Chasing Chaos: My Decade In and Out of Humanitarian Aid

by Jessica Alexander

  And then I saw my name. On a sign held by the smiling driver sent to pick me up. He wore a blue UN T-shirt and matching oversized baseball hat. I waved, he pointed to his sign, I nodded, he smiled and folded it under his arm.

  “I Alfred,” he said.

  “Hi. I’m Jessica,” I said, reaching out to shake his hand. “Thank you so much for coming to get me!” He didn’t understand a word of what I was saying, but through nods and smiles we seemed to be communicating brilliantly. I had a friend and I felt safe. Alfred grabbed my bag and led me through the crowd to the car.

  The inside of the Land Cruiser smelled of diesel fuel and hot plastic. Alfred revved the loud engine and pulled out onto the brightly lit airport road. We passed large billboards advertising everything from milk to tires to condoms. As Alfred made the first turn into Kigali, it got dark like a country road at night. A labyrinth of dusty wooden stalls sold water bottles, lampshades, bed frames, bags of rice, and electrical plugs. Open fires dotted the sides of the road, and white hazy smoke steamed up from the piles of smoldering trash. The air smelled like melting plastic and burning rubber. Neighbors milled along the sides of the roads, talking, resting, braiding hair, sucking sugarcane. Black faces and white eyes were illuminated by candlelight.

  Alfred and I didn’t talk much.

  “Are you from Kigali?” I asked.

  “Yes, yes.” He nodded.

  “Do you live here with your family?”

  “Yes, yes.”

  “Where in Kigali do you live?”

  “Yes, yes.”

  After about fifteen minutes, we pulled up at a squat building. It didn’t really look like a hotel at all: there was nothing distinguishing it from any of the other ones we had passed. The hotel sat so close to the road there was no place to park. I looked at Alfred with some confusion when he killed the engine right there in the middle of the road. But traffic swerved around us indifferently. Alfred quickly got out of the car to get my suitcase. I was embarrassed by its size and weight as we clumsily lugged it up to my room on the second story.

  He opened the door to my room and held it as I entered. It was small; the concrete floors and walls were painted a dull red color. A single bed covered by a mosquito net sat in the center, a mirror hung crookedly on the wall next to it. A short stack of wooden drawers hugged the corner of the room. To the left was the entrance to the bathroom, which held a toilet, a sink, and a barrel of water that came up to my chest.

  Alfred showed me how to tuck the mosquito net under my mattress so that no bugs got in, checked that the bucket of water in the bathroom was full, flicked the light switch on and off, and finally pointed to his watch—his promise that he would be back for me in the morning to take me to the office. Wait! I almost said out loud, almost reaching out to tug on his T-shirt. You’re leaving? Don’t go … please? He shut the door quietly behind him and left me there, alone and tired.

  My suitcase took up most of the floor space next to my bed. I needed a shower and found my shampoo and soap, neatly packed into Ziploc bags, and walked into the dark bathroom. A small pail floated on top of the bucket of water in the bathroom. I dunked it into the water. It was chilly, certainly colder than body temperature, and colder than anything I had ever deliberately dumped over my head before. A cold shower I could handle; I had taken many of those at summer camp. I used to tiptoe in and out of the cool stream, lathering up and rinsing off. But now I stood still, holding the full pail over my head, cringing with goose bumps in anticipation of the cold spank on my skin. I shivered as the first splash of water trickled down my hair onto my back.

  The next morning Alfred arrived exactly at the time he promised and seemed as excited to see me as I was to see him. I jumped in the car and he quickly pulled out onto the city traffic.

  When I was a kid, my dad invented the “Ten Things Different Game.” We’d arrive at a new place, usually Florida to visit my grandmother, and Dad would ask me and my brothers to find ten things that looked different than at home. “The trees—they’re palm!” “The weather—it’s hot!” “The houses—they’re condos!” “The people—they’re all old!” As Alfred navigated my new city, I could tell it wasn’t going to be difficult finding ten things different in Kigali.

