Chasing Chaos: My Decade In and Out of Humanitarian Aid (10 page)

There were limited resources, and he had to distribute
them to a group of people whose needs far exceeded our ability to fulfill them. He spoke calmly to women and touched the noses of their babies strapped to their backs. He organized people into distribution lines more efficient than the checkout lanes at Whole Foods. I was assigned to the soap detail, and handed three long bars, stacked like Jenga pieces, to each tired but grateful recipient.

A huge truck rolled in minutes later and dumped bags of corn, rice, maize, seeds, and oil. Charles split the returnees into groups of twenty. Each group was given a three-month ration of food, which they were left to distribute among themselves. Women took off their cloth head wraps to use as makeshift bags for carrying rice. Others untied their overskirts to do the same.

Charles instinctively knew when people were cheating and would pull them out of line only to see they had indeed forged their ration cards or were taking more than their allocated share. He was in control—and there was nothing more attractive.

BECAUSE HE WAS RWANDAN, CHARLES
earned only a few hundred dollars per month. Although this was considered a good salary, my school stipend to support my internship was double that, despite the fact he was seven years older, ran a field office, and had been working in this industry for close to a decade. But his generosity
was endless, and he never mentioned money or the disparity between our incomes. His friends greeted me warmly, and at their homes brought me trays full of drink and food. When I’d look to him for help finishing a plate loaded high with rice, goat meat, and beans, he would laugh. “Eat up,” he’d say. “You need to get fat like a real African lady.”

When Charles walked into town, everyone seemed to know him. People stopped to greet him, slowed down on their bikes and rolled down their windows to shout his name and wave. Whether it was because he had helped out the daughter of a friend who needed money for school, or lent another some cash so he could repair his house, or taught someone’s child English, they all adored him. Street children followed him around like eager puppies.

Our friendship quickly budded into a romance and we snuck around the office, kissing behind closed doors and leaving notes for each other on our desks. I was as awed by Charles’s skin as Betty’s grandchildren had been with mine. His limbs were long and narrow, and I stroked them slowly and intently.

When he undressed for the first time in front of me, I couldn’t help laughing out loud at his choice of underwear: classic tighty-whities. He looked ridiculous. “What is so funny?” he asked.

“You! That underwear! My brothers used to wear underwear like that in middle school!”

“What do they wear now, those shorts things where
your balls hang down? My dear, goats let their balls hang down. Do I look like a goat to you?”

If I stepped out of line, he would threaten to sell me to his neighbors. “I could get a pretty good price for you, you know. About fifty goats. So you better behave yourself,” he’d joke, tapping on my chest. He called me a silly white lady when I did something stupid. I called him my Tutsi prince.

A few weeks into our relationship, he invited me to Uganda to meet his family, especially his sister, who had just had a baby. I accepted immediately.

We sat next to each other on the ten-hour bus journey, listening to music—he taking one earpiece, me the other—and talking about our families and friends, about how we grew up and who we had known and loved. Outside, the rolling hills of Rwanda gave way to the flat lands of Uganda. When we stopped at a roadside stall outside of Kampala, he got off, saying he needed water. He came back with cookies.

If someone had told me a year earlier that I would be on a rickety bus crossing the border into Uganda, sitting next to the Rwandan I was falling in love with and whose family I was on my way to meet, I never would have believed it. It was ridiculous how fast I transitioned into this world, how much these kinds of moments would sit with me and continue to lure me back to these foreign places again and again and again. Rwanda was so far from New York and the life I had been leading there, so vastly distant from the life
I might have continued to live. But instead I was here, and it didn’t matter that my entire body was cramped up on the metal seats of a hot, crowded, smelly bus: there was nowhere else I would rather have been.

But we both knew that this romance would be short-lived. Charles couldn’t move to America, and I had to go back to school. I desperately wanted to return his kindness by showing him around New York City. But he was reluctant—he had too much pride to stand on line at the US embassy and to be talked down to by “those assholes at the visa counter.”

“Why would I want to go to America?” he’d say. “I have a good job here, I have my family, my friends. What do I want there? To be treated like a second-class citizen? No, thank you.” I tried to tell him that a visit with me would be fun. He laughed as he pictured it. “I can just see the look on your father’s face when you bring home an African man! He’d turn whiter than he already is!”

When it was time to leave, I went to the airport with a few expats I had met who were also leaving that day. The destinations written on the boarding passes in my hand—Brussels, then New York—seemed like other planets.

But I was now certain of one thing: after graduate school, I was coming back to Africa. Of all the discoveries I had made over the past few months, perhaps the most important was just how much I still had to learn.

Charles surprised me and showed up at the airport
to say good-bye. I ran to him when I saw him entering the terminal with his confident bouncy walk. We sat together holding hands until it was finally time for me to board. I started to tear up.

“Stop that,” he said, getting up to hug me. He held my face in his hands. “I will see you again. I promise you that.”

I landed at JFK International Airport on August 14, 2003, in the midst of one of the largest blackouts in American history. Mine was the last plane to touch down before they shut the airport.

