Chasing Chaos: My Decade In and Out of Humanitarian Aid

by Jessica Alexander

  We wrote e-mails regularly and spoke on the phone every day. At first, Mom was too weak to get out of bed, but eventually she was sturdy enough to do laps around the hospital wing. She made friends with all the nurses and they left little gifts for her in her room. One of them ran a 10K race in Jerusalem and gave her his medal. Dad bought colorful posters and hung them on her walls. After the pope visited Jerusalem, Dad bought a pope costume and wore it to the hospital one morning to surprise Mom. They kept each other’s spirits up this way, watching Woody Allen movies and listening to Bob Dylan CDs, playing cards and Scrabble. After Mom died, I found a “100 Things to Live For” list that Dad told me they worked on together during one of the roughest stretches. “More time with Jon” (my dad) was Mom’s first entry. “Jessica’s wedding” was number two.

  I flew over to see her twice. One night, I stayed in with Mom while Ben and Dad went out to dinner. We were lying in bed watching a movie when she turned to me and said, “There are just so many things I want to tell you. I have so much I need to say to you. To all of you.” She was crying.

  “Mom, it’s OK. You’ll have time to tell us everything.”

  “I don’t know. I just don’t know. My dad died when I was sixteen. And I don’t remember him. Of course, I remember what he looked like, but the details, his personality, who he was … I can’t remember. I can’t remember my own father! You guys, my children, you aren’t going to be able to remember me.” She was sniffling into a tissue.

  I guess I expected it to be like in a movie. Music would swell and I’d be able to say to my mother all the things I had been meaning to say for so long. Tell her that I loved her, tell her everything that I admired her for, thank her for my life. But it was nothing like that. I held her hand silently, unable to speak. The only thing swelling was the lump in my throat, which choked off anything profound I might have said. I gathered myself together and made a pitiful attempt at a response: “Of course we’ll remember you. But we won’t have to. You’re coming home.”

  But that wasn’t to be. A few weeks later, although her cancer was officially in remission, the treatment had so debilitated her that a slight infection turned into full-blown pneumonia overnight. Her body was too weak to fight it. Five months after they arrived, Dad and Ben flew back, and my mom went home in a box.

  Sometimes I still can’t believe how much my mother has missed, how much she doesn’t know. She wasn’t here to see Ben get into college, to witness George Bush elected president (twice!). She wasn’t alive for September 11. She didn’t get to vote for Obama. Even trivial things could give me pause. I’d be watching American Idol and all of a sudden the thought would appear in my mind: Mom never knew what reality TV was.

  And Mom never knew who I had become, either. When she died, I was still in New York, working at a marketing firm and leading focus groups about Sunny Delight. Mom didn’t know that I went on to graduate school or worked in Africa and Asia. The last time I saw her was in Israel, four months before the Second Intifada. Still, she warned me, “Don’t go into East Jerusalem.” My parents were cautious and didn’t want me going anywhere that posed even the slightest risk. I obeyed them and stuck to Ben Yehuda Street and the Jewish neighborhoods.

  When I returned to Israel this time, a UN administrator had similar words of advice: “Don’t leave East Jerusalem, the Palestinian section. Eating or staying at a hotel in West Jerusalem is supporting the Occupation and we can’t do that.” It seemed like a silly distinction, and I’d heard from other aid workers that one of the chief consequences of the rule was that housing prices in the West Bank and Gaza had gone up, since there was now a new pool of wealthy aid workers looking for places to live, and some former residents were getting edged out of the market. Still, the instructions seemed apt, somehow—a mirror image of the ones my parents had issued so long ago, the other end of the yardstick measuring just how far I’d come in the years since. And although I could still remember my mother, I knew now she had been right that night she cried to me at the hospital, admitting that she couldn’t remember her father and worrying we would forget her. Nine years later, the details were lost. I couldn’t recall her voice or the subtlety of her movements. I still had a shirt of hers that I never washed because it smelled like her. I would open my drawer every so often to get a whiff of her, but even that smell was fading into a musty memory. My brothers and I watched home videos and looked through photo albums, and those helped a bit, but they were from when we were children. Mom never knew me as an adult.