  By half past seven the streets were already crowded with people, either on bikes, on foot, or behind the wheels of cars that looked more like demolition derby rejects. Some had smashed windshields; others had doors held on with duct tape. Some were missing doors altogether. But no one cared—the attitude seemed to be, if it drives, I’m driving it. Without regular electricity, there could be no traffic lights, no signals—just random merging, staccatoed honking, and suffocating fumes.

  On the connecting side streets were crowds and crowds of people: women walked slowly, balancing heavy bags brimming with rice or flour on their heads. Some had tied babies tightly to their backs with colorful swaths of cloth, the children’s little heads bobbing side to side, like metronomes. Others held large buckets of sloshing water, their shoulders taut, their arms pulled straight down. Young children skipped to school in bright blue and pink uniforms, wearing small backpacks that hopped away from their backs with every step. Older students walked slowly and carried their books close to their chests. Some men dressed formally in baggy suits and polished shoes, holding shiny briefcases with silver buckles. There were no sidewalks that I could see, so foot traffic converged with cars, and they seemed to move together according to a single frenetic rhythm that everyone could feel but me.

  Before I came, people told me that I’d be able to tell the difference between Hutus and Tutsis. Hutus were stereotypically squat and short while Tutsis were long and lean. Others said that you’d never know the difference. For centuries, distinctions between Hutus and Tutsis wouldn’t have been apparent to outsiders: they shared the same cultural practices, lived next to one another, attended the same schools and churches, worked in the same offices, and drank in the same bars. A considerable number of Rwandans were offspring of Hutu-Tutsi marriages. Alfred was of medium build and normal height—I didn’t know which ethnic group he belonged to. But as I noticed the giraffe-like features of some of the women and men throughout town, I thought, those must be Tutsis.

  NINE YEARS HAD PASSED SINCE the 1994 genocide during which the Hutu ethnic group systematically exterminated their Tutsi neighbors. Around eight hundred thousand Tutsis were murdered in the space of one hundred days—five times as fast as the Nazis had exterminated people during the Holocaust. Without killing machines like gas chambers, without trains that could carry carts of people to their deaths, without sophisticated telecommunication equipment to transmit orders, the Rwandan population managed to turn on itself in some of the most savage and barbaric ways possible at a record speed.

  The pulse of violence had been beating for decades. In the 1930s, Belgian colonial officers issued identity cards, which classified Rwandans according to their ethnicity. Under Belgian colonial rule, the administration favored the Tutsi minority for educational opportunities and high-powered positions within government and civil society. When the Belgians finally granted Rwanda independence in 1962, the Hutu majority took control, and a group of Tutsi exiles in Uganda formed the Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF). Throughout the early 1990s, they staged attacks to overthrow the Hutu leadership. But the genocidal killing spree was ignited after the plane carrying President Juvenal Habyarimana, a Hutu, was shot down on April 6, 1994. He was returning from Tanzania, where several African leaders had gathered to discuss peace accords. It is still unclear who actually fired at the plane, but the president’s death threw fuel on a conflagration that was already slowly burning. Lists of Tutsi families had been prepared, machetes and guns were stockpiled, and within twenty minutes of the downed plane, Hutu extremists started their hunt.

  The Interahamwe (meaning “those who attack together”) became the name for the thirty thousand or so Hutu extremist Nationalists who participated in the killings. The propaganda radio commanded H
utu brothers to kill the “Tutsi cockroaches” and spread messages of fear throughout the country: “You must fight these enemies, really ravage them, in short, defend yourselves.” The international community largely looked the other way while the massacres were happening. On April 21, 1994, the United Nations reduced its forces from 2,500 to 250 after ten Belgian soldiers who had been guarding the Rwandan prime minister, Agathe Uwilingiyimana, were killed with her. The United States refused to acknowledge the acts in Rwanda as genocide, because if they did, international law would have required them to intervene. President Clinton had just lost eighteen soldiers in a fight over a downed Black Hawk helicopter in Mogadishu; he wasn’t about to put more American lives at risk for another group of warring Africans.

