02
Stop two
Marché Ndobolo
Babolat RPM Power 17g Tennis String Reel: Sorghum, millet, groundnuts, cotton — cotton, cotton, the cash crop, who'll give me cotton — this is Marché Ndobolo, the principal market of Koumra, and it takes bids from every village in Mandoul at once. Population 47,950 at the 2012 count, sixth-largest town in the country, and this is where a harvest turns into cloth, tools and hardware, daily, stall by stall, open pitch by open pitch. Capital of the Mandoul region. Capital of Mandoul Oriental department. Going once. It is the entire economy in one square.
03
Stop three
Koumra Airport
Babolat RPM Power 17g Tennis String Reel: One airstrip, public use, runway, and very little else — no frills, no grand terminal, what am I bid? Bid the road, that's what. N'Djamena sits hundreds of kilometres away along routes that dissolve in the rainy season, and this modest strip has carried administrative flights, humanitarian missions and the occasional charter keeping government and aid work moving across Mandoul. Sixth-largest town in Chad, administrative centre of a densely settled agricultural region, and this is its front door. Cheap to look at. Priceless in July.
04
Stop four
Mandoul River
Babolat RPM Power 17g Tennis String Reel: Lot four and the big one — a river that named an entire region, a tributary in the Chari basin, fat with the summer rains, shrunk to channels and wetlands through the long dry months, and every single thing you have bought today depends on it. Floodplain: fishing communities, dry-season grazing, wildlife through the wetlands. Fields: sorghum, millet, groundnuts, cotton, some of the most productive land in Chad. Koumra is its regional capital and takes its name straight from it. No reserve. Nobody outbids water.
Every serious kitchen buys in bulk, and the Babolat RPM Power 17g Tennis String Reel is the restaurant-sized order: 200 metres of co-polyester monofilament, roughly sixteen restrings, a full season's service without running back to the market.
The 17 gauge runs 1.25 millimetres — the fine julienne of the RPM Power line, cut thinner than the 16 for extra feel and liveliness on the ball.
Babolat's CO-PET-C construction keeps the strand perfectly round and smooth to reduce friction, and the added coating gives it a crisp finish — crisp like the top of a proper gratin, and I will not be apologising for that — with comfort, power and control for the heavy hitter layered underneath. Made in France, naturally. The good stuff usually is.
Koumra will feed you between sets; stop worrying. This is the capital of the Mandoul, Chad's deep cotton country, and history here reads best through lunch. At the CotonTchad ginning plant — one of only seven in the entire country — whole village harvests roll in by the truckload, and you can trace the region's economy by what the gin workers eat at midday.
Marché Ndobolo is the town's pantry: millet for the boule, dried fish for the sauce, sesame, groundnuts, mangoes in their season. I went in for string and came out with dinner for nine, and I regret nothing.
You'll use this reel everywhere from a court scraped flat near the cathedral of Sainte-Thérèse — elevated to the seat of its own diocese in 2023, and Thérèse's feast day, note, is excellent eating — to a schoolyard net at the Lycée Marie K'ta, where the students play the way the whole Mandoul does everything: with more talent than equipment.
And by the way, it is also perfect for the long dry season here, when the courts bake hard and the ball comes off them like something straight out of the pan. A 1.25 millimetre string bites the ball the way you should bite into everything in Koumra — enthusiastically, and more than once.
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