  When Dad visited me in Sierra Leone, we took a boat ride down a river near the coast. “I wish Mom was here,” I had said to him then, and he had tapped me gently on my shoulder.

  “I picture her sitting right here everywhere you go.”

  I thought of that now, as I walked the streets of Jerusalem, wanting to tell her how much I had changed in the past nine years, and all about what I had chosen to do and why. It was her death, after all, that had set me on the path to this career. I wished I could talk to her about what the work had been like and who it had made me. What idealism still remained within me and what had been chipped away. I wanted to talk to her about everywhere I had been, so she could imagine me there—imagine me living a life she never would have envisioned for me when she was alive.

  But maybe Dad was right. Maybe she already knew.

  I’m Headed to Haiti, Where Are You Going?

  HAITI, 2010

  Haiti is a mystery for most Americans, despite being scarcely seven hundred miles from US shores. The American population has been historically apathetic toward its French-speaking neighbor on Hispaniola. Haiti sits directly in the center of a collection of other places that, in contrast to Haiti, are very familiar to Americans: the legendary Communist island of Cuba, the magical fountain of baseball talent from the Dominican Republic, favorite vacation spots such as Turks and Caicos, Jamaica and the Bahamas, the famous international financial haven in the Cayman Islands, and America’s own commonwealth of Puerto Rico. Incredibly, precisely in the geographical center of this collection of well-functioning Caribbean paradises lies the nation of Haiti, a nation of ten million people that has been dysfunctional longer than any other country in the New World.

  With its long history of bloodshed, disease, oppression, and the ongoing poverty and disenfranchisement of its masses, one might think that the people of Haiti had served their penance for whatever imagined cosmic crime they had committed. Haitians deserved to turn the next chapter of their history, hopefully a chapter of growth and prosperity. At a minimum one would think that things couldn’t, or at least shouldn’t, get any worse for the Haitian people and that gradual progress must be made. But while few thought Haiti could be worse, almost none thought that it could ever be as bad as it became in the early days of 2010.

  Little did I know it either, but I was about to be thrust back into the turmoil of an international disaster response.

  On January 11, 2010, my cell phone rang. Unknown Number. I was busy and not particularly interested in hearing the canned ramblings of what I thought would be a faceless telemarketer, so I decided to wait until later to listen to the message.

  When I got home that evening, I listened to a familiar voice crackling through the phone, and I was thrilled to hear it.

  It was Charles, calling from Port-au-Prince, where he had been working for the past two years. It had been seven years since we last saw each other in Rwanda and almost a year since we had spoken over the phone. I loved his sense of humor, and as I listened to the voice-mail a second time, I laughed out loud as he joked about me being married with kids after only two months of e-mail silence between us. He finished the message casually. “Just wanted to say hello to my favorite muzungu. Bye-bye!”

  I had met plenty of people at postings over the years and many of them were special to me, but after our jobs ended we always lost touch, save for regular Facebook updates. Gradually our lives moved on and those friendships dwindled. But that was not the case with
Charles; Charles never faded.

  I was busy, so I didn’t call back right away, and I went to bed that night without returning his message. I had a boyfriend in New York, Jack, with whom I now spent my evenings. We had gone to college together and became reacquainted at our tenth reunion. Meeting Jack was one of the best things about having come home. Charles could wait.

  By 6 p.m. the next day news of the earthquake began trickling onto television screens and websites across the country. The initial headlines were benign: “Earthquake Reported in Haiti,” “Port-au-Prince Damaged by Earthquake,” “Injuries Reported in Haitian Earthquake.”

  The existing telecommunication structure had been wiped out, so details were sparse. I was aware of the news media’s habit of crying wolf in situations like these, so I assumed things were probably OK and that I would be able to talk to Charles as soon as a few broken utility poles were repaired. But the headlines became more foreboding. And then I saw one that gave me chills: “Earthquake Destroys Haitian Capital.”

