The other day, in the desert of southern Chad, I met a man named Otto Honke. He’s lived in Africa for many years as a German aid-agency worker. As we drove in his Toyota Land Cruiser along potholed dirt roads, through a series of villages near the city of Mondou, we talked about village life in Africa.

He explained that traditional round huts have a practical purpose. Through the course of a day, the round shape provides less wall area to be warmed by the sun than does a four-sided structure with flat walls. The roundness of the huts, Otto explained, is an architectural form of air conditioning.

Yet as you drive through many African villages these days, there’s often a mixture of round and square huts.

The square ones, he explained, are a nod to Western architecture and influence. “The right angle is a European invention,” Otto declared in his thick German accent. The circle, however, is very African. And circular homes represent a connection to centuries’ worth of functional design.

Yet the square structures may also represent a certain aspiration among their builders and residents – an aspiration for a tin roof, which won’t leak during the rainy season. You see, Otto explained, it’s quite hard to fashion a tin roof for a round hut. It has to be conical in shape. But square structures are easily fitted with tin tops. Even though most square structures in this poor country still have grass or straw roofs, the owners may be hoping and saving for a tin one. Also, the walls of square huts tend to be taller than those of round ones – perhaps to allow the hot air to rise, thus keeping the square home cool.

So now, as I drive through villages, I look for the general ratio of square to round structures. (Here's a picture of some huts from a village in eastern Chad.)

More squares hints at bigger Western influence (for better or worse) and is perhaps a measure of the aspirations of the people inside. Certainly in Chad, at least, villages closer to big cities or towns tend to have more square structures, while more-remote villages have a preponderance of round homes.

As the region becomes more Westernized, one has to wonder just how long round homes will be a fixture on the African landscape.

I’ve just spent several days touring refugee camps in eastern Chad – seeing and talking to some of the estimated 180,000 refugees who’ve fled fighting and ethnic cleansing in Sudan’s neighboring province of Darfur. Their stories are dramatic and often horrific.

But another thing struck me about being there: the grit and stamina of the international aid workers on the scene. Unlike the refugees, who’ve been forced into these dire conditions, the aid workers have chosen to live in one of the more remote and desolate places on the planet, often for months at a time. We spent two nights with a particularly hardy group in the northern town of Bahai, which sits on the rim of the Sahara Desert, a few miles west of the Sudan border and south of Libya.

Bahai is an outpost populated by several thousand people. It’s got only mud-brick buildings and no restaurants. At the local brothel, aid workers tell me, a bottle of beer costs more than a night with a prostitute. It’s a rather stark measure of the value of things in Bahai. Transportation costs make any commodity hugely expensive. And women aren’t valued much in this traditional society.

Aid workers toil seven days a week. It’s not as if there’s much to do on weekends. Their home and office is a four-room adobe building that leaks wildly in the frequent rainstorms.

My first introduction to one of these hardy souls was when we got off the 9-seat airplane at “Bahai International Airport” – a sandy airstrip marked by white stones (see photo below).

After dialing up our hosts on a satellite phone, they told us the two 4x4s sent to fetch us had gotten stuck in the mud.

About half an hour later, emerging out of the sand like a mirage, came Geoff Wordley, a senior emergency manager for the United Nations High Commission for Refugees or UNHCR. “Welcome to Bahai,” he said in a jaunty British accent, turning away our offers of water. This former British submarine officer quickly lept up on one of the nearby 55 gallon drums, pulled out his two-way radio, and began directing traffic among the vehicles sent to rescue the stuck trucks. With the crisis under control, he jumped off the drum, climbed up into the airplane, and flew away, off to another nearby camp, undoubtedly to put out whatever fires had arisen.

Another impressive guy is a French former professional hockey player named Axel (never did catch his last name). He’s been posted to Bahai for 2-1/2 months. That means he hasn’t had a single fruit or vegetable in 10 weeks. The only food available here is meat and rice. “I’m never going to eat rice again in my life,” he groused during one dinner.

During our stay, Axel was the acting chief of the UNHCR Bahai mission. He works 14 hour days, mostly trying to move several thousand refugees in truck convoys from the wadis (muddy riverbeds) they settled in when they first arrived, out to the nearby formal refugee camp called Oure Cassoni.

He was also in charge, for instance, of providing enough water for the handful of international staff to cook and bathe in. That meant coordinating a water truck every couple of days to make a run to the city of Tine. Usually that trip takes 1-1/2 hours. But with the rains flooding the wadis it’s begun to take 8 or 9 hours. It’s no wonder, then, that Axel looked a bit askance at me when I took a bottle of water out of one of the boxes in the office.

Ask these workers why they do what they do, and it’s often a combination of altruism, adventure, and, frankly, pretty good pay.

The most animated I ever saw Axel was just before a goat cookout being put on by the International Rescue Committee, a group of several international aid workers that also live in Bahai. Axel was delightedly shaving off his beard of 2 months, dipping his razor in a bowl of precious water and holding a small mirror to get every last whisker. “Finally a chance to not talk only about transferring refugees out of the wadi,” he said. But during the cookout, Axel sat mostly by himself. Maybe two-and-a-half months of all-refugees-all-the-time has left him unable to partake in small talk about much else.

And besides, a rainstorm came up during the cookout – and we all had to rush back to the UNHCR office and put away computers and clothes, so they wouldn’t get dripped on. So much for a social life in Bahai.