Chasing Chaos: My Decade In and Out of Humanitarian Aid

by Jessica Alexander

  “How pretty!” he said cheerfully. He turned to me and cupped my hands in his. “Thank you. Thank you.” I hadn’t done anything, and felt funny receiving a thank you. Maybe he thanked me because I looked more sympathetic than Katrin, who was still at the other end of the table scribbling notes. The man looked defeated. I wondered how long he had waited for this interview, how he must have anticipated it with such hope, thinking that by the end there would be an answer, some kind of resolution to his messy life. He walked out still holding his daughter in his arms. Giggling, she waved back at me over his shoulder. I felt ashamed by my powerlessness. I’m just an intern, I wanted to say to him. But he wouldn’t understand. Katrin handed me the file and said, “I used to cry after every interview. But it gets easier. You just see so many like them.”

  But it didn’t get any easier. I walked out of most interviews speechless and nauseous. I met with teenagers who fled after their family members had been killed, struck with machetes until they choked on their own blood. I met with a boy who saw his cousin’s “manhood” cut off, and another who fled after returning home to find his house burned down and his father’s decapitated body behind it. I met dozens of people like this during my short stay in Rwanda. Similar cases came through this office for more than fifteen years.

  The work in Kigali was going well, but I was still itching to go to the camps. Kassim and I had agreed that for my internship I would work in two other areas, including Kibuye, the town where Kiziba—the camp that held fourteen thousand Congolese refugees, and one of the red dots I’d seen on Kassim’s map that very first day—was located.

  Eventually, my pleas were heard, and everything was arranged: I would be going to Kibuye at last. Kassim would be accompanying me on the two-and-a-half-hour journey from Kigali. Even though he had been in a senior position here for over a year already, this was his first visit to the camp, too. He sat in the front seat of our air-conditioned Land Cruiser, equipped with radios, bottles of water and peanuts, and a medical kit.

  Over the weeks, I had gotten to know Kassim. He was in his late forties and recently divorced from his wife of eight years, the details of which he never explained. He hated working in Rwanda and this was his first, and probably last, mission in Africa. “Africans are lazy,” he said on my first day there. “You’ll see.” I wondered why he had come here in the first place; why he decided to move to this country, this continent. To him, Rwanda was just another posting, a chance to make a break from his ex-wife, a promotion he couldn’t refuse. Here he could save a lot of money and climb another level in the bureaucratic UN system, all the while living in his gated house, with maids and cooks, keeping his head down until his posting was over in a year.

  We made our way along a paved road, passing women with babies on their backs and bundles of firewood or food on their heads. Young children carried bright yellow jerry cans full of water under their little arms. Some balanced them on their heads. Until now, I had only seen the city, and the people there, for the most part, looked healthy and well-fed. Outside Kigali, the signs of poverty were more apparent. Homes made of mud dotted the hills, distended bellies weighed children down, rags and bare feet were the uniform. Most children were out of school—it was summer—and makeshift football fields sprouted up everywhere. Boys played barefoot, or in flip-flops, with balls made of plastic bags or banana leaves rolled together. Women stopped pounding maize in preparation for dinner to look up at our car as we passed through their villages. Others continued working their land as we drove by, their backs extended in perfect angles, knees bent and arms outstretched in positions that would make a yoga instructor envious.

  Out of the car window I saw men sitting on the side of the road, taking rest under the shade of a tree. Others strolled topless; their stomachs were lined with muscle like the rows of a xylophones.

  Each inch of the Rwandan terrain was terraced and cultivated, making a patchwork of undulating shades of green. In the mornings, the mist rose and hung between peaks, like steam that lingers after a hot shower. At late day, the sun hit the hills in such a way that it seemed as if lightbulbs were glowing inside them.