  I was beginning to get scared.

  BY THE NEXT MORNING, all of the major American media outlets had invaded the streets of Port-au-Prince with their armies of production infantrymen and their cavalry of mobile broadcast vehicles. Instead of firing bullets and shells, they fired volleys of verbal and visual speculation that landed in the living rooms of disaster-obsessed consumers across the United States. The favorite blood sport of the media—predicting the number of casualties caused by a disaster—had transitioned seamlessly into its Blitzkrieg phase. Ten thousand dead. A hundred thousand dead. Three hundred thousand dead. Half a million. One million.

  In fact, it was much too early to predict anything, especially while the city was in chaos, individuals were impossible to account for, and there was no way to know at that point how many people were trapped beneath rubble, how many had already died, and how many would soon be dead because they were not found in time. Others would be rescued only to die while waiting outside the overcrowded hospitals.

  But I didn’t care about any of that or the thousands or millions just yet. At that moment there was only one person who I was thinking about, and my mind was filled with terror.

  Fixed in front of the television, I watched replays of buildings collapsing in waves and people running down the streets screaming, their bodies and faces streaked with blood and ash and mud. Reporters said that the UN building had collapsed. I knew there would be many UN buildings in Haiti. Was this the one that Charles worked at? Why hadn’t I called him back earlier? Had he sensed something and called me to say good-bye? No, that was obviously impossible. But was it really impossible? Did he feel something? My mind was obsessed with these questions, and my heart was full of sadness and fear. I dialed Charles’s number, compulsively, over and over again. There were no answers, only the disgusting heartlessness of electronic beeps, followed by the ghastly coldness of mechanical clicks. I pictured his phone under a pile of rubble, smothered by the roof, the walls, the furniture, and the bodies—everything that had collapsed in those thirty seconds. No signal would reach it. My stomach was sour. It was the first time someone I cared about was at the scene of a disaster when it struck. I wrote e-mails and sent texts, hoping somehow something might make its way through. I couldn’t believe Charles was dead.

  Finally, on January 15, three long days after the earthquake, a call: “It’s a huge mess. You can’t imagine. I’m not even sure what is going on.” Charles’s voice sounded strong, but tired.

  “What do you need?” I pleaded. “Where are you sleeping? Is it as bad as it sounds? What can I do? Are you leaving? Can you get to New York? Are you safe? Please stay safe. Are there aftershocks? Where are people living?”

  “I can’t talk long, my dear. I’m fine. You would have felt pretty guilty, huh, if something had happened and you didn’t call me back!” He was able to muster a joke. Charles was really fine.

  “I will be staying. I’ve lost so many friends. People from work keep coming in missing a kid, a spouse. It’s horrible. Horrible. It’s worse than what you are seeing on TV.”

  For once, the reporters may not have been exaggerating.

  The job offer came a few weeks later. I was in the middle of my first year in a PhD program and planned to be done with long missions in the field, at least for the next few years. My life in New York was finally starting to feel real: I was happy to be back and excited about my relationship with Jack, who worked in finance. I enjoyed spending time with someone who wasn’t tied up by the knot of professional and social concerns I had been tangled in for so long. For some time I had suspected the threads would never come loose, but now they were, and I found that not only was there a world beyond aid but that I liked inhabiting it. When the earthquake happened, though, I remembered something a mentor had told me long ago: aid work isn’t just a profession, it is a lifestyle. You never clock out of the field, or not really.

  I told Jack, “I got a job.”

  “Great. What are you doing?” he asked.

  “I’ll be doing monitoring.”

  “Monitoring what?”

  “The response.”

  “What response?”

  “The Haiti response.”

  “From here?”

  “No.”

  “You’re going to Haiti?” Jack had become used to my peripatetic ways. In the months we had been dating, I had been to Kenya, Uganda, and Jordan for various weeklong consulting projects, and I could tell he assumed this was simply another one of those short trips. “For how long?”

