Chasing Chaos: My Decade In and Out of Humanitarian Aid

by Jessica Alexander

  After a few weeks of being unable to shake the grim mood that had clung to me since my return, I decided to see a therapist in Connecticut. He had come highly recommended, and I hoped for some relief.

  “Do you think I understand where you’re coming from?” he asked, stroking his tie.

  “I don’t know. I guess so.”

  “I think I do. And you know what I think you could use? A spa retreat. Just a few days away at a spa. A patient came in here a few months ago—she was going through something similar—and I recommended she go to a spa for a few days. She came back refreshed and so much more relaxed. It’ll take the edge off.”

  He didn’t understand where I was coming from at all. The last thing I wanted to do was to pack another suitcase and be alone at a spa, getting pampered by strangers. Other therapists were worse.

  “You were where? Darfur?” one said, leaning back in her chair, looking at me over her little glasses, pencil poised to take notes.

  “Yeah.”

  “Interesting …” She started jotting something down. I have no idea what since I hadn’t even started talking yet. I looked around at the fancy degrees, matted and framed, hanging on her wall. On the table between us was a box of tissues, perfectly centered.

  “What do you think that says about your family life? Your relationship with your father? It sounds to me like you’re looking for an escape.”

  I looked for an escape from her office and left.

  War Don Don, Peace Don Cam

  SIERRA LEONE, 2006–2007

  I had delayed starting my Fulbright for so long that if I didn’t arrive in Sierra Leone by the end of March, I’d lose the grant. But I still wasn’t sure whether I wanted to go. One cold night in January, I sat with my father in front of our roaring fireplace. Since Mom died, Dad kept a running tally of which of his three children he had to worry about the most. “You came home, and just slid right into first place,” he joked. I laughed with him.

  “Look, I know it’s hard to think about leaving again,” Dad began, in his cool, reassuring voice, “but it’s a great opportunity. I think you will regret passing this up.”

  I didn’t want to lose the opportunity either, but I just wanted to sit still for a bit longer—sit here, in my father’s house, where a fire kept me warm during the bitter New England winter. I didn’t have the desire or energy to pack my suitcase, leave for another country, meet new people and start all over again. But the research project I had proposed still interested me and I really wanted to see it through.

  During a summer internship in graduate school I had worked with a research team in Mozambique, investigating what happened to boys who fought in the civil war. The organization wanted to know what kind of adults these children had become. Did they turn out to be the lost generation, the future barbarians, as everyone had assumed? Or were they integrated into their communities as fathers, husbands, men with jobs and social connections? It turned out that—although their ability to reintegrate largely depended on how long they were in conflict, the role assigned to them by the rebels, and the circumstances under which they were recruited—for the most part, the boys, now men, were working members of their communities and contributing members of society. I was so inspired by the research that while searching for jobs for after graduation, I applied for a Fulbright to repeat the same study in Sierra Leone, where children had been abducted by the fighting forces, as they had in Mozambique. By now, four years after Sierra Leone’s war ended, the people said, “War don don, peace don cam”—The war is done, peace has come.

  “How about this,” Dad said. “We’ll go for a week. I’ll come with you; if you hate it, you don’t stay.” Although the offer was sweet, it seemed a bit too Mom-holding-my-hand-into-class-on-the-first-day-of-kindergarten. He offered another idea that made more sense. I’d buy a round-trip ticket that brought me back to New York after six weeks. Technically, I couldn’t leave the Fulbright grant that early, but it was an out, and it was a way to break up the ten-month commitment into something I could handle.

  I arrived in Sierra Leone the same day that Charles Taylor, the former President of Liberia, was brought there to stand trial at the Special Court (SCSL), an international criminal tribunal. A few days later, Taylor appeared for the first time at the courthouse in Freetown, where he was charged with five counts of crimes against humanity and five counts of war crimes. He was also accused of one additional violation of international humanitarian law: the recruitment and employment of child soldiers. I hadn’t even unpacked my suitcase, but I knew I couldn’t miss Taylor’s trial: this was an event that would be recorded and remembered, this was a moment in time that would harden into a fact, the kind you learned in school—this, in other words, was what it felt like to live history. At the courthouse, I stood with the swarms of sweaty journalists in the security line and lied to the guard, telling him I was one of them. He was easily convinced. We walked in unison, press passes dangling around our necks, to the back of the courtroom, where the reporters frantically scribbled notes and elbowed their way in for a clear view of Taylor. High glass walls separated the observation gallery from the well of the courtroom, where the judges and lawyers sat dressed in their long black and red robes.

  I stood in the back of the observation gallery and watched Taylor’s face, which remained expressionless as the judges read aloud the crimes for which he had been indicted: rape, murder, abduction of children, maiming, looting, theft. Cloaked in a suit, Taylor stood up and defiantly refuted the charges. “Most definitely, Your Honour, I did not and could not have committed these acts against the sister Republic of Sierra Leone.… Most definitely I’m not guilty.”

  Indeed, Taylor was in Liberia during the eleven-year Sierra Leonean war, during which a rebel movement attempted to overthrow the government. However, the rebels were heavily supported by Taylor, who had an interest in the diamond-rich eastern part of the country.

