Chasing Chaos: My Decade In and Out of Humanitarian Aid

by Jessica Alexander

  “Nisha! Tim! I didn’t know you guys were in Sudan!” We kissed and hugged, only slightly surprised to see each other again. Nisha hadn’t changed; she seemed as comfortable here as she was sitting on her back porch in Kigali. She casually inhaled her cigarette, tilting her head back slightly to exhale. I remembered how timid I was back when I met her in Rwanda; it seemed like ages ago.

  Nisha was the one who had the job back in Kigali, but this time around it was Tim who was working. That’s how it went with couples who tried to stay together in the field. It was often hard for both people to land a job in the same place at the same time, but it seemed that Tim and Nisha had made this life work. Their marriage had survived Rwanda and they looked content sitting on that stoop together, carelessly socializing, happy and relaxed. A few years later, I found out that Nisha had an affair with the French procurement officer at work. Tim moved to Kabul. They divorced.

  And then the hot Australian walked in and approached me.

  “Where were you?” I said.

  “Our car got stuck. Someone from UNFPA had a rope and pulled us out. C’mon, I need a drink.”

  Somehow he’d managed to get even more attractive. His shirt was dirty from pushing the car and it pulled across his shoulders, which now looked broader than before. We got drinks and bypassed the dance floor, which was already hot and crowded. If the hot Australian wanted to join in, he’d have to wait; right then I was too nervous—and too sober—to even tap my foot, never mind actually dance with him. As he went to sit down, he put his hand on my lower back. I hoped he couldn’t tell just how excited I was talking to him—a man with an adorable accent, who followed me to this party after pushing his truck out of ditch! I was drunk and, of course, I was smoking and I was just so far from home. At that moment, it felt like I could stay in Sudan, working and living this life for years. There would be endless days and nights like this. We’d work together during the day on serious issues—figuring out how to get health supplies through customs faster, negotiating with the government for access to areas that had been recently attacked, appealing to donors for much-needed funding. But at night we would all act like teenagers. We’d drink and hook up—sometimes on the dance floor, sometimes in the back of a Land Cruiser, or in a sweaty room on a foam mattress under a mosquito net, after driving home drunk through the wobbly streets of Khartoum. I was single and I had no obligations except to my job.

  It got late and the crowd was thinning. Carla came over to us. “We’re leaving.” She turned to me. “You coming?”

  I looked at her with begging eyes—I don’t want to go. She looked at him and then back at me with an expression I recognized immediately—Don’t go home with this guy. Something about him—possibly just his out-of-place hotness—made it clear to her that he was probably going to turn out to be an asshole.

  We exchanged numbers and I went home with Carla. The next day my travel authorization came through and I was put on the next flight to El Fasher. I never got to say good-bye to the hot Australian.

  The office in El Fasher was a few minutes’ drive from downtown, on the way to the three main IDP camps there—Abu Shouk, Zam Zam, and the recently planned Al Salam. Al Salam was the camp I’d been hired to work as the community officer, which meant I had a budget to oversee, and an important role liaising with community representatives from the camp.

  But plans, it quickly emerged, had changed. I hadn’t been at the office for two weeks when Mark, the acting head, informed me that the camp coordinator for Al Salam had left, and I was being deputized to replace her. Mark was a small guy, and looked a few years older than me. In one hand, he held a clipboard with papers crinkled brown at the edges, in the other, a VHF radio. I looked at him with his Red Sox baseball cap and his clumsy stance and couldn’t believe someone so young was in charge of this entire operation. Maybe he had been hired for a different job, too.

  The office was a flurry of activity, with the mostly Sudanese staff hurrying through the hallways or darting in and out of meetings. Our workplace was made up of various interconnected rooms designated as offices with makeshift signs hanging on the doors: Women’s Health, Basic Health, Child Protection, Water and Sanitation, Logistics, Finance, IT. Because our agency was one of the largest working in the region, we covered a number of humanitarian sectors. The walls were mostly bare and there were many windows with screens, to get as much of a cross breeze as possible. Mark led me through a labyrinth of rooms until we reached his office at the end of the corridor.

