(especially Sarh)
Many people don't even know the first thing about Chad's geography: where it's located (in north-central Africa). Hopefully, if you follow my ministry, you do already know that much! But here are some other details that you may not have known (because I didn't know most of these things until I researched them myself).
1. Chad is the third largest landlocked country in the world.
There are currently 44 landlocked countries and five partially recognized landlocked states in the world. The two largest are Kazakhstan and Mongolia, so that Chad is the largest landlocked country in Africa. However, it’s only by a small margin, as both Niger and Mali are only slightly smaller than Chad.
Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Landlocked_country#List_of_landlocked_countries
2. Sarh is nearly 700 miles (1,124 kms) from the nearest ocean.
The nearest coast to Chad is in Cameroon, whose coast is on the Gulf of Guinea in the North Atlantic Ocean. The Chadian languages I work with do not even have a word for ocean, so in the Bible they use a phrase or compound word meaning “big salty river”.
Source: maps.google.com
3. Sarh is geographically closer to Paris than to Cape Town.
Years ago, a church where I was speaking announced me in the bulletin as “missionary to Chad, S. Africa”. They were only a few miles off!!
Source: https://www.distancefromto.net/
4. In 2018, Chad was the 12th least visited country in the world.
14 of the 20 least visited countries listed are in sub-Saharan Africa. It’s not because these countries have nothing interesting to see. But travel and communication can be difficult; resources and facilities for tourists are limited, and some are ravaged by war. In Chad, most of the foreigners who do travel to the country come for business: missionaries, business people, and NGO’s (NGO’s are non-government organizations, such as charities and development projects).
Source: https://www.travelmag.com/articles/most-and-least-visited-countries-in-the-world/
5. The southern quarter of Chad contains 64% of the population; the northern half contains about 8%.
Southern Chad also has nine of the country’s ten largest cities: N’Djamena, Moundou, Sarh, Kelo, Koumra, Pala, Am Timan, Bongor, and Mongo. Abeche is the largest city in central Chad. The largest city in the north, Fada, is the twelfth largest in the country.
Sources: https://knoema.com/atlas/Chad/Region-profiles; https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regions_of_Chad.
6. The distance between Sarh in southern Chad and Bardaï in northern Chad is greater than the distance between Jacksonville, Florida and Detroit, Michigan.
According to Google, it takes about fifteen and half hours to drive from Jacksonville to Detroit. But it would take far longer to travel this distance in Chad, since the roads are so bad (they are so bad now that you can’t even get to N’Djamena in 15 and a half hours, let alone to Bardai). I don’t even want to think about how long it would take to drive to Bardai, and apparently Google doesn’t want to either!
Source: maps.google.com.
7. Chad has the lowest percentage of paved roads in the world.
Dangerousroads.org claims that less than 1% of Chad's roads are paved. This percentage is probably not rapidly improving, as Chad’s existing paved roads are usually poorly maintained. GlobalEconomy.com listed Chad’s roads as the worst quality roads of the 141 listed countries. Note that this is not all the countries in the world, but only those for which they had data.
Sources: https://www.dangerousroads.org/around-the-world/statistics-and-facts/4941-countries-with-lowest-of-paved-roads.html; https://www.theglobaleconomy.com/rankings/roads_quality/.
8. Chad's largest region, Borkou in northern Chad, is nearly as large as Oregon.
But being in the desert, Borkou has a similar population density to that of Alaska, with a population of only around 100,000 people.
Source: fr.wikipedia.com.
9. The region of N'Djamena has about the same land area as Denver, Colorado.
The region of N’Djamena includes the capital city itself (about 720,000 people, slightly less than Denver) and the surrounding area, similar to Washington D.C. in the US or the Australian Capital Territory in Australia. The entire region of N'Djamena has over 1.2 million people.
Source: https://knoema.com/atlas/Chad/Region-profiles.
10. Faya-Largeau in northern Chad only gets 0.4 inches (10 mms) of precipitation annually. Sarh gets 45 inches (1,140 mms).
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| Map of Chad's climate zones |
45 inches is about the same annual precipitation as Maine. Two-thirds of Sarh’s annual rainfall comes between July and September, the peak months of rainy season.
Source: http://www.weatherbase.com/.
