Chasing Chaos: My Decade In and Out of Humanitarian Aid

by Jessica Alexander

  Ishaq started laughing. He knew the score; he had worked with countless foreigners before. They had come and gone—in and out. Transience was the defining nature of this work. Sure, we all exchanged e-mail addresses, promising to stay in touch. But he knew that once I left, I would be gone.

  “What are they saying?” I asked Ishaq.

  He chuckled. “They want to speak to your father and tell him that you must stay.”

  Ahmed pulled out his mobile phone.

  “He’s asking for your father’s number,” Ishaq said.

  “What, he’s going to call my Dad?”

  “Yes. He wants to tell him to make you stay here.”

  “This is ridiculous. Does he even know what time it is there? My Dad’s sleeping!”

  But Ahmed was serious and the rest of the group insisted. He didn’t realize that he couldn’t possibly have enough credit on his phone to call the United States.

  “Tell him to use mine. This is insane.” I gave my phone to Ahmed. I told them my home phone number and Ahmed dialed.

  All of the committee members leaned in, some of them giggling like children. I could hear the distant, tinny buzz as the phone rang, and then my father’s voice. Excited, Ahmed started speaking very quickly, and in Arabic—to my dad, who definitely does not understand Arabic. I took the phone from him.

  “Jay?” my weary father said. It was the middle of the night for him. “Is everything OK? What’s going on?”

  “Hi, Dad. Sorry for calling this late. My friends here in the camp insisted that I call you. They don’t want me to leave.”

  Ishaq took the phone from me.

  “Hello, sir.” I couldn’t imagine what Dad must have thought on the other end of that phone line. “We do not want Jessica to leave. We are her family here. She needs to stay.” My dad was clearly saying something because Ishaq kept nodding and saying “Yes, sir.” He passed the phone back to me.

  “Jay? What …? Who was that?”

  “Dad—I’ll call you back. Go back to bed. Sorry.”

  The committee waited for Ishaq’s verdict, leaning in and looking at him with anticipation. He said something to the committee in Arabic. They leaned back in their chairs and grinned. They knew I was going.

  I WAS SITTING ON MY bed back in the room where I had lived for the past five months when I called my dad back. I was crying. “Dad, how can I leave? I can’t go.”

  “Jessica—this is not your war,” he said. “You are one stick in a river of shit. Nothing you are doing will solve this problem. I know you want to stay, I know you’re doing important work for today, but come on, get out of there. Don’t look back.”

  “But I want to feel like I’ve finished something. Anything!” Each day I won small battles, lost others, but I didn’t ever feel like I had done anything substantial. I’d come to learn that this feeling of powerlessness, this recognition of the insignificance of your own work beneath the overwhelming, endless avalanche of problems, is what aid workers face every day. We worked so hard, put in exhausting effort to move the bar a mere two inches. Such little progress after so much exertion—it was psychologically demoralizing.

  “Look, I know you are committed to your work, but how long will you have to stay to feel that sense of completion? It could be years. And what are you willing to sacrifice to feel it? What does achievement in a place like Darfur look like, anyway?”

  Maybe Dad was right. The fate of Darfur wasn’t resting on whether I stayed or went. Even Ahmed’s niece, whom I had managed to get out—who had been, briefly, my one shining achievement—had died after medical complications.

  Three weeks later, Ishaq brought me to the small airport in El Fasher. He sat next to me as we waited until I boarded the little plane to Khartoum, where I would get my connecting flight to Colombo, Sri Lanka. I knew I would never see him again and he knew it, too.

  When it was time to board we walked slowly to the security area. I wanted to hug Ishaq tightly. But we couldn’t—and so he shook my hand and leaned in so that our shoulders grazed. “I’m sorry, Ishaq.”

  “You must be strong,” he said. How ridiculous, I thought. Him telling me to be strong.

  The little plane lifted up and I looked down on Al Salam, with its ordered rows of tents that we had worked so hard to plan. As we ascended higher, the landscape transformed into a miniature map—tiny blue tents pitted onto pale graph paper.

