Chasing Chaos: My Decade In and Out of Humanitarian Aid (22 page)

THE GEOGRAPHIC SPAN OF DARFUR
was massive—the region is roughly the size of France—and the problems
were always changing. I never felt I got a grasp on the overall situation, but in this small part of North Darfur, I understood the challenges, the context, and for the first time since I started doing this work, I felt I played a big part in it. Even so, the job was hard and frustrating and many of us often felt we weren’t doing enough. Every time things seemed to be on track, there would be another setback. A village was attacked; another rainstorm flooded the camp; a key staff member got malaria and was out for two weeks; a car was ambushed and all movement stopped until it was safe again to drive the streets.

If fighting should break out nearby, there were sketchy evacuation plans for internationals, but none whatsoever for local staff. And they were the ones who were more vulnerable to attack—after all, there were more of them, so the odds that they would be on a road that was ambushed were higher. Before militias discovered there was a high price tag for expat releases, kidnapping or harming foreigners was considered a political risk not often worth taking.

Our Sudanese colleagues had to sit in security briefings as Mark explained the evacuation procedures. I knew this was the norm for agencies that operated in insecure areas, and we couldn’t evacuate them. This was, after all, their country. Every expat worker was just an individual; a national came with his whole family. We couldn’t be responsible for getting entire families out, and staff wouldn’t leave without them. Even if we wanted to shoulder that obligation, the logistical
hurdles would be too great. Oftentimes expats were evacuated across borders; with Western passports, they could easily get a visa. Some of our national staff didn’t even have passports, and probably wouldn’t be eligible for visas. When expats left the country, they were simply in transit; when nationals left the country, they were making an escape.

I had spoken to expat aid workers who still felt guilty after being evacuated in Rwanda and having to leave their Tutsi friends and colleagues behind. I couldn’t imagine having to tell Ishaq that I was leaving him in a war zone after his family had shown me such kindness. I looked over at him; he sat with his legs and arms folded, his head cocked to one side. I was sure he had heard this speech dozens of times by now. This was what he had come to expect. I just hoped that it would never come to that in El Fasher.

Years later, I knew that many aid workers were being kidnapped and abducted in retaliation for the International Criminal Court’s warrant for President Omar al-Bashir’s arrest. But at the time, it wasn’t that dangerous in Darfur. Petty theft was the biggest risk then. Often we’d have to pull off the streets in downtown El Fasher and wait until a convoy of twenty or so military trucks filled with Sudanese soldiers passed. They’d be sitting on the backs, all in Rambo-style camouflage uniforms. Some of them left their weapons resting on the floor. Others held their guns pointing outward, at the road—at us.

“This scares the shit out of me,” said Mark, as we sat in the car on our way to the camp.

“Why? They’re not going to shoot us,” I said.

“No, not intentionally. But how many of those guys thought to put the safeties on those guns? How many of them even know
how
to put their safeties on? A wrong bump and one of those AK-47s goes spraying.” That was the fear. Not that we would be directly targeted—at least not during the time I was there—but that if fighting broke out between militias, we would be caught in the cross fire.

Mark instructed us to drive with the windows up.

“I thought we were supposed to drive with the windows down?” I asked. Back in Zalingei, Dmitri made sure we always kept the windows down. He and Laura had been driving home one night after curfew. They didn’t see any guards, and no one told them to stop. Then Laura heard the cock of a gun.

“Dmitri, stop!” she shouted.

Three guards, all armed, jumped out of the bush. Maybe the guard would have shot if they kept driving, maybe not. But if her window had been up, Laura wouldn’t have heard the gun.

After that, Dmitri scolded us, “I swear, I see another person driving with the windows up, I’m going to smash them all.”

Mark had a different position, though. “No, you drive with them up. In case people throw things at the car.”

Not long after I arrived, Hurricane Katrina struck New Orleans. We all gathered around a small radio and listened to the reports coming out of the United States. CNN and the
New York Times
website had plenty of images of the flooded streets, makeshift shelters, and Red Cross volunteers running around handing things out.

“This looks just like Africa, except the people are too fat,” my American colleague said.

Later that day, I spoke to my dad. “This is our tsunami, Jay,” he said somberly. It had been eight months since the Indian Ocean tsunami of December 2004.

It was the first time I felt that my father understood what I did. But I wanted to correct him: Katrina was not nearly as devastating as the tsunami. Suddenly, Americans were grappling with things that were familiar elements of daily life in other parts of the world: plastic tarps, outbreaks of disease, former-football-stadiums-turned-displaced-person camps, theft—and the endless search for places for people to defecate. No longer could Americans sit in judgment of the rest of the world when violence and disease erupted during times of crisis, or criticize from their couches the length of time it took for a proper response to start. This was happening in a country with money, a federal agency specifically tasked with on-the-ground disaster relief (FEMA), rule of law, and a functional government.
But all over the world, even in America, people were people, desperate and ready to do what it took to feed themselves and their families.

After months of weekly camp meetings, Ahmed, the camp committee leader, and I were friends. It was hard to know how old Ahmed was—his head was always wrapped in a white turban and his body cloaked in a matching
djellaba
. A soft-spoken gentleman with subtle mannerisms, Ahmed carried himself with the wisdom and authority of an elder, and the other committee members and I treated him as one. Even though we communicated through Ishaq, he and I had an unspoken understanding; sometimes I knew what he was saying just by the tone of his voice. Regardless of the scams going on in the camp—the forgery of food cards, the regular theft of materials, the bribery and internal politics—I felt that Ahmed was always straight with me.

