Chasing Chaos: My Decade In and Out of Humanitarian Aid

by Jessica Alexander

  Lindsay was in charge of the NFI allocations. It wasn’t a fun job—she had to manage the safe arrival of tons of goods, and very often the trucks delivering them were looted along the way. If they did arrive, Lindsay then had to organize and oversee their distribution. Once, Lindsay was on her way to the dispensary, where residents had been lined up for hours waiting to receive hygiene kits—soap, buckets, jerry cans, Dettol. Outside the distribution tent, a few women had placed their goods in the path designated for cars. Lindsay needed to get into the tent and honked her horn. The women didn’t know what she wanted. The ordinarily calm and competent Lindsay sat there with her elbow on the horn, her eyebrows raised, and her free hand gesturing for them to move their things. When they still didn’t understand what she meant, she drove ahead, flattening the jerry cans and ripping through the buckets.

  “What is she doing?” shouted our coworker Chris, who was supervising distributions that day.

  She pulled up to where we were standing.

  “What the hell was that?!” he yelled.

  “Chris, they have to learn that they cannot block the entrance. I gave them a warning. I told them to get out of the way.”

  “You need a serious vacation,” he said and walked away.

  She looked back at the women scurrying to get their things. “I guess I do.” She tried to explain to them what was wrong, making sweeping motions with her arms. But the women just threw the broken items at her feet. She walked into the supplies tent, cutting the line that curled around the entrance, and emerged with four new jerry cans and a few buckets. “Here,” she said, apologetically.

  I STARTED TO QUESTION THOSE of us who made the choice again and again to come to places like this. What kind of expectations did we have for each other? Sometimes it felt as if we were giving ourselves a pass: because we were all making sacrifices to be here, because we were “giving” of ourselves, maybe it was OK when we acted badly. It was how we psychologically managed what we were doing. We were frustrated, we were tired, we were lonely, we were hot, but we were here! So maybe we got pissed off and yelled at drivers and ran over people’s possessions, but we were just human, we were good people, some of us too young to know how to deal with what was going on around us.

  My own stress was starting to show, too. The loneliness of the place was what really had started to strip me of my sanity. By this time, the communication networks were down so often that we started calling them “the notwork.” No network, no Internet. No network, no phone. I could feel myself slipping, my irritation mounting, my mental strength withering. I hadn’t actually thrown rocks at children that one morning walking to the office, but that seemed like a trivial distinction: just wanting to was bad enough. I was on the edge of—something—and for what? I knew the services in the camp were keeping people alive for the time being, but alive with what standard of living? Was that enough? Should I feel guilty for what I did, or for not doing more of it? Or should I be angry at the circumstances—the government, the weather, the whole indifferent world—that contrived to make any victory feel fleeting and insubstantial?

  One afternoon after returning from a meeting at the camp, a guard knocked on my door.

  “Ms. Jessica. There are some people from the camp here to see you.”

  People from the camp never came to the office—I always went to them. I assumed something must have gone wrong and hurried to the gate.

  Outside, three of the men from the camp committee sat waiting.

  “We came to see if you were OK,” one of them began.

  “What? You walked all the way here?”

  “Well, we wanted to make sure you were feeling OK.”

  Was it that obvious? Was it my tone of voice? My growing impatience with how slowly things were going? My restlessness at meetings over the general lack of progress? It never seemed as if things moved or improved here. In fact, a lot of the time it felt like things got worse. Another attack, or even just a rainstorm, could undo whatever headway we had made overnight. The setbacks just kept coming: the colleague on leave deciding not to return, HAC rejecting our project proposal, staff members stealing from the agency. It was like those trick birthday candles we had at birthday parties as kids. No matter how many times you thought you’d blown them out, the flame would still maddeningly reappear.

  “Thank you. I’m really OK. I’m sorry if I wasn’t earlier,” I said. “I can’t believe you walked all the way here to see if I was OK!”

  I gave them a ride back to the camp, still thanking them, touched that they had come to check on me, but embarrassed that my mental frailty was so obvious.

