Chasing Chaos: My Decade In and Out of Humanitarian Aid

by Jessica Alexander

  “Or you ask who was his commander? Was he tall? Short? What was his complexion like? Ah, my dear, you say you worked with Foday Sankoh (the Sierra Leonean warlord), you don’t, in fact, know Foday Sankoh—you can’t discuss him with me. You are lying,” Brima said, chuckling.

  After about forty interviews across the country and peeling through more than two thousand sticky, mildewed forms sitting in the Ministry of Social Welfare, I compiled a report detailing my findings. After some scrutiny from the Special Prosecutor—queries about my methodology, the people with whom I met, the way I found them, and the questions I asked—they accepted my report as evidence into the trial. But I never did have to take the stand.

  While I was doing my interviews, I had asked a few children what they thought of the Special Court, if the ones living far from Freetown even knew of it. One boy, not even thirteen at the time I met him, put it best: “For some of us, our lives were miserable, they trained us to come up in a bad way. By trying them, it shows people that if you do bad, there will be consequences.”

  In 2012, when the trial finally came to a close, Charles Taylor was convicted on all eleven counts of aiding and abetting the atrocities of the war and received a sentence of fifty years in prison.

  When Claudetta and I weren’t traveling in the field, we spent days in the office eating lunch, talking over family photos, telling each other stories about our lives. Our birthdays were one day apart, and in August she invited me to her house to celebrate with her family.

  Claudetta would ask me what creams would make her skin white and if she could use my shampoo so that her hair would be smooth like mine. She knew America from movies and the Internet and wanted to come work with me there. Even though Claudetta longed for the things I had in my life, I realized that I was the envious one.

  One night after work, I accompanied Claudetta to the market. A woman hissed when she saw her, and Claudetta stopped to chat. The woman was her cousin. “Mit mi padi Jessica,”—Meet my friend Jessica—she said, introducing me.

  I shook the woman’s hand.

  “Yu de enjoi yu ste?” she asked, wanting to know if I was enjoying my stay.

  “Yehs, a lehk Salone tumohs,” I replied in my broken Krio, telling her I liked Sierra Leone so much.

  Claudetta said good-bye to her cousin and the two of us continued on our way. As we walked, Claudetta turned to me and told me her cousin’s story. Her husband had left her and was now coming back, begging for forgiveness. “Yu no go meso snek te I dai,” Claudetta said. The phrase was a popular Krio expression: “You can’t measure a snake until its dead.” Or, as someone in the United States might put it, “You don’t know what you’ve got ’til it’s gone.” It’s true everywhere in the world: we realize people’s worth only after we’ve lost them.

  As we moved through the market, Claudetta spotted a young girl carrying her backpack home from school. She shouted her name. The girl turned around, raced toward Claudetta, and gave her a big hug. They talked and Claudetta reached into her purse and handed her a few bills. The girl was ecstatic. “OK, sista,” Claudetta said. “Tehl a du to Musa for mi.”—tell Musa I say hi.

  “Yes, ma,” the girl agreed, and I watched as she skipped away.

  Claudetta told me the girl was her niece, who was having some trouble in school. Some nights, Claudetta helped her with her homework.

  After Claudetta and I parted that evening, I realized that I wanted what she had—a community, a sense of belonging, and the closeness of loved ones. Dad’s visit was great, and I had made friends, but my life here was all just temporary. I wasn’t going to stay forever. One night over drinks I asked my Swedish friend Carmen where she planned to go next. She worked for the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) and had been in Freetown since I arrived over a year ago. Her contract would be up in a few months and she was looking for jobs.

  “I don’t know. Depends …”

  “On what?”

  “Well, where I get a contract, of course.”

  “Where are you looking?”

  “The Middle East would be cool. Where do you think the most men would be?”

  “Right now? Probably Lebanon.” Tensions between Israel and Lebanon were flaring. Aid workers were sure to be flocking there in droves.

