Chasing Chaos: My Decade In and Out of Humanitarian Aid

by Jessica Alexander

  “If you want to do something,” I said, “I really think you should find an organization that is good, is working there already, and donate to them. If you want me to help you find some, I can do that.”

  “Thanks. I’ll let you know,” he said, as he walked me to the elevator. I never heard from him again.

  James’s very human impulse—to help others in need—is centuries old. It became an actual industry in the mid-nineteenth century when a Genevan businessman witnessed the death and dying of forty thousand soldiers in the Battle of Solferino. He returned to Geneva and founded the International Committee for the Red Cross with the mission to provide relief to all those in need, regardless of which side they were on. But only in the last few decades has aid become an actual profession. The aftermath of the Rwandan genocide in 1994 is considered a watershed moment for the industry, where it was publicly called out for its chaotic, ad hoc, and poorly coordinated response to the massive refugee crisis that followed. The industry reacted to this extreme criticism by acknowledging its weaknesses and underwent significant reforms, including developing rules and regulations to govern themselves. By the late 1990s, wars were being covered by twenty-four-hour news cycles bringing the world horrific and real-time images of state failures and civil war, ethnic cleansing, and genocide. People were moved and through the early 2000s, the size of the humanitarian community increased significantly in terms of its budget, reach, and modes of providing assistance.

  Today, the aid world is a highly professionalized industry consisting of large, networked International NGOs, UN agencies, local NGOs, think tanks, consortia, and academic institutions. There are at least eighty different global master’s-level programs focusing on humanitarian and development studies, and hundreds of professional training programs. The aid community resented amateurs, “voluntourists” like James. But when they scorned people like James they were also reassuring themselves, justifying their place in the profession and that what they did was a profession. Whenever a dilettante screwed up or revealed his ignorance, it was once again confirmed that experience and master’s degrees were the only ways to be legitimate. But as self-serving and smug as the critics could be, they were also usually right.

  Yet it was easy to point at the flaws within the aid community; certainly I had made many mistakes, and I saw my colleagues and the institutions we worked for make them, too. No one had the perfect answer, the magic bullet. Doing good aid required a time commitment—not a week, not a month, but years. It meant focusing your efforts rather than trying to solve everything at once, and tackling what you could do well. It also meant fessing up to mistakes, learning from them, and sharing them with donors or the general public. Too often we hid behind shiny reports that glossed over the complexities of certain situations and the trouble we might have navigating them.

  “No one wants to hear the truth about aid,” a friend who had just come back from assessing an education program in Niger told me that winter. Over several cups of coffee in her Brooklyn apartment, she detailed the problems she’d encountered during the trip. “The donor government spent fifty million dollars of taxpayer money on this education program. You think they want to hear that it went badly?” she asked. Negative press and scathing headlines would follow if it turned out that money had been invested in projects that were poorly administered or proved otherwise ineffective. “The agency spent the money, so they want to be able to report that they spent it well. The office in the country that actually implemented the program, well, they don’t want to look bad, either, so they will present it as going well, too.” It was one big merry-go-round of denial.

  Now that I worked in New York, I saw her point. At headquarters, we relied on reports from the field for much of our information. We trusted the agency staff out there to tell us how it was going, but they were incentivized to report success and cover up or excuse problems. Numbers could be massaged, made to suggest a positive outcome: X amount of money was spent on Y number of buckets, which were distributed, or Z number of teachers, who were trained, these reports would tell us, and everyone would be happy. But rarely did people follow up on the Ys and Zs. What if the buckets had holes in them? Or what if the teacher training program didn’t make a difference in literacy rates of schoolchildren? In the private sector, a bad investment shows up in the numbers: if you lose money, you know, and somebody’s held accountable. But in the aid world, it was hard to see, let alone measure, impact. Our time lines were often too abbreviated to be sure if an investment was bad or good. After the emergency stage came to an end, humanitarians passed the reins to development professionals like my friends in Sierra Leone who would be there longer.

  “Who, at the end of the day, is really interested in whether the project went well or not?” my friend asked as she took another gulp of her coffee and looked up with raised eyebrows from her large mug.

  “The people who we’re there to help,” I said.

  “Yes. Of course, they are. But we don’t really work like that, do we? I mean, we work for them, but at the same time we don’t. Organizations can fire people, and donors can stop giving, but what can the people we help do, if we mess up?”

  It was true. Accountability to beneficiaries, to the people actually affected by disasters, didn’t fit into the equation anywhere. As long as donors paid for services, they would have the final say about whether or not the program continued. Although humanitarian actors preached “community participation,” and “ensuring affected voices are heard,” at the end of the day it came down to pleasing donors who kept aid agencies in business. The people receiving the services almost never got a say in what was offered in their communities during an emergency response. “We come with hammers and so we look for nails,” a colleague once admitted. “It doesn’t matter if what we’re seeing are screws, we’re going to find those nails so we can get to work as we know how.”

  This isn’t to say that there weren’t very passionate or committed people on the ground. And it’s also not to say that people were actively misusing funds, or spending them with deliberate carelessness or indifference. Although a strong movement to improve quality and accountability was growing and gaining traction within the humanitarian world, there was no getting around the fact that the system was set up so the end user wasn’t in a position to select what he received or to evaluate its benefit.

