Chasing Chaos: My Decade In and Out of Humanitarian Aid

by Jessica Alexander

  My dad was quiet for a moment. “Yeah,” he finally said and sighed.

  “But from a humanitarian perspective, in a way, we don’t have to worry about those people. We have to worry about the hundreds of thousands of survivors. I mean, if it happened at home, where do you think you would you go?”

  “I’d go to Jeff and Molly’s and would stay there and figure it out,” he said. Jeff and Molly were some of our oldest friends who lived nearby.

  “Well, Jeff and Molly don’t have a house now, either. No one you know has a house anymore. Jeff and Molly may not even be alive,” I told him.

  “Everything is gone—your car, phone, computer, bed. Whoosh! And I may be dead, too. You also have no money—because all of the banks are destroyed. And there’s no electronic version of any records. So you can’t get money out of your account, any cash you had is gone because your wallet is somewhere floating in the ocean. And you’re walking around, in the rubble that once was your house, trying to figure out what the hell just happened to your life.

  “Everyone around you is in the same position,” I continued, unable to stop. It was the first chance I’d had to vent, and Dad patiently let me. I paced around my hotel room, twirling the phone cord around my fingers. “Everyone’s trying to put the pieces together. You’re feeding each other with whatever you can find. You’re living in a tent on your property to watch over it. All the roads are washed away and whatever transportation that used to exist doesn’t anymore. Americans from the South and West are coming in to bring you clothes, water, food, and some shelters.” I was barely taking breaths between sentences. The phone cord had twisted tight around my knuckles. “Someone’s telling you that the government will be moving you and all of your neighbors to another part of the country. Far from the sea. Far from your livelihood. Far from everything you’ve ever known. But you don’t know if that’s going to happen or when.”

  Finally, my father cut me off. “God, it’s terrifying not to be in control of your life,” he said, his voice calm and thoughtful.

  “Well, also not to have any information about what is going on or what will happen. Then the international aid workers come in. By the hundreds. The thousands, it feels like.” I lay down on the bed and stared up at the ceiling still holding the phone tightly to my ear.

  “People come up to you on the street asking you what you need and what you want. But, you know, they don’t speak your language—they don’t really listen. They have their surveys and their translators and they ask you for your input but where do you even start? You need everything back! Your house, your land, your children, your job, your life! They take pictures of you while you’re sitting by your house, as you’re sorting through the remains. You don’t know these people, they don’t know you, but they want your picture. Your loss and suffering is going to end up as part of a marketing campaign somewhere, on a website or brochure. You know, those shiny reports we get at home don’t talk about these people as people, but as this mass of poor things that need help. If it were you, wouldn’t you want to scream?!”

  “Yeah,” Dad said.

  “And then some people come and bring saris or burkas, and you’re like, ‘Thanks, but I don’t wear burkas! I wear jeans and T-shirts.’ And they just look at you when you don’t want these things and think—But you’re getting something! Why aren’t you more grateful? And you’re hearing that there is trouble at the port—that shelter and other relief items can’t get through because they’re letting these things you can’t use through first.” I stared out the window onto the busy Colombo street below, watching the steady flow of traffic, the cars starting and stopping and starting again. I knew I was getting carried away, but my father was waiting quietly on the other end of the line, and so I let myself keep going.

  “Then medicines come and are dumped in your village. The local doctor—who may or may not be alive anymore—can’t read the Japanese or French labels that are on these medicine bottles. The meds for your blood pressure are obviously gone. Where are you going to get these drugs now? It’s not like the drugstore is open. So you ask one of the foreigners with a clipboard how you can get medicine. He looks at you and says he deals with shelter, not health, sorry. He says he’ll ask a colleague. You never see him again.”

  “The reports we get here never mention that kind of stuff,” Dad said.

  I felt sad for talking so angrily to my father. I can only imagine how startled he must have been. What happened to my daughter? Where did the energy, the optimism, the excitement go? I couldn’t stop myself, though. Suddenly, seemingly out of nowhere, everything I’d seen and felt was crystallizing inside me. And I still had more to say: “Can your friends please stop emailing me telling me what amazing work I’m doing?”

