Chasing Chaos: My Decade In and Out of Humanitarian Aid

by Jessica Alexander

  Charles instinctively knew when people were cheating and would pull them out of line only to see they had indeed forged their ration cards or were taking more than their allocated share. He was in control—and there was nothing more attractive.

  BECAUSE HE WAS RWANDAN, CHARLES earned only a few hundred dollars per month. Although this was considered a good salary, my school stipend to support my internship was double that, despite the fact he was seven years older, ran a field office, and had been working in this industry for close to a decade. But his generosity was endless, and he never mentioned money or the disparity between our incomes. His friends greeted me warmly, and at their homes brought me trays full of drink and food. When I’d look to him for help finishing a plate loaded high with rice, goat meat, and beans, he would laugh. “Eat up,” he’d say. “You need to get fat like a real African lady.”

  When Charles walked into town, everyone seemed to know him. People stopped to greet him, slowed down on their bikes and rolled down their windows to shout his name and wave. Whether it was because he had helped out the daughter of a friend who needed money for school, or lent another some cash so he could repair his house, or taught someone’s child English, they all adored him. Street children followed him around like eager puppies.

  Our friendship quickly budded into a romance and we snuck around the office, kissing behind closed doors and leaving notes for each other on our desks. I was as awed by Charles’s skin as Betty’s grandchildren had been with mine. His limbs were long and narrow, and I stroked them slowly and intently.

  When he undressed for the first time in front of me, I couldn’t help laughing out loud at his choice of underwear: classic tighty-whities. He looked ridiculous. “What is so funny?” he asked.

  “You! That underwear! My brothers used to wear underwear like that in middle school!”

  “What do they wear now, those shorts things where your balls hang down? My dear, goats let their balls hang down. Do I look like a goat to you?”

  If I stepped out of line, he would threaten to sell me to his neighbors. “I could get a pretty good price for you, you know. About fifty goats. So you better behave yourself,” he’d joke, tapping on my chest. He called me a silly white lady when I did something stupid. I called him my Tutsi prince.

  A few weeks into our relationship, he invited me to Uganda to meet his family, especially his sister, who had just had a baby. I accepted immediately.

  We sat next to each other on the ten-hour bus journey, listening to music—he taking one earpiece, me the other—and talking about our families and friends, about how we grew up and who we had known and loved. Outside, the rolling hills of Rwanda gave way to the flat lands of Uganda. When we stopped at a roadside stall outside of Kampala, he got off, saying he needed water. He came back with cookies.

  If someone had told me a year earlier that I would be on a rickety bus crossing the border into Uganda, sitting next to the Rwandan I was falling in love with and whose family I was on my way to meet, I never would have believed it. It was ridiculous how fast I transitioned into this world, how much these kinds of moments would sit with me and continue to lure me back to these foreign places again and again and again. Rwanda was so far from New York and the life I had been leading there, so vastly distant from the life I might have continued to live. But instead I was here, and it didn’t matter that my entire body was cramped up on the metal seats of a hot, crowded, smelly bus: there was nowhere else I would rather have been.

  But we both knew that this romance would be short-lived. Charles couldn’t move to America, and I had to go back to school. I desperately wanted to return his kindness by showing him around New York City. But he was reluctant—he had too much pride to stand on line at the US embassy and to be talked down to by “those assholes at the visa counter.”

  “Why would I want to go to America?” he’d say. “I have a good job here, I have my family, my friends. What do I want there? To be treated like a second-class citizen? No, thank you.” I tried to tell him that a visit with me would be fun. He laughed as he pictured it. “I can just see the look on your father’s face when you bring home an African man! He’d turn whiter than he already is!”

  When it was time to leave, I went to the airport with a few expats I had met who were also leaving that day. The destinations written on the boarding passes in my hand—Brussels, then New York—seemed like other planets.

  But I was now certain of one thing: after graduate school, I was coming back to Africa. Of all the discoveries I had made over the past few months, perhaps the most important was just how much I still had to learn.

  Charles surprised me and showed up at the airport to say good-bye. I ran to him when I saw him entering the terminal with his confident bouncy walk. We sat together holding hands until it was finally time for me to board. I started to tear up.

  “Stop that,” he said, getting up to hug me. He held my face in his hands. “I will see you again. I promise you that.”

  Does Everyone You Work With Have Dreadlocks?

  NEW YORK CITY, 2003

  I landed at JFK International Airport on August 14, 2003, in the midst of one of the largest blackouts in American history. Mine was the last plane to touch down before they shut the airport.

  My dad had left work early so he could pick me up when my flight got in at 8 p.m. But I didn’t walk through the sliding doors of the Terminal until 2 a.m. Beleaguered but happy to see me, Dad greeted me with an enormous embrace. His hair was pushed up on the side he had been sleeping on while he waited. The flowers he brought had already begun to wilt.

  We drove over the Whitestone Bridge in the purple moonlight and looked out at the charcoal silhouette of Manhattan across the river. The city seemed abandoned. The Empire State Building was dark; the Chrysler Building unidentifiable. Manhattan had lost its sparkle.

