Chasing Chaos: My Decade In and Out of Humanitarian Aid (23 page)

I sat across from Wilbens, the logistics officer from the United Nations’ World Health Organization (WHO), which oversees health care in emergencies. Certainly it had to be in their mandate.

“Look,” he started. “We have requests from IDPs to go to Khartoum every day. If we took up every request, we could not operate. It’s sad, I know.” Wilbens smiled.

“We can’t set this precedent. If we fly this girl and her family to Khartoum for free, how do we tell the next sick person that we can’t fly them?”

“
Shouldn’t
we be flying sick people to Khartoum for treatment? I mean, shouldn’t that be part of our job? We’re here to save lives and reduce suffering, aren’t we?”

“We can’t save everyone, my dear,” Wilbens said.

Wilbens had a point, as did everyone else, and I may have been wildly naive. I could understand their arguments in the abstract. My personal relationship with Ahmed was clearly blurring my logic. But giving shelter, some measly food items, a few bars of soap, and providing overcrowded schools and medical care that wouldn’t stand up to malpractice lawsuits at home—this was the sum total of the humanitarian operation? This was the best we could do? With all the resources
spent on getting us here, trucking us around this foreign land to “help,” was this it?

“Don’t even bother. Let this one go,” Lila instructed me over dinner one night. “It’s not going to happen, so you shouldn’t worry your head about it anymore.” Others weren’t as sympathetic. “All the time you’re spending on this girl, you could be helping a lot of other people. Get back to your job,” Mark told me over a smoke in the office a few days after our initial meeting, when he knew I was still obsessing about it.

But I refused to rationalize the path of least resistance. I was determined to get this girl to Khartoum, no matter what logistical challenges I had to overcome, no matter what arcane UN bureaucracy I had to navigate, no matter the number of people sitting behind desks who politely said, “No, I can’t help.” I had heard “no” many times before as camp coordinator: when we didn’t have the funds to purchase crucial sanitation equipment; when we weren’t able to transport rice to a sister camp because of an impassable road. “No, it is not possible” was the uncomplicated way out, but I often found that bending rules and mandates here and there, and a bit of creativity were the only ingredients required to turn the allegedly impossible into reality.

I had learned this persistence from Mom. She was the woman who always asked—politely, yet sternly—if she could “speak to a supervisor” when things weren’t going her way. One time, our family was taking a vacation to Block Island and we were late for the ferry. We
sat in the car as a crewmember gestured for my father to roll down the window and then proceeded to inform us that there was no room for our bulky Buick station wagon. We’d have to wait for the next ferry—which wouldn’t depart until the following day. Mom leaned over my father from the passenger seat to speak to the deckhand. “What about there?” she said, pointing to a spot at the edge of the boat. She unbuckled her seat belt and got out of the car to show him.

“Ma’am,” he said, “the boat is about to leave, there is no room for your car.” Dad turned around to address my brothers and me. “Watch your mother, kids. Just watch.”

I peeled my skinny legs off the sticky plastic seats and leaned forward. Through the windshield, I saw Mom
sit down
on the divider between the boat and land. “We have a reservation for this ferry. There is one more spot left and my family is getting on it. I’d like to speak to the captain!” People on the upper deck were dangling over the railing to see what was going on below. Finally, the man pleading with her gave up. He opened Dad’s door, told him to slide over, and drove the car onto the boat. The back wheels grazed the edge.

“Thank you,” Mom said, wiping her hands on her shorts as she stood up. “Come on, kids!”

WHILE I WAS TRYING TO
talk my way onto a ferry—so to speak—Ahmed was making plans to help his sister,
her husband, and their daughter get to Khartoum through the desert on the back of a donkey cart. I found him in the camp that morning.

“Ahmed—I’m trying. I really am.” He looked at me with confusion. What could I tell this man? That there is not one agency here that is willing to pay for him?

“They’re leaving by donkey tomorrow,” he said.

“Give me one more day, OK?” I pleaded. “And then they go.”

A few days into my quest, I learned that a prominent agency in Darfur regularly flew planes filled with supplies back and forth from El Fasher to Khartoum. Most of the time, though, the planes were half empty. That night, I approached Jean-Pierre, the agency’s logistics officer, and told him my story.

“I think we can probably manage this,” he said.

“Really?” I couldn’t believe it.

“I mean, we’ve never done it before, but I don’t see why not.”

“That would be so great. What do I need to do?”

“Why don’t you come to my office in the morning and we’ll figure it out. It may be a bit tricky, but we’ll see.”

He seemed genuinely interested in helping Ahmed’s niece, and I was so grateful to have met him. As we continued talking, I learned Jean-Pierre was in his midforties and had worked in Kabul and Peshawar; he had a sophisticated European accent that suggested a peripatetic childhood and degrees taken at various continental universities.

It turned out that when Jean-Pierre called the operation “tricky” he actually meant necessitating nothing short of a minor miracle. Jean-Pierre laid out the requirements the next morning: Ahmed’s family had to sign a waiver stating that they would not seek help from the agency once they landed in Khartoum and that they had no expectations that they would fly them back to Darfur; a doctor had to accompany them on the flight; they had to have all of the proper identification and travel authorizations in order; and an ambulance had to meet them at the airport. And all of this would have to be arranged before the girl’s condition got worse. I left his office deflated and angry at myself for having been hopeful the night before, knowing by now that nothing came that easy in Darfur.

But somehow, it all came together. By now, everyone in town knew about this case and the crazy girl who thought she could rustle up an airplane. A doctor that I had worked with previously happened to be going to Khartoum in two days and agreed to fly with the girl. A friend of mine in Khartoum, a nurse, agreed to pick the family up at the hospital and say that her vehicle was an “ambulance.” Ahmed would sign whatever piece of paper I put in front of his face and happily took a pen to the dotted line when I rushed back to the camp to explain the situation to him.

