Chasing Chaos: My Decade In and Out of Humanitarian Aid

by Jessica Alexander

  For the first time in my career, I had my own office, where I’d return at the end of every day to write up my notes and findings. It was a large room, empty save for the desk and a plastic lawn chair. As basic as this room was, having this space all to myself and knowing that after my work was done I was going home to dine and sleep under the same roof as the same seven people every night was a blessing. My agency provided free English lessons to its staff after work hours, so in the evenings the neighboring room was packed with drivers, cooks, and other employees. Curt phrases emanated in staccato unison: “What. time. is. it?” “It. is. noon.” “What. have. you. got?” “We. have. got. books.” “What. is. your. name?” “My. name. is. Mohamed.”

  After work, I usually walked back to the compound, this being my only chance to poke around the market and interact with people who lived in the town. Some nights, though, I walked home with Laura, and we’d stop in a shack for a mango juice. This counted as a big night out in Zalingei.

  One time, she leaned over to me. “Those guys are Janjaweed.”

  I turned my head, too obviously. “Who?” No one seemed out of the ordinary to me.

  “The ones sitting directly behind you,” she said, staring straight ahead, playing it way cooler than I was.

  “How do you know?” I asked, whispering loudly.

  “The way they are wearing their head scarves.”

  Their head scarves were hooked around their chins and tucked into the other side of their head wrap. Other men just had their head scarves piled on top of their heads. That was it? If I had been alone, I would have never noticed them.

  They wouldn’t have done anything to us, but we finished our mango juices and left. There wasn’t much else to do, anyway.

  One Friday, our only day off in Darfur, we were invited to a party at another agency’s compound. There were so few expats in the remote town of Zalingei that it was hard to get a critical mass for an actual party, but either way, it was a chance to just hang out for a few hours, and we didn’t pass that up. At the compound, we listened to African music and drank whatever alcohol people could scrounge up—a bottle of rum that someone had brought back from a day trip to Kenya, leftover JJ from the weekend before, some vodka left behind by a UN colleague. It was a small gathering, and it wasn’t even that much fun, but it passed the time.

  Amina made samosas. “I’ve never made these with goat before, so no promises that they’re edible,” she said, walking in with a big tray. Amina cooked food for us on certain occasions—when one of us had a birthday, or if someone was returning from R&R. She said it was her true pleasure, that it reminded her of home. Amina’s husband lived and worked in Nairobi, and she had hung photos of him alongside her bed. You could tell that a piece of her was missing. “We met in northern Uganda,” she told me once. “We worked for different agencies. It was worse than here, if you can imagine that. But at least there we had each other.”

  Christine plugged her iPod into small speakers, stopping the African music and turning up A Tribe Called Quest. She started dancing. “Come on guys! Get up!” She bent her knees, put her hands on her lower back and gyrated her hips to the beat in an overtly sexual way that would be inappropriate in any setting, let alone Darfur.

  People were starting to worry about Christine. It had been eight weeks since her last R&R, and although everyone apparently got testy right up until the point they got out, her attitude was more toxic. As the finance officer, she had three local staffers working for her. I could sometimes hear her chastising them from my office. “Habiba, is it possible that your English has gotten worse since you started this job?” she’d ask. We’d often find her home early from work, sprawled out on a mattress on the floor smoking cigarettes, watching back-to-back-to-back episodes of Sex and the City.

  Over dinner, she complained about her job. “They just don’t understand anything,” she’d huff, clanking her plate.

  “Christine, you can’t talk to them like that,” Dmitri told her. “They’re trying.”

  “No they’re not, Dmitri! How many times have I told them to turn off the computer when they leave? And what does Yusuf do today when he leaves? He leaves his computer on. I mean, how could he forget again unless he was just doing it to spite me? I end up having to do everything by myself. It’s faster if I just do it than explaining to them for the fifth time how to enter the numbers.”

