Chasing Chaos: My Decade In and Out of Humanitarian Aid

by Jessica Alexander

  After a visit to a community where I met a few former child soldiers, one of the boys followed me to the car and asked if he could speak with me in private. We walked behind his school and he lifted up his shirt. Carved across his chest were the letters “RUF”: the Revolutionary United Front.

  A medical agency came right after the war and performed plastic surgery on some of the boys to remove the scars. They’d missed this one.

  “Can you help me get these letters off?” he asked, looking away, too embarrassed to even make eye contact. I didn’t know any agency that was doing these procedures anymore. But I told him that I would ask around.

  “Tankey,” he said, as he pulled his shirt down and tucked it tightly into his pants. I was never able to find an agency to help him.

  Many boys were taken deep into the bush where they were trained to shoot and fight. Older boys were forced to steal, kill, rape, and maim. The younger ones, too small to carry guns, were used by the militias as porters, cooks, messengers, and servants. Many were sent on spying missions to see what was available to loot in neighboring villages. Girls as young as seven were taken as bush wives. Some of the older ones became pregnant, and some of the younger ones bled to death after sex. Often, girls needed surgery to repair the damage to their bodies caused by rape and early pregnancy. Those who gave birth had their children labeled rebel pikin—rebel children—and were rejected back at home.

  Meeting the children now, it was hard to believe the trials they endured. But as I learned from my first assignment in Darfur, children are usually the most resilient of all. For the most part, they were reintegrated into their communities and seemed happy going to school and getting their lives back on track.

  Occasionally, I was joined on my travels by Claudetta, my Sierra Leonean friend and colleague, who had worked with one of the agencies that helped demobilize children. “Jessica, yu ma nehba taya,” she’d say to me, which literally meant, “You never tire,” or, “You are always on the go,” because I’d wake up early to get on the road or keep working into the night. Claudetta was definitely bum cut, and flaunted her full figure with sexy tank tops in aquas and pinks and tight jeans. Her smile was sly and playful and when she laughed her head fell back, as did her bright, dangly earrings. We had a fun time on the road together, playing music and stopping for fruit or snacks at every stall we passed. Sometimes when I ate too much she’d jokingly pinch my stomach and exclaim, “Oh, Jessica, yu don fat-o!”—Jessica, you’ve gotten fat! On our long trips we’d talk about our lives, but mostly about boys. She had a boyfriend and couldn’t believe I was single. “Yu noh geht man?” (You don’t have a man?) “No, I don’t!” “Yu noh mared?” (You’re not married?) “No!” Then we’d go through the whole routine again.

  Claudetta survived the rebel attack in Freetown in 2002 but her father was killed. Half of her family’s house had burned down and they still did not have enough money to repair it. Once, when we were in the process of interviewing a group of children, one of them described marching into the capital, drugged up and leading the way. Claudetta’s face went gray. To her, this was the scariest part. “They don’t have a sense of right or wrong yet. They don’t yet understand what it means. It’s a game for them at that age. There is no hesitation for them to just shoot!”

  FIELD RESEARCH PROVIDED A VIVID counterpoint to desk work. Leaving the city, we’d drive deep into the countryside—rows of shell-colored buildings giving way to open fields and damp woodlands, the roar of traffic fading into the dense silence of the forest. Walls of trees, tangled and lush, surrounded us; in the distance, hills floated against the blue sky like pale, mossy stones in a pond.

  But there were also plenty of times we’d drive at night down unlit streets, with only one of our headlights working. Trucks, cars, and motorcycles—none of which had headlights, either—flew by in the opposite direction. It was impossible to tell how close they were until the driver had just enough time to swerve away. Some trucks didn’t even have taillights, and I’d heard of motorcyclists fatally crashing right into the backs of them.

  Other times, the rain fell so thick and so fast the sole working windshield wiper couldn’t keep up, and all I could see was wet, gray fog. And I would sit there, with my seat belt fastened, thinking: If I can’t see anything, I can be pretty sure that the driver can’t, either, and this Land Cruiser doesn’t have an air bag, there is nothing but a piece of metal about as sturdy as a cookie sheet between me and the tree we almost just smashed into. Sometimes I’d try to talk myself down, tell myself we wouldn’t be doing it if it weren’t safe, but eventually I didn’t bother. These were the risks I had to take if I wanted to work in these places, and I did, so there was no point in dwelling on them. I just had to ride the fear through, until I didn’t notice it anymore. First, I stopped being pricked by dread each time I spotted a potential danger, then all the dangers—the collisions, the slippery roads—blurred together. They were just part of the landscape, like the trees along the road.

