Chasing Chaos: My Decade In and Out of Humanitarian Aid (25 page)

“Leave!” Lila commanded me over breakfast. “Are you some crazy
muzungu
? If I had a chance like that, you think I would stick it out here like a fool? Do what you need to do, girl. And leave me your DVDs.”

I confided in another Kenyan friend, Joseph. He was one of Lila’s best friends. “I just don’t know what to do. It’s fine here. I could stay—of course, I could
stay. But this is a really great opportunity. What do you think?”

“You’ve been here how long? Five months? And you were here for two before that? That’s enough. You should go.”

“But what about the camp?”

“What
about
the camp?!” He laughed. “You think being here is going to change that camp? I’m sorry, my dear, but that camp will be here no matter if you are or aren’t. Seven months is plenty. I’m jealous—get out of this shit hole. People leave jobs all the time. Don’t feel badly about it.”

Again and again, it was my African expat friends who sanctioned my leaving. They had a seemingly sensible take on the whole thing. We were here doing a job; this whole thing we whites thought of as philanthropy was irrelevant. Sure, they cared, but their reason for being here was straightforward: they came in order to be able to leave—to return home, eventually, and have an easy life. These jobs allowed them to save more money than they ever would in Kenya or Uganda. For them, being in Sudan was just a means to an end. There was no ego involved. For the Western expats it felt different, like we were here proving something. Our self-worth was wrapped up in this life.

While my Kenyan colleagues may have let me get off easily, I couldn’t bear facing the camp committee. At the end of the next meeting, I found the courage to tell them the news.

“I’ll be leaving in three weeks,” I said, almost in a
whisper. Ishaq translated my message. I had told him earlier that day. He had looked at me blankly, but could sense how distraught I was and didn’t want to torture me. “OK, then,” he said. “Let’s work until you leave!”

The group sat silently, staring at me.

“Where are you going? Why?” Ahmed asked.

What was I going to say?
Sorry, but I’m leaving to go to Sri Lanka and Indonesia, to work there. It’s not that I don’t really care about you all, it’s just, well, I got a better job
. So I lied. I said I was going home for my family.

“But we
are
your family,” Ahmed protested.

“I know you are.” My hands were shaking. I could barely speak, I was so ashamed. “I need to go home, though,” I said softly, my voice quivering.

Two of the members spoke at the same time. “They want to know when you are coming back,” Ishaq translated.

The truth was, I wasn’t coming back. I was just one of many camp coordinators who would fill this role. Just like the person who would replace me, I came in for a few months, did what I could to make life a bit more pleasant. But I could leave, and would; I had options, and at any point I might get on a plane and go home or on to a better job. These people were left in their broken country, ruled by a relentlessly corrupt government that often seemed to do more to fracture the nation than rebuild it. Most of them would remain in these—or similar—conditions for the rest of their lives.

Ishaq started laughing. He knew the score; he had worked with countless foreigners before. They had come and gone—in and out. Transience was the defining nature of this work. Sure, we all exchanged e-mail addresses, promising to stay in touch. But he knew that once I left, I would be gone.

“What are they saying?” I asked Ishaq.

He chuckled. “They want to speak to your father and tell him that you must stay.”

Ahmed pulled out his mobile phone.

“He’s asking for your father’s number,” Ishaq said.

“What, he’s going to call my Dad?”

“Yes. He wants to tell him to make you stay here.”

“This is ridiculous. Does he even know what time it is there? My Dad’s sleeping!”

But Ahmed was serious and the rest of the group insisted. He didn’t realize that he couldn’t possibly have enough credit on his phone to call the United States.

“Tell him to use mine. This is insane.” I gave my phone to Ahmed. I told them my home phone number and Ahmed dialed.

All of the committee members leaned in, some of them giggling like children. I could hear the distant, tinny buzz as the phone rang, and then my father’s voice. Excited, Ahmed started speaking very quickly, and in Arabic—to my dad, who definitely does not understand Arabic. I took the phone from him.

“Jay?” my weary father said. It was the middle of the night for him. “Is everything OK? What’s going on?”

“Hi, Dad. Sorry for calling this late. My friends here in the camp insisted that I call you. They don’t want me to leave.”

Ishaq took the phone from me.

“Hello, sir.” I couldn’t imagine what Dad must have thought on the other end of that phone line. “We do not want Jessica to leave. We are her family here. She needs to stay.” My dad was clearly saying something because Ishaq kept nodding and saying “Yes, sir.” He passed the phone back to me.

“Jay? What …? Who was that?”

“Dad—I’ll call you back. Go back to bed. Sorry.”

The committee waited for Ishaq’s verdict, leaning in and looking at him with anticipation. He said something to the committee in Arabic. They leaned back in their chairs and grinned. They knew I was going.

I WAS SITTING ON MY
bed back in the room where I had lived for the past five months when I called my dad back. I was crying. “Dad, how can I leave? I can’t go.”

“Jessica—this is not your war,” he said. “You are one stick in a river of shit. Nothing you are doing will solve this problem. I know you want to stay, I know you’re doing important work for today, but come on, get out of there. Don’t look back.”

