Chasing Chaos: My Decade In and Out of Humanitarian Aid

by Jessica Alexander

  The damage caused by the earthquake, however, was not merely the consequence of its magnitude, which measured 7.0 on the Richter scale. The 8.8 magnitude earthquake that hit Chile in February 2010 was significantly less destructive, despite being five hundred times stronger than the Haitian quake. So why was the earthquake in Haiti so much more devastating?

  One answer was that the fault line ran directly beneath Port-au-Prince, which was vastly overcrowded and teeming with poorly built structures. There was almost a complete absence of building codes and regulations. Construction companies forewent expensive materials such as rebar, the steel bars used to reinforce concrete. And the concrete itself was cheap, made from salinated sand in the hills. In order to get more for their money, builders also added too much water to the cement mixture, which meant it didn’t actually bond.

  After the quake, more than half a million of Port-au-Prince’s two million residents skipped town to live with family members in rural areas. The rest pitched tent camps all over Port-au-Prince, until it seemed as if every stretch of open land—parks, parking lots, even the dividers down the main highway—were patched in plastic sheeting.

  And when the rainy season started, there wasn’t much more than a few flimsy plastic sheets, tattooed with humanitarian logos, already muddy and frayed, between people and the tropical storms. Gutters turned to whirlpools and roads became gray foaming rivers. Bodies stood stiff against walls, staring stoically outward at the road, trying to stay dry under overhangs. When people had to duck out into a downpour, they wore shower caps or held plastic bags over their heads. People moved a tire, a piece of concrete rubble, a bundle of wood: anything sizable enough to obstruct or divert the water rushing down from the hills and keep it from getting under the tents was repurposed as a makeshift dam. But still the brackish water managed to seep into everything. The stench, like the rain, was relentless. Mothers told us that some nights they held their sleeping children in their arms to protect them from the inescapable wetness.

  “I’d rather be dead than living like this in five years,” a woman said to me one day, when I visited a camp. “When I am deeply thinking about life, I ask for death because I find there is no hope for my children,” she added, brushing away tears as her young son peeked out from behind her legs. “Life does not have sense for me anymore.” The earthquake had stripped her of everything she’d relied on. Her child’s school collapsed. Her house crumbled. Her husband died. She used to sell sweets in a local market but the market had fallen apart and her supply dried up. “Neither in two nor in five years, I do not know where I will be; only God knows. I need a way to survive with my children so that they can be something in the future.” Once again, just like Darfur or Aceh, Port-au-Prince was a giant puzzle to solve, the ultimate professional challenge. And the people were truly desperate for help.

  I was in charge of monitoring the agency’s response in the seven sectors we covered: health, nutrition, water and sanitation, child protection, education, shelter, and food. While people at home were writing me e-mails that said “The work you do is incredible” or “You’re an inspiration to us all,” I was doing what people in offices everywhere did: I sat behind a desk and stared at a computer. My first weeks in Haiti were spent squinting at spreadsheets that listed the number of jerry cans distributed in Delmas 31 Camp and the number of tarpaulins handed out at Gaston Margon Camp. I questioned the contents of the hygiene kits we delivered. I sorted through requisition forms when the number of blankets didn’t add up.

  “Were these the hygiene kits with the toothbrushes donated by the Brits or the sanitary pads from the Danish?”

  “Were these bales of blankets or individual blankets received? How many blankets are even in a bale?”

  “Are these the drugs that came through Miami or Santo Domingo?”

  “I don’t know. I got here two weeks ago,” was the usual response. Staff turnover in a place like Haiti was high.

  I spent at least a few hours every day in a fugue of frustration. I didn’t know what people saw when they imagined me at work, but surely they didn’t picture a glorified bean counter, which is what I felt like most of the time. Regardless, being there and being able to respond and help organize this massive effort was worthwhile. I knew that the tents we distributed, the food that was handed out from our warehouses, and the water we trucked into camps were providing some relief to that woman I met in the camp and the over one million homeless people just like her. They may have been rudimentary, but the temporary schools we built helped keep children in school and may have attracted others who weren’t in school before the earthquake. Our nutrition services gave support to lactating mothers and their newborns. People who had never seen a doctor before were now able to visit our clinics and receive treatment. It was basic, and it was messy, but it was there, and people were grateful.

  Now in a position of relative seniority, I was able to guide strategic planning within our organization and meet with directors of other organizations to devise plans to improve the overall humanitarian response. Donations of millions of dollars came in every day, and part of my role was to help determine how that would be spent and make sure our programs were of high quality. It may have taken time, it may have required patience and perseverance, but I was part of a chain that made progress. Just knowing that was rewarding enough.

  Given that my curfew was 6:30 p.m. and his 7:00, and that both of our days were consumed by work, Charles and I still had not been able to arrange a time to see each other. We spoke on the phone regularly, but that we could be living in the same city after all these years and not see each other was unbelievable—and unacceptable. Finally, after three weeks of trying to make plans, I told him just to meet me by my compound after work one afternoon. The plan lacked a certain ceremony, but if I got to see Charles, that would be enough.