  By July 17 when the RPF defeated the Rwandan army and Interahamwe, eight hundred thousand people had been killed. Paul Kagame, the leader of the RPF, took military control of the country, and two million Hutus fled to neighboring countries for fear of retribution. I arrived in 2003, an important year in Rwanda’s history for two reasons: the country adopted a new constitution in May and held its first post-genocide presidential elections that summer. Kagame won with 95 percent of the votes cast.

  When I arrived in Rwanda that June I was still a student, a year shy of receiving my first master’s degree. I had come to Africa for the coveted summer graduate school internship. I didn’t sign up to go in a fit of passion, or out of a desire to escape to the most far-flung exotic place I could get a job. I wanted a good job, where I’d learn, make some contacts, and try out life “in the field.”

  In classes, the “field” was the reference point for everything. “Yeah, but in the field, it’s totally different,” someone would huff, referring to a microcredit loan project they worked on in Angola. “It’s fine to discuss women’s empowerment in this ivory tower, but in the field there’s just so much more to it,” others would bemoan, citing stories from a maternal health clinic in Bangladesh. If you weren’t there to see it, to live it, you really had no authority to talk about it. Even though I did my reading, diligently highlighting the important passages, I would bite my tongue and stay silent in class, knowing I lacked the requisite field experience.

  Many of my classmates had already worked or traveled overseas, and they talked about their summer job prospects in Ethiopia and Iran as if they were deciding between a job in New York or DC. Danger, discomfort, remoteness—these things were less important than a chance to work in the latest disaster. As for me, I was coming to Rwanda to work for a UN organization that dealt with refugees, an internship that a professor had encouraged me to apply for after I wrote a paper about the region.

  Surrounding East African countries had bloody histories well before the Rwandan genocide erupted. Over the years, thousands flocked to Rwanda seeking refuge, and by the time I arrived in 2003, Rwanda was providing material assistance to close to thirty-five thousand camp-based refugees, the majority of whom were Congolese and the rest Burundians. This agency was mandated to protect the people who crossed the border into Rwanda seeking refuge. I soon learned these were the people I would be working with during my internship—and not Rwandan refugees, as I had assumed from the beginning, and still assumed, as Albert and I pulled into the office driveway.

  WE WAITED AT THE ENTRANCE of the three-story compound for uniformed guards to lift the heavy gate and wave us along. Inside, I took a seat in the lobby while someone summoned Kassim, the man who had hired me. We had communicated a few times over e-mail after my professor had put us in contact. Moments later, he appeared. A short, balding Lebanese man, he wore a pressed shirt and khaki pants and his glasses slipped down his nose as he put his hand out to greet me. “Jessica!” he said enthusiastically. He hadn’t asked my name, but it was a pretty safe bet: I was the only white person sitting in the lobby.

  I followed Kassim to the third floor, where he led me past half a dozen rooms along a corridor. The building was cleaner than I expected, the walls and tan tiled floors smooth and shiny. Kassim’s office was a huge room with a large window overlooking one of the forested ridges surrounding the city. Lush green light spilled in from outside.

  “Wow,” I gasped.

  “Yes, it’s not bad. Here, have a seat.” He pulled a chair out across from his desk. “Do you want some coffee? Tea?”

  “No, thank you.”

  “I’m going to have some. Henry!” Kassim yelled. A short Rwandan man wearing an old collared shirt and faded khaki pants appeared in the doorway.

  “Tea, please,” he said. Henry scurried away.

  A huge map of Rwanda and the surrounding countries hung behind Kassim’s desk. Red pushpins dotted the map. He stood up and pointed to it. “Let me get you oriented. We’re here,” he said, pointing to Kigali. “This is where we process all of the resettlement cases, handle all of the urban cases, and coordinate the camps in the country. In this camp, Kiziba, there are fourteen thousand refugees from Congo who have been here for over five years. We do a lot of GBV [Gender-Based Violence] programming there. In this one—” he pointed to the red dot near the Burundi border—“Burundi refugees live. We manage both of those camps. You’ll visit them and see.”

