Chasing Chaos: My Decade In and Out of Humanitarian Aid (13 page)

One afternoon, I sat on the terrace with Caner, our young Turkish security advisor who traveled between field offices to monitor the security situation. In addition to the daily updates he received from the humanitarian community, Caner often prepared his dinner and ate it outside with the drivers and guards. “It’s the only way to stay informed about the threats,” he’d say. “Those are the guys who really know what’s going on.”

While sucking down three cigarettes on the balcony, he outlined the dos and don’ts of life in Darfur. First, there was curfew. “You have to be out of the camp by 5 p.m., and curfew to get back to the compound is 10 p.m.,” he said, stubbing out his first cigarette in a Coke can. This wasn’t the Mom-won’t-let-me-hang-out-with-the-cool-kids-in-the-parking-lot-outside-Dunkin-Donuts-after-ten
kind of curfew. This curfew was in place because 10 p.m. was when the militia, usually drunk and wielding heavy artillery, came out to patrol the streets.

“We advise staff not to wear flip-flops to the camp,” he continued.

“To protect my feet from the stuff on the ground?”

“Well, yeah, there’s that. But really it’s because you won’t be able to run as fast if something happens.”

Cell phones didn’t always work in Zalingei so we would have to communicate on walkie-talkie. Caner handed me a sheet with the military alphabet and told me my new identity—Zulu X-ray India 9. “We’re on Channel 5. You have to alert base every time you enter and leave the camp, anytime you go anywhere in a vehicle.”

As he explained the lingo—
Oscar
, for instance, meant “office.” I stopped him. “I don’t think I can say ‘over and out’ with a straight face.”

“You need to respect the rules of the radio,” he said blankly.

“It’s not like we’re in the military or anything.” He didn’t budge. I tried again. “Base, this is Zulu X-ray India 9. Arrived safely at Oscar. Do you copy?”

Playing base, Caner replied, “Copy that, Zulu X-ray India 9. I hear you Lima Charlie.”

“Lima Charlie?” I asked.

“Loud and clear.”

From New York City or Geneva, the field is anywhere outside of the bureaucratic headquarters. Once you land in Africa or Asia or Latin America though, the field is anywhere beyond the capital city. So being in Khartoum wasn’t really being in the field. Heading out to Darfur, though, especially the remote town of Zalingei, definitely qualified. And once you took trips from there, out to even more isolated communities, you were no longer considered in the field. You were then one step further. You were in the bush.

Since the American woman had been ambushed, the drive from Khartoum to Darfur—a long trip across open desert—was deemed too dangerous. I was to fly instead, which meant getting from Khartoum to Zalingei would be a two-step, three-day process. First, I would take a plane to Nyala, the capital of South Darfur, and from there a helicopter to Zalingei.

My flight was supposed to leave at 6 a.m., which meant we had to check in at 4 a.m. After a 3:30 wake-up call, the last thing I wanted to deal with besides airport turmoil was a cranky Sheila. “I’m too old for this shit,” she muttered as she got into the car, hurling her bag onto the backseat. Although the sky above us was still dark, the temperature was already 80°F and climbing. At the airport, an airplane cemetery—remnants of plane parts that hadn’t made it, their noses pressed in, wings knotted and twisted—had been left at the end of
the runway for all to see. I struggled to believe that this was really the less dangerous option.

THE DAY WAS HALF GONE
by the time Sheila and I landed in Nyala, where I was to spend the night before my helicopter ride to Zalingei the next morning. Just outside Nyala, the second largest city in Sudan after Khartoum, is Kalma camp, which at the time housed more than 130,000 IDPs, making it the largest standalone camp in Darfur.

It was a short drive from the airstrip to the compound, and groups of IDP tents lined the sandy road. Other buildings the color of earth blended into the brown landscape. There was hardly any vegetation whatsoever; I couldn’t imagine anything but a cactus surviving here. Donkeys trudged slowly along the side of the road, carrying bags of food or pulling carts whose riders relentlessly hit them with sticks. They walked on, heads down, faces stoic, resigned to their miserable lives. It was so hot that even the flies buzzed in slow motion, hovering in the air, making it easy to swat them. But as deserted as it may have felt, I knew Nyala was, in fact, a major Darfurian destination, a historical trade hub with routes to Chad, Central African Republic, Khartoum, and South Sudan.

In Nyala, our offices and residences shared a single compound—a one-story complex made up of five boxy cement buildings, which surrounded an open area where someone had hung a basketball hoop. A
lone latrine sat in the middle, encircled by corrugated metal. Next to it was a sink and a small cracked mirror. Whenever I had to go outside, I’d hug the shaded walls, hiding myself from the fierce daylight that reflected off of every surface.
This sun is seriously trying to kill me
.

But it wasn’t just the Darfur sun—it was the Darfur dust, which seemed to already have penetrated every orifice. I crunched it in my teeth, tasted it in the back of my throat. After having been there only a few hours the skin on my feet turned a shade darker, and my hairbrush was a dirty brown. In Nyala, the office manager gave me a special handheld dryer for my keyboard that got the dust out of the crevices. As I sat there, blow-drying my computer, I wished that I had a similar device for my skin. I had learned quickly in Darfur that it didn’t really matter how many times I showered, since the water coming out of the taps was often dirtier than I was. Some nights as I pulled the fourth brown Q-tip from my ear I’d suspect the dust was mocking my attempts at staying clean. “Nice try, white girl.”