  “We’re here to build their capacity, Christine. You need to work with them and train them. It’s part of your job.”

  “Yeah, well, I also have a job to do and deadlines to meet. And I just have to redo everything that they’ve done anyway, so I should just do it and let them sit there and play their computer games. That’s all they want to do, anyway.”

  All of us worked with local counterparts who would take over our responsibilities when we left. The goal was to work ourselves out of a job, to make ourselves redundant, training local people and building up their capacity so that they could manage the program. It was hard to know what to expect from them, regardless of their enthusiasm and desire to learn. Some were using Microsoft for the first time, others had never even placed their hands on a keyboard. When you needed to complete a spreadsheet that was legible, accurate, and presentable to donors, and you were working under a very tight deadline, sometimes it was just easier to do it yourself.

  That Friday, we were occupied with alcohol and music, and none of us noticed a Sudanese woman walk into the compound. Alison, the gender-based violence advisor whose agency was hosting the party, saw her and rushed to the door. The woman looked frightened. Behind her, a woman lay on her back in a donkey cart. She had been raped. Her friend had pulled her on a cart all the way from the camp to the office.

  Alison scolded us. “You guys need to get out of here.”

  “We know. We’re leaving,” Laura said.

  “I mean, this is really terrible,” she said. “No time for a party.”

  “We know. We’re leaving,” Amina repeated, carrying her half-eaten tray of samosas.

  Alison actually looked excited that there was something she had to tend to. She scurried around, satellite phone pressed to her ear as she called a doctor to come and do a medical exam, her scarf falling off of her head and her bright blue panties showing through her white linen pants.

  Laura went into the room where the woman was being treated to see if she could help; as a rape counselor, she had years of experience working in these situations. As Laura spoke to the doctor, Alison hovered behind her, pacing. Finally, she snapped.

  “Look, Laura, she came to our agency, not yours. We have it covered.”

  “Yeah, I can see that. I just …”

  “It’s fine—we can handle it.” Alison leaned into the room, turning her back to Laura.

  As we left the compound, Laura sighed. “That girl sucks.”

  In the same way that businesses competed for customers, agencies competed with each other for beneficiaries. All of them wanted to be able to tell donors back home about the good things they were doing. Heroic tales could be converted into more donations. Individuals did it, too: for Alison, this tragedy could represent a huge professional victory for her.

  In Sudan, the weather was angry all the time. If it wasn’t the drenching rains, it was the thrashing winds, the oppressive heat, or the omnipresent and omni-annoying dust. It was turning to the rainy season now, and each night the wind carried signs of the sky’s imminent burst. One night at about 2 a.m. I woke to a drizzle drumming lightly above my head, as if children were running across the tin roof. I guess we all had been longing for rain, because when I left my room Amina was already standing in the middle of the compound, looking up. One by one, everyone joined us there, and together we stood beneath the open sky, soaking it up.

  After that night, the rain became a ritual and a nuisance. At around five o’clock each evening, the floodgates opened and the sky dumped buckets of water on the empty, vulnerable land. The rain hit the ground hard, lifting dust
into the air, as if a herd of animals had stampeded past moments before. One day, the downpour was stronger than normal. By the time the rain stopped, the compound had turned into a marsh.

  This had Matthew, our water and sanitation officer, very worried. One flooded latrine had enough bacteria to cause a serious spike in mortality. He was impatient to check out the damage, so we got in the vehicle and rafted our way through the water, which at that point was up to the middle of the car door. A wide, brown river was raging through the lowest stretch of land in the camp.

  “Holy shit,” I said.

  “That’s exactly what it is,” Matthew said, blushing.

  We walked to the lip of the new river. Hordes of people had already gathered to see the spectacle. The crowd had the awestruck glee of children after a snowstorm, when everyone walks around in a daze, in awe of nature’s ability to transform the world so totally and so suddenly. Children were already splashing in the river; donkeys were already drinking from it. On the opposite bank, Laura sat perched on the hood of her car. She had been in the camp for a meeting when the rains started. Now she sat there nonchalantly puffing on a cigarette, waving to us and shrugging. “So now what?”