  THERE WERE THREE THINGS I could rely on—my bed, having water in the house, and knowing that the power would be on until 10 p.m. But then one night the rains were so bad that water seeped through the walls and drenched my bed. Next, our water pump broke and the man who was supposed to fix it never showed up. But it wouldn’t have mattered if he had, since the generator was busted, too. No power, no pump, no shower. I felt bad for complaining and for being annoyed. And, of course, aside from the pressure not to grumble about these things, there was an underlying pressure not to go on R&R. “Who would go on vacation when all of this is going on?” some colleagues would say. The martyr complex permeated my psyche, and although I desperately needed a break, I felt negligent when I left. But people who skipped R&R to tough it out were the ones who kicked something if it didn’t work. They were the ones who beeped at women for not moving their stuff fast enough. They shouted at drivers for being late and cursed at staff for not turning off their computers. They retaliated when children threw rocks at them, or wanted to retaliate.

  Still, sometimes it didn’t matter if we were at our best or at our worst. It didn’t matter if we did everything we could or if we didn’t. Darfur wasn’t a test, and there was no such thing as a perfect score. If one thing didn’t go wrong, another would. In the end, all you could really say was there were just things we didn’t anticipate. And so one morning I woke up and learned that children in the camp had drowned.

  Back in their villages, women dug holes far from their homes where they buried trash. Things were different in the camp, where women couldn’t stray far from their plots of land and living quarters were much tighter. It became my responsibility to organize a waste disposal system. We distributed small red tin barrels throughout the camp for people to dump their trash and hired a local company to cart away the garbage once a week. And that was pretty much that, for a while. After we’d gotten the system set up, I didn’t think too much about it. I was busy making sure that the drugs for the clinics were delivered. I was negotiating protests from teachers who hadn’t been paid in months. The trash wasn’t at the top of my to-do list—until it started raining.

  Sudan’s weather patterns are extreme. When it’s dry, it feels as though a giant straw has sucked the moisture from every molecule. There just isn’t enough water to ever make you feel clean or refreshed. Then, suddenly, the skies open and the rains start. It’s a binary situation: there’s no trickle, there’s no drizzle, when the rain comes, it comes with a fury. The clouds clap and throw down everything they can without mercy. As I had seen in Zalingei, roads turn to rivers in minutes.

  After one night of heavy rain, a few dozen pit latrines collapsed. NFIs in the lower part of the camp washed into the river. We mapped the most vulnerable areas, drafted contingency plans for moving people to higher ground, and distributed supplies to anyone whose belongings had washed away. We delivered burlap bags to camp residents to fill with sand and protect their shelters from the flooding waters. But we didn’t think about the holes.

  It turned out that the trucks that came to take away the trash every other week weren’t doing much because people weren’t using the bins. They didn’t even know what the bins were, so they just went about things as they always had, digging holes and depositing their garbage there, meanwhile, filling the bins with the sand and twigs they dug up. When the storms came, the rainwater f
illed the deep holes and left stagnant pools of water—a breeding ground for mosquitoes. And then there were the drownings.

  “How? Where?” I asked.

  “They fell into the holes. And they drowned,” Ishaq told me. He scratched his head and looked down at the ground.

  “Oh my God. How many?”

  “Three.”

  This was now an emergency. We hired people to fill the holes and canvassed every tent telling women to use the bins. We made posters showing the danger of the holes and hung them all over the camp. We tried our best to get the message out quickly, but how do you change behaviors that have existed forever? At home, how long did it take people to start wearing seat belts, or for the “Give a Hoot, Don’t Pollute” campaign to catch on? How could we expect to change these long-held habits before the next big storm?

