Chasing Chaos: My Decade In and Out of Humanitarian Aid

by Jessica Alexander

  Soon after, I got a job as an assistant marketing executive at a New York City–based advertising agency. On my first day of work, I revolved through the doors of the midtown office building and found myself in a soaring atrium. I felt as if I were on a movie set, playing the part of a young girl just starting out in the city. My heels echoed as I crossed the sunny space, clutching the briefcase my mother had bought me—a real gift, for my first real job. I was giddy by the time I pressed the elevator button.

  But the fantasy vanished quickly. I was assigned to the Totino’s Pizza Rolls account—not to be confused with their Party Pizzas or their Pizza Stuffers. Those were covered by other departments. But our department? Our department owned the Pizza Roll.

  I spent my days researching the frozen pizza market, analyzing the cuisine preferences of our consumer base in the Midwest: White Castle and Wendy’s. Once, I had to go to the supermarket and buy out the entire frozen pizza aisle. I carried stacks of freezing cardboard boxes back to the office, microwaved them all, and sat in the small kitchen taste-testing them myself. When I wasn’t stuffing my face with our own soggy, salty brand or comparing the fat content of Totino’s to that of our competitors, I was watching their ads. The singsong jingle—“What you gonna have? Hot Pockets!”—was the soundtrack to my life.

  I switched jobs a few months later. My new employer was a marketing consultancy firm, and my client list included Fidelity Bank and Sunny Delight. Instead of tasting mini-pizzas, I was leading focus groups with pre-retirees to discuss their financial plans, and ten-year-olds hyped up on Hi-C and Sunny D. Technically, this was a promotion, and although I didn’t feel like I really belonged there, it was more money than I could have ever imagined making fresh out of school. I didn’t really know what else to do, anyway.

  Then, in May of 2000, my mother died, a week after her fiftieth birthday. I was twenty-two. All the clichés turned out to be true: what once had seemed important no longer mattered at all.

  My mother had first been diagnosed with lymphoma five years earlier, when she was forty-five. It had felt then like the thing she was most upset about was having her life fantasy—the dream she had built with Dad over the past twenty-five years—crushed by disease. The whole cancer thing just wasn’t part of their plan. Or her personality: Mom had always defied exhaustion and illness. She would burst through the front door after work and yell in a singsong eruption through the house, “Hello! Kids! It’s Mom! I’m home!” In the car, she played the cool radio stations—Z100 and Power 95—and tapped the steering wheel to Marky Mark or Madonna. When I was a kid, she always had enough pieces of gum in her pocketbook for me and all my friends, and at our birthday parties she stuffed everyone’s little plastic goodie bags until they looked like trick-or-treat take-ins. Mom could make even the most mundane tasks fun—whether it was taking out the trash or learning the state capitals before a social studies test—there was always an accompanying song or dance move. As we grew older, my girlfriends all wanted to be her friend, and my guy friends thought she was hot.

  At the height of her illness, Mom threw on a wig, put on makeup, and forced herself to get up and go, if only to show everyone else that things were all right. If she did have moments of mental frailty, it was behind her bedroom door. With us, she put on a happy face and bubbly voice; she was still the blonde beauty Supermom. I knew she was sick, but I never actually believed my mom could die. I just assumed she’d beat this just like she took on every other obstacle—with determination and fervor until she won. At that time, Mom was more than a mom. She was my friend. I went to her for boy advice; I called her from the high school lobby pay phone during teenage meltdowns. She was the person who advised me on everything from what topic to pick for my English paper to what I should wear to prom.

  But eventually the illness caught up with her. Parties were cancelled. Vacations were called off. My youngest brother decorated her hospital room with his newly won tennis trophies from matches she wouldn’t have dreamed of missing a year ago. She wore a pin on her jacket that explained exactly how she felt: “Cancer Sucks.”