  I waited for him outside the compound gates in an impatient sweat, checking my watch over and over again. Fifteen minutes after he was supposed to arrive, I called him. He didn’t even say hello.

  “I know, my dear. I know. I know. You’re a very busy muzungu lady now. I’m stuck in traffic five minutes away. These guys don’t know how to drive.”

  I laughed. It was the same old Charles.

  I’d only just pocketed my phone when a white Land Cruiser turned the corner and came racing toward me, its lights blinking and horn honking. Charles rolled down the window and waved.

  “Look at my favorite muzungu!” he shouted out the window as the car sped past me toward the parking lot.

  I ran over to his car and he opened the door. We embraced.

  “Look at you!” he said, standing back, holding my shoulders. “You’re a grown-up lady now!” When I met Charles in Rwanda, I was a twenty-five-year-old intern. Now I was thirty-two and a “Senior Specialist,” at least according to my job title.

  “You look exactly the same!” I said.

  “Ha, my dear. You should see these gray hairs I have. Here, get in the car out of this heat.” He guided me into the car and turned the air-conditioning up as high as it would go.

  “So, how are you?”

  “I’m good! I’m … My God, it’s been so long!” There was just too much to say.

  “It has.”

  “So, are you married by now?” he asked, pulling my left hand to see if I was wearing a ring.

  “No, not married,” I said. “But I do have a boyfriend in New York.”

  “That is very good, my dear.” He was being genuine.

  Charles was married now, with children back in Rwanda. For the past two years, he had been living and working in Haiti, where he was earning quite a bit of money. In Rwanda Charles had been a local employee, but here he was an expat, which meant a significantly higher salary in addition to the daily allowances for food and housing that agencies provided to foreign workers. So although Charles could now afford to send his children to the best schools, he couldn’t see them more than a few times a year.

  “Don’t you
miss them?” I asked.

  “Yes, but this is life,” he said, shrugging his shoulders. “And anyway, with that Skype business these days, I see them more than I would if I were at home. You know, at home they would be playing with their friends and have no time for Dad. Now we sit and chat for an hour every night.”

  “They must have freaked out when the earthquake happened.”

  “They thought I was dead. And I couldn’t get through for so long.” He looked down. Then back at me. “It was horrible. I was on the phone and it all started shaking. People were screaming. It was so hard to run, but everyone in my office got outside. There wasn’t much damage to my building. I went home and found that the wall to my bedroom had caved in. No one slept that night. Or for nights after that. Everyone was too afraid to get under a roof. Even now I’m still afraid.”

  He continued, “But the next morning, that was the worst. That was when we realized who hadn’t made it. On the UN radios they kept calling out the names of people they found dead under the rubble. I heard colleagues crying with every name that was called. I knew a lot of them. I just sat there outside the office, listening. One woman I had gotten into an argument with the day before. She was walking into her office when the building collapsed on top of her.” His phone rang.

  “Look, my dear, I have to go. I’m supposed to be off panicking somewhere about something.” He turned to me. “How long are you here for?”

  “I don’t know. Six months?”

  He laughed. “You think this shit will be picked up after a few months?” he said, motioning to the rubble all around us.

  “No. But I can’t really stay longer.”

  “Yeah, yeah, your boyfriend will be upset. I know.” He slapped my thigh. “So, when can I see you again?” We made plans to meet for lunch that weekend.

  Charles was right. The rubble would not be cleared in six months. An estimated 19 million cubic meters of debris clogged Port-au-Prince—enough, some said, to fill a line of shipping containers stretching end to end from London to Beirut. To start the process and get cash in people’s hands, many NGOs hired teams of day laborers, who were given rubber boots, shovels, wheelbarrows, and hard hats, and assigned areas to clear. They dumped the rubble into the backs of massive pickup trucks that the government was in charge of taking away. Often the trucks never showed up, so they left the rubble in enormous piles on the sides of roads. Eventually, we had to change our route to the office because when it rained there was risk of a landslide.

  Since getting big machines such as jackhammers and Caterpillar loaders up many of the narrow streets was nearly impossible, the day laborers dug the city out by hand, tossing one brick at a time down the steep hills. In a handful of areas where the ground was more level, the big trucks could pass, but when one agency brought in heavy machinery, some day laborers protested. In a city with widespread unemployment and underemployment, rubble clearing guaranteed people an income for months, maybe years. To stretch the work out as long as they could, some laborers craftily cleared rubble from one area and slowly dumped it in another, where a different agency would then hire them to move it out of that neighborhood—and so on, and so on. It was an ouroboros of rubble, a whirlpool of trash spiraling around us—but nobody even noticed. Yet the image of all that rubble, moving endlessly around the city, struck me as a bad omen. The universe couldn’t have made itself clearer if it tried: we thought we were making progress in Haiti, but really we were just going in circles.

