Chasing Chaos: My Decade In and Out of Humanitarian Aid

by Jessica Alexander

  Over the years, I’d learn that disasters are actually good for aid organizations. They present opportunities for agencies to attract more funds, garner greater publicity, and essentially grow global empires. After any emergency, I’d imagine PR teams giving each other the thumbs-up after presenting colorful spreadsheets showcasing the number of times the agency was named in the press, or the number of new hits to the agency’s website—because that’s when the money starts pouring in. Sure, the UN and NGOs use those contributions to respond to emergencies, and they need the funding to do their work, but this good-hearted profession is an industry just like any other. It needs dollars, and lots of them, to survive. With such huge surpluses coming into post-tsunami Asia, no agency was going to struggle to survive.

  Only MSF stopped collecting donations once they’d received as much money as they thought they could use. They did so less than a week after the tsunami hit, that’s how fast the money was coming. The other ones just let the tap run on full blast, accepting check after check, until they realized that there was no way that they could actually spend the tens of millions of dollars in the six-month time frames demanded. Getting necessary materials into the country, reaching affected areas and finding out what they needed, working on construction plans, and hiring people to see them through—it took time to do it all right.

  BUT NOBODY HAD THE TIME. With so much funding, so much media attention, organizations were under extreme pressure to get things done quickly. Why hasn’t the money been spent yet? Why hasn’t rebuilding started yet? This was the resounding cry from donors and the general public. They wanted to see their funds going to use; they wanted an immediate response to the dreadful images they were seeing on TV. Get it out and get it done fast became the operating mantra from inside the agencies. Those who got their tents up the quickest or were the first to have their pictures in the press were the successes. They’d take a photo to accompany the reports, whose breathless text revealed a measure of relief, at having gotten the thing done: “Here! Phew! We got the center up. We distributed the supplies. We set up a clinic, a school, a child-friendly space.” Check. Check. Check. And if tents went unused, because people knew they would blow over if you sneezed on them, or a newly built community didn’t have a water source or connection to electricity—well, at least you could tick the box that you had built the damn things. But the quality of these items, and the consequences for beneficiaries—for actual human beings—seemed like afterthoughts. I had read somewhere in graduate school that aid was the world’s largest unregulated industry. Here it was clear: NGOs were implementing their programs but there were few mechanisms in place to measure program effectiveness that would enable donors to hold actors accountable for their successes and failures. This was where our team came in: we were there to assess how things had gone, this time around, and draw lessons for the future—and hope that someone listened to them.

  TOO MUCH MONEY ALSO MEANT hundreds of organizations had the funds to come into the countries, set up shop, and offer assistance. The space became so congested that people were literally scrambling to put a stake in the ground before someone else did. Once, my team and I passed a flattened area where a school would be built. Flagpoles with banners reading “GOAL” marked the area. Construction hadn’t begun and nobody knew when it would, but this was GOAL’s territory, and other relief providers had better stay away. It was like watching a dog pee to mark his territory. Benefactors made sure that their logos were stamped onto everything they funded, and before a donor visit, agency employees would scurry around making sure that all the distributed tents had the donor’s logo on it, too. Both the agencies and their patrons wanted credit and they needed something visible—some easy photo to deliver to the press and the people back home.

  This pointless and petty competition was often counterproductive in terms of the welfare of the people these efforts were meant to serve. For example, so many child centers were popping up, there weren’t actually enough children to fill them. One afternoon, a woman who ran one of the facilities for children explained the problem. She folded her bright red sari under her legs as we sat on one of the mats under the tent, watching the children. Some were drawing or skipping rope; others were kicking a ball around outside and chasing each other to catch it. The woman pointed to the group of kids. “These children, they have been through so much. The child spaces, they are good, but there are so many of them. Save the Children has one there,” she said, pointing down the road. “IRC has one there.” She pointed the other direction. “And they all are trying to lure children to come to their space. They give them sweets and balls and games. The children are confused. They don’t know who to choose, and there is pressure to go to one over the other.”

  The amount of money donated to the tsunami was also disproportionate to what the rest of the country had. The needs outside of the affected areas were great, too; in both Indonesia and Sri Lanka, conflicts had been brewing long before December 26, 2004. In Sri Lanka, the Tamil Tigers (or LTTE), a rebel movement, and the government of Sri Lanka engaged in a decades-long civil war. It is estimated that up to 100,000 civilians were killed in the war, with the forced displacement of hundreds of thousands more. Indonesia witnessed similar years of political instability and conflict, first in the region of East Timor, which became its own independent nation in 2002, and later with the Free Aceh Movement (GAM), a separatist movement seeking the independence of the Aceh region. Serious international political motivation to respond to these crises had been lacking, and aid agencies were responding to the humanitarian fallout on comparatively shoestring budgets.