One day after a camp meeting with the usual agenda—overcrowding in the schools, the broken latrines in block A13, the food distribution disputes from the week before—Ahmed approached Ishaq and me.

“My niece is sick. Can you come see her?”

“Ahmed, I’m not a doctor,” I said.

“I know. She needs help. I don’t know what else to do.”

I suggested he take her to the clinic, and he looked down. “I already have.”

“OK. I’ll come tomorrow. I promise, Ahmed. I have to go now.”

The next morning I was back in the camp to meet with an agency about where camp residents’ cattle could graze. They had started developing a pasture on a parcel of land that the residents had already cleared to build a prayer space. We needed to find an alternative.

Ahmed was waiting for me at the registration center. As soon as I saw him, I remembered. “Your niece,” I said. “I’ll come after this meeting.” He waited patiently in the corner until we finished.

“OK. Let’s go.” Ishaq came with us to interpret, and we piled into the vehicle and drove to Ahmed’s tent. His plot of land was larger than that of many other families. He planted shrubs around the periphery to make a gate and I almost tripped as the cuff of my pants got stuck on one of the twiggy branches.

Ahmed pulled back one of the plastic sheets to his tent, and we slipped inside. His sister, meek and soft, sat on the floor with a large pillow covered by a towel on her lap. She looked up as we walked in, but her face was stoic and expressionless. Ahmed said something quietly to her. She slowly pulled back the towel covering the pillow.

Underneath lay her infant daughter. Her malnourished body was tiny and frail; her head twice its size, swollen and puffy. It looked like a balloon floating on top of a skeleton. The child’s nose was distorted, her
eye sockets sunken in, her cheeks and forehead bags of fluid. When she moved her head, her neck twisted awkwardly, too weak to support the bloated mass. She let out muffled gasps of discomfort.

“Oh,” Ishaq sighed.

I felt queasy. I had never seen anything like this.

“Have you taken her to the hospital?” I asked.

“Yes,” Ahmed said, crouching down to touch her.

“What did they say?”

“They can’t do anything for her. There is surgery she can get, but it’s only in Khartoum.” He covered her head again and stood up.

“OK, well, she has to get to Khartoum then,” I said. sternly.

“Yes. We have to get her to Khartoum,” Ishaq repeated to me in English.

“We’ll get her to Khartoum, Ahmed,” I said to him. “We’ll get her to Khartoum,” I said again, looking at his sister, who was still sitting on the floor.

I went back to the office but none of the doctors were there. So I called the only doctor I knew I could reach—Dad.

“She has hydrocephalus. Swelling in the head. It’s a congenital condition. They usually catch it in utero in the States,” my father said, when I’d finished describing what I’d seen. He was sitting in a lounge chair on the beach in Fire Island.

“Will she die?” I asked.

“If she’s not treated, yes. She needs to be shunted. They drain the fluid from her head and she can be OK.”

“Her head’s already huge, Dad. How much time?”

“It’s hard to know from here. But she needs to get treatment soon.”

T
HERE WAS AN URGENCY
about this situation that felt new. Perhaps it was the personal relationship I had with Ahmed, but whatever it was jolted me into action. The attacks in Tawila, the Janjaweed raping women, the rainstorms—these were all out of my control. But a sick child? That I could actually do something about. I went to Mark.

“There’s a girl in the camp. She has hydrocephalus.”

“What’s that?” he said, looking up from his laptop.

“It’s swelling in the brain or something. Her head is huge, Mark. She needs treatment. The family has exhausted all their options here. We’ve got to get her on a plane to Khartoum and soon.”

He leaned back in his chair, sighed, and combed his fingers through his hair. “WFP won’t let IDPs on the flights. You know that.” The World Food Programme was the UN agency that transported aid workers in and out of Darfur by plane.

“Yeah, I know. But can’t we pay for her and her family to get on a commercial flight out there?”

“We can’t do that. We can’t pick and choose IDPs to fly to Khartoum for medical treatment.”

“OK, well, then I’m going to pay for their flights,” I informed him.

“I don’t think you can do that, either. It will be seen as coming from our agency even if you are paying out of your own pocket because you’re employed by us.”

I called the Khartoum office and asked them. But I got the same response. “Last month there were a few IDPs with heart conditions who needed to be sent to Khartoum,” the emergency coordinator told me. “We couldn’t do it. We can’t send some people to Khartoum and not others. It would just be chaos.”

I talked to the health coordinator in one of the clinics who said the same thing. “There were people with lung issues in the camp a month ago,” she told me. “We couldn’t take them all to Khartoum.”

“So what happened?” I asked.

“Two of them have died already,” she said.

With every rejection, my resolve intensified. I hadn’t been confronted with this degree of clinical detachment before. How could I go back to Ahmed and tell him that there was nothing I could do, nothing that the humanitarian community could do, to help? That I was sorry, but he would have to watch his niece die. For the next week, I spent my nights dreaming of exploding heads, and my days negotiating with WFP, UNICEF, UNDP, none of which would agree to help get the girl on the flight because it wasn’t “in their mandate”—it wasn’t, in other words what they had come to Darfur to do and, therefore, they weren’t responsible for it. Large aid agencies like these developed programs for
tens of thousands of people—large-scale operations that provided a little to many. But working at an individual level—a case-by-case basis—wasn’t what we were in the business of doing.