Chasing Chaos: My Decade In and Out of Humanitarian Aid

by Jessica Alexander

  I think we all came to Haiti thinking there would be more moments of gratification like that, that there would be clearer connections between our efforts and improvements. But a lot of times we took one step forward and then—bam!—the unexpected would happen and we’d take a leap back.

  Take the schools we rebuilt. Tom, our cheerful British construction manager, worked tirelessly for months to rebuild a school in Port-au-Prince. Tom was careful to design the one-story school to code, with reinforced wood paneling and a solid foundation made of high-quality concrete. He never thought that as soon as he handed over the keys—the day after a big ceremony where the children sang and the senior staff gathered to take pictures—that the headmaster would strip the roof and begin constructing a second floor. It was a private school—80–90 percent of schools in Haiti are—and the more children who enroll, the more money the headmaster makes. A second story would double the number of students and, therefore, the headmaster’s income. But if there were another earthquake, the foundation wouldn’t support the additional height and the school would collapse. Tom removed the agency plaque from the school wall.

  Wellness staff tried to help us manage stress by giving us cards listing the signs of burnout. Excessive drinking? Check. Exhaustion? Check. Short temper? Check. The burnout we were experiencing certainly wasn’t going to be identified on laminated wallet-sized checklists or be treated by lavender oil and antitrauma body spray, which they also generously doled out. Signs placed around the office ordered us to “Take care of YOU!” Although we may not have been taking care of ourselves, Haitians were taking care of themselves, visibly and busily getting back to the business of daily life. They called their country “Ayiti Cherie”—My Dear Haiti—and as one of our young colleagues told me: “We know that the world thinks our country is a mess. But we still have pride.” And they flaunted this pride: colorful art markets returned to the streets, where painters strung their art along the sides of roads, and loud Haitian kompa music wafted from bars and clubs. The vibrant Creole scene was alive and couldn’t be buried under all that concrete and pain. While we the expats were busy stressing, smoking, and swearing, our local colleagues ate their lunch on benches with friends. They took time to tell a joke, laugh. It wasn’t because they weren’t working just as hard as we were, but because they chose to celebrate being alive. “By the grace of God, we survived,” one said.

  Moments like these left me humbled. A friend of mine once went to a shelter distribution where his driver recognized one of the beneficiaries standing in line, a tall, slender man with a carefully groomed beard. The driver stopped the car in the middle of the road, got out, and ran over to hug him. The bearded man turned around and, realizing who had greeted him so enthusiastically, bent over with laughter. They embraced for a while. Our driver later informed us that Groomed Beard was an old school friend. Each thought the other had died.

  Every day I drove past a pancaked five-story building, next to which a woman had built a small shack made of a piece of tarpaulin draped over corrugated metal. The shack leaned to the side, and its open front could barely protect the occupants from even a light rain, but it provided the illusion of shelter, which was enough to comfort many Haitians at that time. Inside, the plump woman had placed two folding chairs, one of which she sat in and the other of which was always empty. Beside the chairs were small cardboard boxes, which she used as tables, on which she placed an array of colorful hair combs. Above the open door she had placed a hand-painted sign that said BEAUTY PARLOR.

  Other people were busy clearing the rubble near their homes. They didn’t have much to work with, but they were resolved to get the job done with whatever instruments they could find—sometimes removing rubble using rubble itself. I saw one man using a ripped piece of corrugated metal to push large chunks of gravel away from his home like a snow shovel, while another man used pieces of shattered wood to pry up slabs of concrete just enough to get his hands under. I even saw one man digging out his home with a large soupspoon that he had found in the heap. They had a look of determination, all of them, and instead of being bitter, they had compassion for others in similar situations. When the Pakistan floods ripped through the spine of that country later that summer, I passed walls of graffiti written by Haitians: “Pakistan needs help.”