  “HAITI WAS AN EMERGENCY BEFORE the emergency,” my Haitian colleague told me one afternoon over lunch at our office. We were sitting at his desk, looking at a report citing Haitian human development indicators. In every major category—education, health, and living standards—Haiti ranked the worst of any country in the Western Hemisphere. In short, 80 percent of the population lived below the poverty threshold and only 50 percent of children were enrolled in school. Almost half the population had no access to basic health care or potable water. The country had been plagued by political instability and associated violence and civil unrest for so long that the UN peacekeeping force had been stationed there since 1993, and in 2012 the worldwide corruption perceptions index placed Haiti as the 165th most corrupt country out of 176. Corruption was so endemic in Haiti that they used New York lotto numbers because if the Haitian government ran the lotto, no one would believe that it wasn’t rigged. Given these preexisting conditions, we had to ask ourselves: What, exactly, did “building back better” look like? If we helped increase school attendance by 10 percent, was that success? How much did we expect from ourselves here, and were those expectations reasonable or insane?

  In crisis situations, the immediate response was emergency relief, which eventually gave way to long-term development planning. The boundary between emergency aid and development aid was always a little fuzzy. But two goals we all worked toward were strengthening the ability of people to meet their own needs, and helping them develop the capacity to withstand future shocks on their own. In Haiti, however, many of us wondered: How long could an emergency response last before it became routine? When did living in the aftermath of a disaster turn into simply living? Agencies provided free water to people living in the camps, but it didn’t come cheap to us; the water had to be trucked in, since it wasn’t feasible to start drilling boreholes throughout the middle of a crowded city. Just getting rid of human feces was also a huge cost to agencies. Much of the excreta was disposed via emergency latrines and had to be desludged daily. This was by no means a sustainable solution, but in the short term we had no other option. We wanted to divert our support to relocation sites, but since they were still undetermined, these expensive but necessary interventions had to continue. But many people openly went to the bathroom all over Port-au-Prince—we used to make bets on the way to work about how many people we’d see peeing on the side of the road. The “flying toilet”—shitting in a plastic bag and throwing it anywhere, in a ditch, in the air, on the side of the street, a method commonly used in Africa—was widespread.

  Some of the ongoing crises were predictable, but no one was attacking the root causes. The hurricane season, for example, came every year and always caused mass destruction and flooding. Port-au-Prince had canals that were supposed to evacuate the excess water. But because there wasn’t a regular garbage disposal system, people threw their trash in the canals, creating enormous mounds where you’d see fat pigs literally rolling in piles of shit. Every year agencies cleared out the canals in anticipation of the heavy rains. But what Haiti really needed was a sustainable trash collection system, so that these Band-Aid solutions wouldn’t have to be repeated year in and year out. But rebuilding water, septic, and garbage collection systems in a capital city that had been functioning poorly even before the earthquake wasn’t going to happen overnight. Meaningful change—rebuilding the house from the ground up—took much more time. And it took cooperation and leadership from the government, the same government that had been ill-equipped to deal with the country’s struggles even before disaster hit.

  “The UN should just run this country,” my boss declared. “This is ridiculous.” An older Danish man in charge of the emergency programming, he was furious after coming out of another fruitless meeting. Thousands of people were living in makeshift tents, and the government was supposed to find somewhere for them to resettle. But no site had been selected, and nobody knew how long it would be until one was. At times we questioned whether the government was working with us or exploiting us. Our agency had new cars, for instance, which arrived safely in the port but, for reasons that remained less than clear, could not be properly registered and, therefore, had to be impounded. In the meantime, we spent more than $100,000 a month to rent vehicles. People speculated that the government was taking kickbacks from the car rental companies. As long as our vehicles were stuck in the ports, everyone profited off our inconvenience. “Giving the government money,” my boss said, sighing, “is like putting Dracula in charge of a blood bank
.”

  There were moments in Haiti, moments of hard work and dedication that I will never forget: a colleague coming out of a coordination meeting collapsing onto a plastic chair, lighting a cigarette as if in a trance, and slowly smoking it while debris—dust and tattered plastic bags—blew behind him; a health worker putting her hands on her hips and pausing to catch her breath before returning to the line of patients that snaked outside the clinic gates; the face of a seething logistics manager who arrived at a locked warehouse to find that the contingency stock of nutritional supplies had been stolen; the head-in-hands frustration of an education officer who learned that five of her tented temporary schools had collapsed overnight in a rainstorm. Some of us worked fourteen, sixteen, eighteen hours a day, seven days a week, and although it could be hard to see, the work was making a difference. In some places, a child who had been getting zero meals a day now received two. Pregnant women could get stronger and healthier. A girl who was once a restavek—a form of domestic child labor in Haiti, which some UN officials have deemed “a modern form of slavery”—enrolled in a school we rebuilt and had now risen to the top of her class. Simply knowing how to read could save a child’s life the next time there was a disaster, and our education programs did just that. “It’s massively frustrating,” Margaret, a Canadian woman my age in charge of programs for children, stated one night after returning from a visit to a completed child-friendly space that she had worked months to set up. “But then you go meet those kids, and you’re like—that’s amazing. And it makes it all worthwhile.”