Chasing Chaos: My Decade In and Out of Humanitarian Aid (34 page)

They took note of physical signs as well. “We looked at their teeth,” Fatima said. “Did they have molars? Did they have their front teeth in?” She pointed to her incisors and grinned widely, so I could see her back teeth. “You listen to their voice. You can tell if they’ve been through puberty yet. For boys we measured the size of their calves, looked to see if they had an Adam’s apple or underarm hair. For girls we looked if they had breasts.” It may not have been the most scientific approach, but it was the best they could do, and it sounded pretty reasonable. “You can tell a ripe corn by its looks,” she said. The mean age of the twenty-three hundred children entered on the Ministry forms—each one filled out by someone like Fatima, who’d carefully estimated the child’s age as nearly as possible—was still only eleven years old. Eleven was four years away from fifteen, the court’s designated cutoff age. So even
if the approximations were off by a year or two in either direction, it wouldn’t make a difference. These were children.

The defense was also likely to question the validity of the children’s stories. When these centers opened, suddenly demobilized children were everywhere. “If I see my friend demobilized and getting access to education, I will want to come and lie and say I was demobilized, too. Some were opportunists—those who wanted something to put in their stomachs,” Brima, a neatly put together male social worker who worked in the northern town of Kono, told me. The ICCs didn’t have a lot of resources. They couldn’t afford to accept children who weren’t eligible. “So,” Brima continued, “all you have to do is ask a lot of questions. He will get confused. The story won’t add up.”

The social workers who questioned these children survived the conflict themselves. “I know exactly when that town was attacked, because it was my village! Now this boy comes and tells me it was last year? No, no. He was not a soldier,” Brima recalled. “He may have gotten some information from a friend, but if you go a little further and ask what kind of conflict took place, he won’t know,” Brima went on, leaning his head back as he recounted the stories. “Also, if they say they used an AK-47, then they were given training. So we’d ask—how do you use it? Can you draw one for me? What is a magazine? How many cartridges will go in a package? If a child has fired a gun for three years, he will have a
mark on his finger.” He pointed to his index finger. “If he has been using a big gun, he will have a mark on his shoulder.” He patted his right shoulder.

“Or you ask who was his commander? Was he tall? Short? What was his complexion like? Ah, my dear, you say you worked with Foday Sankoh (the Sierra Leonean warlord), you don’t, in fact, know Foday Sankoh—you can’t discuss him with me. You are lying,” Brima said, chuckling.

After about forty interviews across the country and peeling through more than two thousand sticky, mildewed forms sitting in the Ministry of Social Welfare, I compiled a report detailing my findings. After some scrutiny from the Special Prosecutor—queries about my methodology, the people with whom I met, the way I found them, and the questions I asked—they accepted my report as evidence into the trial. But I never did have to take the stand.

While I was doing my interviews, I had asked a few children what they thought of the Special Court, if the ones living far from Freetown even knew of it. One boy, not even thirteen at the time I met him, put it best: “For some of us, our lives were miserable, they trained us to come up in a bad way. By trying them, it shows people that if you do bad, there will be consequences.”

In 2012, when the trial finally came to a close, Charles Taylor was convicted on all eleven counts of aiding and abetting the atrocities of the war and received a sentence of fifty years in prison.

When Claudetta and I weren’t traveling in the field, we spent days in the office eating lunch, talking over family photos, telling each other stories about our lives. Our birthdays were one day apart, and in August she invited me to her house to celebrate with her family.

Claudetta would ask me what creams would make her skin white and if she could use my shampoo so that her hair would be smooth like mine. She knew America from movies and the Internet and wanted to come work with me there. Even though Claudetta longed for the things I had in my life, I realized that I was the envious one.

One night after work, I accompanied Claudetta to the market. A woman hissed when she saw her, and Claudetta stopped to chat. The woman was her cousin. “Mit mi padi Jessica,”—Meet my friend Jessica—she said, introducing me.

I shook the woman’s hand.

