Chasing Chaos: My Decade In and Out of Humanitarian Aid (17 page)

In Sudan, the weather was angry all the time. If it wasn’t the drenching rains, it was the thrashing winds, the oppressive heat, or the omnipresent and omni-annoying dust. It was turning to the rainy season now, and each night the wind carried signs of the sky’s imminent
burst. One night at about 2 a.m. I woke to a drizzle drumming lightly above my head, as if children were running across the tin roof. I guess we all had been longing for rain, because when I left my room Amina was already standing in the middle of the compound, looking up. One by one, everyone joined us there, and together we stood beneath the open sky, soaking it up.

After that night, the rain became a ritual and a nuisance. At around five o’clock each evening, the floodgates opened and the sky dumped buckets of water on the empty, vulnerable land. The rain hit the ground hard, lifting dust into the air, as if a herd of animals had stampeded past moments before. One day, the downpour was stronger than normal. By the time the rain stopped, the compound had turned into a marsh.

This had Matthew, our water and sanitation officer, very worried. One flooded latrine had enough bacteria to cause a serious spike in mortality. He was impatient to check out the damage, so we got in the vehicle and rafted our way through the water, which at that point was up to the middle of the car door. A wide, brown river was raging through the lowest stretch of land in the camp.

“Holy shit,” I said.

“That’s exactly what it is,” Matthew said, blushing.

We walked to the lip of the new river. Hordes of people had already gathered to see the spectacle. The crowd had the awestruck glee of children after a snowstorm, when everyone walks around in a daze, in awe of nature’s ability to transform the world so totally and
so suddenly. Children were already splashing in the river; donkeys were already drinking from it. On the opposite bank, Laura sat perched on the hood of her car. She had been in the camp for a meeting when the rains started. Now she sat there nonchalantly puffing on a cigarette, waving to us and shrugging. “So now what?”

A few weeks later it was time to leave Zalingei. I submitted my report to a grateful Amina and took the same helicopter through Nyala until I got to Khartoum where I waited for my flight back to New York. As soon as I got back to the States, I started looking for ways to return to Sudan. I couldn’t go back to my old job—I had completed my report, and there wasn’t enough funding to hire me again—so when I wasn’t scouring the newspaper for articles about Darfur, I was filling out applications for jobs there. It felt like the most exciting work in my field was happening there. I got a short glimpse of how this country and the humanitarian operation ran, and I wanted more.

And so when an e-mail came from a colleague from another NGO offering me a job that would allow me to return to Darfur, I jumped on it. I called my dad to break the news.

“You’re going BACK? What? But you just came home!”

“I got a job. It’s a good job. I’ll be in the north this time. In El Fasher.”

“El what? Jessica—why do you need to go back?”

“I just do, Dad. I was only there for two months. I need more experience. I want to go back. I want to be there.”

And so a few weeks later, I returned to Khartoum. The driver who picked me up at the airport asked if this was my first time in Sudan.

“No, I have been here before,” I said.

“Oh!” he laughed. “Then you are Sudanese!”

I was happy to be back in Sudan. This time, I would be in El Fasher, the capital of North Darfur, working for a much larger NGO. Instead of simply doing research that would be used to develop future programs, I would actually be helping coordinate projects themselves. But before I could get there, my new employer kept me
in Khartoum for two weeks of orientation and security training.

I liked Khartoum: it was the perfect stop between home and Darfur, a chance to readjust to the heat and dust but still revel in the comforts of city life—paved roads, working Internet, dining choices. And for the first time since starting out in aid, I no longer felt like a total novice. I was working for a large NGO; I could tell people I had been to Darfur before; I was able to speak with certainty about the camps in Zalingei.

I spent those weeks with Carla, a friend from graduate school who had already been in Khartoum for six months working for the UN. In some places, the UN had different housing regulations than the NGOs. If the area was considered sufficiently safe, the UN allowed its staff to rent their own apartments, and provided rental subsidies. (NGO staffers, on the other hand, usually stayed in group compounds.) It was a way of providing employees, especially those on long-term contracts, with privacy, independence, and something approaching a familiar domestic routine. Carla rented a two-bedroom apartment on the top floor of a seven-story building downtown. It had air-conditioning in every room, a cold fridge stocked with boxes of smuggled white wine, and a fully loaded bathroom: a hot water tank, Neutrogena skin creams, Kiehl’s shampoos. Carla would be living in Khartoum for two years; she came prepared.

There were few luxuries in Khartoum, but we took advantage of what we could find, whether it was a football
match at the local stadium or beers at the Chinese restaurant. Smoking cigarettes on Carla’s balcony, drinking glasses of pinot grigio in her small kitchen, sending texts to find out where the party was that evening—sometimes, for a second, a night in Khartoum didn’t feel so different from a night in New York.

But, of course, it was very different. Khartoum was filled with an incestuous horde of internationals who called this foreign land their home for months, sometimes years. The resulting social climate was a unique combination of surveillance and spontaneity—everybody was, at one speed or another,
just passing through
, which could make interactions feel both urgent and inconsequential. What happened in Sudan, or Chad, or Cambodia certainly did not
stay
in Sudan, or Chad, or Cambodia, and it didn’t take me long to realize gossip was the lingua franca of the aid world.

One Friday afternoon, the Sudanese equivalent of Sunday and our only day off, we lounged by a popular pool at a hotel in Khartoum with the other expats in town. It still felt bizarre to be luxuriating like this in Sudan, but I’d come to appreciate these amenities all the more so after going without them in Darfur.

“Did anyone see the new MSF [Médecins Sans Frontières] guy at the meeting?” Carla’s friend asked.