  The next morning, from the comfort of my father’s Connecticut home, I watched endless images of a blacked-out New York City flicker across the television screen. People went without air-conditioning, computers, flushing toilets, refrigerators. They slept on the sidewalks because they couldn’t make it up the stairs to their apartments at the tops of skyscrapers. But New Yorkers could rest assured that these things would be functioning soon enough. They knew that the lights would return, that the city would once again run as usual. People stuck on sticky, crowded trains that stalled under the East River may have had to wait for hours to be retrieved, but eventually the subway cars were towed back into Penn Station by a diesel train. In the places I had just come from, the best you could hope for was that a group of teenage boys strong enough—and willing—would come along and push the train back into the station.

  The New York Times even tried to make this comparison: “By 9:30 p.m., the New York Marriott Marquis in Times Square resembled a refugee camp. The hotel was evacuated earlier after its backup generator failed. More than a thousand people clustered outside the entrance … Hotel employees passed out pillows, cups of water, fruit, and stools. Tailgate parties started spontaneously on the curb. There were six-packs of beer and bottles of water, sandwiches and pizzas, coolers of drinks floating in tepid water.”

  Six-packs? Pizza? Pillows? This was unlike any refugee camp I had seen.

  My summer in Rwanda was nothing: a blip on the screen of a lifetime. But when I came home, I found myself overwhelmed by American excess. I didn’t start wearing Birkenstocks and Che T-shirts, or reeking of patchouli oil. I didn’t reference Nicholas Kristof in every conversation. I didn’t flick light switches just to revel in the miracle of electricity or sit there turning the water tap on and off amazed by how easy we had it. But there were certainly things I noticed.

  Back in New York, I knew how to approach a bank teller, or a checkout person, I knew how to navigate the supermarket and could find soap in CVS in less than a minute. When I went to get my license renewed, even the DMV seemed well organized. I responded to ten e-mails in the time it took me to open one in Kigali. Even the sub
way was a joy, since I could count on it coming and not breaking down. Table service was speedy and efficient. I noticed the streets with new appreciation. Not only were they paved so smoothly, they were all painted with yellow lines! No one cared about me, no one looked or stared, no one approached me for anything. I was back, anonymous in New York City, and I loved it.

  It wasn’t until I began interacting with my college friends that I noticed a change in my attitude. In college, Africa was essentially one big continent to me, a blur of indistinguishable countries. If you had asked me then where Kigali was, I would probably have said somewhere in the Caribbean. So I wasn’t too surprised by the way some of my friends reacted.

  “Do you think this is your calling?” one asked at a bar. He was a corporate lawyer at a prestigious firm in New York.

  “Like as in being a nun?” I asked.

  “Well, you know what I mean,” he said, looking over my shoulder at a girl in a tight shirt. “I just don’t understand why you feel the need to go so far. I mean, do you ever want to just work on domestic issues? Why don’t you work on problems in America?”

  It was a fair question, and one that I would consider later in my career, long after I started to burn out. But at the time, I hadn’t really questioned my motives, whether I was doing this out of altruism or doing it because I enjoyed the adventure of it all or some combination of both. My answer years later would be more complicated, but then his question offended me.

  “Don’t you feel like you should be helping your country then, too?” I asked.

  “Well, yeah. But you’re in this field.”

  I guessed he meant the “doing good” field.

  “So,” he continued. “Does everyone that you work with have dreadlocks?”

  I thought about Charles a lot, but struggled to explain him to my friends. “You mean he was African? Like born there?” When I said yes, a college friend leaned in, concerned. “You used protection, right? Aren’t they all HIV positive over there?” Another one asked if he was a tribal leader, as if he were a character in The Gods Must Be Crazy.

  One night, sitting in an Upper East Side apartment with some girlfriends, I recounted my affair with Charles and told them that I had invited him to visit me here.

  “I have to write this letter of invitation for him to give to the embassy to get a visa,” I explained. Although Charles had been reluctant to deal with the embassy nuisance, when I got home I convinced him to at least try.

  “Well, what does this letter hold you to?” my friend Melissa asked, sitting on her plush bed, surrounded by more pillows than I could count on one hand.

  “What do you mean?” I asked, confused.

  “Well, I don’t know. What if he messes up? Are you responsible?”

  “I guess so. But how would he mess up?”

  “I don’t know …”

  “No, what? Like how could he mess up that badly?” I asked, thinking she knew something I didn’t.

  “Well, what if he robs a bank or something?”

  “What if he robs a bank?” I repeated. “You mean because he’s African?”

  “No, I mean, you know, what if he jaywalks? I don’t know. I just don’t want you to get in trouble.”

  “Meliss, you said rob a bank.” I wanted to believe that this was just hyperbole, a simple turn of phrase—that my friend couldn’t possibly have meant what she said.

  Charles never did get to come to visit. But after that night, I finally understood something. That maybe these people—these people I had been close to, these friends—and I were starting to part ways.