  “Jess, what is the first thing you will do when you get home?” Dad asked brightly, trying to redirect the conversation.

  “Sleep.”

  I Make a Living Off the Suffering of Strangers

  NEW YORK CITY, 2006

  I returned home three days before the wedding shower of one of my best friends from high school. Although I had looked forward to the party, coordinating my flight connections so I could make it, by the time I got home I was dreading it. All I wanted to do was lie in bed and watch television. Law & Order reruns were particularly good at making the time pass. I wasn’t at all prepared to put on a dress or make small talk. But I was a bridesmaid and had a line to read in the singsong poem her sister wrote, so I took the train from Connecticut to Washington, DC, where she lived now.

  When I arrived at the shower, I followed the female chatter up a long staircase to a room decorated in pristine pinks and whites. Flower petals were sprinkled on the tables. Everyone was perfectly dressed, and I was wearing the only pair of shoes I had been able to find that morning, an ugly pair of flats I’d worn to an eighth-grade piano recital.

  This was the first time I had seen Rebecca since her engagement party eight months before. She had clearly lost weight, and her small body seemed overwhelmed by all the attention. I approached her and we hugged.

  “It’s so good to see you,” she said, touching my hair. I hadn’t had the chance to get a haircut, and in my opinion I looked like I was wearing a witch wig.

  “You, too. You look amazing.”

  “Thank you. How are you?” she asked.

  “Honestly? Not so OK. I’m having a really hard time,” I said, surprised to find I was tearing up.

  “I’m sure. We’ll get into it later. But just not here,” she said, still stroking my unruly hair. I wished she would stop.

  “I know. God, I’m sorry,” I said quickly, embarrassed.

  “Thanks, Jess. I’m so glad you’re here.” She turned away to greet an aunt or cousin behind me, patiently perched on tiptoe, waiting to dote on her.

  Around me, women were mingling near the bar. A long bench was stacked high with gifts wrapped in delicate paper and textured ribbons. Waiters in tuxedos passed colorful hors d’oeuvres and glasses of champagne. I grabbed one.

  I couldn’t remember the last time I had seen most of these women. I spotted an old classmate with whom I kept in occasional touch and made my way toward her. “Oh my God! Jess! How are you?!” She hugged me, trying not to spill the Bloody Mary she held in one hand or drop the potato puff clutched in the other.

  I responded cautiously. “I’m good. I mean, I’m OK. How are you?”

  “Whatever, I’m fine. I want to hear about you! What was it like?!”

  “Um, it was … hot.”

  “Right, I’m sure!”

  “And hard. It was really hard. Darfur is in really bad shape. And the tsunami response is so complicated.”

  She was nodding thoughtfully but her eyes were already wandering. While she might have been interested in where I’d been and the work I’d done, my friend Jenn didn’t have the words to talk about it. And the truth was, neither did I. Jenn just wanted to know how I was doing; I was the one struggling to put sentences together. I didn�
�t have party-appropriate anecdotes I could rattle off or dramatic stories that would cause a crowd to gather around us. Most mornings, I had trouble even bringing myself to get out of my pajamas.

  I deflected the conversation back to her. “But how are things with you?”

  “Good. I mean, but it’s nothing compared to what you do.”

  A school acquaintance overheard our conversation and came to greet me. “Hey, Jess! I heard you were away—Rebecca told me Sri Lanka and Indonesia? For the tsunami?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Oh my God. So how was it? Was it, like, fun, or devastating?”

  When a question like that, about one of the most publicized natural disasters in the world, came from a graduate of Yale Law School, I wasn’t quite sure what to say. These were mostly private school–educated women, wealthy women, women who ate at fancy restaurants, went to art openings, and belonged to book clubs. So these conversations always caught me off guard, and I didn’t have the slightest clue how to respond to her question.

  Rebecca opened gifts and we “oohed” and “ahed” on cue—gasps of delight for cutlery and crockery, linens and lingerie. After lunch, we ordered coffees and cappuccinos and nibbled on caramel-drizzled brownie sundaes. Julie, another classmate, wasn’t touching her dessert. She looked over at me gobbling mine—I hadn’t eaten anything this tasty in months.

