Chasing Chaos: My Decade In and Out of Humanitarian Aid

by Jessica Alexander

  My father had insisted on coming to the airport with me, and after buying sufficient magazines, candy, gum, and water, we sat down for a cup of coffee. Dad’s white hair had thinned since Mom died. He wore it full and puffy in the front to mask the growing bald spot in back. Still, his skin had few lines; it was plump and soft like my grandmother’s—an Alexander gene that I hoped I had inherited. Even though loss still hovered over him, Dad was relentlessly energetic, embracing each day with legitimate joy, and retained a curiosity about the world that for most other men would have been buried with his wife. I so admired his optimism and patience that one year on New Year’s Eve I called to tell him my resolution was to be more like him.

  Dad reached into his jacket pocket and handed me an envelope.

  “What’s this?” I asked.

  “It’s some money.”

  “I have money, Dad.”

  “I know, but you never can have enough cash on you.”

  “Dad, I don’t want your money.”

  “Jessica, it’s in case of an emergency. I don’t want you to be without US dollars. US dollars talk,” he said, shifting his hands around the coffee cup.

  He could tell I was about to start arguing and cut me off. “Look, what was Saddam Hussein carrying when he was found in Iraq? A suitcase full of American dollars. You can give it back to me if you don’t use it. But I want this on you in case you have to get out of a jam.”

  I thanked him and put the thick envelope into my bag. I didn’t want to think about the kind of jam I’d have to use it in.

  We walked to the security line casually, neither of us wanting to acknowledge that this was it. But when we finally got there and saw the NO UNTICKETED PASSENGERS ALLOWED sign, it was time to say good-bye. I hugged him for a long time.

  “Bye, Jay. I love you,” he whispered.

  “I love you too, Dad.”

  I walked through the metal detector, and looked back at Dad, still standing where we had parted. He touched his upper lip and rubbed it. I could tell he was crying. We waved good-bye again, and I blew him a kiss. I walked around the corner toward my gate before he could see that I was tearing up, too.

  My flight arrived in Khartoum at 3 a.m. As soon as I stepped off the plane I was enveloped by the dry, searing heat of a brick oven. My bag had to be scanned before I could bring it into the country. I was warned not to bring a camera or alcohol because they would be confiscated: alcohol because Sudan is a dry country, a camera because the government didn’t allow anyone except journalists with permits to record what was happening inside the country. Pornography and pork weren’t allowed either. People who worked for the UN could flash their light blue Laissez-Passers and walk in without a hassle, their suitcases usually stuffed with boxes of wine or bottles of spirits.

  I was picked up by a driver from the agency and taken straight to its compound—a two-story building: the office downstairs, and the expat guest residence upstairs. The residential floor held a few bedrooms, one bathroom, and a small kitchen. A terrace overlooked the narrow street below, and a pack of cigarettes, a couple of coffee mugs, and a few scattered papers littered the small deck table. It was 4:30 in the morning by the time I was shown my room. I turned on the air conditioner, climbed under the mosquito net and onto the foam mattress, and passed out immediately.

  Three hours later I awoke to a knock on my door. “Hello?” A female face appeared in the doorway. “Oh, you arrived. Good. I’m Sheila,” she said. All I could see was a short woman in jeans and a bright green shirt charging toward me.

  “Hi,” I said, still groggy.

  “Sorry to wake you. Mustafa needs your passport to get your travel authorization approved before we go to Darfur. Do you have it?”

  “Yeah, hold on,” I said, getting up and going through my bag. “Here you go.”

  She took it from me. “We’re all working downstairs,” she told me, moving toward the door. “Come down when you’re ready.”

  In the office below, doors swung open, then shut again—loudly. I could hear the whir of a copy machine, and a phone that wouldn’t stop ringing. Sluggishly, I detached myself from the foam mattress and resigned myself to the day.

  I MET THE OFFICE RECEPTIONIST at the bottom of the stairs. A pudgy Sudanese woman, she wore a blue-gray scarf around her head, then draped low across her body, like a dress. She smiled warmly, as if she had been expecting me, and showed me to the small office that I would be sharing with a Sudanese man named Mohammed. He looked up from the document he was reading. “Salam Aleikum,” he said. He wore glasses that were too big for his face, with thick plastic rims that magnified his eyes.