  A few weeks later it was time to leave Zalingei. I submitted my report to a grateful Amina and took the same helicopter through Nyala until I got to Khartoum where I waited for my flight back to New York. As soon as I got back to the States, I started looking for ways to return to Sudan. I couldn’t go back to my old job—I had completed my report, and there wasn’t enough funding to hire me again—so when I wasn’t scouring the newspaper for articles about Darfur, I was filling out applications for jobs there. It felt like the most exciting work in my field was happening there. I got a short glimpse of how this country and the humanitarian operation ran, and I wanted more.

  And so when an e-mail came from a colleague from another NGO offering me a job that would allow me to return to Darfur, I jumped on it. I called my dad to break the news.

  “You’re going BACK? What? But you just came home!”

  “I got a job. It’s a good job. I’ll be in the north this time. In El Fasher.”

  “El what? Jessica—why do you need to go back?”

  “I just do, Dad. I was only there for two months. I need more experience. I want to go back. I want to be there.”

  And so a few weeks later, I returned to Khartoum. The driver who picked me up at the airport asked if this was my first time in Sudan.

  “No, I have been here before,” I said.

  “Oh!” he laughed. “Then you are Sudanese!”

  Center for Survivors of Torture Fancy Dress Night

  NORTH DARFUR, 2005

  I was happy to be back in Sudan. This time, I would be in El Fasher, the capital of North Darfur, working for a much larger NGO. Instead of simply doing research that would be used to develop future programs, I would actually be helping coordinate projects themselves. But before I could get there, my new employer kept me in Khartoum for two weeks of orientation and security training.

  I liked Khartoum: it was the perfect stop between home and Darfur, a chance to readjust to the heat and dust but still revel in the comforts of city life—paved roads, working Internet, dining choices. And for the first time since starting out in aid, I no longer felt like a total novice. I was working for a large NGO; I could tell people I had been to Darfur before; I was able to speak with certainty about the camps in Zalingei.

  I spent those weeks with Carla, a friend from graduate school who had already been in Khartoum for six months working for the UN. In some places, the UN had different housing regulations than the NGOs. If the area was considered sufficiently safe, the UN allowed its staff to rent their own apartments, and provided rental subsidies. (NGO staffers, on the other hand, usually stayed in group compounds.) It was a way of providing employees, especially those on long-term contracts, with privacy, independence, and something approaching a familiar domestic routine. Carla rented a two-bedroom apartment on the top floor of a seven-story building downtown. It had air-conditioning in every room, a cold fridge stocked with boxes of smuggled white wine, and a fully loaded bathroom: a hot water tank, Neutrogena skin creams, Kiehl’s shampoos. Carla would be living in Khartoum for two years; she came prepared.

  There were few luxuries in Khartoum, but we took advantage of what we could find, whether it was a football match at the local stadium or beers at the Chinese restaurant. Smoking cigarettes on Carla’s balcony, drinking glasses of pinot grigio in her small kitchen, sending texts to find out where the party was that evening—sometimes, for a second, a night in Khartoum didn’t feel so different from a night in New York.

  But, of course, it was very different. Khartoum was filled with an incestuous horde of internationals who called this foreign land their home for months, sometimes years. The resulting social climate was a unique combination of surveillance and spontaneity—everybody was, at one speed or another, just passing through, which could make interactions feel both urgent and inconsequential. What happened in Sudan, or Chad, or Cambodia certainly did not stay in Sudan, or Chad, or Cambodia, and it didn’t take me long to realize gossip was the lingua franca of the aid world.

