Chasing Chaos: My Decade In and Out of Humanitarian Aid

by Jessica Alexander

  A warm Bangladeshi woman in her early thirties with a round face, deep dimples, and curly hair heard the gate open and skipped over to me as I lugged my suitcase along the pebbly path. She immediately put out a hand to help. “You’re Jessica! I’ve been waiting for you! I’m Amina.” After my time with Sheila, I was relieved to be welcomed by such a friendly woman, especially since I knew she would be my direct supervisor. We had exchanged a few e-mails before I arrived but I hadn’t guessed she’d be this nice.

  Amina introduced me to my new colleagues. Laura, the gender-based violence officer, had already been working in the camps for five months. She was in her early thirties, a hardened rape counselor from Queens who loved the Beastie Boys. She had a thick tattoo around her arm, and spoke with an unsentimental New York accent. Matthew, a shy, sweet Swiss water engineer, oversaw the water and sanitation program, which included everything from basic camp hygiene, to digging wells and designing and constructing latrines. Although he spent his days figuring out how to keep people clean and safe from their own shit, he blushed whenever the word was spoken. “I prefer to call it excrement,” he said.

  Christine was an adorable blonde Canadian in her early twenties who always seemed to be bouncing. She had been here for more than seven months working as the finance administrator. Like me, this was her first real job in the field. Then there was Jumma, an older Pakistani man in charge of logistics. Jumma was routinely asked to do the impossible, procuring everything from Nescafé to printing paper, from the foam mattresses we slept on to the daily donkey delivery of two barrels of water that we used to shower. He had a head of thick gray hair, stocky legs, and pants with ten pockets. You wanted him on your side because he’d be the one to find a working fan or extra lamp for your bedroom when everyone else said it was out of the question.

  Dmitri was the head of the Zalingei office: everyone’s boss. A tall, balding, handsome ex-military man from Russia, he was kind and approachable despite his intimidating résumé. He wore a T-shirt which displayed a picture of his wife and son and drank his coffee from a mug with the same photo on it. Dmitri welcomed me warmly and showed me to my room. It was small but had everything I needed: a bed and mosquito net, a lightbulb, a screened window, a fan, and a small dresser. After so much anticipation, I was finally here, and the place didn’t seem nearly as rough as I had expected. I unpacked slowly and heard a knock on my door.

  Amina popped her head in. “You OK?”

  “Yes, yes!” I said. “Here, come in.” I didn’t have a chair in my room so she sat on the bed.

  “It’s really great to have you here. I think your study will really help us plan our programs. I have some ideas now and am applying for more funding, but we need to know more about the children and their needs before we can make further plans.”

  People like Amina ran programs that worked to restore normalcy for children. Experts in child psychology had long understood that children needed structured and stimulating places to go and outlets for play, especially after times of trauma. Usually children were the most resilient people in a population and could rebound easily if given the chance just to be kids. My role was to investigate how the children in the camps were coping with the changes in their lives—to question boys and girls about their feelings of safety, their daily routines, their fears, who they went to for help and support. There were many questions Amina wanted answered. Did girls go to school—or were they too busy with household chores or taking care of their younger siblings? Did boys go to school—or did they try to earn money by making bricks? What did the children here like to do for fun? Had their behavior changed since coming to the camp? Did any show signs of antisocial behavior? What did antisocial behavior even look like in place like Darfur?

  “I’m excited, too.” Elated was more like it.

  “Well, let me know if you need anything and I’ll see you out there for dinner. My room is right next door,” Amina said, getting up to leave. She pulled on her long, yellow blouse so that it hung to mid-thigh.

  I changed my clothes for dinner and walked outside. Laura was already there, tucking into a plate of cold lentils, some mushy spinach-like greens, white rice, and chicken. She looked up at me. “Sorry, I couldn’t wait. Starving. Plates and forks and stuff are in the cabinet over there,” she said, pointing to a tall wooden cabinet, full of all sorts of unmatched utensils, like a rummage bin at a tag sale.