  BUT HAITI STILL NEEDED HELP, too. We learned that cholera was stirring in the central plateau just 100 kilometers from Port-au-Prince. It was a vicious disease whose victims died from dehydration, caused by severe and unrelenting diarrhea and vomiting. Health practitioners started preparing rehydration salts, telling communities how to prevent and detect the disease, and making beds with strategically located holes, under which they’d put buckets to collect the mess. Nurses drew lines across the buckets which measured the amount of liquid waste so that they knew how much the person lost and how much they had to replenish him with.

  Back at our residence, a few colleagues sat on the stoop under the hazy moonlight, the buzz of the generator gently lulling in the background, fearing the what-ifs. Would cholera make its way to the capital? Could Port-au-Prince handle a disaster on top of the disaster? Marie, our resident house doctor, remembered her work in Goma, Democratic Republic of the Congo (then Zaire) in the mid-1990s when cholera stole the lives of tens of thousands of people in what seemed like an instant. “It’s the easiest thing to cure—if you get there in time,” she said. With cholera, prevention is everything, and the tragedy was just how simple it would have been to prevent. “Soap and clean water. That’s it. None of this wipe-your-hands stuff (she was referring to hand sanitizer) or Dettol. No, no, no.” We sat quietly as cigarette smoke drifted above our wineglasses, and the cat chased a cockroach. “If you get to them in time, it’s just about rehydrating. An IV in this arm and an IV in that one,” she said, hitting the inside of her arm at the elbow like a junkie. “And if it’s really bad, then you stick them behind the knees, too,” she added. In the end, cholera did arrive in Port-au-Prince, and by May of 2013 over 650,000 cases and 8,000 deaths had been reported. (The cholera strain was found to have been introduced to Haiti by UN Nepalese soldiers who arrived to assist the earthquake recovery efforts. The UN has come under considerable criticism for denying compensation for cholera victims.) But the work that Marie and other health workers like her did to educate children about washing and to teach mothers about clean water helped prevent what could have been a crisis of even vaster—and graver—proportions.

  But not everyone was committed to doing the heavy lifting required to make a substantive difference in people’s lives. “Look at those people,” a colleague said to me one day when we were out in Port-au-Prince, pointing to a group of Americans wearing matching blue shirts and crisp khaki pants, cameras hanging from their necks and inexperience dripping from their sweaty faces. “If we want to get it right, we need to stop encouraging every volunteer out there who can pick up a shovel and throw some rocks on the back of a truck to come down here. If it were you and your family, would you want amateurs coming and just using their whims to determine how to respond? I mean, it’s like giving people shotguns and sending them to Afghanistan to fight the war.”

  In other emergencies, various travel constraints—visa restrictions, the cost of the plane ticket, the length of the flight, the fact said flight would end with them landing in the middle of a war zone—combined to dissuade most would-be humanitarians from just dropping in. Haiti, however, was only a one-hour flight from Miami and did not require an entrance visa, which made it an ideal destination for people who wanted to come “help out” for a week. We’d see flocks of Americans sporting shirts commemorating the trip they were currently on. The Haitians knew the groups were there to help clean up, and presumably the groups themselves knew why they were there, so the brightly colored billboard T-shirts were only there to remind the weekend warrior do-gooders and their friends what great people they were.

  Their chests would proclaim: “Haiti Relief 2010: June 16–22” or “Haiti Proje
ct Spring Break 2010.” Most were worn by missionary groups: “Forward Edge International: Ordinary People, Extraordinary Purpose,” “World Hope International: Making Disciples of All Nations,” “Southwest Haiti Christian Mission: Rescue, Restore, Redeem,” “Angel Missions: Relief, Recovery, Rebirth,” “Love Haiti Missions: Keeping Hope Alive,” “Southern Baptist Mission: Raising Children from Poverty with Compassion in Jesus’ Name.” And last but not least: “Church of the Brethren: I’m Headed to Haiti, Where Are You Going?”

