Chasing Chaos: My Decade In and Out of Humanitarian Aid (11 page)

“Meliss, you said
rob a bank
.” I wanted to believe
that this was just hyperbole, a simple turn of phrase—that my friend couldn’t possibly have meant what she said.

Charles never did get to come to visit. But after that night, I finally understood something. That maybe these people—these people I had been close to, these friends—and I were starting to part ways.

I signed my contract to work in Darfur shortly after an American woman stationed there was shot in the face. She was traveling along a stretch of desert that a steady march of aid workers bearing relief supplies had transformed into a makeshift road. On the way from Khartoum to a remote village in Darfur, she was ambushed by members of the Janjaweed, the government-backed
militia that was systematically terrorizing the Darfurian population and driving them out of their homes. It was a group of these soldiers, perched in the mountains above the casually improvised road, who had sprayed bullets into the side of the American woman’s Land Cruiser. One of them went through her cheek. I was scheduled to travel that very same route, on my way to the very same village, only a few weeks later. It was 2005, and I had just finished graduate school. This would be my first
real
job in the field.

If I wanted to keep doing aid work, I had to go to a place like Darfur. Touring the countryside of Rwanda nearly a decade after the genocide was like doing a desk job in the Green Zone, never facing actual combat. Hardship duty stations like Darfur, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, or Northern Uganda were where you moved up in the ranks and built your résumé.

I had no idea what to expect. I knew that I would be working in Zalingei, the capital of Central Darfur. Zalingei’s small population—about thirty thousand people—was outstripped by the number of refugees in the IDP (Internally Displaced People) camps that had been set up nearby. The NGO that employed me was running three programs in the camps: one for children, one for women affected by violence, and one that delivered water and maintained sanitation facilities. I was hired to oversee a study about the lives of children in the camps, the results of which would be used to help our organization plan a youth program. I had conducted
research with children a year earlier, during a summer internship in Mozambique—not too shabby, but not exactly world-class credentials. But while I didn’t have much experience, the agency didn’t have a lot of money to spend, and I came cheap.

Most Sudanese are practicing Muslims and the country’s penal code is based in large part on conservative sharia law. I rummaged through the sale racks at GAP, Old Navy, and H&M, seeking not only scarves to cover my head but skirts that reached past my knees, loose, long-sleeved shirts that didn’t reveal my cleavage, and baggy pants suited for a missionary.

Meanwhile, I asked myself the questions people always ask themselves when they start new jobs. Will I be able to do the work? Have I just convinced them that I’m qualified, and will they find out that I’m really not? At that point I couldn’t know, but in this case, however, there was the added anxiety of knowing these questions would be answered in a war zone.

The night before I left for Sudan was one of those perfect New York evenings. It was May, and everyone in the East Village seemed to be out on the streets. Beneath canopies of blooming trees, bikers weaved through traffic and hipsters leisurely walked their dogs alongside mothers pushing infants in expensive strollers. Conversation—life—seemed to ricochet off every
building. I breathed deeply, trying to absorb these final moments of metropolitan comfort.

Before going to the airport, I stopped to say good-bye to Joanna, my best friend. She spun out of her office’s revolving door quickly, leaving a tough day behind her, and appeared beside me on the sidewalk.

“You’re smoking now?” she asked.

“Yeah, I guess,” I said, looking at my Marlboro Ultra Light. “It just seemed appropriate.” I was nervous.

“Can I have one?” She lit it. “These are gross. It’s like puffing air.” She usually smoked Parliaments.

We walked down the street; I lugged my suitcase, which now felt like a permanent appendage, behind us.

“So, Jo—” I began.

“Yeah?”

“Since I’m probably not going to get married anyway, and well, even if I do, I’m not having bridesmaids, this is I guess the equivalent of me asking you to be a bridesmaid …”

“What is?”

“Well, you know, if something should go horribly wrong, will you speak at my funeral?”

“Dude. Shut up.” She rolled her eyes. “You’re not going to die. It’s going to be fine.”

“I know. I know. I’m just like—” I started to well up.

“Jess, come on. Look, if it’s awful, you leave. Simple as that. You can leave whenever you want. There’s nothing to prove here.”

“I know I can.” This was a lie—I just didn’t know
it yet. How could she or I have known then that leaving Darfur was almost as difficult as breaking out of a maximum-security prison? That once you got into the country, the government had to issue an exit visa, which they did at their whim, and their pace, before you could leave. Furthermore, flights from Darfur to Khartoum were often cancelled because of bad weather, malfunctioning engines, delayed itineraries. You never really believed you’d gotten out of there until the rickety wheels hit the tarmac in Khartoum and the shaky ten-seater came to a final halt.