  A beat-up couch and a small coffee table sat on one side of the room, his desk on another. Pale sunlight spilled through a row of uncurtained windows and a floor-to-ceiling map of Darfur hung next to the couch. A large fan swiveled slowly, ruffling a stack of papers held down with a brick on Mark’s desk. With each rotation, the papers fluttered softly, as though they were sighing. Mark sat down and took off his baseball hat, combing his hands through his sweaty hair.

  Although I had not yet come to realize it, Terms of Reference (TORs) for jobs were so loosely written that sometimes people ended up with completely unexpected responsibilities. As long as the job didn’t require technical expertise, like constructing shelters, designing latrines, or delivering health care, there was always the chance you’d be the one to do it. People ended up filling in for their colleagues, as in Mark’s case, and also mine. Years later, when I landed a new post, a friend offered the following advice: “Don’t let anyone around here see that you’re competent. You’ll end up doing everyone’s job.”

  When Mark broke the news to me, he tried to put a positive spin on it—“Your first day, and already a promotion!”—but I wasn’t persuaded. I was twenty-seven, and had spent only a few months working at a camp before—how would I be able to serve as the primary person overseeing activities in the camp? Mark pulled a thick manual off the wobbly bookshelf behind him: Camp Management Toolkit. He plopped it on the desk. I left Mark’s office with the handbook and a name: Ishaq. “He’s great,” Mark promised. “He’ll show you around.”

  When I arrived in El Fasher, aid agencies were in the process of moving twenty-four thousand people—residents of the village Tawila, which the Janjaweed had attacked a few weeks earlier—from one camp, Abu Shouk, across a river to the new one, Al Salam (its name meant “peace”). There was no other option: Abu Shouk already housed fifty thousand people, and couldn’t absorb tens of thousands more. The new arrivals huddled around the perimeter of the camp, building shelters with whatever scraps of cloth and sticks they could find. They came inside the camp to use the latrines and get water, already in short supply. But without being officially registered, they didn’t have access to the food distributions, and were not permitted to send their children to schools in the camp or receive other basic services. With so much extra use, the pit latrines were filling up fast. Eventually, some had to be sealed shut.

  The aid workers who found the land for the new camp hadn’t had an easy time of it. It took weeks to negotiate with the government, which had to authorize the use of more land for the displaced; consult with the community leaders to explain the plan; arrange for twenty-four thousand displaced people to move across the dry riverbed, or wadi; and finally settle them into the new camp, Al Salam. Busses were provided for elderly and sick but the rest came by foot. It wasn’t too long a journey: you could see one camp while standing in the other.

  After receiving my “promotion,” I followed the advice Mark had given: “Go up to the camp and poke around.” I hopped in an agency vehicle that was on its way to the camp, asking the driver to drop me at the registration tent. It took about ten minutes to get from the office to the camp, and the driver sped through the open stretches of desert, lining the tires up with the grooves created by previous cars. All around us was sand, scattered trees, and a few tukuls. He turned up the song on the radio—a repetitive, mantra-like Sudanese tune, a male singer’s voice ranging all over the scales, the sitar and steady drum beat playing behind him. The hot Darfur air bl
ew in through the open windows, and my hair flitted across my face, strands sticking to damp patches on my skin. I pulled it back in a tight ponytail, using sweat as hair gel.

  SOON, I COULD SEE THE new camp—a sweep of sand the size of more football fields than I could count—stretching out before us. Small flags marked its perimeter. A few tents made from plastic sheeting had sprung up near the edges, but most of the wide, dry land was empty. Families were arriving at the registration center, a large domed tent perched at the top of a hill. When I saw the people waiting outside it, the lines curling down the slope, I realized it wouldn’t be long at all before all of the land was occupied.

  The inside of the registration tent seemed orderly and efficient. About ten desks were lined up in rows, and male and female Sudanese registration officers sat behind each of them, calling families in one at a time. Communities in Sudan are arranged by tribe; there are close to a hundred tribes in all of Darfur. Al Salam held tribes from five regions: Jebel Marra, Tawila, Dar Zaghawa, Jebel Si, and Korma. Each group was headed by a leader, or omda, who acted like the governor for that community. The tribes were broken down into smaller groups, and every group was led by a sheikh—the equivalent of a mayor.