  Regardless of what I told myself, I couldn’t help feeling that I had been somehow responsible for the drownings—that the cause of death, for each of these children, had been my neglect. If I had known what to look out for, if I had more experience, maybe I could have anticipated this. But others were dealing with the unexpected, too. The heat in the camp was so intense that any relief—whether it was walking in a donkey’s shadow, or just sitting under a sheet held up by two poles—helped. So when vehicles were parked for hours in the camp, children crawled under them to get some shade. Two children were almost run over this way, but scrambled out from under the car just in time. Ian, our British logistician, called an emergency meeting for the drivers and ordered them to check under their vehicles before even starting their engines.

  Soon, Tawila got attacked again and the camp was flooded with more people waiting to get in. More and more of them appeared every day, and one morning when Ishaq and I pulled up to the registration tent we were swarmed by so many people that I couldn’t even open the car door. Women and men pleaded for attention, for their dignity, for someone to listen to and look at them as individuals and not lump them in with the morass of people, all desperate, all needing, all with their own stories of loss. They shoved papers in my face, showing they had come from Chad and shouting in Arabic. I walked ahead, trying to make it to the registration tent, but I was surrounded by a dizzying whir of people tapping on my shoulder, tugging the back of my shirt, grabbing my hands. Women swirled around me, clutching babies shrilling with snot bubbling out of their little noses, their crusted upper lips trembling.

  “I know,” my friend Ben would say years later, when we talked about these moments. He told me a story.

  “When I was in Cambodia we were registering people for a food distribution. This tiny old woman kept coming up to me begging for more food. There were hundreds of people on line getting what we could give and this lady wanted more. I turned to her and said, ‘Why should I give you more food? Why are you more deserving than any of these other people?’ But she just kept pleading, telling me that her daughter was sick and she needed more food. All of these people’s kids were sick. Everyone was hungry. I just walked away, but she kept appearing, begging for more food. I kept trying to ignore her.

  “She finally left and I sort of forgot about her. Until I saw her in the distance walking toward the camp. This little old woman, carrying her daughter, literally a sack of bones, in her arms. All she wanted was to get my attention. She pushed her way to the front of the line again and handed me her daughter. I’ve never seen someone dying of starvation, let alone held one in my arms. Ugh,” he sighed. “I still think about that and feel awful.”

  Eventually there were so many people flocking to the camp that we had to build a fence around the registration tent to keep order. The African Union Peacekeepers came in to do crowd control; two unarmed men stood at the gates of the fence so it wasn’t mauled. Still, people pushed up against the barriers, desperate to get in and register. I was afraid there would be a stampede, the children sitting on the ground next to the fence would be trampled, and the whole place would implode. Everyone there, the mothers carrying babies, the worried men with their donkeys, the children whose little faces poked through the fence, they all expected me to have an answer. I wondered what Charles would have done in this moment, remembering his coolness under the same chaos at the distribution in Rwanda. I wished I had that kind of calm, but I was in over my head. I was never trained to deal with riots. I didn’t know what to do except to call on the camp committee members and have them quell the mayhem.

  AT A CERTAIN POINT I FOUND myself teetering on a meltdown. I’d wake up to the call of prayer every morning at 5:30 a.m. and trudge to the office, almost in a coma. One day, Abdullah, the driver who was supposed to take me to the camp, was late. I was scheduled to meet with Ahmed and the rest of the committee to discuss registering the new arrivals. I waited outside the office under the shade of a tree, cursing.

  “Where the hell is he?” I said. “Has anyone seen Abdullah?” I demanded, addressing some local staff standing by the gate. They all shook their heads.

  “Goddamnit,” I muttered as I walked away. I’m sure they could hear me.

  About twenty minutes later, Abdullah pulled up in the vehicle. I got in and slammed the door. “Where were you?” I asked.

  “Malesh,” Abdullah said—sorry. “My daughter had to go to school and my wife is sick and so I had to take her.” I didn’t respond.

  We got to the registration tent and Ishaq and I sat with the camp committee members to plan the registration that day.

  “Jessica, can I go pray?” Ishaq asked.

  “Really? Now?” I responded.

  “Yes, I was here early this morning and missed the morning prayer.”

  “Can’t it wait?” I needed his help.