  One Friday afternoon, the Sudanese equivalent of Sunday and our only day off, we lounged by a popular pool at a hotel in Khartoum with the other expats in town. It still felt bizarre to be luxuriating like this in Sudan, but I’d come to appreciate these amenities all the more so after going without them in Darfur.

  “Did anyone see the new MSF [Médecins Sans Frontières] guy at the meeting?” Carla’s friend asked.

  “Yeah. Totally cute. Is he married?” another replied, looking up from her book.

  “Does it matter?”

  “Well, what do we know about him? Where was he last posted?”

  “I think he came in from Kabul. I’m going to ask my friend Mark there for the dirt.”

  That’s how it went: your reputation followed you from one country to the next. We all knew someone who had worked with somebody somewhere. “Yeah, I saw him in Liberia in ’03.” “I lived with her in Timor in ’02.” “We met in Kosovo during the war.” The illusion of this industry was that we worked in the whole, wide world—that the seven continents were just one big office to us. The truth was, our world was tiny, and it got smaller with every job we took.

  Although they were still new to me, parties in Khartoum were as regular as UN meetings. Many nights there would be more than one to choose from. Some had themes or required costumes, which tended to be limited by our wardrobes and imaginations: people arrived as human-sized jerry cans, or in togas made of plastic tarps we distributed as shelters; couples came dressed up in pairs—mosquito and mosquito net, for instance, or sugar and salt (the ingredients in oral rehydration solution). So it wasn’t out of the ordinary when in any humanitarian setting to get an e-mail with the subject line “War Children Party—Thursday Night—Festive Attire Required!” or “Center for Survivors of Torture—Fancy Dress Night Friday.” The expats in town—aid workers, international journalists, diplomats—dressed up and made their way to the Center for Survivors of Torture compound for JJ and rap music, French cheese and Swiss chocolate.

  At one of those parties I met Pete, an Australian who worked for the UN. He was classically handsome—tall, dark hair, olive skin—and he knew it. I would have been attracted to him in any setting and couldn’t believe that someone so irrefutably good-looking had walked into a party here. We stood by a table of drinks, chatting about where we were from, our former posts, possible mutual acquaintances.

  “How long you in town for?” he asked.

  “Not sure. Until my travel authorization gets cleared.”

  “Oh, so could be a couple of days then.”

  “Yeah.”

  “You going to the ICRC party later?”

  “Yeah, we’re supposed to head over there, I think.”

  “You should ride with me,” he smiled, swirling his tepid vodka soda in his glas
s. Ice was hard to come by in Sudan.

  I wanted to go with him, but I also didn’t want to give in that easily. “Oh, thanks, but I’m going with my friends. I’ll just see you there?”

  We parted ways, and a little bit later Carla waved me over to the door—our ride was leaving. The hot Australian followed us in his car. We navigated down the narrow bumpy Khartoum streets until we got to the large ICRC compound. When I looked back, though, the hot Australian wasn’t behind us anymore.

  The music was so loud we could hear it from across the street where we parked. The road was clogged with Land Cruisers, and drivers from various agencies congregated outside the party’s gates. Some slept inside the vehicles with their seats pushed back and their windows rolled down.

  Inside, a dance floor was set up in the middle of the patio. Huge speakers, the kind you’d see at the prom, stood prominently on either side of the room and blared everything from hip-hop and Michael Jackson, to Senegalese bands and bhangra. Bottles of alcohol and flimsy plastic cups cluttered long porch tables. There were more than a hundred people there—some danced, others lounged on chairs, smoking hookahs. A glowing disco ball rotated overhead.

  Everyone in the room looked like someone I knew, even though I didn’t actually know any of them. By now I was accustomed to the European accents, the ankle tattoos, the Marlboro Reds, the men sporting secondhand T-shirts and five-day stubble, the women in Indian-style three-quarter-length shirt dresses and African bracelets and necklaces. Then I saw Nisha, the kind woman who had invited me to that first dinner party in Rwanda. She was sitting on a low stoop next to her husband.