  A FEW WEEKS LATER, the agency did hire another camp coordinator to replace me. Six months after I left my friends still in El Fasher told me that Al Salam had virtually doubled in size—to forty-five thousand people. How were they living, where were they bathing or disposing of their trash? We tried so hard to keep the place orderly, with enough space for everyone to live without being on top of each other. I couldn’t imagine cramming twice as many people into the carefully planned plots of land inside the camp borders. But I didn’t have to. Doing the unimaginable was someone else’s responsibility now.

  Four years later, the government kicked out thirteen Western aid groups in retaliation for the International Criminal Court’s decision to issue a warrant for the arrest of President Al-Bashir on charges of war crimes. Did the roof that we fixed on the school in block D16 even matter now? Did the covers we put on the latrines to stop the flies mean anything anymore? They were fine solutions to stop the immediate problems, but this war was much bigger than me, than the agency that I worked for, than the countless humanitarian workers running around providing bars of soap. The country needed a government that didn’t terrorize its own population, one that was committed to peace and didn’t back a militia that ran people off of their land. And without this, without a government that worked with the aid community, not against it, our programs could only be short-term solutions.

  More Money, More Problems

  SRI LANKA AND INDONESIA, 2005

  The first day on the job I was greeted by sliding glass doors, marble floors, and enormous flower arrangements in the lobby of the Colombo Hyatt. Tourists roamed the atrium, gripping maps and guidebooks, with cameras dangling from their necks. In one corner, a small café sold croissants and cookies; in another, a man played Barry Manilow songs on a polished grand piano. Businessmen sat on the cushy couches, reading the newspaper or talking on the phone. I was given a note at check-in: “Welcome to Sri Lanka. We have a meeting with Save the Children at 10 a.m. See you then.”

  I had been hired by one of the largest agencies responding to the emergency to assess their response to the tsunami. As the aid world became more professionalized—establishing minimum standards by which to operate, requiring master’s degrees to enter the field, developing codes of conduct and measures to increase accountability—evaluations like the one I was doing were now common practice. I would be traveling throughout tsunami-affected areas in Sri Lanka and Indonesia examining programs for children while the rest of the team covered education, health, nutrition, and water and sanitation. We weren’t there to build the toilets, run the clinics, or reconstruct schools; we were examining the agency to determine whether the toilets they built, the clinics they ran, and the schools they reconstructed were working and were working well. I was an outsider—or independent evaluator, as industry jargon put it—looking in on this operation.

  I had never worked in a sudden-onset emergency operation before. The humanitarian relief I had seen was in times of conflict, prolonged crisis, chronic distress. At that time, the tsunami was considered the biggest natural disaster the humanitarian community had ever responded to. The event killed more than 220,000 people across fourteen countries and displaced 1.7 million more. I was curious to see a relief response to a natural disaster in countries with stable governments and functioning civil sectors. The reconstruction would take years, but here you could work toward such a goal with some hope, feel you were genuinely building momentum and traction. Although both countries had preexisting challenges, especially in their education and health infrastructures, neither Sri Lanka nor Indonesia were fa
iled states. And if we ever forgot or made comparisons to where we had come from, the local staff and government were there to remind us, “This is no sub-Saharan Africa.”

  By the time I arrived, nine months after the tsunami hit in December of 2004, the event had faded from the nightly news and the front pages. As the crisis became less acute, the media’s interest waned. Once the first bottles of water and bags of rice were delivered and interviews with English-speaking tourists were wrapped up, the cameras stopped rolling. The reporters—with a few exceptions—filed their last stories, and moved on to the next assignment. But the long-term tragedy for the survivors had really just begun.

