"There is a war going on in Chad, but getting anywhere near it is as difficult as buying a ringside seat for a title fight," reports TIME Nairobi Bureau Chief John Borrell, who has spent the past two weeks reporting on the struggle between government forces and Libyan-backed rebels. "Even getting to N'Djamena, the capital, was a challenge, reinforcing my long-held belief that covering Africa is 80% logistics and 20% reporting." Borrell was in Nigeria for its national elections when Chad began to heat up. He waited to send the election results from Lagos, then made an early-morning dash to the airport and the only flight that would get him near Chad that day. "I had to race 200 yards across the Tarmac, clutching suitcase and typewriter," he says.

"The door was swinging shut as I raced up the boarding stairs." After landing in Maiduguri, in northeastern Nigeria, he hired a bush taxi for a 300-km run across northern Cameroon, much of it over a heavily rutted road.

Dropped off at the Chari River on the far bank from N'Djamena, he completed his trip in a rented dugout canoe.

His pell-mell trek served to heighten his frustration at Chad's policy of keeping all reporters at a remove from the war.

"The front," says Borrell, "is 500 miles from N'Djamena. But the distance is academic, since the government shows no signs of breaking with time-honored African tradition and allowing anyone near the fighting." The frustrating alternative: gleaning nuggets of fact from the Chadian Information Minister, resident diplomats and other sources, including wounded soldiers evacuated from the battlefield. As threads of information are woven together, the pattern of the war emerges. Then the challenge is getting the story out through N'Djamena's overtaxed telex facilities, and past a censor with an imperfect command of English: he initially demanded French translations of large sections of copy, leading some reporters to render their accounts of government troops in retreat as "defensive tactical maneuvers."

For Borrell, a correspondent in Africa for twelve years who joined TIME last October, testing his logistical skills and reportorial talents against vast Africa's challenges is a familiar part of the job. In the past four months, what with assignments in Tanzania, Ethiopia and the Ivory Coast, among other places, he has spent just eight days in his Nairobi office. This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.