  “How do you stay so thin, Jess?” she asked.

  Jenn answered for me. “She lives in Ethiopia, that’s how!”

  I laughed politely. I didn’t bother telling them I had never visited Ethiopia.

  In retrospect, I came into the wedding shower too raw. These friends meant well, and I could have easily slipped into this setting only a few years before. But now the fantasies that people had about the places I worked somehow disturbed the fabric of these social gatherings. In most people’s imaginations, I was a million miles away from what they knew, what they could relate to, so of course their awe—their curiosity, their self-consciousness—came out sounding shallow. My friends wanted desperately to relate to me and what I was doing; they were seeing a person who, in a way, they didn’t recognize anymore. But they didn’t know how to integrate me back into their world as much as I didn’t know how to integrate myself. Despite my new worldliness, I felt annoyed and disconnected—I couldn’t extend the same sympathy to these people that I could to people in Darfur. In some ways, my dumbfounded reactions were just as shallow as theirs.

  I see now that I had begun to lose it long before I touched down in New York. It was foolish to think I could go straight from Darfur to Sri Lanka and then to Indonesia without a break. The tension had been building for months, and by the time I finally landed at home I was unhinged. It wasn’t just the lingering guilt of abandoning the camp; after these two consecutive assignments, my idealism seemed to have vanished. I felt lost, betrayed. With such high ambitions for this industry, the flaws seemed overwhelming. And—while I was questioning the extent to which aid had positive outcomes—what did this commitment even mean anymore? Did my endless fatigue mean I wasn’t cut out for the physical rigors of this job? It was disorienting to suddenly doubt the profession that I had spent years trying to break into. Was I still willing to throw my life into chaos for an industry that I now questioned? And if the answer was “no,” then what would I do?

  Unpacking, I couldn’t find bracelets—silly, inexpensive bracelets—that I had carried with me all this way. I hurled a shoe at my bedroom wall and slammed a cabinet.

  “Where the hell are they? I know I packed them!” I was yelling and stomping like a child.

  My father looked at me as though he didn’t recognize me anymore. “What’s wrong with you, Jess?” he said, and walked away. I looked out the door of my bedroom and saw him, still in his pajamas, perched at the edge of the stairs, holding his head in his hands and shaking it.

  Reintegrating into my life at home was hard, but a lot of my anxiety was attached to a decision I knew I had to make, and soon. In Darfur, I learned that I had been awarded a Fulbright Grant to study child soldiers in Sierra Leone. I’d applied for the Fulbright when I graduated from my master’s program, before I’d gone to Sudan. Now I only had two months to decide whether or not I was going to go. As the deadline approached, my anxiety intensified. I pulled my hair and bit my cuticles until my fingertips were red, raw stumps. I was prescribed Xanax. I took long baths. I got a massage and went to the gym. I did yoga, Pilates, meditation. Nothing worked. But after two weeks, my friend Joanna called. I hadn’t seen her since we parted ways outside her office before my first assignment to Darfur.

  “Enough of this. When are you coming to New York?” she asked.

  “I’m not.”

  “What do you mean you’re not? I want to see you.”

  “I’m not going into the city. I don’t want to. I just want to stay here.”

  “Stay there and do what?”

  “Not leave bed. I don’t know. Jo, I look like shit. I don’t want to talk to anyone. I just don’t want to do any of it.”

  “Whatever.” She let me off the hook for a few days. And then she called me back. “If you don’t come in this weekend, I’m coming out there and dragging your ass back here.”

  So I went. I stayed in her Brooklyn apartment and the first night we drank beers and ordered Chinese food and huddled around her space heater because her heat wasn’t working.

  “I don’t know why I feel so lost. I kept thinking that home was going to be so great. I couldn’t wait to get back where things seemed to make sense. Back to what was normal. But everything feels different. I don’t even know what normal is anymore.”

  “It’ll probably take some time, but you’ll be OK,” she reassured me.

  “Will I? And what will OK look like, anyway? I’m supposed to go on this Fulbright to Sierra Leone and I don’t even want to. The thought of leaving again, of going to another unfamiliar place, of being so far away, again, so soon, I don’t know if I can do it.”