  During my senior year of high school, I would come home and gently turn the knob to her bedroom door. She’d be in bed, lying on her back, the comforter tucked under her chin, her wig on the bedside table. The sunlight from the window grazed the tips of her blonde buzz cut. It looked as if it had been sprinkled with gold glitter.

  No one says cure when they talk about cancer—at least they never did to my mom—and even during her healthy stretches, there was always a pestering voice in the back of everyone’s head. This may not be the end of it.

  Mom fought hard. One morning while I was getting ready for school, I heard her arguing with Dad in their bedroom. The door was closed—they didn’t want to worry us—but I opened it anyway.

  “Jessica, tell your father that I am not going back to the hospital!” She was on the floor, still in her nightgown, sitting next to a large red stain on the carpet. She reached into a bucket full of sudsy water, holding a rag that was also stained red. She pulled the rag at both ends furiously, dripping pink suds onto the floor. Mom started sobbing again. I went over to console her. Dad stood at his closet, already dressed for work. As a doctor, he was used to seeing patients in the hospital, trained to deal with them in a removed, clinical way. He now had to adjust to sharing a home with a chronic patient. Bedside manner is taught in medical school, but no one tells you what to do when the person you’re treating is your wife.

  “Honey, you just threw up a lot of blood. We have no idea what is going on,” Dad said.

  “I feel fine!” She knew Dad was right; she was arguing with the cancer. Eventually, Mom gave in. Not only that time, but time and time again. There were weekly stints in the hospital for radiation, then chemo; then more radiation. Daily, it seemed, doctors drew her blood to check low red blood cell counts and high white blood cell counts until the thin blue veins in her arms collapsed and they had to start poking her legs. She went to an herbal specialist who gave her immunity-boosting teas. Her hair fell out and then grew back again, only to fall out twice more. She gained weight because of the steroids they put her on, her face puffing and swelling. They cut open her chest to install a shunt, then cut her open again to remove it when it got infected. She had a bone marrow transplant that landed her in the hospital for three months. It failed. The lighthouse in my life switched off.

  Even though we had had five years to come to terms with her illness—and the chance that she might not survive it—after my mother’s death I was in more pain than I could have ever imagined. I spent a lot of time in bed. To me, ours was a fortunate, normal family, with weekend soccer practices and dance recitals, neighborhood barbecues, and plenty of sleepover parties. Thursday nights, my brothers and I took breaks from our homework and jumped into bed with Mom and Dad, where we’d share a fresh bowl of popcorn and watch Seinfeld together. Weren’t happy endings just part of this story? This wasn’t supposed to happen to the Alexanders or to my indestructible mom.

  I thought about the news of Mom’s death spreading through town—the lady who did her nails, the checkout person at the grocery store, the receptionist at her doctor’s office—all the people who had known her well. I imagined how shocked they must have been to learn that Mom, the woman whose laugh you could hear in the next room, was dead. The two images just didn’t belong together. For a girl raised in a sheltered New England town, protected from tragedy, with a mother who could do anything, it was the first time I contemplated that bad things could happen to us, too.

  If I could die at age fifty, I wanted a more meaningful profession than the one provided by Hot Pockets and Sunny Delight. I had inherited Mom’s vivacity, her can-do spirit, and the memory of her strength emboldened me with newfound nerve. I wanted to live life to the fullest, and that meant breaking the conventional course that I was charting. Impulsively, and against the advice of my father and all the career counselors I had met with at Penn, I quit the marketing firm witho
ut another job in the wings. I didn’t know what I was going to do next, but I also didn’t care.

  That summer I decided to go to Central America—alone. It was my first time traveling by myself, and my first encounter with such foreign conditions: I jammed inside busses filled with people and chickens. I got welts on my arms and legs from insects living inside my mattress. I bartered for fruit at the market in a language I barely spoke. It wasn’t all that exotic, as there were plenty of backpackers and tourists in the towns I visited. But during that trip, something clicked. I was for the first time encountering inequality close up—visiting towns where there was no running water and where treatable diseases went untreated. I met expats who worked in these countries, embracing a different and intriguing way of life. I saw something out there far bigger than my own New York existence, and I wanted to be a part of it. I returned home determined to pursue aid work.

