Chad is rad

Arriving in the border town of Adre, it was not what I expected. It looked to be a fairly large settlement, with a bustling market and even a couple of schoolhouses, and there were a lot of people walking around. Not the picture of a region under siege, but soon I understood why. Besides janjaweed incursions, the border has also been the theater recently of clashes between rebels and the Chadian military. The biggest so far happened in Adre in December, so the government sent in thousands of troops to fortify the town. So Adre is about as safe as can be, while a few miles away some bad things are happening.

This became clear when we went to the hospital in Adre, which has been run for the last two years by Medecins Sans Frontieres of France. They're pretty much the only relief agency working on the border these days, and the handful of doctors and medical staff we met - expatriates and Chadians alike - are doing amazing work in difficult conditions. Besides treating expectant mothers, sick children, the old and the infirm, they are dealing almost daily with victims of the violence on the border.

The afternoon we were there, last Wednesday, a military truck rolled into the hospital about 4 p.m. and a commotion ensued. Slowly four men, all of them bloodied and seemingly in shock, were carried into the dark concrete box used as the makeshift emergency room. The driver of the truck, a camo-wearing officer who couldn't have been more than 20, told me there had been an attack on a village about 10 miles away. "Janjaweed?" I asked. "Of course," he said.

All four had been struck by bullets, but three of them had been hit in the legs or arms. Only one looked to be life-threatening - a young kid, in his late teens or early 20s, had a bullet go through his right shoulder and come out the middle of his back, traveling some pretty serious territory along the way. An American MSF doctor, a great guy named Peter Reynaud of New Orleans, told me the kid's lung was collapsing, and they called for the surgeon. A few hours before, when I met Christophe at the MSF house, he was saying he hadn't done a single surgery in the month he'd been in Adre. He was about to go to work.

I'm not going to pretend I understood what Dr. Christophe did, or Dr. Peter's explanation, but it involved jamming a rod in the guy's chest and other indelicate maneuvers. I stifled a couple of yelps, but my pain was visible. The young man on the operating table, however, was stoic. He'd been given a couple of painkillers, but nothing like what I'd need if I was in his place. At one point, Dr. Peter asked him if he was in pain, and the guy responded simply, "Yes, it's painful." His strength, and that of the doctors and hospital staff, was remarkable under the circumstances.

That night Abdul Hamid and I slept in a guesthouse run by a local Muslim leader. The beds were not what you would call clean, and there was the distinct smell of donkey in the air, but hey - he had two rooms, two lanterns and water for bathing, so you couldn't really complain. (There were mosquito nets, but they had golf ball-sized holes in them, so I slathered myself in insect repellent.) The next day, after a few more interviews in town and at the hospital - checking on the previous day's patients, all of whom were reportedly doing better - we were back on the road in the other direction, away from the border, heading for the refugee camps.