  According to Sierra Leone’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission, the years leading up to the war were characterized by endemic corruption, and the denial of basic human rights—schooling, health care, water—which led to a frustrated and angry population ready for revolt. Youth formed the Revolutionary United Front (RUF) with the intent to overthrow the government to create a fair and just society. But their initial quest for justice quickly turned into a ruthless conquest, as the RUF began slaughtering and maiming innocent civilians who were thought to have sided with the government. The RUF specifically targeted young children for recruitment, abducting them from their homes and forcing them into battle. During the 1996 elections, when citizens voted by thumbprint, the RUF amputated people’s hands as a tactic to prevent civilians from voting or to punish those who had. Amputation also prevented people from farming their land, which the RUF then seized. Thousands of people, including children, survived having their limbs amputated by the RUF. It is unknown how many died after amputation.

  THE RUF’S ASSAULT ON THE country was aided primarily by Charles Taylor’s National Patriotic Front of Liberia. The RUF took control of the diamond-rich areas of eastern Sierra Leone, harvesting the diamonds in order to purchase weapons—from Taylor in particular—and enter the global arms trade. Taylor was found to also have personally planned attacks in parts of Sierra Leone, including Freetown. Finally, in 2002, the RUF was defeated and the country could slowly begin to rebuild.

  WHEN THE INDICTMENTS BROUGHT BY the chief prosecutor of the Special Court for Sierra Leone against Taylor were made public in June 2003, Taylor resigned as president of Liberia and sought refuge in Nigeria. Three years later, Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, the new president of Liberia (and first female African president), requested his extradition to the Special Court. Taylor attempted to escape but was arrested by border guards when trying to cross into Cameroon and was immediately handed over to the Court.

  The Special Court was much like the war crimes tribunals of Iraq, Yugoslavia, and Rwanda, which prosecuted Saddam Hussein, Slobodan Milošević, and Jean
Kambanda, a former prime minister of Rwanda. But Taylor’s was a special case: unlike the other trials, which happened outside of the country involved, Sierra Leoneans could bear witness to Taylor’s prosecution. Another difference was that unlike the other international tribunals, which were mainly staffed by expats, the Special Court also included Sierra Leonean judges and lawyers. Although I didn’t know it then, the trial would come to play a larger role in my own life, too.

  The name Sierra Leone comes from Portuguese Serra de Leão, which means “Mountains with Lions.” (Sierra Leone is the Italian translation.) There are no lions in Sierra Leone; the phrase, coined by Portuguese explorers in the fifteenth century, refers to the lion-shaped mountains on the peninsula beyond Freetown. The capital city, Freetown, was established as a settlement for freed slaves in the final years of the eighteenth century. Over the next few decades, thousands of former slaves from the United States and the West Indies came to make Freetown their home.

  Sierra Leoneans speak Krio, an English-based creole whose lexicon includes words from a number of African languages. They shorten the name of their country to Salone, and the rest of the language is hilariously literal. A popular local baked biscuit got its name after a man stopped his car at a market, bought a bag full of them, and pulled out into the street. Moments later he was killed in an accident. From then on the biscuit was called “Kill Driva.” Once, when a friend locked her keys in her car, children from town surrounded it, telling her she needed a “sardine key.” One of the children returned a few minutes later holding the top of a sardine can, which he skillfully used to jimmy the lock open. Instead of saying “How are you?” people asked each other “Ow di bodi” (literally, “How the body?”). The standard response is “I tell God tankey, di bodi fine,” which means, “I thank God, the body is fine.” (I was told that this saying came from the slave era when blacks were regularly beaten by their masters. So they would ask each other, how’s your body, or have you been flogged?) Sierra Leoneans’ take on John F. Kennedy’s famous speech is rearticulated as: “No ask watin Mama Salone don de for yo, but ask watin yo don do for Mama Salone.” In Sierra Leone, diabetes is “the sweet piss”; someone who’s peeing is “easing themselves.” A thin woman is referred to as “straight cut,” a plumper one as “bum cut.” There are no other sizes.

  The names that commanders chose for themselves during the war were no different: Captain Blood, Major Bomb Blast, Colonel Bullet, Sergeant Cut Head, Colonel Dead Squad, Colonel Butt Naked, Major Kill Man, Colonel Long Life, Commander Man Suffer, Colonel No Joke, Colonel Park a Man in a Vehicle, Captain Poison, Captain Rambo, Colonel Road Block, Captain Sucking Blood, Brigadier Superman, Colonel 31 Rounds. And during the war, even the most horrific of acts were spoken of in classically Sierra Leonean terms. When people’s arms were amputated, some were given a choice. Either “long-sleeved”—a chop below the elbow—or “short-sleeved”—a chop above.