  At the time, I’m not sure I understood what I was getting into. Even now, it’s hard for me to distill my feelings into a single, succinct motive. Part of me was enticed by the idea of traveling to foreign places and being part of a global community. I imagined my life abroad would be filled with adventure and rewarding, intellectually intriguing work. Another side of me was looking for a way to dodge the painful repercussions of my mom’s death. A career that would bring me to the most extreme places on earth could do just that. I would be distracted, from the grief that still lingered at home, and inside me. There was other suffering out in the world, and I wanted to touch it. Whatever my intentions, subconscious or not, they led me to the conclusion that the traditional grind could wait: I was young and free and animated by a newfound sense of possibility—the urge to move out into the world, and to be moved by it.

  I started my search confident that I would easily find work. How hard could it be? But every opening posted online, even entry-level ones, required field experience. Some asked for a master’s degree. I sent résumés and letters every day; all went unanswered.

  I was shocked and humbled. Back then, I assumed that “helping people” who were poorer than me and in need of whatever the well-off and educated could offer would be something anyone could do. I had no idea what the jobs entailed or what it meant to be qualified for one. People advised me to go into the Peace Corps, claiming that was the best way to get the field cred I needed to break into this industry. I balked at this: a month traveling around Latin America I could handle, but I wasn’t exactly prepared to commit to living in a remote village in Burkina Faso or Guatemala for a whole two years. Not at this point, anyway.

  After months of rejection letters, I found a public relations job at a small but growing international development organization in New York. I had just spent a year doing marketing. I figured that I could handle PR. It was an entry-level position, and it would get me in the door.

  The first few weeks on the job were unlike anything I’d ever experienced. The office culture was nothing like the corporate environment I had just left: small, windowless cubbyholes were packed with up to three senior staff members. Junior staffers sat in the hallways, surrounded by stacks of books and papers. Cabinets with half-shut drawers exposed a haphazard filing system. The photocopy machine broke all the time and we always had to wait several days before someone would come to fix it. But everyone who worked there was young, smart, and dedicated. They casually referenced their recent trips to Guinea or Gabon, and I’d scurry back to my computer to look up whether those countries were in Asia or Africa. They spoke authoritatively about HIV in Uganda and microcredit in India, female genital cutting in Senegal and child rights in Afghanistan. Just overhearing their conversations made me feel smarter.

  The new job helped me move past the loss of my mom; so did a new relationship. I started dating Michael, a kind and soft-spoken man a few years older than me. I had met Michael within weeks of returning from my trip to Central America. He was the most patient, comforting person I could have been with during those months. In 2002, after a year and a half of dating, he proposed. It was the night of my twenty-fifth birthday, and I said yes. With my job at the development agency going well and my new fiancé, I felt as if everything were finally coming together.

  But one day on the job, I realized there was a lot more to it and maybe it wasn’t all so together. I presented a press release about a program we ran in response to Hurricane Mitch. Our work was based in Tegucigalpa, the capital of Honduras. I spent hours researching the place, the local agency we were partnering with, and determining how we had helped the people affected by the storm. “So,” I began, “the article will focus on the work happening out of Tegu-whatever-it-is, not as much in the rural areas.”

  The Latin America Program Manager—a young woman from Honduras—looked up. “You mean Tegucigalpa?”

  “Yes, Tegoo …”

  “Te-goosy-galpa,” she said slowly, as if pronouncing it for a three-year-old.

  I repeated the capital slowly back to her, left the press release on her desk, and walked out of the office. If I was planning to stay in this field, maybe a master’s degree wasn’t a bad idea after all.