“Yu de enjoi yu ste?” she asked, wanting to know if I was enjoying my stay.

“Yehs, a lehk Salone tumohs,” I replied in my broken Krio, telling her I liked Sierra Leone so much.

Claudetta said good-bye to her cousin and the two of us continued on our way. As we walked, Claudetta turned to me and told me her cousin’s story. Her husband had left her and was now coming back, begging for forgiveness. “Yu no go meso snek te I dai,” Claudetta said.
The phrase was a popular Krio expression: “
You can’t measure a snake until its dead
.” Or, as someone in the United States might put it, “You don’t know what you’ve got ’til it’s gone.” It’s true everywhere in the world: we realize people’s worth only after we’ve lost them.

As we moved through the market, Claudetta spotted a young girl carrying her backpack home from school. She shouted her name. The girl turned around, raced toward Claudetta, and gave her a big hug. They talked and Claudetta reached into her purse and handed her a few bills. The girl was ecstatic. “OK, sista,” Claudetta said. “Tehl a du to Musa for mi.”—tell Musa I say hi.

“Yes, ma,” the girl agreed, and I watched as she skipped away.

Claudetta told me the girl was her niece, who was having some trouble in school. Some nights, Claudetta helped her with her homework.

After Claudetta and I parted that evening, I realized that I wanted what she had—a community, a sense of belonging, and the closeness of loved ones. Dad’s visit was great, and I had made friends, but my life here was all just temporary. I wasn’t going to stay forever. One night over drinks I asked my Swedish friend Carmen where she planned to go next. She worked for the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) and had been in Freetown since I arrived over a year ago. Her contract would be up in a few months and she was looking for jobs.

“I don’t know. Depends …”

“On what?”

“Well, where I get a contract, of course.”

“Where are you looking?”

“The Middle East would be cool. Where do you think the most men would be?”

“Right now? Probably Lebanon.” Tensions between Israel and Lebanon were flaring. Aid workers were sure to be flocking there in droves.

Susan, another friend who worked on human rights, had just been offered a job in Juba, the capital of South Sudan. “The woman who interviewed me said that I’d even get my own container to live in,” she said, laughing. “As if that’s supposed to be a draw! My friends at home are buying houses and on their second babies. I’m supposed to get all excited about a prefab box to live in for a year?”

Finding long-term companionship in this field seemed like a fluke. Some people’s relationships did last overseas, but they were the lucky few, able to continue this life, fulfilled both personally and professionally. Couples living apart trying to have babies ended up planning their R&Rs around ovulation cycles. If they were stationed together, reproducing in a bunker in Iraq, a compound in Sri Lanka, or a tent in Myanmar wasn’t easy. Some made it work, and those who did called their offspring “tsunami babies,” “cyclone babies,” even “conflict babies.” Some people tried to hold onto long-distance relationships, but most couldn’t
maintain the passion over crap phone connections and unreliable wireless signals. As we worked hard to rebuild other people’s lives, our own were falling apart.

“George is going to Iran,” my friend Muriel told me one night over dinner. She was a French nutritionist working in a clinic downtown. She and her boyfriend had been dating for two years, since they met in Malawi.

“He didn’t even consult me! He just told me one morning over Skype. What am I supposed to do with that? I don’t want to go to Iran.”

“Then don’t.”

“And then what? This is over? He got an amazing job there, so it’s hard to blame him for wanting to go. But we were supposed to make these decisions together now. I want to talk to him, but, tell me, what are the rules for communicating when one person is in post-conflict West Africa and the other is in a failed state on the verge of a revolution?” I didn’t know what to tell her. The problem was that there were no rules—or if there were, nobody knew them.

Everything felt fleeting—jobs, friends, romances, apartments, countries, even our sanity. Our belongings were strewn all over the world, packed away in the basements of our childhood homes or storage facilities on distant continents. (“I have my winter clothes at my friend’s place in Amsterdam, most of my books are still with my ex-girlfriend in Nairobi, and my ski jacket, hat, and mittens are in Geneva,” Scott once explained to me. We were standing in his bedroom, which was
empty save for some shirts and slacks and two pairs of shoes. “That’s really about all I own.”) Building momentum in a romance that was going to be cut short anyway just meant asking for heartache; investing in material things just meant paying more for overweight baggage.