  Susan, another friend who worked on human rights, had just been offered a job in Juba, the capital of South Sudan. “The woman who interviewed me said that I’d even get my own container to live in,” she said, laughing. “As if that’s supposed to be a draw! My friends at home are buying houses and on their second babies. I’m supposed to get all excited about a prefab box to live in for a year?”

  Finding long-term companionship in this field seemed like a fluke. Some people’s relationships did last overseas, but they were the lucky few, able to continue this life, fulfilled both personally and professionally. Couples living apart trying to have babies ended up planning their R&Rs around ovulation cycles. If they were stationed together, reproducing in a bunker in Iraq, a compound in Sri Lanka, or a tent in Myanmar wasn’t easy. Some made it work, and those who did called their offspring “tsunami babies,” “cyclone babies,” even “conflict babies.” Some people tried to hold onto long-distance relationships, but most couldn’t maintain the passion over crap phone connections and unreliable wireless signals. As we worked hard to rebuild other people’s lives, our own were falling apart.

  “George is going to Iran,” my friend Muriel told me one night over dinner. She was a French nutritionist working in a clinic downtown. She and her boyfriend had been dating for two years, since they met in Malawi.

  “He didn’t even consult me! He just told me one morning over Skype. What am I supposed to do with that? I don’t want to go to Iran.”

  “Then don’t.”

  “And then what? This is over? He got an amazing job there, so it’s hard to blame him for wanting to go. But we were supposed to make these decisions together now. I want to talk to him, but, tell me, what are the rules for communicating when one person is in post-conflict West Africa and the other is in a failed state on the verge of a revolution?” I didn’t know what to tell her. The problem was that there were no rules—or if there were, nobody knew them.

  Everything felt fleeting—jobs, friends, romances, apartments, countries, even our sanity. Our belongings were strewn all over the world, packed away in the basements of our childhood homes or storage facilities on distant continents. (“I have my winter clothes at my friend’s place in Amsterdam, most of my books are still with my ex-girlfriend in Nairobi, and my ski jacket, hat, and mittens are in Geneva,” Scott once explained to me. We were standing in his bedroom, which was empty save for some shirts and slacks and two pairs of shoes. “That’s really about all I own.”) Building momentum in a romance that was going to be cut short anyway just meant asking for heartache; investing in material things just meant paying more for overweight baggage.

  Sam had been shipped back to Afghanistan, and Facebook continued to blast photos of weddings I had missed at home. Every week it seemed, babies were born, engagements announced, new apartments moved into with new partners. Seeing all these happy couples with their kids and houses made me wonder why I didn’t simplify my life. Sure, I had accumulated more stamps in my passport and made friends from places I didn’t even know existed a few years before. But the catalogue of countries I had been were memories that I shared with people scattered across the globe. The work I found so rewarding threatened to destroy everything else meaningful in my life. I loved a job that made loving anything else seemingly impossible.

  Years later, I saw a Facebook posting that perfectly captured why I decided to go home—and how hard it was to make that decision. A friend from grad school who shared my nomadic existence posted pictures from his recent trip to India. Someone he knew, probably from childhood, wrote on his wall: “You’ve been across the Sahara, to Petra, to the Taj Mahal, and most of Europe. You’ve crossed off 75 percent of MY wish list. What exactly doe
s YOUR wish list look like?”

  My friend replied: “Having a lovely wife and a gaggle of children like yours … and being able to build a 12-square-meter back patio on which to sip cold beers and grill lamb chops. Grass is always greener, my friend.”

  Saving Lives One Keystroke at a Time

  NEW YORK CITY, 2008–2009

  “Jessica. How are you? It’s been ages.” It was James, an old acquaintance from college, calling. I hadn’t spoken to him in years. Since we graduated, James had made a career financing and developing five-star restaurants around the world. He had done quite well. “I heard that you’ve been living in Africa, and I want to do something in Africa. You can help me!”

