Chasing Chaos: My Decade In and Out of Humanitarian Aid

by Jessica Alexander

  THERE WAS NO TIME TO worry about whether or not I was qualified to do this job. With my Camp Management Toolkit under my arm and Ishaq by my side, I jumped in. The first thing we had to do in Al Salam was set up a committee that would represent the twenty-four thousand residents of the camp, and which would be the group I would meet with regularly. The Camp Management Toolkit advised setting up fair elections, but I was already coming to realize that the manual’s rules didn’t always account for reality. The omdas and sheikhs were the ones who presented themselves for the jobs, which made sense: these were the traditional leaders of the community, they had always spoken on its behalf.

  At my first meeting with the committee, Ishaq introduced me. The men nodded respectfully as I started speaking to them in English. Ishaq translated.

  “My name is Jessica,” I said. “I’m from the US, and I’m here to work with you in the camp.” The whole thing felt ridiculous. Some of these men were old enough to be my father. I wondered what they thought of me, a naive twenty-seven-year-old American girl, clutching her camp management toolkit like a life vest. How strange it must have been for these men, after all they had been through and all they were still grappling with, to have me there to discuss and negotiate their living conditions. Over time, though, I realized that my naïveté and humility actually worked to my advantage. I listened to the men on the committee and constantly asked for their input. They desperately wanted to participate in the decisions that were affecting the lives of their community members and families. Being there every day, listening to their concerns, and relaying those concerns back to other aid workers was the best way I could do my job.

  The committee assumed considerable responsibility for day-to-day camp management and would eventually come to help distribute food, report on any Janjaweed activity spotted in the camp, and assist in the planning of NGO activities like where new water points would be constructed, or what other NFIs were needed. In the coming months, I would rely on these men for everything, but I knew they didn’t represent everyone in the camp—such as the women and the youth. I set up separate smaller committees with representatives from these groups as well.

  THE FIRST THING THE CAMP committee requested were name badges, to distinguish themselves as leaders of the community and to show the aid agencies working in the camp that they also had a say in its administration. The issue of the name badges was very important to them; they asked me about it each time we met. I told them we could make name cards back at the office, but they insisted on real badges, with a photo and a stamp. Nothing in Sudan felt legitimate unless it had an official seal: when you bought a soda, the shopkeeper wrote up your purchase on a small piece of paper, which he carefully blotted with a red rubber stamp.

  I was sure that El Fasher wouldn’t have a photo lab, but Ishaq knew of one downtown. It looked like one of those low-budget Glamour Shots portrait studios you’d find at a mall. There was nobody inside except the shopkeeper. I asked him when I could bring twenty-seven people in to have their photos taken. Anytime was fine, the excited shopkeeper said, as long as there was power in town.

  We only had two vehicles to move everyone, but before I could even explain that we’d have to make a few trips, the Land Cruisers were filled: some people sat on the floor, others on laps; a few men stood and held onto the back of the vehicle. This was certainly against agency regulations, but I wasn’t going to make a fuss. I felt as if I were chaperoning a class field trip—I had only worked with these men inside the camp so it was fun to see them out and about in town.

  Sometimes I’d found the photos of other African residents deceiving; even the silliest of people came out looking stoic and serious. I realized that the images we saw didn’t always look like life—they didn’t capture the character of the person they depicted, or the true spirit of the place he or she came from. Out in the field, you saw children playing, doing backflips, running around wildly—and then as soon as you whipped out your camera, they froze like deer. Their bodies became stiff, their faces drawn, their eyes wide, focused and solemn. Nobody had ever taught them how to project an image of themselves, or told them to say “Cheese!” and smile for the camera.

  When we arrived at the studio, the committee members waited in line to get their passport-sized photos taken. Whenever someone’s turn came, he would stand in front of the light blue background, look intently at the camera until it flashed, and then melt into giggles. After each of them had gone through, they wanted one last photo of all of us together. I was working on a very tight budget, and we had already maxed it out. I told them so.

  “They want to pay for it themselves,” Ishaq told me.

  “Oh, that’s ridiculous. They’re not paying for it.” I couldn’t imagine why they would want to spend whatever little money they had on a photo. But they insisted.

  The leader of the group, Ahmed, waved me over. “Come, come!” he said. I had never heard him speak in English before. “Jessica, come!” The photographer organized us in front of the safari backdrop, as though we were in a large wedding party. I knelt down with some of the shorter men, smiled, and waited for the click.

  Days in Darfur usually went by too quickly for me to feel I’d accomplished anything. I was essentially a messenger between the people in the camp and the aid community. With various agencies running three clinics, five schools, biweekly food and non-food distributions, hundreds of latrines and water pumps, someone had to be the go-between, and that person was me.