  “Aleikum Salam,” I said back, and sat down to plug in my laptop. I had to start preparing for the assessment I would be doing in Darfur and send some e-mails to my colleagues there. Mohammed helped me get organized, showed me the passcode for the Internet and where to get tea. At eleven, he looked up from his computer and said, “Would you like to join us in feitur?”

  “What is that?” I asked.

  “It’s our breakfast. Just come,” he said, waving me along. Sudanese drink tea in the morning and wait until eleven to have their first meal. I hadn’t even thought about food all morning, but as soon as I heard the word “breakfast” I realized I was hungry. I followed Mohammed outside to the lawn in front of the compound. A group of Sudanese colleagues gathered around a large bowl filled with grayish bean soup. As I approached them I realized I was the only foreigner there. At once, they dipped pieces of bread into the murky puddle and stuffed it in their mouths, chewing and slurping loudly. Mohammed tore off a piece of his bread and handed it to me. I followed their lead, dunked it into the soup, and let the dull lentil mixture fill my mouth. The bland mush needed salt. I grinned and swallowed. My colleagues were pleased.

  AFTERWARD, SHEILA BURST INTO our office, her sweaty hair sticking out of the ponytail and poking up around her neck. “Abdul left for the day without telling me. Now there’s no one to go to the bank.” I could understand her annoyance but it seemed a little extreme, especially since Abdul left after hearing his uncle had been hospitalized. “I’m going over there now,” Sheila grumbled. “God knows when I’ll be back with this traffic.” She stormed out.

  Mohammed looked at me through his glasses and giggled. I did, too. What the hell is she so pissed off about? In the coming days, I’d hear Sheila yell at the administrative staff, demanding explanations, which they struggled to provide in English. Nothing was ever fast enough. She walked out of offices huffing, leaving the people inside rolling their eyes.

  Sheila was in her midforties, and the lines on her face revealed years of smoking too many cigarettes in scorched settings. I wouldn’t realize until much later that Sheila was a character I would see on many future missions: a burned-out, middle-aged woman, who had either divorced or never married, who didn’t have children because she had spent her reproductive years in rain forests or deserts. Aid workers had a name for women like her: humanitarian widows.

  One morning, Sheila and I sat on the terrace having a breakfast of yogurt and granola. After finishing hers, she got up and brought the dishes to the sink. “You know,” she sighed, “this is the third day in a row that Fatima has not been here. I come to these places so I don’t have to do things like this.” The dishes clanked as she rinsed them hastily.

  In places like Sudan, Sheila and other expats could afford luxuries that would have been beyond their means at home—cooks, maids, drivers. They didn’t struggle with mortgages or car payments, food and labor was cheaper, and many UN employees received school allowances for their children to attend private schools. Houses came with swimming pools and gardens, guest bedrooms and terraces. It was a tradeoff for sure: families often had to bounce around the world, chasing contracts and emergencies, to places they might be reluctant to bring children. But if they were able to settle down, any attendant annoyances—your car breaking down, a leak in the roof—could be taken care of by someone else. You could always
hire people to maintain the infrastructure of your daily life. Tasks like doing the dishes just disappeared.

  The next morning, Fatima’s sister came in to tell Sheila that Fatima was still very sick and wouldn’t be able to work that day.

  “Well, when will she be back?” Sheila insisted.

  Fatima’s sister looked at her feet and shrugged.

  “OK, well, tell Fatima that we’re going to have to start looking for a new lady.”

  Two days later, Fatima’s sister returned to the office. This time it was to tell Sheila that Fatima had died of typhoid. Later that afternoon, an e-mail was sent around to all staff to make sure that our vaccinations were up-to-date.

  It would take a few days before the government approved our travel authorization for Darfur—standard procedure for anyone who wanted to move around the country—so I had some time to explore Khartoum. The call to prayer reverberated through the city five times a day, as muezzins filled the sky with their chants, echoing high above the crowded streets. At noon, the sun bleached the city white. It felt too hot to move, and most people stayed indoors. Later, when the sun’s glare lifted, the city glowed gold and copper.