  I listened intently, took out my notebook, and started jotting down words: urban cases, two camps, Kiz-something.

  “We have field offices here and here,” he said, indicating one town near the border with Congo and another near the border with Burundi. “We also have a temporary field office here in Kibungo but will be closing it by year end.” This red dot was in the southeastern part of Rwanda, close to the Tanzanian border.

  Tanzania usually had an open-door policy for refugees, but the massive influx after the 1994 genocide had them reconsidering their usual protocol. As Kassim explained, now that Rwanda was a stable country, Rwandans in Tanzania could no longer claim refugee status and the Tanzanian government went so far as to call them illegal immigrants. Beginning in 2002 the Tanzanian government removed these people from Tanzania, all twenty-three thousand of them, in a period of three months. Although organized by the United Nations, the repatriation to me seemed nothing more than a glazed-over forced removal of the Rwandan refugees for the benefit of the Tanzanian government.

  After so many years in another country, most people didn’t have roots or family to return to. Their land and homes in Rwanda had been reallocated to others, and basic social services—health care, schools, water—were lacking. “We’ve been dealing with the returnees there, registering them at the border, providing them with initial supplies, and making sure they are safe to return. There are only a few left who need to be processed and given NFIs [non-food items], so in a few more weeks we’ll be shutting down that office,” Kassim explained.

  He sat down and sipped the tea that Henry brought on a big round brassy tray.

  “So I hear you are good writer,” he said.

  “Sure, I guess …”

  “Well, we need a good English writer here to write up the refugee status determination interviews.”

  I spent much of those early days pretending to understand the lingo before hustling back to my desk to figure everything out before anyone caught on to the fact that I had no idea what they were talking about. But now, sitting across from Kassim, I listened intently, nodding without fully comprehending, and eventually, I caught on: in Kigali, close to twenty-three hundred urban refugees and about three thousand asylum-seekers of various nationalities were receiving limited assistance. Those were the cases I’d be working on.

  “A lot of the interviews were conducted by nonnative English speakers, so we need someone to correct them in solid English so that they’re in good shape to send to Nairobi.”

  Again I nodded. Nairobi, English, interviews.

  “OK, I have to go to a meeting at UNICEF now, but Katrin will show you around and get you started.”

  Kassim yelled for Henry, who appeared within seconds, as if he’d been standing behind the door waiting for his next order that whole time. />
  To Henry: “Get Katrin!” Then, to me: “Have you found a place to live yet?”

  “No, I’m staying at a hotel.”

  “Oh, OK.” He paused. “I’m sure you will find something soon.”

  “Do you know where I could find something?” I asked.

  “It’s hard to get a temporary rental here. I don’t know. Ask around. I’m sure it will work out.” I wasn’t as sure. Who was I supposed to be asking?

  Katrin appeared at the door and Kassim introduced us. She was a tall, stocky woman from Ukraine who looked only a few years older than me. She had cropped blonde hair, a plump face, and a wide smile.

  Kassim seemed relieved to get me out of his hair and ushered us out of his office. “Show her around and give her that extra desk in your office.”

  I followed Katrin as she led me from office to office introducing me to the staff, people representing a mixture of cultures, races, and backgrounds—some from Canada, Europe, other African countries, and many Rwandans. The staff at the time totaled sixty-one, the majority of them being locals. The Rwandans at the office were happy to meet me and stopped whatever they were doing to chat. “Welcome to Kigali,” they said.

  Programs for refugees happened in the camps, out in the countryside. The Kigali office was where the basic administration, such as financial procedures, donor reporting, IT, and HR, took place. My office with Katrin was spacious enough to fit two desks, and we both faced a balcony overlooking the busy street. The tall bookshelves lining the walls were filled with unmarked blue binders. Katrin had a tackboard next to her desk where she had hung a typed paper titled 1951 Refugee Convention, a scribbled note marked “Nanny” with a phone number, a typed list of office extensions, and a small photo of a snowy city which I guessed was somewhere in her home country, Ukraine.