  It was the dry season. Whenever a vehicle drove on the dirt roads to and from villages, it sent clouds of ruddy earth swirling into the air and left everything in its path blanketed with dust. A few months earlier, a mandate was issued by one of the humanitarian agencies ordering drivers not to exceed 30 kilometers per hour on dirt roads, so as to limit the spray produced by moving vehicles. It sent the wrong message to go into a community, run a workshop about health and safety, and then on the way out leave everyone coughing and choking on dust.

  TO REACH THE CAMP, we pulled off the main road and drove up a dirt one for forty-five minutes, switchbacking our way up the steep mountainside. With each turn we got another view of the twinkling lake and the taffeta grasses below. Just over the perch, I could make out the lush hillside sprinkled with plastic sheeting where the community of refugees resided. We passed through the security check—a piece of string held up by two twigs. A refugee, hired as a guard, slowly got up from his chair and lowered the barricade to the ground. We drove over it with our truck.

  The driver parked in the center of the camp where a clinic, three schools, a water hole, and some administrative offices stood. Immediately, screaming children surrounded us on all sides. “Muzungu! Muzungu!” Within seconds, I had one child holding each finger, all of them wanting to take me somewhere, to show me something. The little ones at the back were desperate to get in on the action, too, as were the adults slowly making their way over to the vehicle. It was rare that a foreigner came to the camp—usually, Kinyarwanda-speaking local staff led food distributions, held community meetings, and managed day-to-day affairs. Some stared like Gloria’s grandchildren did, as if I were a celebrity walking down a crowded street. Except they didn’t have cameras or cell phones that took pictures. They had their eyes, which followed my every move.

  Kassim got out of the car, looking alarmed, as if he had been handed someone else’s child and that child had just pooped in its diaper. With a nervous chuckle he muttered, “I wonder how the mothers keep their kids apart? Don’t they all look the same to you?”

  I smiled weakly at his attempt at irony, the all-black-people-look-the-same joke. But he was panicking, and I realized he was serious.

  I had imagined refugee camps to be like this. Homes made of mud were crowded together in tight clusters. They looked as though they just sprouted from the earth, like human-sized sand castles. Cracks on the walls created a zigzag pattern, like a large road map. I couldn’t imagine how these homes didn’t melt in the rainy season, but somehow a combination of cement and mud held them together. The alleys between them were lined with sewage, and children ran up and down the pathways, dodging the soggy strips on either side. Windowpanes were made of the tins from cooking oil containers that read “Gift of USA,” which was how the United States labeled its food donations so that recipients were certain to know where their meal came from. Some camp residents played makeshift board games or cards, squatting among goats and chickens in the alleys. Already a layer of brown dust caked my pale skin and linen clothes, but the residents looked clean and fresh, their faces smooth, their skin radiant.

  For clothing, most people at the camp made do with Salvation Army donations—mementos of experiences they had never had, expressions they had probably never heard. Adults wore “Don’t mess with Texas” T-shirts and shirts that said “Shit Happens.” Kids dressed in novelty jerseys (“Co-ed Naked Field Hockey: We Know How to Handle Sticks”) and keepsake boxer shorts (“I boogied my pants off at Jenny’s Sweet 16”). And once I saw a grandmother wearing a T-shirt emblazoned with the words “Tug my Jugs.”

  DURING THE WEEKS I SPENT in Kibuye, I worked out of the agency’s three-room field office. It was run by Meredith, a French-speaking Canadian woman in her late thirties who had already been there close to a year. She worked with two Rwandan program staff and one administrative
staffer. I was the only other person in the office with whom she could communicate in English and I think she appreciated it.

  “You know, I don’t even know if that camp population figure is right anymore. We’ve been using it for over a year now, and I don’t know when the last census was even taken.” She revealed this on my first day in Kibuye, as we sat in her small office by Lake Kivu. Refugees moved fluidly in and out of the camp, so we never knew at any one time how many people were housed there. But Meredith was concerned about an emergent underground market, where people traded and forged their ration cards, adding additional children or relatives to get more supplies.