  At that time, in 2005, there were multiple wars going on in Sudan, the largest country in Africa. Eleven years after the international community vowed “never again” to the Rwandan genocide, a similar catastrophe was happening in Darfur. Land disputes between seminomadic livestock herders and crop farmers who practiced sedentary agriculture had been going on for decades. In February of 2003, two opposition groups—the Sudan Liberation Army (SLA) and the Justice and Equality Movement (JEM)—assaulted a military airport in El Fasher where they captured a general and destroyed multiple aircraft. The raid came after months of conflict, during which opposition groups attacked army vehicles and encampments to protest the consistent economic marginalization of the region and the ongoing attacks on local villages by the Janjaweed, the government-backed militias formed by nomadic Arab tribesmen.

  By the time I arrived the conflict had claimed fifty thousand lives and driven more than 1.96 million into Internally Displaced People (IDP) camps in Darfur and another 200,000 to refugee camps in neighboring Chad. According to the United Nations, Sudan, with its already huge IDP populations from its earlier and ongoing North–South civil war, had the largest internally displaced population in the world.

  Although terror gripped the countryside, Khartoum itself was free of street crime. It was massive and sprawling, a web of wide roads—some paved, others simply strips of dusty orange earth. It seemed unsuitable for living, yet somehow on this vast, scorched expanse a city, fed by rivers of oil wealth and billions of dollars of Chinese loans, was functioning. Multistory buildings were going up on every corner. There were plenty of restaurants: Thai, Indian, even Italian with a separate gelato shop. Although alcohol was forbidden, the sole Chinese restaurant secretly served beer out of teapots.

  It felt as if the entire aid world had descended on Khartoum. In graduate school, I applied for unpaid internships, consultancies, and part-time jobs doing work no one else wanted to do. The agencies had seemed so inaccessible and elite then. But in Khartoum, they were everywhere, more than two hundred of them, their names and logos stuck to the sides of white Land Cruisers, flapping on flags jutting from their antennae, and on the tall gates that surrounded their large compounds.

  After a while, the names of agencies working all over the world began to sound like bids for distinction. CARE got its name from its beginnings, when in 1945 the organization rushed care packages to survivors of World War II. Others, obviously inspired by CARE, opted for other one-word descriptors: Concern, Plan, Goal, and PATH.

  If agencies worked for children, they let you know it. There was War Child, Peace Child, Invisible Children, and HANCI (Help a Needy Child International). You’d walk out of the airport and see people holding signs for incoming staffers: Save the Children here, Feed the Children there. Religious agencies found their way too, and most made their denominational affiliations explicit (World Vision, a prominent Christian agency, was a rare exception): there was Church World Service and American Jewish World Service; Samaritan’s Purse, Catholic Relief Services, and Catholic Agency for Overseas Development, Islamic Relief.

  People complained of getting lost looking for the DRC (Danish Refugee Council) and showing up at the nearby NRC (Norwegian Refugee Council) office. Sometimes a heavy accent made it hard to tell if someone was looking for ARC (American Refugee Committee) or IRC (International Rescue Committee), two streets away.

  Meanwhile, Doctors Without Borders (which we Americans called Doctors Without Borders, Nurses Without Panties and the Brits called Nurses Without Knickers) became the model for dozens of other organizations. Around the world there were Engineers Without Borders, Reporters Without Borders, Teachers Without Borders, MBAs Without Borders, Veterinarians Without Borders, Mothers Without Borders. I had even heard of an agency called Clowns Without Borders. Aid workers started referring to each other this way—our gay friends were Queers Without Borders, the assholes Douche Bags Without Borders.

  And those were just the NGOs. The United Nations had its own army of acronyms too: UNICEF (United Nations Children’s Fund), UNFPA (United Nations Population Fund), UNHCR (United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees), WFP (World Food Programme), WHO (World Health Organization), UNDP (United Nations Development Programme), OCHA (Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs).

  A typical UN meeting would be a two-hour “After Action Review” or “Impact Indicator Breakout Session.” We’d play UN Bullshit Bingo, betting packs of cigarettes on how many times these phrases would be said.

