Mandoko Motherless looked for frogs to eat because her stepmother wouldn't give her any food. Her stepmother's ladle was ideally suited for digging up sleepy frogs from the riverbank.

Chad, a large central African nation, is bordered on the west by Lake Chad, between Niger and Cameroon, on the south by the Central African Republic, and on the north by Libya. Its eastern border with the Sudan is mainly desert, though once the kingdom of Waddai flourished there, along the pilgrims' route from Nigeria to Mecca, across the Red Sea from Suakin and Port Sudan. Less than four million inhabitants populate Chad's 495,000 square miles. The capital, N'Djamena (formerly Fort Lamy) has barely two hundred thousand inhabitants. Lake Chad or Tchad (the name means "water," pronounced tsade, in the language of the Buduma people, who row their reed rafts on the lake) shrinks to 10,000 square kilometers in the dry season. In prehistoric times, the lake measured 1 million square kilometers.

Chad became a French colony around 1900 and an independent republic in 1960. For the past few years, the Chadian government army, backed by the French, has fought off attacks from the Libyan army and air force.