  Maybe it was the excitement of the Taylor trial, but my anxiety about leaving home disappeared immediately. In Sierra Leone, time passed quickly, and my return ticket—the one Dad had encouraged me to buy, which would have taken me back to New York after six weeks—languished somewhere in my suitcase. I’d forgotten about it entirely. I found a place to live in an apartment overlooking the city and the sea, in a building filled with people who worked at the Special Court as lawyers, human rights monitors, reporters. Some of my new housemates had come from other tribunals, like International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda in Arusha, Tanzania. Years later, when many of the Sierra Leone trials ended, some moved to Phnom Penh to work for the Criminal Court trying the remaining members of the Pol Pot regime.

  When I returned home from Sierra Leone, some people said they couldn’t believe I’d “made it out of there alive” because—“Well,” they’d ask me, “did you see Blood Diamond?” But Sierra Leone was no longer the country that was portrayed in that movie. The war had stripped the small West African country of its natural resources, leaving the cities and countryside shrouded in poverty. The combination of malnutrition and the absence of even the most basic preventative care—vaccines, vitamins, mosquito nets—made Sierra Leone’s infant and maternal mortality rates among the highest in the world. Almost one out of three children born in Sierra Leone died before reaching the age of five. In 2007 Sierra Leone ranked the least developed country in the world according to the UN’s Human Development Report. Yet Sierra Leone seemed to defy hardship. Freetown was a Matisse-colored world, bursting with traffic jams and street music on every corner. Unlike the barren landscape of Sudan, Sierra Leone was a tangled, hilly green. A large cotton tree sat in the center of town, its branches reaching higher than the surrounding buildings and its flowering leaves bending toward the frenetic traffic below. In a place such as Freetown, where the war was over and people were motivated to recover, normalcy came quickly, or quicker than it might have elsewhere. Sierra Leoneans seemed almost to will it into existence, they were so in love with life. You saw them celebrate it every day, dancing, singing, shouting in the streets.

  That isn’t to say Sierra Leoneans no longer faced significant hardships. Like drought. When it stopped raining for a few weeks in a row during what had traditionally been the rainy season, the dry earth seemed to cast the country’s scars into relief. Because the reservoir was drying up, the government rationed the water and only turned on the pipes to Freetown a few times a day. Toilets started backing up in our home; the taps in our offices ran dry. Overnight, the cost of bottled water tripled. We, the rich foreigners, would be fine, and continued buying bottles of water, which we used to cook, bathe, and flush our toilets. But people living in town were so desperate that they overturned a water lorry coming to refill a well.

  It’s one thing to ignore requests for money, even for food. But when people come to you begging for water—that’s an entirely different story, one I wouldn’t have predicted but will never forget. The words just hit your body in another way. Before leaving home I often filled a few large water bottles from the coolers we had at our apartment and stuffed them in my bag. Only a few meters out of our gate, however, I had already poured all their contents into empty cups that people thrust at me.

  Children, whose role it was to collect water for their families every morning before school, now had to walk three miles farther to get it from the closest working well or water pump. To make matters worse, the water shortage happened to occur right at the time of school exams. Because children now had to fetch water so much farther away, many of them missed their exams and could not pass to the next class level. Children’s agencies were lobbying with the Ministry of Education to let the students take the tests at a later date, but it wasn’t clear whether they would. These were the decisions that families and children had to make: pass to the next class in school or go without water.

  When the Sierra Leonean conflict finally ended, 45,000 fighters were disarmed and demobilized by UN peacekeepers. Men put down their guns in fields and the international community, along with the Sierra Leone National Commission for Disarmament, Demobilization, and Reintegration (NCDDR), tried to facilitate their return to something like their normal lives. Aid organizations and the local government distributed starter money, provided transportation home, and helped people as they tried to find work.

  For children, the process was different. Between 1998 and 2002, nearly seven thousand children who had been forcibly conscripted to join the war were demobilized. Many had been transported far from their homes and the NCDDR and the international agencies were attempting to reunify them with their families. These children were placed in Interim Care Centers (ICCs) until someone could track down their families and return them to their homes.

  I came into my research project with a lot of questions. What was the reunification process like? What strategies were most effective? What were these children doing now, and how had they fared since returning home? Being free to formulate these questions on my own also meant traveling the country and
making connections at my own discretion and pace. At times, the autonomy that came with being on a Fulbright could feel overwhelming. But eventually, I began to get my bearings, and found plenty of organizations that had worked with children after they were demobilized, and it turned out they were asking the very same questions I was. They were happy to collaborate and provided transportation, accommodations, and the names and contact information of people I ought to meet along the way. With two assistants, one translator and one driver, a backpack filled with notepads, and the necessary toilet supplies for living in the bush for a few weeks, I went to the field to track down and interview former child soldiers, social workers, and reunification officers about the demobilization process.

  On these trips I learned more than I had set out to. Children were an uncomplicated target for the rebel groups—they were easy to manipulate, their minds malleable and their bodies quick. They did as they were told, their innate obedience heightened by the drugs the rebels administered through injections or by cutting a child’s skin and rubbing the chemicals directly into the wound. In order to extinguish any family ties, rebels would force children to kill or rape their relatives. This was torture, and a kind of insurance policy: now, even if they wanted to escape, the children would have no home to return to. The rebels also branded children as a way to keep them close. If they ran away and were captured by another one of the factions, children with markings from the rebels would immediately be killed.