The UN was holding a security briefing for all agencies the afternoon Sheila and I arrived. It was nothing more than a small room of twenty or so sweaty and exhausted aid workers sitting around a wobbly plastic table, but this was my first multi-agency meeting, and
I was excited. “It’s just a security briefing,” Sheila said. “Don’t get that psyched.”

A man from one agency stood at the front of the room and read out the latest news from the town and camp. “There was an incident yesterday. A fight between the host community and some camp residents broke out. We’re still getting details, no one was hurt, but some of the IDPs were taken to jail. We’re working on getting them released and will get back to you when we have more information.”

Tensions between the displaced people living in the camps and residents of the towns (referred to as the host communities) were common. I tried to imagine the reaction in my hometown if more than one hundred thousand people descended upon it. The displaced were a social and financial burden to areas already strapped for resources. Sometimes the presence of so many new residents decreased wages or increased housing costs. Local businesses could suffer from the stuff aid workers handed out for free: urban water sellers, for example, couldn’t compete when people snuck into the camp to get free water and resold it in town, bringing down the price. Or host communities were angered by the free services that IDPs received from aid agencies, the kinds of things they themselves didn’t even have access to: the water, for instance, health care or education. Sometimes townspeople rented out their homes and registered as IDPs, taking up residence in the camps. There they were able to receive free goods
and avoid paying taxes. The aid community tried to temper such discrepancies and prevent attempts at fraud by providing services to the host community, too. But the limited nature of supplies inevitably created an undercurrent of tension, a strained mood always exacerbated by the apparent endlessness of war and the attendant uncertainty as to when people might be able to return to their homes.

In the meeting room, people had other questions: “When will the evacuation plans be finalized?”

“They’re in Khartoum now awaiting approval,” someone replied. If severe fighting were to break out, we were all hightailing it out of there on UN helicopters. The problem was that there were more aid workers in Nyala than seats on the helicopters. If push came to shove, UN staff got first priority, NGOs were second. No matter what, though, local staff would be left behind, a sad reality I would come to grapple with soon enough.

“What is the status of the police escorts for women getting firewood?” a blonde woman with a Dutch accent asked. “We’ve had another rape.” I listened intently. I’d heard about rape in Darfur before, but the problem seemed so pervasive and horrendous that from far away it was hard to believe—like reading about American soldiers pissing on dead Iraqi bodies.

One of the greatest needs of the displaced was firewood used to cook food and boil water. Women, who customarily collected these household goods, endured
tremendous risk when venturing beyond camp borders. To avoid having to stray far from the camp, the new population cut down surrounding branches, bushes, and trees, which denuded the landscape, depleted vegetation, and led to rapid deforestation. They even resorted to digging out roots of trees, leaving huge gashes in the land. When nothing was left, women were forced to walk even farther outside the protective confines of the camp to get firewood. These trips could take up to three or four days. Many women were attacked or raped by roaming gangs of soldiers, militia members, or bandits.

Everyone knew rape was a common weapon of war in Sudan. According to Sharia law, which forbids adultery, it was technically illegal for the women to have intercourse outside of marriage, even if they were raped. I heard from nurses who had to block the entrances to their clinics to keep out police officers trying to take women to jail. No one pursued the rapists. Compounding the problem was “Criminal Form 8,” a boilerplate medical evidence form issued by the Ministry of Justice that victims of violent crimes were required by law to complete. Women who had been assaulted had to obtain Form 8 from the police before seeking medical treatment. Since they feared being arrested by the police, women didn’t get the form, which meant they didn’t get treatment. Eventually, after significant advocacy from human rights groups, Criminal Form 8 was amended. Women no longer had to report to police
prior to receiving medical services, and health providers who did not file the form were no longer subject to punishment for treating rape survivors.

The UN was trying to arrange police or army escorts for women. Their husbands and fathers, their uncles and brothers—they couldn’t escort them or go themselves. When asked why, they answered, “Because we will be killed.”

As the security briefing wrapped up, a final announcement was made. “Oh, and the party tonight is … Where is it again, Mike?”

“UNICEF,” Mike shouted from the crowd.

“Right—UNICEF compound. Bring your own JJ.” JJ, as I would discover later that night, was the locally brewed alcohol, dubbed Janjaweed Juice.

When we got back to the office, Deddy—a polite young Indonesian logistician with dark hair and a skinny moustache—asked if I wanted to go to the party with him.

“Sure!” Friday was the only day off in Sudan, so Thursday was the night to party.

“You know we have to leave at nine forty-five to get back by curfew at ten,” he said, tempering my excitement only the littlest bit.

After dinner, we drove down dark stretches of dirt roads lined by gated compounds and
tukuls
—Sudanese huts made of earth and roofed with thatch—in search of the UNICEF compound. “God, it’s hot out here,” I said, trying to make chitchat with Deddy. He was a
quiet man and not the type to initiate conversation. “What do you think it is?”

“At least 38,” he said.

I tried doing the math in my head. “What is that in Fahrenheit?”

“I don’t know, but it’s hot. The only number you need to really know here is 40. If your temperature is 40, that’s 104°F. You probably have malaria, and that’s when you go to the hospital.”

We continued down the bumpy streets, me gripping the glove compartment to steady myself. “There it is,” he said, looking down a narrow path lined with about a dozen parked white Land Cruisers. He slowed and backed into the spot so the car faced outward. “You should always park this way—in case something happens we can get out of here quickly.” Deddy had just spent three years working in Iraq, where he picked up these sorts of things.