“But I want to feel like I’ve finished something.
Anything!
” Each day I won small battles, lost others, but I didn’t ever feel like I had done anything substantial. I’d come to learn that this feeling of powerlessness,
this recognition of the insignificance of your own work beneath the overwhelming, endless avalanche of problems, is what aid workers face every day. We worked so hard, put in exhausting effort to move the bar a mere two inches. Such little progress after so much exertion—it was psychologically demoralizing.

“Look, I know you are committed to your work, but how long will you have to stay to feel that sense of completion? It could be years. And what are you willing to sacrifice to feel it? What does achievement in a place like Darfur look like, anyway?”

Maybe Dad was right. The fate of Darfur wasn’t resting on whether I stayed or went. Even Ahmed’s niece, whom I had managed to get out—who had been, briefly, my one shining achievement—had died after medical complications.

Three weeks later, Ishaq brought me to the small airport in El Fasher. He sat next to me as we waited until I boarded the little plane to Khartoum, where I would get my connecting flight to Colombo, Sri Lanka. I knew I would never see him again and he knew it, too.

When it was time to board we walked slowly to the security area. I wanted to hug Ishaq tightly. But we couldn’t—and so he shook my hand and leaned in so that our shoulders grazed. “I’m sorry, Ishaq.”

“You must be strong,” he said.
How ridiculous
, I thought.
Him telling me to be strong
.

The little plane lifted up and I looked down on Al Salam, with its ordered rows of tents that we had worked so hard to plan. As we ascended higher, the landscape transformed into a miniature map—tiny blue tents pitted onto pale graph paper.

A FEW WEEKS LATER
, the agency did hire another camp coordinator to replace me. Six months after I left my friends still in El Fasher told me that Al Salam had virtually doubled in size—to forty-five thousand people. How were they living, where were they bathing or disposing of their trash? We tried so hard to keep the place orderly, with enough space for everyone to live without being on top of each other. I couldn’t imagine cramming twice as many people into the carefully planned plots of land inside the camp borders. But I didn’t have to. Doing the unimaginable was someone else’s responsibility now.

Four years later, the government kicked out thirteen Western aid groups in retaliation for the International Criminal Court’s decision to issue a warrant for the arrest of President Al-Bashir on charges of war crimes. Did the roof that we fixed on the school in block D16 even matter now? Did the covers we put on the latrines to stop the flies mean anything anymore? They were fine solutions to stop the immediate problems, but this war was much bigger than me, than the agency that I
worked for, than the countless humanitarian workers running around providing bars of soap. The country needed a government that didn’t terrorize its own population, one that was committed to peace and didn’t back a militia that ran people off of their land. And without this, without a government that worked with the aid community, not against it, our programs could only be short-term solutions.

The first day on the job I was greeted by sliding glass doors, marble floors, and enormous flower arrangements in the lobby of the Colombo Hyatt. Tourists roamed the atrium, gripping maps and guidebooks, with cameras dangling from their necks. In one corner, a small café sold croissants and cookies; in another, a man played Barry Manilow songs on a polished grand piano.
Businessmen sat on the cushy couches, reading the newspaper or talking on the phone. I was given a note at check-in: “
Welcome to Sri Lanka. We have a meeting with Save the Children at 10 a.m. See you then
.”

I had been hired by one of the largest agencies responding to the emergency to assess their response to the tsunami. As the aid world became more professionalized—establishing minimum standards by which to operate, requiring master’s degrees to enter the field, developing codes of conduct and measures to increase accountability—evaluations like the one I was doing were now common practice. I would be traveling throughout tsunami-affected areas in Sri Lanka and Indonesia examining programs for children while the rest of the team covered education, health, nutrition, and water and sanitation. We weren’t there to build the toilets, run the clinics, or reconstruct schools; we were examining the agency to determine whether the toilets
they
built, the clinics
they
ran, and the schools
they
reconstructed were working and were working well. I was an outsider—or independent evaluator, as industry jargon put it—looking in on this operation.

I had never worked in a sudden-onset emergency operation before. The humanitarian relief I had seen was in times of conflict, prolonged crisis, chronic distress. At that time, the tsunami was considered the biggest natural disaster the humanitarian community had ever responded to. The event killed more than 220,000 people across fourteen countries and displaced 1.7 million more. I was curious to see a relief response to a
natural disaster in countries with stable governments and functioning civil sectors. The reconstruction would take years, but here you could work toward such a goal with some hope, feel you were genuinely building momentum and traction. Although both countries had preexisting challenges, especially in their education and health infrastructures, neither Sri Lanka nor Indonesia were failed states. And if we ever forgot or made comparisons to where we had come from, the local staff and government were there to remind us, “This is no sub-Saharan Africa.”

By the time I arrived, nine months after the tsunami hit in December of 2004, the event had faded from the nightly news and the front pages. As the crisis became less acute, the media’s interest waned. Once the first bottles of water and bags of rice were delivered and interviews with English-speaking tourists were wrapped up, the cameras stopped rolling. The reporters—with a few exceptions—filed their last stories, and moved on to the next assignment. But the long-term tragedy for the survivors had really just begun.