  In most cases those research missions took us to former Interim Care Centers (ICCs), where demobilized children received assistance from local social workers while waiting to be reunified with their families. While in Bo, a city in southern Sierra Leone, I met a social worker named Francis. A tall, thin man, Francis was in his forties but looked twenty years younger. We sat on a wooden school bench outside a classroom as he recounted the children’s temperament when they first arrived at the ICCs. “They were so stubborn when they came. Troublesome. They picked fights. They stole,” he recalled, shaking his head. “Some of the older ones who rose to certain levels wanted us to call them ‘Sir.’ These pikin, ugh! They were so aggressive.” He looked ahead as he remembered more. “They were boastful about their exploits. One boy, he came up to me and said, ‘Do you know how many arms I’ve cut off? Two boxes of arms and I will soon be a second lieutenant.’ They didn’t think they had even done anything wrong.”

  Other children, he said, were sullen; many had trouble sleeping and kept to themselves. Francis and his colleagues didn’t do clinical interventions but used drama, song, sports, and drawing to help the children. “Through these things they can regain themselves,” Francis explained.

  Some children were so young when they were taken from their villages they could no longer remember where they were from, or what their mothers looked like. Francis recalled a girl who “no longer understood her own language. She was only four when they took her.” As far back as they could remember there had only been war. “Some said they wanted to be reunified with their warlords. There was a strong attachment to commanders, thinking that he was a savior, a protector,” Francis said. It wasn’t easy for people like Francis to break these links. “Some of the children had risen from the junior ranks and the younger children continued to salute them in the ICCs.”

  Family tracing programs began. Social workers took pictures of the kids, displaying hundreds of faces on large posters that were circulated across the country. Parents scoured the images for their children. When one was found, social workers informed the appropriate ICC and a tape recording of the child’s voice was prepared for the parents. When—if—the parents confirmed that this was their child, the social workers scheduled a reunion.

  Many of these reunions were joyous, but some were not. “Children themselves were scared about how they would be received when they went home.” And for good reason. “Sometimes when we took children back home, the community threw rocks at the car,” Musa, a social worker from Makeni, told me. “We were in serious danger. ‘That boy was one of them who led the RUF to our village and burned our homes! These children destroyed a nation’ the community would say.” Musa still worked with foster children, and I interviewed him in a café near the school where he was now employed. To our meeting, he wore a bright red collared shirt, which had been tucked in tightly enough to reveal the outline of his belly button.

  Musa recalled the months he and other social workers spent preparing communities for
these returns, explaining that everyone was a victim of the war, even the children. “It’s not a day’s work,” he said laughing. “Some people said they would not associate with these children. Others said they were bush people and not fit for the community. They didn’t want the kids to even sit down in their houses.” Musa and other social workers visited villages, spoke to local leaders, and developed radio programs that instructed people to “stop provoking these kids.”

  IT’S NO WONDER THAT MANY children tried to leave home as soon as they had returned. Even if families did accept the children, Musa explained, they couldn’t provide three meals a day, or the toys and regular educational opportunities that the children got at the ICCs. “We would reunify a child with his family or a foster family and think that everything was OK. A month later we would find out that the same child left that family and enrolled in a different ICC where he wouldn’t be recognized,” Musa recalled. And this time they were smart—they told lies about where they were from, delaying the process of getting “reunified” in order to extend their stays at the center for as long as possible.

  The school Musa now worked at was one that had accepted former child soldiers when they were reintegrated. One of the ways the aid groups tried to persuade the children and the communities to accept each other was by covering the children’s school fees for five years. But even this was complicated. Some children had missed too many years of school to enroll in grades appropriate for their ages. They needed to catch up somehow, and a rapid education program that condensed six years of schooling into three was launched. But why should the children who participated in the war be rewarded, community members protested, when those who weren’t taken, who stayed home or fled alone, got nothing? The community called the support “blood books, blood materials.” To mitigate some of the resentment, the aid community provided school supplies—desks, pens, pencils, bags—to all of the students at schools where children were reintegrated.

  One afternoon, I spoke with a group of teenage girls who had participated in a vocational-training program when they were returned. They had just left class and were still dressed in their brown uniforms. We sat together on a picnic bench outside their school. “No one would talk to us. The boys all thought that we had sex with our captors. They said we were damaged goods,” one girl explained. They giggled together as they recounted the story. A small NGO had come in and created a microcredit program for girls. Soon they were earning not only enough to pay back their loans, but to be the breadwinners of their homes. “After that, the boys all wanted to be with us. We told them, ‘But I thought we were “damaged.” Why do you want to be with us now!?’ ” They laughed and slapped their thighs.

  AFTER HEARING SO MANY STORIES of pain and anguish from civilians, I didn’t understand how people—my friends—could defend the perpetrators. “Look, this whole international criminal tribunal thing would be a circus if there wasn’t a good defense,” my American friend Scott said. He was in his thirties and had worked in corporate law back in New York, but was taking two years out of the grind to do something more interesting. I was back in Freetown, and he had come over to my apartment for a typical meal of rice and chicken. We were sitting on my terrace, eating and drinking as the sky began to turn soft and dark above the city.