  To organize the move, sheikhs provided camp workers with lists of families who planned on arriving together. Families presented themselves to the registration officers, who crossed-referenced their names with the lists provided by the sheikhs. The officers carefully entered each family’s information into ledgers written by hand. In rows drawn with a ruler, they recorded the number of family members, their ages and genders, and their community of origin. A special note was made if it was a female-headed household. All of this information was copied by hand again onto a wallet-sized card, which was given to the family.

  Families were then ushered into an adjacent tent to receive medical screening. Babies were weighed, children were checked for malnutrition, and any noticeable ailments were referred to the doctor. Next, families were issued a certain number of household supplies based on family size. A distribution team checked the card, stamped it, and dispensed an array of NFIs (non-food items): plastic sheeting (one piece per five people), iron poles (to hold the sheeting up), and rope (to tie them together); as well as jerry cans, soap, kitchen utensils, and a plastic pot for washing.

  The camp was divided by region of origin, and each family was given a plot of land, determined by the size of the family, within that division. Families walked to their lots slowly, their new items clanking at their sides, and any personal effects they had brought from their villages strapped to donkeys, or balanced on their heads. Even small children were expected to carry things. Anyone who had arms and legs and could hold something, did.

  Unlike most instances of displacement, where communities flee and haphazardly squat on new land, in this case aid agencies had the opportunity to coordinate a more orderly, systematically designed camp, with carefully measured distances between living quarters, latrines, clinics, and schools. It was one of the first times during a humanitarian crisis that a camp was developed this way and so far things seemed to be going according to plan.

  Aid agencies need to collaborate to provide people with material relief—and ideally, help them preserve a sense of human dignity—and there were over twenty such agencies working in Al Salam. A single organization doesn’t have the resources or expertise to do it all. If one organization builds a school, another must deliver water and a place for kids to go to the bathroom. If another organization doesn’t provide a meal in school, children will typically go hungry and be too exhausted to study. And if yet another organization doesn’t come in to assist parents in finding and maintaining their livelihoods, they might not be able to afford to send their kids to school, or pull them out to work instead. If there isn’t a clinic nearby where a child can get treated if he gets sick—well, then he wasn’t going to be coming to school anyway. People didn’t need just one kind of intervention. They needed a package of services, and agencies had to come together to provide comprehensive support. It’s like building a house: you need a contractor to pour the foundation and erect the walls, an electrician to install the lights and outlets, a plumber to put in the sinks and toilets.

  Unlike Zalingei, where the expat staff lived in one compound, in El Fasher we were spread across guesthouses within a quarter of a mile radius of the office. Since El Fasher was a larger town, there were plenty of these small homes to rent. My agency had leased five of them, and I was assigned a room in Guesthouse Three with Lila, a tall, thin Kenyan woman who had a six-year-old daughter back in Nairobi. Many Kenyans were in Sudan working for aid agencies. For most expats, going home meant traveling for at least two days. But for Kenyans, getting from Khartoum to Nairobi was an easy two-hour flight.

  “I’m setting up a women’s center,” Lila told me. “It will be a place where women can come to learn a new trade, where we teach them about women’s health, give them a space to go to just relax.” Her eyes opened widely as she spoke about the center, her smooth, cropped hair (that I later learned was a wig) shining in the sunlight. She had built one with success in Congo the year before with the same agency, but here they were having trouble procuring some of the necessary supplies.

  Agencies that wanted to erect permanent structures in camps had to get permission from the government. Since the displaced communities were only supposed to be there temporarily, neither the agencies nor the government wanted to create the impression that IDPs could—or would—stay indefinitely. But a balance had to be struck, as temporary facilities were often unable to withstand strong winds and heavy rains. Restoring them constantly cost time and money, and oftentimes they went unrepaired. We all knew that the IDPs would be here a long time, so Lila had gotten permission to build a semipermanent structure on the agreement that the host community would get to use it when the camp’s current occupants returned to their homes, if they returned to their homes. Years later, a friend would give me this advice: if you’re planning camps in a place like Darfur, “plan the camps as though they’ll be there forever.”