Sam had been shipped back to Afghanistan, and Facebook continued to blast photos of weddings I had missed at home. Every week it seemed, babies were born, engagements announced, new apartments moved into with new partners. Seeing all these happy couples with their kids and houses made me wonder why I didn’t simplify my life. Sure, I had accumulated more stamps in my passport and made friends from places I didn’t even know existed a few years before. But the catalogue of countries I had been were memories that I shared with people scattered across the globe. The work I found so rewarding threatened to destroy everything else meaningful in my life. I loved a job that made loving anything else seemingly impossible.

Years later, I saw a Facebook posting that perfectly captured why I decided to go home—and how hard it was to make that decision. A friend from grad school who shared my nomadic existence posted pictures from his recent trip to India. Someone he knew, probably from childhood, wrote on his wall:
“You’ve been across the Sahara, to Petra, to the Taj Mahal, and most of Europe. You’ve crossed off 75 percent of MY wish list. What exactly does YOUR wish list look like?”

My friend replied:
“Having a lovely wife and a gaggle of children like yours … and being able to build a 12-square-meter back patio on which to sip cold beers and grill lamb chops. Grass is always greener, my friend.”

“Jessica. How are you? It’s been ages.” It was James, an old acquaintance from college, calling. I hadn’t spoken to him in years. Since we graduated, James had made a career financing and developing five-star restaurants around the world. He had done quite well. “I heard that you’ve been living in Africa, and I want to do something in Africa. You can help me!”

As soon as I’d returned to New York in 2008, I immediately applied for headquarter positions. It would provide the stability I craved while allowing me to remain engaged with the field. I now had the sunny apartment in Brooklyn that I could only have imagined a few years before, and I was happy to shove my suitcases under my bed and put my passport in a drawer. I missed the thrill and unpredictability of my life abroad, but there was a new excitement to coming back. Instead of having just a place to stay—a guesthouse, a shipping container—I had a place where I might stay indefinitely.

I’d also worked abroad long enough that I’d accrued some authority, at least to people at home. When there was an emergency, friends asked me where to donate; if someone wanted to volunteer overseas, she came to me for advice.

“Where in Africa?” I asked James.

“I don’t know. I just want to do something in Africa.”

“Why don’t you find an organization that works there and donate to it?”

“No, no. I want to do it. I want to go there with some friends and do something.”

“Are you going to live there?”

“No, just go for like a week and give things out. We’re basing it on the one-for-one concept. Eat at our restaurant and you buy a pair of glasses for someone who needs them or something like that. We’d then go and distribute the glasses to people who can’t see.”

Since I’d been home, I’d noticed aid was getting a lot of attention, far more than when I had first set about applying for jobs so long ago. This newfound awareness was both due to and sensationally embodied by the celebrities who now attached themselves to various aid projects. Angelina Jolie was an ambassador for the refugee cause. George Clooney had a hand in the Sudan peace accords. Bono was now treated as a legitimate expert on development and even wrote the foreword to renowned economist Jeffrey Sachs’s book
The End of Poverty
. UN agencies boasted celebrity spokespeople who raised the profile of the organizations: UNICEF
had David Beckham and Jessica Lange; UNDP enlisted Antonio Banderas; the World Food Programme drew Christina Aguilera, Drew Barrymore, and Penelope Cruz. A young, single male friend of mine working in the outreach section of an ambassador-less UN agency was trying to recruit one. “You think we can get Megan Fox? What about Rihanna?” he asked with a hopeful grin. In Hollywood, being linked to a charity was as important as having a good agent. And it had a ripple effect, providing aid work with a sheen of sex appeal and giving the impression that anyone with a heart and some money could do it.