  The Sri Lankan coast was a tropical paradise by any standard. Men walked along the side of the road wearing colorful sarongs, which they tied like skirts around their waists. Women strolled together draped in bright, glittering saris. People on bikes casually rode through lush hills past endless rows of palm trees. But reminders of the tsunami’s devastation were everywhere. Dotting the otherwise tranquil horizon were the brick foundations where buildings had once stood. Bridges were crooked and collapsing, their roadways dangling just feet above the water; roads were cracked, slabs of concrete smashed up against each other, resembling the shifting tectonic plates that caused this ruin. The water had pulled everything in its reach back out to sea, like a windshield wiper clearing a soaked window. Much of the remaining debris had been removed by the time I arrived and it wasn’t until I saw a barge that the sea had carried one mile inland that I could understand the magnitude of the wave.

  Many children were orphaned, but many more died. As witnesses explained, the tsunami first pulled the sea back, away from the shore, exposing hundreds of fish flopping on the naked sand. Children raced in to catch them. They were jumping around with the fish when the first wave, like a boomerang, swept back in. “It’s strange,” a professor from graduate school said to me before I left. He had worked in Indonesia during the early days of the emergency, and I called him for advice. “You walk into these villages, and there are just no children.” I was used to children shouting “Muzungu” and “Khawaja”—white person—whenever our Land Cruiser entered a rural area. But for my professor, what he remembered from the days after the tsunami was the silence.

  More men survived than women, not only because they were more likely to know how to swim, or because they were stronger and could hold onto stationary objects—trees, roofs—tighter, but because the clothing women wore (saris in Sri Lanka, head scarves in Indonesia) got caught on floating debris and sucked them underwater. Some fishermen were far enough away from shore that they only felt the sea swell, their boats rising and falling with the current. They couldn’t know the destruction happening on land.

  MAYBE IT WAS THE DUSTY Darfur smell and the sand tucked into every crevice of my clothes or my notebooks filled with to-do lists from Al Salam that reminded me I had abandoned the camp. Maybe it was the constant travel along the coast of Sri Lanka and Indonesia—packing and unpacking, dragging bags down hotel hallways, lugging them into the backs of the vehicles. Mental checks: Do I have my wallet? Where’s my passport? Shit, I left my toothbrush. Or maybe it was walking along the remains of what was left after the tsunami raced onto the coast and swept back out to sea carrying children, women, men, houses, roads, schools, anything that its foamy fingers could reach. It must have been all of those things because the months I spent in Sri Lanka and Indonesia were hell.

  I spent most of my time there in a daze. Even a nightly dose of Ambien couldn’t get me to sleep. Every morning, my eyes throbbed with exhaustion. I’d look into the bathroom mirror at my pale face, raccoon circles around my eyes, the edges of my lips drawn down, my hair overgrown and knotted. I don’t look like this. This isn’t me. Only days ago, in Darfur, I had been dodging hedgehogs and using bottled water to bathe. In the capitals, I was now staying at five-star resorts with lavish buffets, poolside bars, overstuffed pillows, hundreds of television channels, and steaming showers with pressure that drilled into my neck and back. I should have enjoyed it, but the lingering shame of leaving Darfur still clung closely. Being pampered in my new surroundings only made it worse.

  At the time, the tsunami response was the most generous and rapidly funded international humanitarian operation in history. By December 2005, a year after the tsunami struck, a total of $14 billion had been pledged or donated for emergency relief and reconstruction. About 40 percent, or $5.5 billion, came from the general public. For most humanitarian crises, that figure is usually around 15 percent. The outpouring of donations from the public was due to a number of circumstances: an enormous and blameless natural disaster, its timing (right after the Christmas holiday), the number of Western tourists who had been present, and the extensive media coverage. The influx of money, of human resources, of gifts in kind—they were on a scale the aid world had never seen before.