  The rest of my new colleagues came out one at a time and I filled my plate with food. It was surprisingly good. I told everyone so.

  “Ha,” Laura laughed. “That’s how you tell the newbies. Give it a few days. We have the same thing every night.”

  Dmitri came out of his room holding a radio, a satellite phone, and his cell phone, switching among them to get reports of what was going on in the neighboring town of Mukjar. I tried to listen to what he was saying as we ate.

  “There’s no one in the markets … Right. The weapons are facing outward?” Dmitri paced up and down the corridor. “No camels. Yeah, sounds pretty standard. Uh-huh. Right. OK, I’ll call back in half an hour.” He got off the phone and walked back to where we were sitting.

  “So, Alasdair says there’s talk of another attack,” he announced.

  Alasdair was the head of the Mukjar office. Apparently he had information that the Janjaweed would soon be attacking the town. He and Dmitri were discussing whether Alasdair should evacuate the staff and come to Zalingei.

  “God, Jessica Simpson has really gained a lot of weight,” Christine said, flipping through the People magazine I brought from home.

  “I’m gonna hop in the shower and then watch the last episode of West Wing if anyone wants to join,” Laura announced, slapping her thighs before jumping out of her seat.

  “Sweet. I’ll make some popcorn,” Matthew said.

  Did no one just hear what Dmitri said? Was I the only one concerned that a neighboring town was being attacked? How far was Mukjar anyway? Was it like Brooklyn to Manhattan or Philadelphia to Manhattan?

  “Look, we’re not going to take any measures until we get more information,” Dmitri tried to reassure me. I must have looked panicked. “But if something should start to go down, you’ll get out. Don’t worry.”

  Nothing did go down that night, or any night during my time there. But life was spent in a cloud of looming danger, the prospect that something could kick off at any moment. Just one year later, there were regular attacks in the camp, stories of the Janjaweed setting fire to thirty homes during one raid, a report that a local leader had been murdered. My colleagues were unflinching when faced with rumors of attacks, but I had yet to build up my tolerance for such dangers.

  Life on lockdown was pretty straightforward. After 8 p.m. curfew none of us could go anywhere, so we sat around the table talking and smoking. Christine had brought a huge stack of pirated DVDs back from her last trip to Nairobi, and Jumma had sourced an old TV and propped it atop the refrigerator, so sometimes we piled extra mattresses on the floor and watched movies. Other nights we played poker or Ping-Pong on the slanted, rain-damaged table. Or we talked about our lives at home over candlelight in the dining area, licking forkfuls of Nutella and drinking warm, Gatorade-infused water. There wasn’t much in the way of privacy and it wasn’t long before I’d know when all of my new colleagues were going to the bathroom or to bed, what they looked like first thing waking up or coming out of the shower wrapped in a towel.

  Although our compound may have felt like summer camp, on the outskirts of Zalingei were two displaced persons camps—Hassa Hissa and Hamadyia. There were close to one hundred of these camps scattered across the Darfur region, housing villagers who fled violence and came to the closest town, hoping to find safety in numbers and security near an urban center, far from the open stretches of desert where attacks could happen unnoticed. The Janjaweed’s tactics were working—their purpose was to terrorize farmers until they ran off their property and were too scared to return. Once a critical mass was reached in these se
ttlements, aid agencies came to provide basic services and ensure humane living conditions.

  Camps were never intended to be permanent solutions but their closure and people’s safe return hinged on the end of war—requiring delicate political arrangements that might not be reached for years. Suddenly, the very elements that were absent from people’s villages were available, free of charge and courtesy of the international community. In the camps, children who had never been to school were now able to access basic education. People who had never seen a doctor received free medical care. Women learned new skills and maybe a new trade. The assistance may have been rudimentary, but it often provided more than many of these people had had back in their villages. Though no one outwardly admitted a preference for the camp over a life at home, the former certainly boasted certain advantages.