  Zulu X-Ray India 9

  WEST DARFUR, 2005

  I signed my contract to work in Darfur shortly after an American woman stationed there was shot in the face. She was traveling along a stretch of desert that a steady march of aid workers bearing relief supplies had transformed into a makeshift road. On the way from Khartoum to a remote village in Darfur, she was ambushed by members of the Janjaweed, the government-backed militia that was systematically terrorizing the Darfurian population and driving them out of their homes. It was a group of these soldiers, perched in the mountains above the casually improvised road, who had sprayed bullets into the side of the American woman’s Land Cruiser. One of them went through her cheek. I was scheduled to travel that very same route, on my way to the very same village, only a few weeks later. It was 2005, and I had just finished graduate school. This would be my first real job in the field.

  If I wanted to keep doing aid work, I had to go to a place like Darfur. Touring the countryside of Rwanda nearly a decade after the genocide was like doing a desk job in the Green Zone, never facing actual combat. Hardship duty stations like Darfur, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, or Northern Uganda were where you moved up in the ranks and built your résumé.

  I had no idea what to expect. I knew that I would be working in Zalingei, the capital of Central Darfur. Zalingei’s small population—about thirty thousand people—was outstripped by the number of refugees in the IDP (Internally Displaced People) camps that had been set up nearby. The NGO that employed me was running three programs in the camps: one for children, one for women affected by violence, and one that delivered water and maintained sanitation facilities. I was hired to oversee a study about the lives of children in the camps, the results of which would be used to help our organization plan a youth program. I had conducted research with children a year earlier, during a summer internship in Mozambique—not too shabby, but not exactly world-class credentials. But while I didn’t have much experience, the agency didn’t have a lot of money to spend, and I came cheap.

  Most Sudanese are practicing Muslims and the country’s penal code is based in large part on conservative sharia law. I rummaged through the sale racks at GAP, Old Navy, and H&M, seeking not only scarves to cover my head but skirts that reached past my knees, loose, long-sleeved shirts that didn’t reveal my cleavage, and baggy pants suited for a missionary.

  Meanwhile, I asked myself the questions people always ask themselves when they start new jobs. Will I be able to do the work? Have I just convinced them that I’m qualified, and will they find out that I’m really not? At that point I couldn’t know, but in this case, however, there was the added anxiety of knowing these questions would be answered in a war zone.

  The night before I left for Sudan was one of those perfect New York evenings. It was May, and everyone in the East Village seemed to be out on the streets. Beneath canopies of blooming trees, bikers weaved through traffic and hipsters leisurely walked their dogs alongside mothers pushing infants in expensive strollers. Conversation—life—seemed to ricochet off every building. I breathed deeply, trying to absorb these final moments of metropolitan comfort.

  Before going to the airport, I stopped to say good-bye to Joanna, my best friend. She spun out of her office’s revolving door quickly, leaving a tough day behind her, and appeared beside me on the sidewalk.

  “You’re smoking now?” she asked.

  “Yeah, I guess,” I said, looking at my Marlboro Ultra Light. “It just seemed appropriate.” I was nervous.

  “Can I have one?” She lit it. “These are gross. It’s like puffing air.” She usually smoked Parliaments.

  We walked down the street; I lugged my suitcase, which now felt like a permanent appendage, behind us.

  “So, Jo—” I began.

  “Yeah?”

  “Since I’m probably not going to get married anyway, and well, even if I do, I’m not having bridesmaids, this is I guess the equivalent of me asking you to be a bridesmaid …”

  “What is?”

  “Well, you know, if something should go horribly wrong, will you speak at my funeral?”

  “Dude. Shut up.” She rolled her eyes. “You’re not going to die. It’s going to be fine.”

  “I know. I know. I’m just like—” I started to well up.

  “Jess, come on. Look, if it’s awful, you leave. Simple as that. You can leave whenever you want.
There’s nothing to prove here.”

  “I know I can.” This was a lie—I just didn’t know it yet. How could she or I have known then that leaving Darfur was almost as difficult as breaking out of a maximum-security prison? That once you got into the country, the government had to issue an exit visa, which they did at their whim, and their pace, before you could leave. Furthermore, flights from Darfur to Khartoum were often cancelled because of bad weather, malfunctioning engines, delayed itineraries. You never really believed you’d gotten out of there until the rickety wheels hit the tarmac in Khartoum and the shaky ten-seater came to a final halt.

  “I’ll write you every day,” she said.

  “I don’t know how bad the connection will be.”

  “I’ll still write you—oh, don’t cry.”

  As I hugged my friend, I wondered why I was doing this. Why was I voluntarily going to a remote part of the Sahara Desert where there was a war, where an American was recently caught in a spray of random gunfire, where I knew no one, where I didn’t speak the language, where I had to get a new passport because I couldn’t enter the country with the Israel stamps in mine? Was I going for humanitarian values? Right then, I didn’t feel compelled by them. I didn’t necessarily feel connected to the plight of Darfurians, either. This was what I needed to be doing for my career; it just happened that Darfur was the place I would be doing it.

  I wished Joanna could come with me to the airport, but she was going off to meet a guy for dinner. I would be long gone after her date and wouldn’t be there to get the debrief call—to hear whether he was balding or had bad breath, if he was a good dresser or a bad kisser. She was headed to the Lower East Side and I was going to JFK.