  And with hundreds of agencies running around trying to “build back better,” there was also an increased interest in analyzing what the aid community was doing. I had read plenty of background reports about the tsunami; they could be easily downloaded online. Hundreds of evaluations were going on, so many it sometimes seemed as if there were more evaluators examining the response to the tsunami than there were people actually responding to it. To me, all the ground appeared to be covered: how efficient agencies were, how effective their response was, and how well organizations coordinated and worked with local actors. Other evaluators had already scrutinized the response from a gender perspective, an environmental perspective, and inspected the financing instruments used, and whether the money got where it needed to be fast enough.

  “This may be totally naive of me, but what else is there to say?” I asked our team leader, Toby, a chainsmoking chubby Brit in his midforties, as we rode together in the back of a rickshaw. It was my second day in Sri Lanka and we were on our way to speak with people from the Ministry of Education. We sat close together to avoid the raindrops seeping through the sides of the plastic panels that hung over the scooter.

  “It’s a question I’ve asked, too,” he said. “This thing has been analyzed to death.”

  I found myself comparing everything about the tsunami response to our work in Darfur. What would an evaluator say about Al Salam? There were agreed upon international standards and benchmarks: twenty people to a latrine, 15 liters of water per person per day, minimum surface area of 45 square meters (or about 484 square feet) for each person in the camp. Our initial plans for Al Salam followed the standards closely. But nothing about aid really ever went according to design. With new people coming each day, the pace at which we could get in materials, the unexpected rainstorm or militia attack, these standards became more aspirational than realistic. I reasoned that here, hopefully, with seemingly fewer constraints and so much more money, the aid community could do more.

  I shuffled through meetings with government ministers, UN and NGO staff, police, community leaders, mothers, and teachers, all along the coast of Sri Lanka. We then flew to Banda Aceh, Indonesia, to do the same. I asked a lot of questions about the agency’s work: How fast did they react? What did their programs do? What was the quality of their response? Were the affected populations consulted in the process? The final report would be read by not only the responding agencies but also people at headquarters and large government donors who paid for multimillion-dollar programs and who wanted to see how their dollars were spent.

  I also interviewed people from other agencies to hear what they had to say about the overall response. People kept complaining: “There’s actually too much money.” At first, I dismissed this kind of statement; it seemed like an aberration. But after six weeks of countless interviews, I realized that I hadn’t just heard it once, but again and again.

  In Darfur, we stretched our budget to the limit. We turned the generator off at 10 p.m. every night and suffered through the immovable heat to cut fuel costs. The office I wanted to build for the committee, with multiple meeting ro
oms, had to be scaled back to a single room because we didn’t have the budget to build extra walls. But aid money is lumpy. People are mesmerized by the images of suffering that come out of a disaster like the tsunami. The chronic emergencies—the northern Ugandas, the Darfurs, the Congos, and the Somalias—don’t have simple, iconic images and can’t be summarized in easy-to-digest sound bites. Yet those crises slowly kill as many people or more than the tsunami did. Estimates put the number of people displaced as a result of violence in northern Uganda at 2 million, and the International Rescue Committee has calculated that roughly 5.4 million people died in the Congo between the time war broke out in 1998 and 2007. But these tragedies never get the same kind of attention or funding. Still, I didn’t understand. How could too much money ever be a problem?

  Aid funding after an emergency like the tsunami is one big feeding frenzy. To stay in business, agencies must appeal to funders. The largest donations to the UN and NGOs are from Western governments’ foreign assistance budgets (USAID, for example, is the US government’s international assistance branch that doles out millions of dollars each year to aid organizations, the Brits have their own federal aid branch, as do most other wealthy nations), large foundations (such as the Ford Foundation and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation), and more recently, private companies (such as Google or Ikea) and the foundations they endow. Agencies compete with each other for this money. Their employees write proposals about projects they envision—how many tents they can distribute, how many clinics they will set up, how many schools they’re going to rebuild—and how efficiently they’ll execute these plans. The donors award grants to the most persuasive agencies, the ones best at convincing benefactors they can deliver. With this influx of cash, agencies get to work. Humanitarian responders gear up, parachute in, and provide lifesaving assistance—water, food, and rudimentary shelter—as quickly as possible.