Chad

Dear Lila,
We have been pen-pal for 3 years now and I really want you to visit Chad. Here is some information on it so that you can prepare for your trip.

I was born and raised in Chad. I live in a small home, which is okay with me because I've never known anything else. Mom says Chad is a Third World country, but I know that really means Chad is a poor country. I guess I would rather live in a nicer country like Australia or America, but I would never want to leave my family and friends. Tonight for dinner I'm eating porridge. . . again. At least tonight we get some fish in it because the normal tomatoes, onions, spices, and the occasional hog doesn't really float my boat. At least porridge is better than the even more often served Millet. Millet was either served as a paste or a ball, my family normal eats it as a ball because it is less expensive to make. It is basically just grain dipped in Chadian sauces. Although I do like Millet if we make it into pancakes or if we put it in a Chadian Cuisine. We get millet by growing it on the far. Some other things we grow are cotton, sorghum, millet, peanuts, rice, potatoes,and manioc.

My house is one of the better villas in Chad seeing I live close to the capitol, N'Djamena,but some houses here are really beaten down. You could probably compare them to the house made out of straw in the 3 Little Pigs. Chad's coordinates are 20 degrees North and 20 degrees East. I live really close to the equator, which means it's always very hot around my house. Today I got dressed in my purple top, tan briefs, and my nicest scarf. Many Chadians wear traditional dress, mainlyplain colored long sleeve shirts and briefs while women wear scarves and hats on their hats  although a fairly large portion of us wear Western clothing and some even wear tribal garb.Most of these out fits include shorts and t-shirts because of the hot weather.

I live in Dikwa, which is a city in the region of N'Djamena. N'Djamena is the richest of the 18 regions, but it does still not have much money. I go to Shehu Sanda Primary School, Primary school basically just means secondary school. But I am at one of the nicest primary schools in Chad. At least I don't go to the SOS Primary School which has about 300 needy kids enrolled. Most of the parents of kids there don’t have jobs because most jobs are agriculturally related. So if you don’t have flat land, you can’t grow crops.

Most of my friends parents are farmers but not my dad, he works with the transportation of goods in and out of the country. He told me that we buy about $830 million worth of goods each year from different countries. Some of these goods that are imported are machinery and transportation equipment, industrial goods, foodstuffs,and textiles. He also said that people in Chad buy way more stuff then we sell. We sell about $4 million worth of goods each year, we sell cotton, cattle, gum arabic, and oil. My dad knows a lot of because he needs to speak to people in a bunch of countries.I speak Arabic and  French, which are the to most spoke languages here, but there are over 120 more languages spoke in Chad including Sara.

-Larrisa