  That became my task—to reregister families and check the agency’s records. With a team of three Rwandan staff, we went door-to-door numbering houses with white chalk and writing down how many people lived inside. It was a simple job that didn’t require a lot of skill, but it allowed me to explore the camp, enter people’s homes, see how they lived. Most families crammed inside these small cracked homes, pushing all the mattresses to one side, where they’d sleep close together. When I visited, it was usually the women and girls who were at home, cooking or braiding hair, sweeping the floors, nursing infants, pounding cassava.

  After visiting for a few weeks, I started to be recognized by camp members. They invited me into their homes for tea, let me hold their babies, asked me to take their pictures. Many people in the camp confused me with Melanie, a Canadian girl who worked for another organization. She had cropped blonde hair (mine was long and dark) and she was a good six inches shorter, never mind thirty pounds heavier than I was. No one would have ever confused us back at home, but I tried not to be insulted when people shouted “Mel!” as I walked through camp. I remembered Kassim’s observation that all their children looked the same. They thought that of us, too.

  Sometimes driving through the country, I saw groups of men dressed in flamingo pink uniforms jogging or walking in unison. The first time I saw them, I asked my colleague whether there was a circus act in town.

  “They’re the Hutu prisoners. That’s the prison uniform. Those bastards.”

  By 2004 (after I had left) fewer than 5 percent of the 120,000 Hutus imprisoned for allegedly participating in the genocide had been tried. Those detained included men, women, and children. A handful of people thought to have wielded especial power during the genocide were brought to the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR) in Arusha, Tanzania. The rest were crammed into Rwanda’s prisons. Harsh conditions contributed to the deaths of more than 1,000 inmates during 2000. At the pace local courts were proceeding, human rights organizations estimated that prosecuting all these people would take more than a century.

  Gacaca was the traditional communal law enforcement process that handled village or familial disputes—everything from theft to marital issues, land rights, and property damage. The word gacaca means “cut grass” in Kinyarwanda, to symbolize the outdoor gathering place where the community would come to deliberate. The government realized that in order for economic recovery to begin, the thousands of men biding their time in jail had to come back to their communities and work. They hoped the gacaca courts could speed up the process.

  The day I came to listen to a gacaca trial, I recognized the pink uniforms on the men standing on the back of a pickup truck, holding onto the sides for balance as it pulled into the community center. When the truck arrived, wives, children, and friends ran to greet the prisoners. The men embraced their spouses and swooped their children up in the air to cuddle them. They shook hands with neighbors and laughed with their siblings. These were not the monsters I had imagined. Some were quiet and shy. Others seemed charming and friendly. These looked like normal men—men who had lost themselves for three frenzied months, and did the unspeakable.

  But gacaca forced these men to speak. In order to get a reduced sentence, the accused had to admit his crimes in front of his peers, neighbors, and family. It was the surviving community members who acted as the witnesses, lawyers, and jurors. Nineteen judges, mostly women—appropriately, and inevitably, given that when the country started to rebuild in 1995 an estimated 70 percent of the population was female—determined the credibility of the accused and decided their punishment. I sat with a translator on the edge of the hill, looking down on the fifty or so community members who had gathered on the grass to listen to the prisoners disclose their crimes and implicate those who had participated with them. Those who confessed and whose confessions were deemed truthful were either immediately released or had years shaved off their prison terms.

  That day we heard from a man who was accused of murder.

  “He killed six people. Two of them children,” my translator whispered in my ear.

  Without flinching, the man described how he and his group staked out a strategic place in the bush. They confronted everyone who passed and asked for the identity cards. If the person was a Tutsi or did not have a card, his group killed him on the spot.

  He told the judges about a woman who hid Tutsis in her house. The woman eventually betrayed the Tutsis she was sheltering and told his group where to find them. Although he denied having participated in the murders himself, the man on trial admitted that the men he was with had gone into the woman’s home and killed them all.