My dad had left work early so he could pick me up when my flight got in at 8 p.m. But I didn’t walk through the sliding doors of the Terminal until 2 a.m. Beleaguered but happy to see me, Dad greeted me with an enormous embrace. His hair was pushed up on the side he had been sleeping on while he waited. The flowers he brought had already begun to wilt.

We drove over the Whitestone Bridge in the purple moonlight and looked out at the charcoal silhouette of Manhattan across the river. The city seemed abandoned. The Empire State Building was dark; the Chrysler Building unidentifiable. Manhattan had lost its sparkle.

The next morning, from the comfort of my father’s
Connecticut home, I watched endless images of a blacked-out New York City flicker across the television screen. People went without air-conditioning, computers, flushing toilets, refrigerators. They slept on the sidewalks because they couldn’t make it up the stairs to their apartments at the tops of skyscrapers. But New Yorkers could rest assured that these things would be functioning soon enough. They knew that the lights would return, that the city would once again run as usual. People stuck on sticky, crowded trains that stalled under the East River may have had to wait for hours to be retrieved, but eventually the subway cars were towed back into Penn Station by a diesel train. In the places I had just come from, the best you could hope for was that a group of teenage boys strong enough—and willing—would come along and push the train back into the station.

The New York Times
even tried to make this comparison: “By 9:30 p.m., the New York Marriott Marquis in Times Square resembled a refugee camp. The hotel was evacuated earlier after its backup generator failed. More than a thousand people clustered outside the entrance … Hotel employees passed out pillows, cups of water, fruit, and stools. Tailgate parties started spontaneously on the curb. There were six-packs of beer and bottles of water, sandwiches and pizzas, coolers of drinks floating in tepid water.”

Six-packs? Pizza? Pillows? This was unlike any refugee camp I had seen.

My summer in Rwanda was nothing: a blip on the screen of a lifetime. But when I came home, I found myself overwhelmed by American excess. I didn’t start wearing Birkenstocks and Che T-shirts, or reeking of patchouli oil. I didn’t reference Nicholas Kristof in every conversation. I didn’t flick light switches just to revel in the miracle of electricity or sit there turning the water tap on and off amazed by how easy we had it. But there were certainly things I noticed.

Back in New York, I knew how to approach a bank teller, or a checkout person, I knew how to navigate the supermarket and could find soap in CVS in less than a minute. When I went to get my license renewed, even the DMV seemed well organized. I responded to ten e-mails in the time it took me to open one in Kigali. Even the subway was a joy, since I could count on it coming and not breaking down. Table service was speedy and efficient. I noticed the streets with new appreciation. Not only were they paved so smoothly, they were all painted with yellow lines! No one cared about me, no one looked or stared, no one approached me for anything. I was back, anonymous in New York City, and I loved it.

It wasn’t until I began interacting with my college friends that I noticed a change in my attitude. In college, Africa was essentially one big continent to me, a blur of indistinguishable countries. If you had asked me then where Kigali was, I would probably have said
somewhere in the Caribbean. So I wasn’t too surprised by the way some of my friends reacted.

“Do you think this is your calling?” one asked at a bar. He was a corporate lawyer at a prestigious firm in New York.

“Like as in being a nun?” I asked.

“Well, you know what I mean,” he said, looking over my shoulder at a girl in a tight shirt. “I just don’t understand why you feel the need to go so far. I mean, do you ever want to just work on domestic issues? Why don’t you work on problems in America?”

It was a fair question, and one that I would consider later in my career, long after I started to burn out. But at the time, I hadn’t really questioned my motives, whether I was doing this out of altruism or doing it because I enjoyed the adventure of it all or some combination of both. My answer years later would be more complicated, but then his question offended me.

“Don’t
you
feel like you should be helping your country then, too?” I asked.

“Well, yeah. But you’re in this field.”

I guessed he meant the “doing good” field.

“So,” he continued. “Does everyone that you work with have dreadlocks?”

I thought about Charles a lot, but struggled to explain him to my friends. “You mean he was African? Like
born there?” When I said yes, a college friend leaned in, concerned. “You used protection, right? Aren’t they all HIV positive over there?” Another one asked if he was a tribal leader, as if he were a character in
The Gods Must Be Crazy
.

One night, sitting in an Upper East Side apartment with some girlfriends, I recounted my affair with Charles and told them that I had invited him to visit me here.

“I have to write this letter of invitation for him to give to the embassy to get a visa,” I explained. Although Charles had been reluctant to deal with the embassy nuisance, when I got home I convinced him to at least try.

“Well, what does this letter hold you to?” my friend Melissa asked, sitting on her plush bed, surrounded by more pillows than I could count on one hand.

“What do you mean?” I asked, confused.

“Well, I don’t know. What if he messes up? Are you responsible?”

“I guess so. But how would he mess up?”

“I don’t know …”

“No, what? Like how could he mess up that badly?” I asked, thinking she knew something I didn’t.

“Well, what if he robs a bank or something?”

“What if he robs a bank?” I repeated. “You mean because he’s African?”

“No, I mean, you know, what if he jaywalks? I don’t know. I just don’t want you to get in trouble.”