  The guesthouse Lila and I shared was small and bare; it would be just the two of us living here. Everything was made of the same rust-colored cement: the floors, the walls, even the inside of the bathrooms. Like most of the compound interiors I saw in Darfur, it seemed hastily put together—the walls were lumpy, the floors were slanted, and the entrances to rooms looked accidental, as if someone had run out of cement and simply wandered away, leaving a few vaguely rectangular holes behind. Lila and I shared a bathroom and a modest screened-in living area that had two wooden couches covered by faded yellow foam cushions. Our kitchen was in a separate hut.

  That first night, I walked around the compound aimlessly, still overwhelmed by the news from Mark. I pulled out the Camp Management Toolkit, its weight on my lap like a phone book. I started flipping through it, but became overwhelmed and decided to unpack instead. I carried my bag to my room, and had to heave my shoulder against the door to open it. No one had been in there in a while. The air was stale and smelled like my grandmother’s attic. Light poured in through the one window, illuminating a trickle of dust. A patchwork of colorful prayer mats was spread over the floor. The bed looked like a bottom bunk without a top. Metal poles stuck up around the frame, over which someone had draped a mosquito net, now covered in dust.

  As I was surveying my new home, my phone beeped. It was a text message from the hot Australian: “Hey, you want to get dinner tonight?”

  The night before felt like a lifetime ago. How I wished I were back there now, or with Carla, a friend to talk to. “Would love to but already in Fasher,” I texted back.

  “” he wrote.

  It was so nice to hear from someone even remotely familiar that I ignored his lame emoticon. I could already tell it would be harder to make friends here. The agency I worked for now was not only more prestigious than the one in Zalingei, but also much larger. The operation felt so big that it would take a w
hile before I knew everyone.

  Still holding my phone, I pushed the bed net aside and sat on the foam mattress. It sagged under my weight. I felt like I had just been dropped off on my first day of college. I wanted to go back to high school where the halls and teachers were familiar and welcoming, where the expectations were not as great—where I was neither alone, nor terrified of failing.

  The next morning a lanky man was waiting for me at the office gate. “Jessica!” he called, bounding over to me. “I’m Ishaq!” he said, proudly. I couldn’t tell how old Ishaq was, but I guessed early forties. “Yesterday when you arrived I was busy at the Ministry. Mark told me you were here.” He held a large blue notebook to his chest. “Welcome to El Fasher. How are you settling in?”

  “Oh, it’s OK!” I said.

  “Not too hot in this Darfur heat?” he asked. “No, no. It’s fine.”

  I was lying. El Fasher was hotter than Zalingei, even hotter than Khartoum. I was already a sweaty, wrinkled mess, whereas Ishaq was dressed immaculately in a collared polyester shirt and bell-bottom pants perfectly altered to fit his tall, slim frame. It turned out, no one could figure out where he got these clothes, what inspired his decidedly unique fashion sense, or who his tailor was.

  I followed him inside the compound and he led me to our office. It looked like all the others and held a small metal desk, two plastic chairs and two windows on opposite walls for ventilation. I put my bag down. “So you’ve been to Al Salam already, yes?”

  “Yes, I went to the registration yesterday.”

  “Good, good,” Ishaq nodded. “I’ve been working on getting that set up. Yesterday we had a slight problem with the Ministry, but it seems to be OK now.” He nodded again, as if reassuring himself that things would work out. The Humanitarian Aid Commission (HAC) was a government agency, and it wielded strict authority over all our actions. Before aid agencies could do anything in the camps—erect a tent for a meeting space or provide hygiene training—the project had to be approved by the Sudanese government. Which was perfectly reasonable—this was their country after all; we were their guests, working with the Sudanese population. They had every right to be involved in and informed of the work we were doing there. But introducing them into the process slowed everything down—they took their time green-lighting plans, usually because their own bureaucracy was so inefficient that whatever petition needed to be approved—be it a request to lead a seminar on sanitary practices, or install a dozen latrines—had to pass through many hands before it reached the official authorized to endorse it. Some aid workers were also suspicious of HAC’s motives—they were indeed an office of the government, the same government that was killing and driving these people off their land in the first place.