  Meanwhile, the Vegan Food Relief Team had matching baseball caps, while the Scientologists favored identical orange ponchos. No matter what their members wore, every group’s agenda was always the same: they cleared some rubble, said a few prayers (except for the vegans), took a lot of pictures, and left.

  If their shirts weren’t brazen enough, their conversations were. On one of my flights back from New York, I was joined by a bunch of firefighters. After the baggage carousel in the Port-au-Prince airport stalled for a third time, some of the firemen started to get restless. The group leader admonished them: “I told you guys, it’s like a fourth-world country down here! You gotta just be patient!” Standing directly to his left were several Haitians, who understood him perfectly well.

  A few weeks later I was on a field mission in Jacmel, a lazy seaside town about three hours from Port-au-Prince. Two vacationing American teenagers who were staying at my hotel struck up conversation with me. The best part of their trip, they agreed, had been the orphanage and playing with some of the children. The orphanage was a tourist stop for these boys, who now sat on hammocks by the beach drinking Prestige, the local beer. For them, going and giving out candy to kids hadn’t just felt normal—like handing out pellets to goats when you’re at a petting zoo—it felt noble. But while these boys may have thought they were doing good, putting smiles on the faces of children, and creating “lasting bonds,” I imagined the kids they had left behind, who had to interact with and potentially form attachments to the stampedes of foreigners that rolled through the orphanages every day.

  “Real” aid workers hated these folks. We called their trips “hug vacations.” “They’re on spring break! This trip is for them, not for Haitians! Let’s be clear, they’re the beneficiaries of this whole thing. They’re here to have a story when they go home, to feel good about themselves,” complained one aid worker. “Seriously,” bemoaned another, “all you need is a good heart and a Bible and you can get away with anything these days.” Another friend told us about a group she knew of in Cambodia. “There are tour operators who you can pay to go on a tour and hand out food to ‘poor people.’ ” We all turned to look at her. “No,” she protested, seeing our incredulous expressions. “I’m serious!”

  One afternoon I arrived at a camp clinic to check on our infant feeding program and saw a bunch of these tourists wandering around, shaking their heads in disbelief. They photographed everything, especially children; whenever some kids were spotted, the whole set would take turns posing with them. They looked like a tour group at the Grand Canyon—or Disneyland. I was surprised there wasn’t a coach bus waiting for them outside the camp.

  “Hey, Claude.” I turned to my driver. “Can we actually go back?”

  Claude looked at me, confused.

  “You forgot something?”

  “No, I just can’t be here with this going on,” I said, pointing to a group of white women holding babies and taking photos of themselves with them.

  Claude smiled. I wondered what he thought of this spectacle. Of all of these people—myself included—stomping through his country, there to “make a difference.” To Claude and to the rest of the Haitians, I was probably just another white face among the thousands of do-gooders, no different from any of the other disaster tourists. Revulsion clenched my stomach whenever I thought of the people I saw at the camp, and yet still I knew I recognized myself in them. Perhaps my motives for coming here weren’t so different from theirs. These church groups wanted to see Haiti, wanted to touch it—wanted, in other words, to be part of an extraordinary experience. But so did a lot of the people I worked with, who updated their Facebook statuses every two minutes in order to keep everyone they had ever met apprised of their latest activities in Haiti. Why should Claude have been able to distinguish me from them, or from anyone else working there?

  As they did in every emergency, organizations in Haiti competed with each other for funding from big governmental donors. Agencies—mine included—needed these multimillion-dollar grants in order to carry out their projects. But watching these contests play out in real time was like moving from the nosebleed seats to the orchestra: for the first time, I could see what this maneuvering actually entailed, and it struck me as crude and shameless. As field workers scrambled to hand out tents and provide water and rebuild schools, staff from headquarters in the United States and the United Kingdom flew in to take pictures and cherry-pick details for the profiles they would write about the people we helped, which would be featured in press releases and websites. Once, someone from the PR/Marketing team asked a program officer if he could put Christmas lights on the tents in a camp where he was shooting a promotional video. “We know it’s not Christmastime now, but the video will be airing at Christmas, and we think it would have a better impact,” the producer said.