  “I call ‘strategic objectives’ and ‘reach a consensus,’ ” someone would say on the way to a meeting. “Fine, but I get ‘humanitarian architecture’ and ‘accountability mechanism,’ ” someone else would say. Another voice would chime in from the back of the Land Cruiser: “I won on ‘performance framework’ last time—I’m gonna ride that horse again.”

  The same overflowing fishbowl of agencies traveled from one disaster to another. It felt oddly similar to the Greek system in college—there were the “good” agencies, the “exclusive” agencies, the agencies that kept to themselves, and the ones that threw big parties; the rich agencies with their fancy compounds, air-conditioned bedrooms, regular Internet access, and dozens of white Land Cruisers parked in their lots. Each agency had a reputation and a place somewhere in the industry hierarchy. But the pecking order varied from country to country. Just as SigEp could be cool at WashU but lame at Michigan, so, too, could Save the Children be great in Darfur, but terrible in Aceh. It really just depended on who was there.

  One afternoon, I sat on the terrace with Caner, our young Turkish security advisor who traveled between field offices to monitor the security situation. In addition to the daily updates he received from the humanitarian community, Caner often prepared his dinner and ate it outside with the drivers and guards. “It’s the only way to stay informed about the threats,” he’d say. “Those are the guys who really know what’s going on.”

  While sucking down three cigarettes on the balcony, he outlined the dos and don’ts of life in Darfur. First, there was curfew. “You have to be out of the camp by 5 p.m., and curfew to get back to the compound is 10 p.m.,” he said, stubbing out his first cigarette in a Coke can. This wasn’t the Mom-won’t-let-me-hang-out-with-the-cool-kids-in-the-parking-lot-outside-Dunkin-Donuts-after-ten kind of curfew. This curfew was in place because 10 p.m. was when the militia, usually drunk and wielding heavy artillery, came out to patrol the streets.

  “We advise staff not to wear flip-flops to the camp,” he continued.

  “To protect my feet from the stuff on the ground?”

  “Well, yeah, there’s that. But really it’s because you won’t be able to run as fast if something happens.”

  Cell phones didn’t always work in Zalingei so we would have to communicate on walkie-talkie. Caner handed me
a sheet with the military alphabet and told me my new identity—Zulu X-ray India 9. “We’re on Channel 5. You have to alert base every time you enter and leave the camp, anytime you go anywhere in a vehicle.”

  As he explained the lingo—Oscar, for instance, meant “office.” I stopped him. “I don’t think I can say ‘over and out’ with a straight face.”

  “You need to respect the rules of the radio,” he said blankly.

  “It’s not like we’re in the military or anything.” He didn’t budge. I tried again. “Base, this is Zulu X-ray India 9. Arrived safely at Oscar. Do you copy?”

  Playing base, Caner replied, “Copy that, Zulu X-ray India 9. I hear you Lima Charlie.”

  “Lima Charlie?” I asked.

  “Loud and clear.”

  From New York City or Geneva, the field is anywhere outside of the bureaucratic headquarters. Once you land in Africa or Asia or Latin America though, the field is anywhere beyond the capital city. So being in Khartoum wasn’t really being in the field. Heading out to Darfur, though, especially the remote town of Zalingei, definitely qualified. And once you took trips from there, out to even more isolated communities, you were no longer considered in the field. You were then one step further. You were in the bush.

  Since the American woman had been ambushed, the drive from Khartoum to Darfur—a long trip across open desert—was deemed too dangerous. I was to fly instead, which meant getting from Khartoum to Zalingei would be a two-step, three-day process. First, I would take a plane to Nyala, the capital of South Darfur, and from there a helicopter to Zalingei.

  My flight was supposed to leave at 6 a.m., which meant we had to check in at 4 a.m. After a 3:30 wake-up call, the last thing I wanted to deal with besides airport turmoil was a cranky Sheila. “I’m too old for this shit,” she muttered as she got into the car, hurling her bag onto the backseat. Although the sky above us was still dark, the temperature was already 80°F and climbing. At the airport, an airplane cemetery—remnants of plane parts that hadn’t made it, their noses pressed in, wings knotted and twisted—had been left at the end of the runway for all to see. I struggled to believe that this was really the less dangerous option.