  It was silly being Ishaq’s “boss”—we both knew that I was dependent on him for everything. He grew up in El Fasher and had been working for our agency long before I arrived. At meetings with the committee, he’d translate for me, but I thought it would be such a better use of time if he just led the sessions himself. However, I soon realized that I was technically the one in charge not only because I could use Excel and read and write in English. I noticed how differently both Sudanese and expats treated us. People perked up when I entered the room—my skin color afforded me this undeserved authority. If Ishaq was going to a meeting alone, he’d sometimes ask me to come with him.

  “Ishaq, why? You can do it—you know it better than I do!”

  “I know,” he said. “But believe me, they’ll listen more if you are there.”

  Despite the fact that I was probably twenty years his junior, that he knew the IDPs and had been to all of the towns they came from, that he spoke their language and shared their religion—despite all this, I was the one everyone deferred to. But the truth was, I yielded to Ishaq’s judgment on pretty much everything, from which government minister we needed to see to where we should eat lunch.

  Over time, Ishaq and I became close. Some nights we had dinner together at the local restaurant in town, where we’d drag our sticky bodies up to the roof, order mango juices and goat and onion sandwiches, and collapse on the unsteady plastic lawn chairs. It was nice up there, one of the only places in town where you could get a steady breeze. A flurry of people bartered in the market below, carrying their vegetables home in flimsy blue-and-white-striped plastic bags. Camels were herded through the streets, their steps deliberate and slow, making puffs of sand with each clop. Soft music, the impatient honks of car horns, and the roar of diesel engines wafted up to where we sat. The sky stretched as far as the dusty dunes, and at sunset it matched the orange earth.

  Ishaq’s compound was a short walk from Guesthouse Three. The first time I visited, his younger daughter, a four-year-old, was standing naked in a big metal bucket, lathered in soap, as her older sister poured a pail of water over her head. They both froze, startled. Ishaq heard the creak of the gate and rushed out to greet me.

  The boxy furniture inside his house looked the same as what Lila and I had in our living quarters. But Ishaq’s home was decorated with personal effects—a photograph of what looked like his parents hung on the wall; faded green hand-sewn curtains draped the windows. A drawing by his daughter was displayed next to a large shelf that held books in Ara
bic. The living area was crammed with furnishings: bulky wooden chairs with the familiar foam cushions, a well-polished wooden table.

  To have this compound—to dress as he did, to be as educated as he was—Ishaq had to be wealthier than most Sudanese, and he was. Having a senior position at an NGO was a good job, one that he took pride in. If the war hadn’t broken out, if the NGOs weren’t there providing services to IDPs and salaries to men like Ishaq, he might not have had a career. A gig at an NGO paid more than a government assignment, which was hard to get anyway, usually requiring a family member on the inside. If the war stopped and all the agencies left, I wondered what Ishaq and the rest of the local staff—the drivers, the maids, the guards—would do. Aid agencies were the biggest employer around, and without a war to keep us here, Ishaq and many others would be out of work. With the existence of a parallel economy fueled by international agencies, local aid workers didn’t really have an incentive to discourage its continuation—or, by extension, to solve the problems that kept us here and kept them employed.

  At dinner that night, Ishaq’s silent wife served piles of mushy vegetable stews from a big round silver tray, which she carried into the dining room on her head. Ful, the hearty bean soup that I tried with my colleagues that first day in Khartoum, was a staple in Sudan and eaten by dipping kissra, a flat bread made of millet, into it. Ishaq’s older daughter brought out a large portion in a tin bowl, along with boiled cassava, a tomato salad, and a plate of goat meat. I was touched and humbled by how much trouble they went through to prepare the meal. We sat around the small table, Ishaq, his bathed daughter and her older sister, his wife, and I, the plates of food taking up most of the space. They sat in silence, the two girls staring at me. I realized they were all waiting for me to start. I took a piece of the kissra and dipped into the ful.

  “This is delicious,” I said.

  Ishaq smiled and translated for his wife, but I understood her response. “Shukran,” she said quietly—thank you.

  I’D MEET ISHAQ AT THE OFFICE each morning, and over two little plastic cups of Nescafé we’d lay out the plan for the day. The first thing we usually did was ride to the camp to see if anything had happened overnight that we needed to address. Whether it was a collapsed latrine or a water container that looked low, Ishaq spotted problems way before I did.

  “Stop,” he instructed the driver one morning, pointing out the window. “Those tents aren’t occupied.”

  “How do you know?” I asked.

  “Look at how the dust has gathered around the opening of the tent. No one’s been in there.”

  We stopped and walked over, Ishaq trudging through the sand in his polished brown shoes. I could see large drifts of sand had pushed up against the opening of the tent, pinning the bottom down. We peered in. Ishaq was right. The tent was empty.

  As we feared, people who weren’t really IDPs had been registering as IDPs, receiving a card to get rations, pitching a tent, and then going back to their real homes either in Abu Shouk or in town. Once, Ishaq told me, he had even recognized his neighbor in the registration line. He laughed and escorted her away gently, but he knew there were more like her in line and that we had already accepted other hopeful imposters who had managed to slip through the cracks.