  As soon as I’d returned to New York in 2008, I immediately applied for headquarter positions. It would provide the stability I craved while allowing me to remain engaged with the field. I now had the sunny apartment in Brooklyn that I could only have imagined a few years before, and I was happy to shove my suitcases under my bed and put my passport in a drawer. I missed the thrill and unpredictability of my life abroad, but there was a new excitement to coming back. Instead of having just a place to stay—a guesthouse, a shipping container—I had a place where I might stay indefinitely.

  I’d also worked abroad long enough that I’d accrued some authority, at least to people at home. When there was an emergency, friends asked me where to donate; if someone wanted to volunteer overseas, she came to me for advice.

  “Where in Africa?” I asked James.

  “I don’t know. I just want to do something in Africa.”

  “Why don’t you find an organization that works there and donate to it?”

  “No, no. I want to do it. I want to go there with some friends and do something.”

  “Are you going to live there?”

  “No, just go for like a week and give things out. We’re basing it on the one-for-one concept. Eat at our restaurant and you buy a pair of glasses for someone who needs them or something like that. We’d then go and distribute the glasses to people who can’t see.”

  Since I’d been home, I’d noticed aid was getting a lot of attention, far more than when I had first set about applying for jobs so long ago. This newfound awareness was both due to and sensationally embodied by the celebrities who now attached themselves to various aid projects. Angelina Jolie was an ambassador for the refugee cause. George Clooney had a hand in the Sudan peace accords. Bono was now treated as a legitimate expert on development and even wrote the foreword to renowned economist Jeffrey Sachs’s book The End of Poverty. UN agencies boasted celebrity spokespeople who raised the profile of the organizations: UNICEF had David Beckham and Jessica Lange; UNDP enlisted Antonio Banderas; the World Food Programme drew Christina Aguilera, Drew Barrymore, and Penelope Cruz. A young, single male friend of mine working in the outreach section of an ambassador-less UN agency was trying to recruit one. “You think we can get Megan Fox? What about Rihanna?” he asked with a hopeful grin. In Hollywood, being linked to a charity was as important as having a good agent. And it had a ripple effect, providing aid work with a sheen of sex appeal and giving the impression that anyone with a heart and some money could do it.

  “Why don’t you come over to my apartment and I’ll explain it to you,” James offered. He wasn’t a bad person; he wanted to help, but just didn’t know how. So I went.

  The elevator opened directly onto his five-bedroom Upper East Side apartment. The three bathrooms were big enough to be confused with day spas. The cost of the artwork that hung on the enormous walls alone would have been enough to feed a rural community in Africa for a decade.

  James passed me a sheet of ideas that he had been working on: giving away glasses and solar-powered stoves, building houses for Africans, sending orphans to school. “Simple recipes, simple solutions,” was one of the taglines.

  “What are the good ideas here?” he asked.

  “I don’t know. Africa’s a really big place. The needs are different everywhere.”

  “Well, let’s pick an idea and figure out where they need it.”

  I didn’t know what to say. James had the classic misconception of aid, that it was just charity. People had good intentions, but they assumed that Africans were so pathetically poor that they would want anything we threw at them; that we could predict what they needed from afar. James was tacking on a solution before even knowing what the problem was.

  I UNDERSTOOD WHERE HE WAS coming from, though: the West’s idea of Africa has been shaped by years of misleading generalizations and sentimental imagery. All people can picture are those Sally Struthers infomercials, in which Africa is always portrayed as a lack: a place where people are defined by what they don’t have, a hole that needs to be filled. And by us—by our lifestyle, education, and values. What these infomercials never showed was what they did have: community, tradition, resilience, and pride.

  “Well, just giving people things isn’t going to really solve their problems. You’ll want to work with an agency that’s already there and knows the issues and the best way to approach it,” I said. “Or you should start very small. Go to a community, do some research to find out what would really make a difference in people’s lives. I bet you they will say jobs, or health care, or even sanitation. It’s not sexy, but before you go distributing these things, find out if people actually want them, or need them.”