  People Died This Way

  RWANDA, 2003

  I was sixteen when I pulled TIME magazine out of the mailbox. The cover read: “There are no devils left in Hell. They are all in Rwanda.” Rivers overflowed with dead bodies. Neighbors hacked each other to death with machetes. Children were separated by tribe, and those from the wrong ethnic group, butchered. A pregnant Tutsi, the article reported, was cut open and the infant inside her ripped from her womb.

  I gazed with disgust at the images from this country that, at the time, I could neither pronounce nor find on a map. But it was May; I had my PSAT scores to worry about and summer jobs to apply for. I could easily forget about Rwanda.

  I didn’t understand until nine years later, when I saw church walls stained with the blood of Tutsis who huddled together before grenades hit them, when I saw their belongings—a comb, a coloring book, hollow clothes—scattered throughout that church, when I watched men rip thick bush with one swing of their machete. Only then did I know that people died this way.

  Rwanda was not the first African country I had been to, but for me, it will always be the one whose spell I first fell under—the place that, in my memory, represents everything good about being young, idealistic, and free.

  I arrived at night, tired after an eighteen-hour journey from New York for the start of a summer graduate school internship. I had enrolled in a masters program the previous fall and in between my first and second years went to put my studies into practice. The fat Belgian man sitting next to me was snoring in his seat, bored by an experience he clearly had too many times. I was on the edge of mine, straining to make out the blurry capital city below—Kigali.

  Although Rwanda is small—slightly smaller than the state of Maryland—its ten million residents make it Africa’s most densely populated country. Rwanda is called les pays des mille collines—the land of a thousand hills. The sequined lakes of Rwanda had been described to me as some of the most magnificent places on earth. As excited as I was to see this beautiful place, I was nervous, too. Yet I could easily imitate my more experienced graduate school classmates talking about Rwanda and what I’d be doing there in that casual, cocky air they affected so convincingly. I had to get all of the necessary shots for the first time—the names of which were terrifying enough (yellow fever, typhoid, hepatitis) and spent an absurd amount of money on anti-malarial drugs. I even bought an East Africa guidebook and a new backpack for the occasion.

  The primary languages spoken in Rwanda, a former Belgian colony, are French and the local language, Kinyarwanda. Although English was made the third official language in 1996, most people didn’t speak it. My French vocabulary consisted of “merci,” “merci beaucoup,” and “voulez-vous coucher avec moi.” The French phrase book I brought was of no help either. I ruffled through it on the flight, but “I’ll have the fondue” was meant for someone going on a glamor
ous Swiss holiday. There was no translation for “The goat stew is full of gristle. I am unable to eat it.” The index unhelpfully had no entry for “explosive diarrhea” or “convulsive vomiting.”

  The stewardess sent me off the plane with an “au revoir!” as perky as her tailored starchy blue uniform. I walked slowly down the stairs and onto the tarmac, taking in my first breath of the honeyed African air. Above the terminal, the neon lights spelling out Kayibanda International Airport flickered like a NO VACANCY sign on a roadside motel in the middle of nowhere.

  I walked to the terminal casually, trying to act as if I were as cool landing in Kigali as I would be landing in Denver. I shifted my new backpack from one shoulder to the other in what I hoped was a laid-back sort of way, as if the biggest thing on my mind was the fact that my bag was too heavy. I put my hair in a low, messy ponytail, trying to invoke my mental image of a seasoned field girl.

  I had imagined chickens walking through the terminal. Instead, there were fluorescent lights, tiled floors, customs booths that efficiently ushered people through them, a swift conveyor belt that whipped our luggage around. I was impressed. But once I pulled my suitcase through customs, everything changed. Throngs of people waited outside, pushed up against the metal gate. Shabby dogs wandered through the crowd and locusts flung themselves around the lights overhead, forming green halos. A few children played beneath the lights, and every so often a boy reached up, plucked a locust from the air, and popped it in his mouth. The rest of the kids laughed and shrieked.