  After the tsunami, donors earmarked funding specifically for tsunami programming. Some of the camps for tsunami victims that I visited were replete with flushing toilets, regular electricity, and hardwood floors. A few meters away were the camps where people displaced by the enduring domestic conflicts had been living. Their age showed: the tents were tattered, the alleyways lined with sewage, the latrines daunting, odiferous cesspools.

  “We’ve been getting complaints. It’s really causing a lot of problems,” one of the local leaders explained to me. He stood in the middle of the newer camp in flip-flops, a white button-down shirt tucked into a checkered sarong covering his legs, and a mop of black hair on his head. “People from the conflict camp are asking, ‘Why can’t we have what they are getting? Because we didn’t lose our house in the tsunami? Well we lost our house long ago! Why are they being rewarded and not us?’ ” No one was saying that the victims of the tsunami should get run-down equipment, but their relatively well-appointed shelters, and the quality and quantity of the supplies devoted to their care, struck many around them as disproportionate. This inequity was causing tension and people worried that it could lead to civil unrest. Even within the new encampments, people could recite the type and amount of goods their neighbors in distant camps had received. Some demanded to know why they weren’t receiving the same benefits.

  The economic distortions that aid caused went beyond the discrepancy in living conditions. Suddenly, productive and educated members of the workforce were being snatched up by NGOs. I met a local judge who was now working as a driver for an NGO because his new job paid him twice what his old one did. School principals worked as administrative assistants for international agencies. One day in Sri Lanka, I arrived at a temporary school to monitor a teacher training session with Arjun, my translator, a slight man with a thick moustache. As soon as they spotted us, the students spilled out of the classroom and flocked to greet him. “I used to teach at this school,” he explained.

  As a translator, Arjun made three times what he would as a teacher. Instead of participating in the training, Arjun came to work as a translator for us, translating our presentations for his former coworkers in the school. We needed people like Arjun, people who could read and write in English, people with enough skills to manage projects. A job at an NGO—almost always the biggest employer in town—was a lucrative position for a pers
on who lived there, and we poached some of the best and brightest right out of the very civil society we were trying to support, luring them into what were essentially temporary positions. We weren’t going to be here forever, and when we were gone the jobs would be, too.

  After the training, as we got in the car to go, Arjun turned to me and said, “The other teachers want to know whether you have any jobs for them.”

  Money also equated stuff. Tons of stuff, which poured in from well-intentioned people all over the world. Ports were flooded with boxes of clothes, toys, and books, none of which had a place in these countries. Women who only wore saris and had never exposed their legs to slacks, let alone ripped jeans, were now being sent someone’s old dungarees. People who had worn only sandals were being handed four-inch heels. They didn’t want the inappropriate hand-me-downs that were sent from people’s basements or closets. Much of the clothing sat on the sides of the roads, where cattle started chewing on it and getting sick. Basketballs and American footballs were sent to kids who played cricket and soccer. Shipments contained children’s books written in English, medicine bottles with labels printed in languages nobody in these communities could read, open tubes of Preparation H and Neosporin, even Viagra. These items had to go through customs, just like the life-saving supplies. Civil servants had to divert time from other projects to get rid of it all.

  “We’re not beggars,” one told me as he pointed out the window of our vehicle as we made our way to a government building. Outside we passed large piles of unwanted stuff rotting on the side of the road. “We don’t want people’s junk.”

  I could imagine the church fund-raiser or the elementary school benefit where these contributions came from. People were good-hearted and only wanted to help. What they didn’t realize was that there was a cost to transporting and ultimately disposing of unused donations. It was a waste of everyone’s time and money.

  “If you knew the time it took to sort through this shit and figure out what was garbage and what was actually useful, you’d be amazed,” Mike, a stocky British logistician who looked as if he was right out of the army, told me inside a large warehouse that held everything from fuel-efficient stoves to blankets. He was walking briskly through the aisles, supplies stacked in tall piles on either side of him. I felt as though I was following him through Costco. He had a clipboard in one hand, a pen tucked behind his ear, and a radio attached to his belt. “I’ve got my logs guys up to their ears in tents and tarps and the other items that people actually need. And then I have some guy from America sending me a box of teddy bears for kids. OK, thanks mate, but what do I do with them? Who do I give them to? It’s not enough for all of the children we work with, and giving this stuff to just a few leaves the others out. Some of this stuff is ridiculous. Yesterday I sat here sorting through Santa costumes.” In some cases, logisticians such as Mike delivered the excess to the easiest neighborhood they could reach. This caused further distortions: some people received three bikes, while others got none.

  Four years later, on an assignment after Cyclone Nargis in Myanmar, I heard of donated plastic sheeting for tents that was of such low quality the aid community didn’t know what to do with them. “They looked like tablecloths that you’d use on your back porch,” someone recalled. There was no way this material would stand up to the next rains or heavy winds, and it certainly wasn’t anything you’d want to live under. But the aid workers there were inventive. They didn’t distribute the sheeting as material for shelter. Instead, they hired local tailors and turned thousands of sheets into rain ponchos for kids.