  From New York headquarters, it was even easier to lose sight of my connection to the field and affected populations. This was classic office grunt work—I sent e-mails, wrote reports, circulated memos, developed log frames. My job was to evaluate a new method for financing aid which supposedly delivered money to disasters faster. People at headquarters wanted to know whether the streamlined process was turning into speedier aid delivery at the field level. My job oversaw a painfully inefficient process, requiring input from at least two dozen people at different agencies scattered across the globe. The perpetual overreliance on consensus slowed proceedings down even more. “It’s one big kumbaya session,” my boss said, frustrated that before we could move on with anything we had to wait for feedback from Geneva, Rome, Nairobi. “This place needs a dictator to just lay down the law and make decisions.” Meanwhile, we had to play the never-ending game of interagency politics, appeasing all vested parties in order for anything meaningful to occur.

  My daily routine in New York—going into the office, contacting people, negotiating with them, waiting for people to sign off on a decision, then starting all over the next day—was admittedly far less exciting than the life I had lived abroad. But if you wanted some of the steady normalcy of home, working at an agency’s domestic headquarters was an attractive option. What I didn’t realize until I was working in New York is that the more senior you become in this profession, the less interaction you have with the parts of the job that keep people motivated: seeing human resilience in some of the toughest situations imaginable, knowing that children are back in school due in part to work you’ve done, giving people a place
to sleep, even if temporarily. Several years later, I still remembered the expressions of people standing in line for food distributions in Darfur, the interactions that I had with children who had been assisted after the war in Sierra Leone, the names of asylum seekers in Rwanda. Even though it was flawed, the work there helped people at the times when they needed it most. Writing reports and drafting memos from headquarters, I had to remind myself of this every day.

  AND IT TOOK TIME TO adjust to headquarters bureaucracy language, too. Words not recognized by a proper English dictionary were regularly passed off as actual vocabulary, adding to the already brimming bowl of bureaucratic alphabet soup. Complementarity of processes, sectoral coverage, evaluability of impact, operationalization of the concept—eventually enough of these invented phrases were dropped in documents or e-mails that people stopped wondering if they held actual meaning. “Modalities are in place” was the response you got almost every time you asked how a project was progressing. I never got a clear answer about what a modality actually was or how you would go about putting one in place. But eventually I was able to translate it from aid-speak to actual English myself: it was an admission that we’d put that one on the back burner, indefinitely.

  These words not recognized by Microsoft spell-checker or any other dictionary, were used to compose what were basically nonsense sentences, which resulted in e-mails literally devoid of any actual meaning: “The Inter Agency Real Time Evaluation Interest Group (IA-RTE IG) is meeting for a full-day workshop to agree on procedures and methodologies for IA-RTE (to be presented to the Inter Agency Steering Committee Working Group—IASC-WG), inter alia also a ‘logic model’ that could be used to assess effectiveness and results. Reading all the issues and options for discussion with the Consultative Group, I feel that there are clear linkages between the two ‘Working Groups’ and that we shall strive to maintain and strengthen the relationships so that each can benefit from the other’s work.” Years later, I still have absolutely no idea what that e-mail means.

  Every agency had an Evaluation Office that analyzed the effectiveness of the agency’s response to a particular disaster or crisis. But then someone else would be hired to evaluate the quality of the Evaluation Office’s evaluations: these reviews were called “meta-evaluations.” The reports issued by the meta-evaluators often recommended that they create a subcommittee to review the recommendations and create another report to summarize and report back on actions taken.

  No one could make up their minds about what language we should use when referring to ourselves or the people for whom we were working. “Beneficiaries” was widely used until it was deemed disempowering and people started using “affected populations” instead. Some agencies called them “people of concern.” Others used words like “clients,” “aid customers,” “aid recipients,” or “program participants.” The humanitarian community was referred to by some as “change agents.” Others made this distinction: they were “rights holders” and we were “duty bearers.”

  Days were assigned causes: World Refugee Day, World Humanitarian Day, United Nations Day. Even this practice quickly came to seem like a parody of itself—it wasn’t long before we started getting e-mail reminders about World Breastfeeding Week, Global Handwashing Day, World Toilet Day.

  But a lot of the time only people who worked in the UN could understand the lingo. A typical sentence from a UN e-mail: “The initial phases of the CERF (Central Emergency Response Fund) evaluation will need to consider CHF (Common Humanitarian Fund) countries where there has been a CAP (Consolidated Appeal Process) or CHAP (Common Humanitarian Action Plan). The NURD (Northern Uganda Recovery and Development) donor group will be funding part of it but we’ll have to rely on the ERFs (Emergency Relief Funds) and HRFs (Humanitarian Relief Funds) to finalize the rest.” When I read a report that Violence Against Girls had been shortened to VAG it was undeniable: the absurdity of the bureaucratic speak had gotten completely out of hand.