  The humanitarian community, aware of this discrepancy, struck a fine balance between providing resources in a way that allowed people to live with some semblance of dignity and inadvertently creating permanent slums on the outskirts of urban centers. Some agencies invested back into the community, focusing beyond camp borders in an effort to incentivize people to return to their previous lives when the violence died down. So far, with the ongoing instability of the region, these attempts have not exactly met with marked success: by early 2013 there were still 1.4 million IDPs living in Darfur and 204,000 refugees in Chad.

  On my first day inside Hassa Hissa, the bigger of the two camps, I was surprised by how sprawling it felt. Although homes were tightly clustered together, the amount of land the camp took up was massive. Living quarters, built with plastic sheeting, mats, grass, and millet stalks, came in various shapes: circles with sloped roofs, squares with flat roofs. Throughout the camp, men sat on colorful mats, their heads covered by small white caps or loosely tied wraps. A few wore checkered scarves around their necks, the sole splash of color in the sea of white attire. Elderly men sat, holding canes, in the few available chairs. They were sheltered from the sun by threadbare blankets, scrap plastic, or cardboard boxes sewn together and draped over dead tree branches. At prayer time, the men stood in a line, bowing and kneeling in unison.

  As in the towns, you didn’t see many women out and about. Most were gathered at the water holes or stayed in their homes. One of Laura’s projects for the women at the camp was teaching women how to make fuel-efficient stoves out of available materials—donkey dung, dirt, hay. These stoves burned firewood at a rate ten times slower than the traditional method, reducing fuel consumption and making women less vulnerable to attack, since they would spend less time collecting firewood. Laura oversaw the project with local female trainers who taught women how to make the stoves and tasked each of them with teaching ten more women, until the whole camp was covered.

  Matthew, our Swiss friend, made sure the population had enough water to drink and places to go to the bathroom. A common form of death for children under five was diarrhea contracted from unclean drinking or bathing water. With such crowded conditions, basic cleanliness was an essential measure to reduce mortality. Matthew trained local hygiene promoters who went door-to-door teaching families about the importance of washing their hands, how to store water safely, or fix the pumps if they broke. Many of the people in the camp were used to walking out to the field somewhere to go to the bathroom. Few had ever seen a latrine or knew its purpose. Many of the latrines that Matthew had carefully and expensively built were going unused because people were afraid of falling in. The hygiene promoters had to teach people how to use them.

  Other agencies worked on setting up schools, running clinics, providing food, distributing materials for shelter. I was working on a tiny piece of the whole operation and so my exposure to other branches was limited. My project had a start date and an end date, there were specific pieces of information I was expected to discover and document, my tasks were straightforward. For others, the work never ended. It wasn’t until my next assignment in Darfur a few months later that I’d realize how interconnected these programs were, the immense effort that was required to coordinate their projects, and just how messy aid work could become.

  I loved my job. I went into the camps every day to play with children, talk to them and learn about their lives. They were so excited to break up the monotony of their days that dozens lined up outside the tent hoping to get in on a piece of the action. Girls, usually tasked with household chores, said that fetching water from the borehole was their favorite time of day. They’d lay their jerry can down, marking their place in line, and braid each other’s hair, or play kebenong qua, a jumping game where they jumped high, quickly bringing their feet up to their inner thighs and smacking them together before reaching the ground. Some played Tongag tonga—a game where they pretended a brick was a toy house. Others sat there chatting and giggling like girls at recess.

  Boys’ favorite activity was going to religious school, where they were taught to read from the Koran. In the eyes of Sudanese elders, Koranic school was where the boys became men. I’d see boys walking to school, carrying the small wooden boards on which they took notes and learned to read and write. They too collected firewood but didn’t share it with girls for cooking—they used it specifically for reading at night.