  ONE DAY IN BANDA ACEH, Indonesia, I interviewed a local man who worked for one of the shelter agencies. We were sitting in the remains of a café that had been demolished and was now covered by plastic tarps. The waiters, grateful for our patronage, constantly refilled our small cups of tea. He told me about gotong royong, or mutual aid, a local tradition that had characterized the response in the early days. I had read numerous reports that described the impressive lifesaving action and early emergency support shown by survivors themselves.

  “People were so helpful to each other. They’re the first responders. The survivors are the people who are doing things—feeding each other, pulling each other out of debris, rebuilding what they can.”

  Maybe it has something to do with how the media portrays people who have just suffered a serious disaster, but the public usually thinks that affected populations are more helpless and less resilient than they really are. In Myanmar, I would learn this firsthand. In the days immediately following Cyclone Nargis—and the deaths of more than 130,000 people—the ruling junta closed the borders to foreigners and forbade aid workers from entering the country and providing relief. International agencies panicked, forecasting further devastation if the hundreds of aid workers currently swarming around Bangkok waiting for their entry visas weren’t granted immediate access. Without them, disease, starvation, and widespread homelessness were all but guaranteed.

  As it turned out, although the ruling junta provided almost nothing, the immediate relief operation carried out by concerned citizens and monks was nothing short of extraordinary. When at last the foreign relief workers were allowed access, and saw how the affected populations were getting on with things, they nodded and scratched their heads. Things weren’t nearly as hopeless—people not nearly so helpless—as they’d predicted. No one was sitting around waiting for the expats to swoop in and save the day. They were too busy rebuilding their homes and picking up the pieces of what was left of their lives. It seemed the doomsayers had been wrong.

  Back in the tsunami, though, with so much aid, the self-help mentality had shifted. “Now, they have become used to us giving them things and paying them for their help,” my colleague told me.

  “What do you mean?” I asked. Although paying people to assist with distributions wasn’t something agencies usually did, they did provide small stipends to community members who helped them dig latrines or construct buildings. The community should be involved in this reconstruction, the thinking went, and compensating people was a way to remunerate them for labor and to ensure they were part of that rebuilding effort. But paying people to help with distributions or other tasks could potentially change community members’ expectations about what aid agencies were there to do.

  “The other day I packed up a truck full of items to send to a village. When the truck got there, one of my drivers got out and asked people to help him off-load the materials—hygiene kits, I think it was. But the men just sat there. They demanded that he pay them to help. And when he refused and said that he would just off-load it himself with his team, they said they would not allow it. They wanted a payment and weren’t going to let him deliver these items without one.”

  “So what did he do?”

  “He called me to ask what he should do. I told him to get back in the truck, turn around, and tell the community that he would go distribute somewhere else,” he replied, chuckling. “The next day the community leaders came to my office apologizing.”

  THE EVALUATION WAS A REVELATION—BUT something about it made me uneasy. I felt like a voyeur, peering in on the suffering of others and taking notes, as if I were on tour. After so many evaluations, I got the sense that people were sick of talking to us foreigners. I couldn’t blame them—I’d wonder, even if they were polite and forthcoming, how many before me had stomped into their communities with clipboards and surveys, asking questions but not giving anything in return. People didn’t know how the information they provided was used and didn’t understand the decision-making processes behind the delivery of aid. I had heard of a community in Congo being asked so many times the same questions by aid agencies without receiving assistance that someone in the village finally wrote down the usual answers and tacked it to a tree. When the next inquiring aid worker drove in, the community just pointed.

  Good work was being done—there was a significant reduction in morbidity for treatable diseases such as malari
a, children returned to school, and temporary shelters were housing thousands. I met dozens of smart and committed people who worked in exceptionally challenging conditions to improve the situation for the affected population. Although I knew genuine progress had been made, the critical lens through which I was seeing these things made me question some of the most fundamental assumptions I had about aid. One night when I was even more overwhelmed than usual, trying to make sense of things that didn’t make sense, I did what I always did when I needed a sounding board: I called my dad.

  “Hello?”

  “Dad?”

  “Jay? Where are you? Are you OK?”

  “Yeah, I’m OK.” We caught up for a few minutes—and then I couldn’t help diving into everything I was seeing. “Dad,” I said, “what if there were a tsunami at home? Just imagine it.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Well, imagine if everyone in Ridgefield died.”

  “That’s what, around 22,000 people?”

  “Yeah. Now imagine ten times that many people died—that’s—”

  “220,000.”

  “That’s how many people died here, from the tsunami.” I didn’t know how to make my father feel exactly how enormous a figure 220,000 was—I didn’t know how to translate these numbers into words. So I stuck with numbers, ones he’d know: “They read all 3,000 names of the people who died in 9/11 every year, right? Imagine how long it’d take to read 220,000 names.”