  Some aid workers made cracks about the impact we were having from so far away. Someone would get up at the end of lunch and declare, “Well, guess I’m going back to my desk to save some more lives now,” and everyone would laugh. “Saving a life one keystroke at a time” became the running joke. We all missed life on the ground. Daily field engagement is critical to making the issues real and giving legitimacy to the work of the international agencies. But as time goes on, it’s harder for aid workers rising through the ranks and wanting a life in the West to have regular access.

  There was constant jockeying among HQ staff to be selected for short missions in the field. Meetings would get tense as soon as the announcement was made. “You just got back from Afghanistan—give someone else a turn!” someone would snap. “I haven’t been to Asia in months,” another person would say mournfully, while others rolled their eyes. All of us needed to go back and be reminded of what drew us to this career in the first place. Because it certainly wasn’t what we were doing from New York.

  That year for my job, I often traveled from New York to Geneva—the “Peace Capital” of the world and seat of the UN’s humanitarian assistance and human rights operations, as well as host to a vast assortment of other international agencies. In graduate school I read somewhere that when you’re in a place like Geneva, you can’t imagine a place like Africa even existing. And when you’re in a noisy hectic African capital, a place like Geneva cannot exist. The idea stuck with me, and when I landed in Geneva for the first time, it was clear. In Geneva, the air smells of croissants, chocolate, cappuccinos, and wealth. It’s a place obsessed with time; clocks are everywhere, from the bus stops that tell you the minute the next bus will arrive, to the Rolex and Tissot stores on every corner. Litter doesn’t exist in Geneva, and the city streets are scrubbed clean of life and character. Shops close exactly at 6 p.m. each night, except Thursdays, when they stay open until 8 p.m. The whole city shuts down on Sundays. A friend told me that she was given a list of rules when she moved into her apartment: vacuuming was not permitted, except on Saturdays, and flushing the toilet after 10 p.m. was absolutely forbidden.

  Such a pristine city, so governed by rules and so admiring of orderliness: nowhere on earth was farther away from Africa, with all its haphazard chaos, its constant upsetting of even the best-laid plans. Yet life in Africa was affected by the decisions made and policies implemented at meetings in Geneva. The UN building was a palace, with long echoing hallways and offices adorned with Persian rugs. The walls were lined with maps and photos from Africa and Asia, but they may as well have been postcards from other planets: places so far away, and so hard to imagine. The manicured lawn outside the United Nations overlooked the still and silvery water of Lake Léman, and the white Alps glowed pink at sunset. Some days I’d come out of a meeting about aid distribution in African countries and seeing the lake and the mountains made me feel like I was living in a snow globe—a cold and perfect sphere, a world unto itself, apart even from our own.

  A few months later, I got another chance to travel abroad when I was sent to Jerusalem for two weeks to plan the logistics of an upcoming evaluation. It wasn’t until after I landed that I realized it was the ninth anniversary of Mom’s death.

  My mother died in Israel. She wasn’t there for spiritual reasons, to be closer to God or to be in the Holy Land. When the cancer returned after the first bone marrow transplant, the doctors at home shrugged and shook their heads. They said we were out of options. But Dad, refusing to give up, found a doctor in Israel who offered to perform a kind of bone marrow transplant that was not yet approved in the United States.

  I remembered a night nine years ago, when all five of us—Mom, Dad, my two younger brothers, and I—had cuddled next to each other in Mom and Dad’s bed, talking about whether Mom should go. She was scared. We were all scared. She didn’t want to live out what might be her last few months or weeks in a foreign place, far from friends and family. But as we lay there discussing the options—Mom and I under the covers, the boys sitting
among overstuffed pillows—my younger brother, Ben, his head resting against my mother, got to the point. “If you stay here, there’s nothing left to do, right? You’ll die. So there’s really not a choice, is there?”

  “No, I guess there isn’t,” Mom said softly, staring blankly at the ceiling and mindlessly stroking Ben’s hair.

  A week later Dad left work and Ben transferred to an international high school in Jerusalem. When they moved, Dan and I stayed behind—he was in college and I had just graduated and started my new job. Mom refused to have us join them. “Look,” she said, when I pleaded with her. “This is already disrupting Dad’s and Ben’s lives. You don’t need to come. I don’t want you quitting your job. It will make me sadder having you there than if I know that you’re getting on with it in New York. What are you going to do there anyway? Sit by my bed and watch me? Stay. Live your life.”

  She spent that last week packing and tying up as many loose ends as she could—making last-minute phone calls, sending e-mails, showing me where she kept her jewelry, closing out professional obligations and appointments. She wrote a letter to each of us. There was so much to do. How do you prepare to leave your life, potentially forever?

  The day of their flight came at last, and while Ben and my father were carrying all the suitcases down the stairs and packing them in the trunk of the car, my mother crouched to stroke our cat good-bye. Then she stood up and hugged me for a long time. I was crying. “Don’t worry, honey. I’m coming back,” she whispered in my ear as she turned to get into the car. The procedure and the recovery period were to take five months. Dan and I waved good-bye from the porch as Dad pulled out of the driveway. Through the window, I saw Mom turn around and look back at the house, taking it in for the last time.