  “First of all, there’s no electricity in the camps,” the program officer told him. “And anyway, you can’t string lights up on people’s tents and take their photos like they’re props.”

  That much was obvious, but the argument went that if the video tugged at heartstrings at Christmastime, more people would donate money, and that money could then be directed back to those people living in the camps. Celebrities were also part of the equation, as a single photograph in People could boost donations significantly. But celebrity visits took work, since whole teams had to rearrange their schedules to be available to fulfill requests from the visiting luminary on a moment’s notice: What is the make and model of the helicopter we’ll be using? Can you accommodate vegetarians? Do the vehicle and hotel have air-conditioning? Can someone who speaks English drive with us to the Dominican Republic and explain the sights?

  “Demi Moore makes a statement about vulnerable children in Haiti and I have to spend half my day responding to her in the press?” fumed one of my colleagues, who had been conscripted to manage the fallout from a New York Times article that criticized our organization for not doing enough to support vulnerable children. He was furious. “What the fuck do you know about vulnerable children, Demi Moore? Go back to Hollywood!” Some journalists were no better. One photographer asked a bunch of children to sit in a partially collapsed school so he could take pictures whose message would be impossible to mistake: look how eager Haitian children were to return to their educations! When the child protection team heard about this, they forbade the photographers from working with their programs again.

  The fundraising worked exactly like a business except in one critical way. Because Haitians weren’t paying for what they received, their requests and opinions were rarely taken into account. Although Haitians were the “consumers” of the aid industry’s “product,” agencies didn’t rely on them for their own institutional survival. Only the donors could put an aid organization out of business by refusing to fund it. In a typical free market relationship, consumers have a choice of goods. If you don’t like Crest, you’ll choose Colgate. If enough people choose Colgate, Crest will either go out of business or adapt to the demands of the marketplace. But in the world of aid, the “customers” don’t choose what kind of soap they receive or the quality of the tarpaulins that are distributed. And they don’t decide when these things arrive—or if they arrive at all. In almost any other circumstance, businesses couldn’t survive if their end users repeatedly criticized their products. No company that wants to stay in business would conceive of not asking its customers how they were experiencing their product.

  But in aid, that’s exactly what w
e did. “It’s basically a take-it-or-leave-it relationship,” an older female colleague once told me. “There’s no situation where the power between two groups is more lopsided. Except,” she added carefully, “maybe prison.”

  Later, on another mission, I would meet a woman who told me how she handled the imbalance. As an individual, she felt powerless to change the backward dynamics that made the overwhelming pressure to answer to donors and the media more acute than ensuring quality services to the people who needed them. When the bureaucracy felt more pressing than the work, when reporting to headquarters was prioritized over going to the field, when she was scolded for not cc’ing people in the right order on e-mails—those were the times, she said, that she looked at a photograph she kept on her desk of a child she had met on a field mission. “I look at that picture,” she told me, “and I think: This is my boss.”

  Seeing Charles in Haiti was like opening a time capsule that I had buried years ago in Rwanda. He reminded me of the person I had been in those days: idealistic and energetic, intent on making things better and undaunted by the work that would require. It was exactly that enthusiasm—and that patience—that had made me good at my job. I had been in Haiti a few months when Jenna, a young blonde woman, was hired to work on PR. A bubbly Canadian, she had only just completed graduate school, and this was her first field mission: Haiti was where she’d cut her teeth. I introduced myself and asked how long she would be in Haiti. She smiled and said, “One year.”

  A year was a long time, longer than Jenna probably realized. I had been that naive once, too—we all had—and now I was treating her as I felt I’d been treated in Rwanda, when I sat alone in my room wishing somebody would be my friend, or at least talk to me. I should have been kind and welcoming to Jenna, but I wasn’t. I was tired and worn out, and I couldn’t muster the energy to show her the ropes. She would figure the job out for herself, just as we all had.