The only thing left was the travel authorization. Ahmed had no identification, no birth certificate for himself, let alone his sister or her daughter. But Ishaq’s
cousin worked at the Ministry of Social Welfare and was able to pull together a special transit pass that would satisfy the airport guards. Breathless, I returned to Jean-Pierre’s office with all of the required documentation. He seemed surprised, but dutifully inspected the paperwork nonetheless. When he reached the bottom of the final sheet, he looked up and said, “OK. They go.”

I dashed back to Ishaq’s office. “They’re going!”

He stood up. “Really?”

“Yes, the authorization came through just now!”

He leaped over to me, and I swear he was about to hug me. He got a hold of himself—a Muslim man cannot embrace a woman unless she is his wife—and just touched my shoulder. I touched his, and for a few minutes we bounced around like that, giddy and laughing. When I told Mark that everything had worked out, he seemed impressed. Coincidentally, I ended up having to be in Khartoum for a meeting on the same day that Ahmed’s niece arrived. That morning, I met with the Sudanese doctor who would see her at the hospital and told him I would cover any medical costs. He smiled. “I will not charge these people anything.”

I went with my friend in our makeshift ambulance to pick up Ahmed’s sister and child from the airport. She carried the little girl through the terminal on the same large pillow she had been clutching when I met her. She covered her baby with a towel that both protected her
and shielded her from the stares of strangers. I showed them to my friend’s “ambulance” and we embarked down the crooked Khartoum streets.

When we reached the hospital, the doctor was already waiting outside. Ahmed’s sister took my hands in hers and held them for a few moments before she scooped up her heavy baby, and carried her through the hospital gates.

Back in Darfur, my situation was getting harder and harder to bear. I dreaded going back to the compound, unsure if we’d have power, but certain I would be facing another empty night. I met a German guy who was in town for a few weeks doing a water assessment. We had nothing in common. In fact, I found him pretty annoying. But I hooked up with him anyway. In the field, age and nationality really didn’t matter. You mingled with people much older, or much younger, from dozens of different countries. As long as you shared some common pop culture references, had traveled to the same parts of the world, and could basically speak the same language, you’d get along just fine.

Being with the German temporarily alleviated the boredom and the monotony of my nights. He had a car, so sometimes we drove through town just to break up the scenery. But we couldn’t go past a certain checkpoint.
It felt like we were on
The Truman Show
—the invisible borders of our world as rigid and impassable as actual walls.

But after five months and the onset of Ramadan, everyone seemed to unravel at once. The Sudanese, who fasted all day, walked around in a trance. Ishaq was still usually full of energy, but most of our other colleagues gave up. Some pulled mattresses out of storage, laid them in the halls, and napped. Those of us who were eating didn’t bother trying to rouse them. It seemed cruel and dangerous, in this heat, to have to work without water. And when they spoke, the Ramadan-induced halitosis was so putrid you couldn’t help thinking it’d be better if they didn’t.

Lindsay was in charge of the NFI allocations. It wasn’t a fun job—she had to manage the safe arrival of tons of goods, and very often the trucks delivering them were looted along the way. If they did arrive, Lindsay then had to organize and oversee their distribution. Once, Lindsay was on her way to the dispensary, where residents had been lined up for hours waiting to receive hygiene kits—soap, buckets, jerry cans, Dettol. Outside the distribution tent, a few women had placed their goods in the path designated for cars. Lindsay needed to get into the tent and honked her horn. The women didn’t know what she wanted. The ordinarily calm and competent Lindsay sat there with her elbow on the horn, her eyebrows raised, and her free hand gesturing for them to move their things. When
they still didn’t understand what she meant, she drove ahead, flattening the jerry cans and ripping through the buckets.

“What is she doing?” shouted our coworker Chris, who was supervising distributions that day.

She pulled up to where we were standing.

“What the hell was that?!” he yelled.

“Chris, they have to learn that they cannot block the entrance. I gave them a warning. I told them to get out of the way.”

“You need a serious vacation,” he said and walked away.

She looked back at the women scurrying to get their things. “I guess I do.” She tried to explain to them what was wrong, making sweeping motions with her arms. But the women just threw the broken items at her feet. She walked into the supplies tent, cutting the line that curled around the entrance, and emerged with four new jerry cans and a few buckets. “Here,” she said, apologetically.

I STARTED TO QUESTION THOSE
of us who made the choice again and again to come to places like this. What kind of expectations did we have for each other? Sometimes it felt as if we were giving ourselves a pass: because we were all making sacrifices to be here, because we were “giving” of ourselves, maybe it was OK when we acted badly. It was how we psychologically managed what we were doing. We were frustrated, we
were tired, we were lonely, we were hot, but we were here! So maybe we got pissed off and yelled at drivers and ran over people’s possessions, but we were just human, we were good people, some of us too young to know how to deal with what was going on around us.

My own stress was starting to show, too. The loneliness of the place was what really had started to strip me of my sanity. By this time, the communication networks were down so often that we started calling them “the notwork.” No network, no Internet. No network, no phone. I could feel myself slipping, my irritation mounting, my mental strength withering. I hadn’t actually thrown rocks at children that one morning walking to the office, but that seemed like a trivial distinction: just wanting to was bad enough. I was on the edge of—something—and for what? I knew the services in the camp were keeping people alive for the time being, but alive with what standard of living? Was that enough? Should I feel guilty for what I did, or for not doing more of it? Or should I be angry at the circumstances—the government, the weather, the whole indifferent world—that contrived to make any victory feel fleeting and insubstantial?