  “Everyone—even a war criminal, Jess—has a right to a fair trial. The prosecution would have a field day with these guys if we didn’t hold them to some standard. They might very well have been war criminals, but it was for particular acts at particular times. They didn’t do everything in all places at all times, which is what the prosecution is throwing at them.” With so many warring factions, all of which had members who had committed grave human-rights violations, culpability wasn’t just in the hands of a few people or even one fighting party. Everyone, regardless of which side they’d been on, had to be brought to justice for the country to recover.

  Sierra Leone was in what the aid industry referred to as a post-conflict development stage. Now that peace had come, international aid workers and local civil society groups were undertaking longer-term projects. When the political climate has stabilized and the first, frenzied stage of emergency has passed, humanitarian actors generally exit the picture and development folks enter. Development agency staffers typically stay in countries for longer periods of time, trying to restore the country’s infrastructure and create a stable, sustainable foundation for civic life and economic health, which would hopefully be resilient enough to endure future crises.

  Some of my friends worked for the ministries, advising them on policy formulation on everything from economic growth to improving health systems. A couple of Brits started a development fund with money raised back home and invested it in local businesses in Sierra Leone. Others founded an organization that provided legal aid for women who were being held in prison for petty crimes or serving sentences on behalf of their husbands, who were nowhere to be found. One friend capitalized on the rich music scene in Sierra Leone and arranged concerts across the country to promote safe sex and HIV/AIDS awareness.

  The expat community was as active as anywhere else, but in Sierra Leone, so were the Sierra Leoneans. They were confident and loud; they had attitude and flaunted it. Our lives intermingled at work and outside of it—they came to our parties and we went to their bars. Many of my expat friends, both men and women, were dating Sierra Leoneans.

  Regardless of how integrated we were, we would always be reminded that we were first-world people in a foreign land. One night, for instance, Amy, an American friend who worked as a reproductive health nurse, sat down at dinner and lit a smoke. “Well ladies,” she said exhaling, “some days you are just a white lady explaining genital discharge to Muslim primary-school students in West Africa.”

  We laughed. All of us had been in some situation like that at one point or another. “How about going through customs in Somalia and having the male inspectors pass around your tampons, thinking they were biological weapons? I had to explain—pantomime and all—what they are used for,” another friend, Claire, recalled.

  Stories like this could go on all night. My contribution was a story about something that had happened just a few days before, while I was away on a trip doing research.

  “You know when I was in Kailahun last week?” I began. They nodded. “I was staying in a container and stupidly left my light on when I went to dinner.” (A lot of times agencies used prefab containers as bedrooms; a group of them together looked like a trailer park.) “Well, when I got back, I thought the door to my container was moving. I got closer and realized that the entire thing was covered with slithering bugs.”

  “Ew!” my friends screamed in unison.

  “No, you guys, it gets worse, seriously,” I promised, as I went on to tell them the rest of the story. Eventually, I found the bug spray and hosed down the door, sending bugs everywhere. Some of the ones that died were so big they actually hit the ground with a thud. When the coast was clear, I ran into my container and killed the bugs that followed me with my flip-flop.

  I considered the problem solved until I woke up a few hours later, having to pee. My neighbor had left his light on and another ecosystem of bugs was now flying around his door, which I’d have to walk past to get to the bathroom. I decided that instead I would pee in a small bucket I had in my room and then empty it out the window. I completed the first part of the mission and was carrying the bucket to the window when I slipped—banana-peel style—on the giant, wet corpse of one of the bugs I’d murdered earlier. The bucket jolted in my arms, and I drenched myself with my own fresh urine.

  Occasionally I’d think about that night and wonder if it weren’t an apt allegory for working abroad, for the particular stance you had to take toward the unexpected and uncontrollable. Living in Sierra Leone meant practicing radical acceptance: sometimes, you just had to stand there in your own piss. That’s what one of my trips to Liberia felt like, when I had a ticket on a flight scheduled to depart at noon. Noon came and
went, and we hadn’t even boarded the plane. There was no sign or announcement saying that the flight would be delayed. You have to make a conscious decision to embrace patience in Africa, but I had a meeting that I couldn’t miss. I got up to ask the woman at the counter when we would be taking off. She checked her watch. “Noon.”

  I looked down at my own watch. It was half past twelve. I told her it was half past twelve.

  Her face remained expressionless. “The flight,” she repeated, “will take off at noon.”

  I stood there, unsure whether she had understood what I was saying. Should I even try to engage with this woman or just sit back down and wait? I decided to return to my seat, because essentially she was saying, Look, white lady, I don’t know what to tell you. Deal with it.

  Eventually, I went through security with the rest of the passengers and more incompetence ensued. We took off our belts and shoes, placed our bags in trays, and walked through the metal detector. None of the security guards were paying attention. As I waited to retrieve my bag from its tray, I turned back and noticed that the monitor was blank. The security men were looking at a blank screen. And the metal detector? It wasn’t plugged in. The airport had no power. But they put on a good show anyway, as if to say, Maybe if we pretend it’s working, it will.