“Yeah. Totally cute. Is he married?” another replied, looking up from her book.

“Does it matter?”

“Well, what do we know about him? Where was he last posted?”

“I think he came in from Kabul. I’m going to ask my friend Mark there for the dirt.”

That’s how it went: your reputation followed you from one country to the next. We all knew someone who had worked with somebody somewhere. “Yeah, I saw him in Liberia in ’03.” “I lived with her in Timor in ’02.” “We met in Kosovo during the war.” The illusion of this industry was that we worked in the whole, wide world—that the seven continents were just one big office to us. The truth was, our world was tiny, and it got smaller with every job we took.

Although they were still new to me, parties in Khartoum were as regular as UN meetings. Many nights there would be more than one to choose from. Some had themes or required costumes, which tended to be limited by our wardrobes and imaginations: people arrived as human-sized jerry cans, or in togas made of plastic tarps we distributed as shelters; couples came dressed up in pairs—mosquito and mosquito net, for instance, or sugar and salt (the ingredients in oral rehydration solution). So it wasn’t out of the ordinary when in any humanitarian setting to get an e-mail with the subject line “War Children Party—Thursday Night—Festive Attire Required!” or “Center for Survivors of Torture—Fancy Dress Night Friday.” The expats in town—aid workers, international journalists, diplomats—dressed up and made their way to the Center for Survivors of Torture compound for JJ and rap music, French cheese and Swiss chocolate.

At one of those parties I met Pete, an Australian who
worked for the UN. He was classically handsome—tall, dark hair, olive skin—and he knew it. I would have been attracted to him in any setting and couldn’t believe that someone so irrefutably good-looking had walked into a party here. We stood by a table of drinks, chatting about where we were from, our former posts, possible mutual acquaintances.

“How long you in town for?” he asked.

“Not sure. Until my travel authorization gets cleared.”

“Oh, so could be a couple of days then.”

“Yeah.”

“You going to the ICRC party later?”

“Yeah, we’re supposed to head over there, I think.”

“You should ride with me,” he smiled, swirling his tepid vodka soda in his glass. Ice was hard to come by in Sudan.

I wanted to go with him, but I also didn’t want to give in that easily. “Oh, thanks, but I’m going with my friends. I’ll just see you there?”

We parted ways, and a little bit later Carla waved me over to the door—our ride was leaving. The hot Australian followed us in his car. We navigated down the narrow bumpy Khartoum streets until we got to the large ICRC compound. When I looked back, though, the hot Australian wasn’t behind us anymore.

The music was so loud we could hear it from across the street where we parked. The road was clogged with Land Cruisers, and drivers from various agencies congregated outside the party’s gates. Some slept inside
the vehicles with their seats pushed back and their windows rolled down.

Inside, a dance floor was set up in the middle of the patio. Huge speakers, the kind you’d see at the prom, stood prominently on either side of the room and blared everything from hip-hop and Michael Jackson, to Senegalese bands and bhangra. Bottles of alcohol and flimsy plastic cups cluttered long porch tables. There were more than a hundred people there—some danced, others lounged on chairs, smoking hookahs. A glowing disco ball rotated overhead.

Everyone in the room looked like someone I knew, even though I didn’t actually know any of them. By now I was accustomed to the European accents, the ankle tattoos, the Marlboro Reds, the men sporting secondhand T-shirts and five-day stubble, the women in Indian-style three-quarter-length shirt dresses and African bracelets and necklaces. Then I saw Nisha, the kind woman who had invited me to that first dinner party in Rwanda. She was sitting on a low stoop next to her husband.

“Nisha! Tim! I didn’t know you guys were in Sudan!” We kissed and hugged, only slightly surprised to see each other again. Nisha hadn’t changed; she seemed as comfortable here as she was sitting on her back porch in Kigali. She casually inhaled her cigarette, tilting her head back slightly to exhale. I remembered how timid I was back when I met her in Rwanda; it seemed like ages ago.

Nisha was the one who had the job back in Kigali,
but this time around it was Tim who was working. That’s how it went with couples who tried to stay together in the field. It was often hard for both people to land a job in the same place at the same time, but it seemed that Tim and Nisha had made this life work. Their marriage had survived Rwanda and they looked content sitting on that stoop together, carelessly socializing, happy and relaxed. A few years later, I found out that Nisha had an affair with the French procurement officer at work. Tim moved to Kabul. They divorced.

And then the hot Australian walked in and approached me.

“Where were you?” I said.

“Our car got stuck. Someone from UNFPA had a rope and pulled us out. C’mon, I need a drink.”

Somehow he’d managed to get even more attractive. His shirt was dirty from pushing the car and it pulled across his shoulders, which now looked broader than before. We got drinks and bypassed the dance floor, which was already hot and crowded. If the hot Australian wanted to join in, he’d have to wait; right then I was too nervous—and too sober—to even tap my foot, never mind actually dance with him. As he went to sit down, he put his hand on my lower back. I hoped he couldn’t tell just how excited I was talking to him—a man with an adorable accent, who followed me to this party after pushing his truck out of ditch! I was drunk and, of course, I was smoking and I was just so far from home. At that moment, it felt like I could stay
in Sudan, working and living this life for years. There would be endless days and nights like this. We’d work together during the day on serious issues—figuring out how to get health supplies through customs faster, negotiating with the government for access to areas that had been recently attacked, appealing to donors for much-needed funding. But at night we would all act like teenagers. We’d drink and hook up—sometimes on the dance floor, sometimes in the back of a Land Cruiser, or in a sweaty room on a foam mattress under a mosquito net, after driving home drunk through the wobbly streets of Khartoum. I was single and I had no obligations except to my job.