  “The leader of their group told them to kill quickly,” my translator whispered, “because in the neighboring town they had finished the job of eliminating Tutsis long ago. It was a competition. His group was ordered to pick up the pace so that no Tutsi was left.”

  While children roamed through the crowd, radios played softly in the background, and cows passed through the judge’s circle. The accused spoke freely and mildly about the murders he had committed, as if he were merely commenting on the weather.

  The community didn’t get up and scream. They didn’t run up to the people who killed their family members and rip their eyes out. They sat quietly and listened, poised and calm, and then stood up one by one to cross-examine the prisoner. “I saw you kill my cousin.” “You took my goats.” “You went in a truck with my brother and then I never saw him again.”

  The next man on trial named the people he killed. None, he said, were children. A woman from the crowd remembered his involvement differently, though.

  “You came and knocked on my door. You came into my house and tapped the side of my arm with a machete, telling me to shut up while your friends searched the ceiling and under the bed for my son. And when you found him, you killed him.” Surrounded and supported by her remaining friends and family, this woman pleaded with him to admit to this act.

  Finally, he responded. “I didn’t actually kill the child,” he told her, “but I was in the group that did. Bring the Bible here so I can swear on it.”

  Although it was a small town, I met more aid workers in Kibuye than I had in Kigali, and on our days off it turned out there was a lot to do: take boat rides on Lake Kivu, drive to the tea plantations, visit the mountain gorillas. I crossed the border into Congo for $30, which seemed like a lot of money, until an American friend reminded me that it was essentially a cab ride from the Upper West Side to Brooklyn and to get over it. I got over it. In Kibuye I awoke to the sounds of birds and chickens, walked to the office on a path beside the lake, read on the porch at sunset while frogs and crickets softly announced the end of the day.

  My posting after Kibuye would be Kibungo, a small border town near Tanzania, where the majority of the more than twenty-three thousand Rwandan refugees were returning from Tanzania were lodged. It was there that I fell in love.

  I MET CHARLES AT THE field office, a small building on the side of the road whose staff oversaw the returning refugees. Charles’s parents had fled Rwanda to Uganda in the late 1950s, when the wave of violence between the Hutu and the Tutsi struck the country. He was raised in the capital, Kampala, where he went to the English school. He was tall and smart and funny and didn’t care that I was American. He wasn’t like the other Rwandan men who had ei
ther asked me to get them a visa or to marry them within hours of our meeting.

  Charles supervised aid distributions to returning refugees in Kibungo, and I was sent there to help him. The refugees were loaded onto the backs of trucks at the Tanzanian camps, driven over the border and dropped off in Kibungo, where they were registered and supplied with food (rice, oil, and salt) and NFIs (the non-food items that Kassim had explained)—bars of soap, cooking materials, tarps with which to make temporary shelters. In most cases, the refugees’ property in Rwanda had been taken over by other families and their belongings lost. Everything they owned, they carried.

  One evening, a scheduled food delivery was delayed and the repatriating refugees waited overnight without anything to eat. When we arrived the next morning, they flocked to the car, surrounding it before we had even parked. They were frantic and flailing, shoving papers in Charles’s face, speaking wildly, each one needing help and attention. With the calm of an airline ground attendant after a flight has been cancelled, he walked through the crowd, writing down the requests, assuring each person one at a time.

  There were limited resources, and he had to distribute them to a group of people whose needs far exceeded our ability to fulfill them. He spoke calmly to women and touched the noses of their babies strapped to their backs. He organized people into distribution lines more efficient than the checkout lanes at Whole Foods. I was assigned to the soap detail, and handed three long bars, stacked like Jenga pieces, to each tired but grateful recipient.

  A huge truck rolled in minutes later and dumped bags of corn, rice, maize, seeds, and oil. Charles split the returnees into groups of twenty. Each group was given a three-month ration of food, which they were left to distribute among themselves. Women took off their cloth head wraps to use as makeshift bags for carrying rice. Others untied their overskirts to do the same.