  It’s well understood that some percentage of aid goes to people for whom it’s not really intended. People who aren’t the “target” population—IDPs from a neighboring camp, for instance—show up and try to get in on the action. I had seen this in Rwanda, when Charles plucked people who had forged their ration cards out of the distribution line. Agencies try to limit this by making the registration process as efficient and accurate as possible, and the cards themselves difficult to duplicate. But when twenty-four thousand people need to be registered, their names are some version of Ishaq Adam Yusuf, or Adam Hassan Mohammed, and the staff is keeping records by hand, someone’s bound to slip through.

  It wasn’t just poor record keeping that allowed for the errors. The sheikhs whose lists we took to crosscheck the family names were in on the game, too. Often people who weren’t eligible for aid bribed sheikhs to get on the list, or the displaced paid to get on the list twice, under two different names. I met someone who had worked on distributions in West Africa and made people dip their fingers in blue ink to indicate they had already received their shares. Kids came back hours later with their fingers scrubbed raw in hopes of getting more supplies. I had heard that in some camps, agencies went so far as to eye-scan the beneficiaries to keep track of them.

  Years later, my British friend Lewis helped me put the situation in perspective. “When I was in my twenties, I applied for welfare. I wasn’t really eligible, but I got it anyway because I took the time to fill out all those damn forms, stand in lines, make those calls, and deal with those thick bureaucrats. But at that time, I really needed that hundred extra pounds a week. Later, the hundred pounds weren’t worth all the hassle. So I didn’t bother applying. You have to think—those guys who are from town or the next camp standing in these lines for two days, dealing with the forms and the shit we put them through—they must really need those jerry cans. So we gave ten percent of our supply to people who technically aren’t IDPs? So what? Those people need the stuff just as badly.”

  I didn’t really mind. As far as I was concerned, as long as we had this stuff in warehouses we should be giving it all out. But after we pulled up to see the tent that Ishaq had spotted, we soon found another. And then another. It was happening all over. “This is bullshit,” I said.

  Ishaq never swore, but he nodded his head in agreement. “Yes, yes. It most certainly is.”

  I called a meeting with the committee to get to the bottom of it. “We cannot keep giving things out to people who aren’t IDPs. Because if we do, there won’t be enough for people who really need it. We plan everything around the population of the camp—how many latrines to dig, how big schools should be, how many beds we need in the clinics. We need accurate numbers for this. We can’t be using these inflated lists.” At these meetings, the committee members sat in rows of chairs, looking at me intently and furrowing their brows. Even though they nodded in agreement, I knew that the problem would continue. This was a market like any other, and if people could game the system, they would. It was nothing personal. Everyone needed a little extra to get by.

  LATER THAT MORNING, WE MET with teachers in an empty classroom of one of the schools, a large tent with a few benches and many rolled-up prayer mats, which the children sat on during lessons. A lone chalkboard stood at the front of the tent with a faded math problem written across it.

  One at a time, the teachers stood up and informed us of the issues.

  “The children don’t have enough notebooks. They’re sharing three children to each notebook.”

  “We haven’t been paid in two months.”

  “The classes are so overcrowded that some children are sitting outside.” At one point there were one hundred and fifty children to a teacher. Up to eight children were sharing one lesson book. The UNICEF school being built at the edge of the camp would alleviate some of this overcrowding, but it still hadn’t been completed because the brick was stuck somewhere on its way from Khartoum. This was to be one of the only permanent structures created in the camp, and it would be used as a school for the host community when the IDPs returned home. If they returned home. In the meantime, we erected extra classrooms for the other children with leftover plastic sheeting.

  A woman in the back stood up. “The school is too far from where we are living.” It was about a ten-minute walk away. “We want to move it,” she declared. Ishaq translated her request to me and then continued in English: “OK,” he said, shaking his head. “Now they’re just playing games.” A few weeks later, at a similar meeting, there were requests for us to build a mosque and a movie theater.

  At 11 a.m., after the meeting, Ishaq needed a place where he could wash his hands and pray. At that time we were usually at the registration tent, whi
ch was now functioning as our camp office. He’d duck around the back, find a mat, a place to wash his hands and face, and pray. Other men were back there doing the same.

  At 1 p.m., we had a health meeting with an agency that ran one of the three clinics in the camp. Apparently, someone had dropped one of the bottles of medicine we had received from an American NGO in the water. The label peeled off, and the original sticker underneath showed an expiration date that had already passed. It was rumored that the US military, and other groups, sometimes relabeled old medicines, then dumped them onto camps as “charity.” Were these still OK to use?, the health workers wanted to know. I had no idea. To be safe, the agency ordered new medicines, but in the meantime, the clinics would have to make do with an even more limited supply.

  An hour later I was meeting with the camp committee to designate a plot of land where people could be buried. I never imagined I’d be mapping out a cemetery.