  He gave me a look. It was a familiar one. One that I had seen my first time in Sudan, on the faces of staff when Sheila left the room after an outburst back in Khartoum. And then it hit me. I was becoming the very person I had despised.

  “I’m sorry, Ishaq,” I said. “Go pray.”

  He walked away slowly. I knew I needed a time-out. But there was no time.

  And then, out of nowhere, I was offered an escape—a permanent one. I was sitting in my office when an e-mail popped up, offering me a job in tsunami-affected Sri Lanka and Indonesia. I would be working with a team, evaluating how a large agency had responded to children’s needs in the wake of the disaster. It was a three-month consultancy, and it would certainly be easier than what I was doing in Darfur.

  I sat in my office reading and rereading the e-mail, expecting it to end with: “Just kidding!” I didn’t even remember applying to this job; it must have been months ago, when the tsunami hit and I started sending off résumés. I had already been in Darfur for seven months, which made me a novice. Sure, for people not in this line of work seven months living and working in Darfur was forever. But I was surrounded by colleagues who had spent years here, who extended contract after contract, choosing again and again to stay. How could I face them and admit that I was even considering leaving? I imagined they’d be angry, suspicious, peg me as a sellout and a phony.

  “Leave!” Lila commanded me over breakfast. “Are you some crazy muzungu? If I had a chance like that, you think I would stick it out here like a fool? Do what you need to do, girl. And leave me your DVDs.”

  I confided in another Kenyan friend, Joseph. He was one of Lila’s best friends. “I just don’t know what to do. It’s fine here. I could stay—of course, I could stay. But this is a really great opportunity. What do you think?”

  “You’ve been here how long? Five months? And you were here for two before that? That’s enough. You should go.”

  “But what about the camp?”

  “What about the camp?!” He laughed. “You think being here is going to change that camp? I’m sorry, my dear, but that camp will be here no matter if you are or aren’t. Seven months is plenty. I’m jealous—get out of this shit hole. People leave jobs all the time. Don’t feel badly about it.”

  Again and again, it was my African expa
t friends who sanctioned my leaving. They had a seemingly sensible take on the whole thing. We were here doing a job; this whole thing we whites thought of as philanthropy was irrelevant. Sure, they cared, but their reason for being here was straightforward: they came in order to be able to leave—to return home, eventually, and have an easy life. These jobs allowed them to save more money than they ever would in Kenya or Uganda. For them, being in Sudan was just a means to an end. There was no ego involved. For the Western expats it felt different, like we were here proving something. Our self-worth was wrapped up in this life.

  While my Kenyan colleagues may have let me get off easily, I couldn’t bear facing the camp committee. At the end of the next meeting, I found the courage to tell them the news.

  “I’ll be leaving in three weeks,” I said, almost in a whisper. Ishaq translated my message. I had told him earlier that day. He had looked at me blankly, but could sense how distraught I was and didn’t want to torture me. “OK, then,” he said. “Let’s work until you leave!”

  The group sat silently, staring at me.

  “Where are you going? Why?” Ahmed asked.

  What was I going to say? Sorry, but I’m leaving to go to Sri Lanka and Indonesia, to work there. It’s not that I don’t really care about you all, it’s just, well, I got a better job. So I lied. I said I was going home for my family.

  “But we are your family,” Ahmed protested.

  “I know you are.” My hands were shaking. I could barely speak, I was so ashamed. “I need to go home, though,” I said softly, my voice quivering.

  Two of the members spoke at the same time. “They want to know when you are coming back,” Ishaq translated.

  The truth was, I wasn’t coming back. I was just one of many camp coordinators who would fill this role. Just like the person who would replace me, I came in for a few months, did what I could to make life a bit more pleasant. But I could leave, and would; I had options, and at any point I might get on a plane and go home or on to a better job. These people were left in their broken country, ruled by a relentlessly corrupt government that often seemed to do more to fracture the nation than rebuild it. Most of them would remain in these—or similar—conditions for the rest of their lives.