  He took a sip of his tea. This isn’t what he wanted to hear. But I continued.

  “And the sending-the-orphans-to-school idea will surely tug at heartstrings for the people who eat at your restaurant. But orphanages are the worst place for children! A lot of times children in orphanages aren’t even orphans—their parents send them there because in an orphanage, at least, they know that their child might receive three meals a day, some kind of schooling, and maybe even a bed. So the day after your orphanage is set up the number of ‘orphans’ will increase tenfold. Work with families in the communities to raise their quality of life so that they can care for their children and pay for them to go to school.”

  He looked at me like I was a heartless bureaucrat, wondering why I couldn’t just be nice to orphans? I think he wanted me to tell him how amazing I thought his ideas were. But all I could think was, Don’t use some African family as an advertisement for your fancy restaurants.

  “Well, isn’t it better than doing nothing?” he asked instead.

  I didn’t know how to explain what had taken me years to learn. Similar to the boxes of DVDs and stuffed animals and platform sandals that arrived after the tsunami, his plan could end up doing more harm than good. Powdered milk, for example, was often sent to help mothers nurse their babies after a disaster, when it was feared that the traumatization would result in an inability to lactate. But mothers mixed the powder with water, water that was contaminated, water that could end up killing the babies. Even liquid formula could be harmful: nutrition experts advocated for breast-feeding in almost all circumstances and rarely gave formula to nursing mothers because when that supply ran out, the mothers—who were no longer producing milk—would feed children rice or other foods that the infants couldn’t digest. Also, cans of liquid formula need to be kept cool, which can be impossible or at least prohibitively expensive in places that are baking deserts, where there isn’t much in the way of refrigeration.

  Aid procedures weren’t developed out of a lack of compassion; in fact, they specifically took into account how easily compassion could lead us and people like James astray. Aid workers aren’t just a bunch of people doing the first nice thing that came into their heads. Sympathy was a shortsighted emotion: it told you to make the pain stop now, and so you went with the quick fixes. Because you wanted your pain to stop, too: you didn’t want to be someone who stood by, seemingly idle, while human beings suffered.

  But aid workers couldn’t afford to be impulsive. People affected by crisis deserved more than just our working on a whim. They deserved the respect that went with providing services based on best
practice and thought-out plans. To outsiders like James who wanted a quick win, we may have appeared callous, but over the years aid organizations had learned the value of foresight and patience, after seeing so many ostensibly well-intentioned initiatives create perverse incentives. The outcomes in those cases could be truly appalling: I’d heard of an agency working in the Central African Republic that inadvertently increased the HIV rate when they provided microcredit loans to HIV-positive mothers. Suddenly women who had previously tested negative for HIV were getting rescreened, and the results were coming back positive. The man who worked on the program was convinced that these women had contracted the disease deliberately, in order to be eligible for the loans. These were knotty issues, and to address them one needed to possess a high tolerance for nuance and ambiguity. In this case, I didn’t think James had it.

  “LOOK, IF YOU WANT TO do this yourself, it will take a significant investment. Why don’t you help small businesses that already exist grow their own retail operations, help them reach international clients, help them market their own products? Handing stuff out just competes with local vendors and undermines small businesses. A lot of times the cost of shipping this stuff over, paying for clearing customs, and trucking the goods to communities costs more than if you bought things in the local marketplace. Plus that way you put money into the economy.”

  “That’s really complicated, though.”

  That was exactly the point. Helping people required pinpointing what needed to change, and actually changing it, and both often raised difficult logistical, ethical, and economic issues. James’s handout mission wasn’t going to address these issues and could very possibly interfere with the work of people who were. He may have had a catchy tagline for his project, but aid is more complicated than that. It takes time and it takes an investment. You couldn’t just come up with a good title—you had to actually write the book. Sitting at his granite kitchen counter, I could tell he wasn’t getting it.