“I’ll write you every day,” she said.

“I don’t know how bad the connection will be.”

“I’ll still write you—oh, don’t cry.”

As I hugged my friend, I wondered why I was doing this. Why was I voluntarily going to a remote part of the Sahara Desert where there was a war, where an American was recently caught in a spray of random gunfire, where I knew no one, where I didn’t speak the language, where I had to get a new passport because I couldn’t enter the country with the Israel stamps in mine? Was I going for humanitarian values? Right then, I didn’t feel compelled by them. I didn’t necessarily feel connected to the plight of Darfurians, either. This was what I needed to be doing for my career; it just happened that Darfur was the place I would be doing it.

I wished Joanna could come with me to the airport, but she was going off to meet a guy for dinner. I would be long gone after her date and wouldn’t be there to
get the debrief call—to hear whether he was balding or had bad breath, if he was a good dresser or a bad kisser. She was headed to the Lower East Side and I was going to JFK.

My father had insisted on coming to the airport with me, and after buying sufficient magazines, candy, gum, and water, we sat down for a cup of coffee. Dad’s white hair had thinned since Mom died. He wore it full and puffy in the front to mask the growing bald spot in back. Still, his skin had few lines; it was plump and soft like my grandmother’s—an Alexander gene that I hoped I had inherited. Even though loss still hovered over him, Dad was relentlessly energetic, embracing each day with legitimate joy, and retained a curiosity about the world that for most other men would have been buried with his wife. I so admired his optimism and patience that one year on New Year’s Eve I called to tell him my resolution was to be more like him.

Dad reached into his jacket pocket and handed me an envelope.

“What’s this?” I asked.

“It’s some money.”

“I have money, Dad.”

“I know, but you never can have enough cash on you.”

“Dad, I don’t want your money.”

“Jessica, it’s in case of an emergency. I don’t want you to be without US dollars. US dollars talk,” he said, shifting his hands around the coffee cup.

He could tell I was about to start arguing and cut me off. “Look, what was Saddam Hussein carrying when he was found in Iraq? A suitcase full of American dollars. You can give it back to me if you don’t use it. But I want this on you in case you have to get out of a jam.”

I thanked him and put the thick envelope into my bag. I didn’t want to think about the kind of jam I’d have to use it in.

We walked to the security line casually, neither of us wanting to acknowledge that this was it. But when we finally got there and saw the
NO UNTICKETED PASSENGERS ALLOWED
sign, it was time to say good-bye. I hugged him for a long time.

“Bye, Jay. I love you,” he whispered.

“I love you too, Dad.”

I walked through the metal detector, and looked back at Dad, still standing where we had parted. He touched his upper lip and rubbed it. I could tell he was crying. We waved good-bye again, and I blew him a kiss. I walked around the corner toward my gate before he could see that I was tearing up, too.

My flight arrived in Khartoum at 3 a.m. As soon as I stepped off the plane I was enveloped by the dry, searing heat of a brick oven. My bag had to be scanned before I could bring it into the country. I was warned not to bring a camera or alcohol because they would be confiscated: alcohol because Sudan is a dry country, a camera because the government didn’t allow anyone except journalists with permits to record what was happening inside the country. Pornography and pork weren’t allowed either. People who worked for the UN could flash their light blue
Laissez-Passers
and walk in without a hassle, their suitcases usually stuffed with boxes of wine or bottles of spirits.

I was picked up by a driver from the agency and taken straight to its compound—a two-story building: the office downstairs, and the expat guest residence upstairs. The residential floor held a few bedrooms, one bathroom, and a small kitchen. A terrace overlooked the narrow street below, and a pack of cigarettes, a couple of coffee mugs, and a few scattered papers littered the small deck table. It was 4:30 in the morning by the time I was shown my room. I turned on the air conditioner, climbed under the mosquito net and onto the foam mattress, and passed out immediately.

Three hours later I awoke to a knock on my door. “Hello?” A female face appeared in the doorway. “Oh, you arrived. Good. I’m Sheila,” she said. All I could see was a short woman in jeans and a bright green shirt charging toward me.

“Hi,” I said, still groggy.

“Sorry to wake you. Mustafa needs your passport to get your travel authorization approved before we go to Darfur. Do you have it?”