  “Then don’t,” she said matter-of-factly.

  We finished one six-pack, then another. We opened a bottle of wine and finished that, too.

  “There’s a party in Fort Greene. You want to go?”

  “Not really.”

  “Come on. Let’s get you out. It will be fun. And if it sucks, we can leave.”

  At the party, dozens of people my age were crammed into the living room. Pounding music came from one of the bedrooms, now a dance floor. I met a guy in the kitchen while pouring myself a vodka soda.

  “What do you do?” he asked.

  I didn’t want to get into it. “I’m a middle-school teacher.” Admitting to running a camp in Darfur would make me stand out as much as being the only white face in a sea of Sudanese.

  “That’s cool.” We chatted for a few more minutes and parted. Later, he found me in the living room.

  “Your friend just told me you were in Darfur! That’s amazing! You should be telling everyone. You’re like a good person! The world needs more people like you!”

  By now I was used to this kind of reaction but I still didn’t know what to say. It wasn’t false modesty; I really couldn’t point to what I had done to warrant such praise. I abandoned the camp. I almost lost my mind out there. I almost threw rocks at children. I make my living off of the suffering of strangers.

  By virtue of our chosen profession, aid workers are automatically ascribed certain qualities: bravery, righteousness, badass-ness. We never had to actually prove that we possessed these attributes—the job title spoke for itself. And if that didn’t convince people, all we had to do was drop the name of a country where we had worked, a war or natural disaster we had been on the ground responding to, and the assumptions were confirmed. “I feel better about myself just hanging out with you!” a friend in finance once told me.

  But people didn’t understand that this work hadn’t turned me into a saint. People like me, out there “doing God’s work” and “saving the world,” wanted to ge
t drunk and laid, too. We have the same concerns—ageing, putting on weight—as anyone else. It just so happened that the dull, daily work of caring—the familiar task of living our lives—was played out against a backdrop of humanitarian catastrophe.

  People asked me how long I could afford to volunteer. What no one seemed to understand was that I was paid to do this work, just like they were paid to do their jobs. Yes, I was committed to aid work and the difference I still believed it could make, but I went to these places not only out of philanthropy. Like other aid workers, I had plenty of selfish motives as well: the building of a career, the adventure of travel, the excitement of meeting different people. Except unless people were fleeing, dying, ailing, or starving, I wouldn’t have a job. “See you in the next one,” people said at their farewell parties in the field. We’d all be reunited at the following war, flood, or earthquake.

  “YOU MUST HAVE SEEN SOME horrible things,” people would say to me, but I hadn’t seen death the way they imagined. Yes, suffering was all around me, but people coped. They were strong and alive and doing their best to rebuild their lives. I grew accustomed to impoverished surroundings in a clinical way, like an ER doctor getting used to seeing multiple gunshot wounds. But the cumulative effect of those months had eroded me. My depression wasn’t just about feeling out of place at home, but the sense of disorientation I felt in all worlds. I certainly couldn’t live in a place like Darfur for the long term, but living in New York now felt just as strange.

  I had heard that at some point many people in the aid industry continue to return to the field because they drift so far from home they no longer recognize themselves in it, just as a soldier might keep signing up for duty because the chaos of war feels more comforting than the banality of paying electric bills, fixing the dishwasher, and picking the kids up from soccer practice. I had been warned about the disaster addicts, the emergency enthusiasts, the aid junkies—and now I was worried I had become one of them. The world I came from told me that by the time I was twenty-eight I should be making money, getting an apartment, thinking about establishing roots somewhere. But I didn’t have a boyfriend, I wasn’t dating anyone, the last person I had slept with was somewhere in Bangladesh now. At least in Africa, as an expat, I may not have been part of the culture, but I was part of a subculture. I knew where I stood. It wasn’t the novelty pushing me to these places anymore. Now I kept going because I saw myself as someone who kept going, and so did other people. It was how they defined me, and it was how I defined myself. As much as I may have wanted to slow down, I couldn’t. If I wasn’t the person pushing herself to the next scary place, then who was I?