  The children reminisced about the things they missed in their villages: tending to their gardens, eating mangos, swimming in ponds, sucking on sugarcane. They had beds with sheets there, they said. They missed their good clothing, which they had to leave behind when they fled. Boys missed playing football. Girls missed fetching water from the rivers, where they swam and played. “We moved freely then,” they said, looking down at their feet. I asked teachers and parents how their children’s behavior had changed since the conflict started. Children showed normal signs of distress, they said: bed-wetting, restlessness, and sadness. Some were easily distracted, angry, and violent. Mothers said a few boys regularly went to the market and pretended to attack it.

  Camp life disrupted many social norms of this community. An elderly man wearing a long white djellaba told me that, at home, it was customary for boys and girls to sleep opposite one another and for parents to separate themselves from their children by the time they are ten, so they “don’t discover the serious relationship between man and wife.” He blushed as he told me this, stroking his cane and averting his eyes. Space limitations in the camp rendered such separation impossible. Things were getting awkward.

  Other disruptions were due to the arrival of so many foreigners. Whenever a white person entered the camps, children would encircle the car, screaming “Khawaja! Khawaja!” in unison. It was like Rwanda, but there we had been muzungus. One of my questions to children was who they wanted to be like when they grew up. Many said teachers, parents, or community elders. But some said they wanted to actually become a khawaja. To these kids, white people drove fancy cars, helped their parents, and distributed tons of food and goods to them and their families. White people wielded authority.

  Most of my interactions with the children were confined to a tent. These makeshift structures may have provided shelter from the sun but offered little relief from the unrelenting heat. In fact, the plastic shell trapped the hot, desert air, turning each tent into a plantless greenhouse. I did my best to stay focused, ignoring the tickling beads of sweat as they trickled down my chest and collected in the folds of my belly. After one of the groups, I stretched my arms and neck, gazing upward at the discolored plastic ceiling that seemed to be melting onto us. As I looked closer, I heard a faint buzzing and noticed a subtle vibration. The roof of the tent was covered with a layer of dank, humming flies. And those brown spots on my notebook? It was fly shit, or fly spit, or whatever it was flies did. I tried not to think about how much of their excrement had fallen onto my skin or gotten absorbed in my hair, and summoned the next group for our meeting.

  Haboobs, as the locals called them—I called them mini-tornadoes—swirled through the lanes of the camp, like dust devils in old Westerns. Long skinny lines of
dust would scrape the sky, pulling apart any unfortunate structures in their way. One day, while speaking to a group of about fifteen children, I heard an unfamiliar flapping and howling, like a plane passing too low overhead. I peered outside and saw a wall of dust whirling toward our rickety shelter. Parts of roofs from other houses had already been ripped off. Panicked, I huddled the kids together, wishing I could cover them all with my head scarf until it passed. The hut trembled, some straw from the walls tore off, a massive gust of dust and wind burst inside, and it was over. I peered out from my head scarf and looked around to see whether or not we were still in Darfur anymore.

  The kids, of course, got an enormous kick out of my alarm. Dust storms were the least of their worries; they dealt with them every day. The only thing new to them was this foreigner whose hysteria over a little bit of dust provided amusement to last a week. They rolled on the floor, laughing and pointing at me. I deserved it.

  I couldn’t believe how well behaved and obedient the children were after all they’d been through. I remembered substitute teachers back at home coming in to teach fifth-grade math and the ordeal the other students and I would put him through. But the kids in the camps were eager to be there, so enthusiastic to share, staring at me with credulous eyes. I often wondered if they would live in the camp their whole lives, and what their future would be. Whatever program we ended up providing for these children would be such a small offering for a chance at a promising adulthood. What they really needed was structural change, a swift resolution to the conflict so they didn’t spend their childhoods languishing in some makeshift camps. But that wasn’t really the business we were in. Political negotiations were happening simultaneously to our humanitarian intervention; we just had to wait and see what would happen—and keep working in the meantime.