweating it out inside on a mattress that’s absorbed the day’s heat.

The chocolate pieces in your yummy cereal, which you convince yourself is healthy because it has the word ‘muesli’ on the box, melts onto the packaging, rendering it impossible to enjoy the chocolate as it’s effectively disappeared

Empty cereal packaging, the cereal rendered more
healthy than normal thanks to the automatic removal
of the chocolate pieces from amidst the muesli

Your friends turn up with a boot-full of mangoes they bought mega-cheap from the local mango farm

I never even knew this local mango farm existed!  The joys of new teammates who find this stuff out.  I love mango and always say that they’re the only positive part of hot season in Chad.  I bought 10 mangoes from my friends for the princely sum of 75p :)

You get mega excited when a colleague presents you with a cold coca-cola in the middle of the day

Unfortunately, with my facemask on, you can’t tell I’m smiling in this photo but trust me, I let out a little whoop of excitement when I was given this!

While they’re watering the garden, you ask your friend to hose you down even though you’re still fully dressed

So refreshing!

I carried on wearing these clothes in my house after becoming drenched.  One way of staying cool!  90 minutes later they were bone dry.

Last minute meal ideas are easy – take two tortillas out of the freezer and 5 minutes later they’re defrosted and ready to eat

Taken out of the freezer at 6pm, ready to eat at 6.05pm

A local lady makes these.  They’re cheap (15p each) and make a nice change from eating baguette which is the most frequently available source of bread here.

There are probably other signs of hot season, but I can’t think of any more right now.  Other than boring you with multiple photos of my thermometer.  My parents, sister and brother-in-law are the only ones I force to see all those via WhatsApp!  Oh yes, birthday cake candles have to be kept in the fridge else they spontaneously melt and look pathetic.  That’s a good one.  I unfortunately don’t have an exciting photo of a semi-spontaneously melted candle though, sorry about that.  Oh and then there’s the fact that you have to drink around 6 litres of fluid per day.  Can’t really take a fancy photo of water bottles but yeah, that’s about the average that I drink during hot season.  Oh and that you need to add salt to food to replace what you’ve sweated out.  That’s pretty counter-cultural when you’re taught growing up that you shouldn’t add salt to anything in order to be healthy.

Hopefully that’s given a little insight into the joys of Chadian hot season!  This has been my 5^th and they don’t get any easier.  However, we’re all in the same boat and everyone consoles each other and spurs each other on.  It definitely builds camaraderie and solidarity!