  “I don’t know, six months?” I knew this was going to come as a shock. I had applied for the post secretly, telling myself I just wanted to see if I’d get the job, never expecting it would come through so soon. But when it did, the same reflex kicked in. I felt a familiar tug in my stomach, and I realized how badly I wanted to go.

  “Six months!?” He sighed. If we were going to stay together, these surprises were something he’d have to adjust to somehow, and I could tell he was trying. We hadn’t been dating long enough for him to put his foot down and demand I stay. But the relationship was meaningful enough that one of us leaving for a foreign country wasn’t something that we could take lightly, either. At least I didn’t take it lightly.

  But my resolve was clear. Watching the response unfold on television, I knew, after having seen the aftermath of similar situations, that whatever the final death toll was it was more than just a figure. It was people—people with families and friends, people who were loved. People like Charles, who could have been a number but wasn’t. He was still Charles—and I was so grateful.

  Part of me, though, didn’t think that going off to Haiti was jeopardizing anything at all. In my mind, I could justify my decision easily. Haiti was close; I was only going for a few months; it was a good job; and Jack and I worked out a plan to see each other every three weeks. Unlike Darfur or Sierra Leone or anywhere in Asia, where the journey home was a grueling global marathon, the flight from Haiti to New York was an easy three hours or so. I could eat lunch in Port-au-Prince and dinner in SoHo, if I wanted. If this hadn’t been possible, I wouldn’t have gone. I thought I could have one foot in my professional life and one foot in my personal, and maintain good standing in both. And I promised myself that if things started to fall apart with Jack, I’d quit.

  When I look back now, my actions do seem reckless. The thought that I could move fluidly between worlds was ridiculous. I had everything that I had imagined wanting from afar: a boyfriend, a sunny apartment, a life with some steady direction. Convincing myself that I could assuage the tug to follow another disaster while also maintaining a normal life at home was foolish. Sheer adrenaline was what was pulling me to Haiti—the addictive rush of being part of a major response. I loved that my career was intertwined with the most urgent events in the world. Sitting around in New York, I felt like a football player on the disabled list, watching the game unfold in front of me, but not being able to get off the bench. All my other jobs
now felt like practice runs. In Haiti, I’d be in a position of seniority, with the chance to contribute more than I ever had before. So when I got the call, how could I refuse? This disaster was bigger than my nice life in New York; the allure was too powerful to ignore, and its force helped me rationalize my decision, as I persuaded myself I could have both the job and the relationship.

  When I arrived in Port-au-Prince that winter, I had never seen anything like it. Iron rods jutted out from slabs of concrete like broken bones—looking at them you’d think, I was never supposed to see that. Facades had been ripped off buildings, exposing the insides, and concrete walls were shot through with cracks. If a building was clearly beyond repair, it was demolished, and every day more of the town came down, as people slowly chipped away at the places they once called home.

  And these chips added up. My first morning on the streets, I stared out the window of the van transporting me and the rest of the staff to our office. They had done this trip for a few weeks now and sat silently with their laptops open, somehow managing to type as we bumped along the rubble-filled streets. Meagan, the young red-haired British nutritionist who had been there since day two of the quake, looked up from her spreadsheet and saw the expression on my face. In the understated way that only a Brit can pull off, she nodded slowly and said, “Yeah, it’s a bit shit, isn’t it?”

  I nodded back, unable to imagine a force powerful enough to cause all this damage. With just a thirty-second flick of its tail, le grand serpent (the great snake, as Haitians called it) brought down schools and homes, crushing classrooms and entire families. More than 220,000 people were killed and approximately 180,000 homes were wrecked, leaving 1.5 million Haitians homeless. Close to four thousand of the roughly five thousand schools affected by the earthquake were leveled completely. January 12, 2010 would be a turning point for the nation: now people referred to events in Haiti’s history as having taken place “before”—or “after.”