Chasing Chaos: My Decade In and Out of Humanitarian Aid (16 page)

Most of my interactions with the children were confined to a tent. These makeshift structures may have provided shelter from the sun but offered little relief from the unrelenting heat. In fact, the plastic shell trapped the hot, desert air, turning each tent into a plantless greenhouse. I did my best to stay focused, ignoring the tickling beads of sweat as they trickled down my chest and collected in the folds of my belly. After one of the groups, I stretched my arms and neck, gazing upward at the discolored plastic ceiling that seemed to be melting onto us. As I looked closer, I heard a faint buzzing and noticed a subtle vibration. The roof of the tent was covered with a layer of dank, humming flies. And those brown spots on my notebook? It was fly shit, or fly spit, or whatever it was flies did. I tried not to think about how much of their excrement had fallen onto my skin or gotten absorbed in my hair, and summoned the next group for our meeting.

Haboobs
, as the locals called them—I called them mini-tornadoes—swirled through the lanes of the
camp, like dust devils in old Westerns. Long skinny lines of dust would scrape the sky, pulling apart any unfortunate structures in their way. One day, while speaking to a group of about fifteen children, I heard an unfamiliar flapping and howling, like a plane passing too low overhead. I peered outside and saw a wall of dust whirling toward our rickety shelter. Parts of roofs from other houses had already been ripped off. Panicked, I huddled the kids together, wishing I could cover them all with my head scarf until it passed. The hut trembled, some straw from the walls tore off, a massive gust of dust and wind burst inside, and it was over. I peered out from my head scarf and looked around to see whether or not we were still in Darfur anymore.

The kids, of course, got an enormous kick out of my alarm. Dust storms were the least of their worries; they dealt with them every day. The only thing new to them was this foreigner whose hysteria over a little bit of dust provided amusement to last a week. They rolled on the floor, laughing and pointing at me. I deserved it.

I couldn’t believe how well behaved and obedient the children were after all they’d been through. I remembered substitute teachers back at home coming in to teach fifth-grade math and the ordeal the other students and I would put him through. But the kids in the camps were eager to be there, so enthusiastic to share, staring at me with credulous eyes. I often wondered if they would live in the camp their whole lives, and what their future would be. Whatever program we ended up providing for these children would be such a small
offering for a chance at a promising adulthood. What they really needed was structural change, a swift resolution to the conflict so they didn’t spend their childhoods languishing in some makeshift camps. But that wasn’t really the business we were in. Political negotiations were happening simultaneously to our humanitarian intervention; we just had to wait and see what would happen—and keep working in the meantime.

For the first time in my career, I had my own office, where I’d return at the end of every day to write up my notes and findings. It was a large room, empty save for the desk and a plastic lawn chair. As basic as this room was, having this space all to myself and knowing that after my work was done I was going home to dine and sleep under the same roof as the same seven people every night was a blessing. My agency provided free English lessons to its staff after work hours, so in the evenings the neighboring room was packed with drivers, cooks, and other employees. Curt phrases emanated in staccato unison: “What. time. is. it?” “It. is. noon.” “What. have. you. got?” “We. have. got. books.” “What. is. your. name?” “My. name. is. Mohamed.”

After work, I usually walked back to the compound, this being my only chance to poke around the market
and interact with people who lived in the town. Some nights, though, I walked home with Laura, and we’d stop in a shack for a mango juice. This counted as a big night out in Zalingei.

One time, she leaned over to me. “Those guys are Janjaweed.”

I turned my head, too obviously. “Who?” No one seemed out of the ordinary to me.

“The ones sitting directly behind you,” she said, staring straight ahead, playing it way cooler than I was.

“How do you know?” I asked, whispering loudly.

“The way they are wearing their head scarves.”

Their head scarves were hooked around their chins and tucked into the other side of their head wrap. Other men just had their head scarves piled on top of their heads. That was it? If I had been alone, I would have never noticed them.

They wouldn’t have done anything to us, but we finished our mango juices and left. There wasn’t much else to do, anyway.

One Friday, our only day off in Darfur, we were invited to a party at another agency’s compound. There were so few expats in the remote town of Zalingei that it was hard to get a critical mass for an actual party, but either way, it was a chance to just hang out for a few
hours, and we didn’t pass that up. At the compound, we listened to African music and drank whatever alcohol people could scrounge up—a bottle of rum that someone had brought back from a day trip to Kenya, leftover JJ from the weekend before, some vodka left behind by a UN colleague. It was a small gathering, and it wasn’t even that much fun, but it passed the time.

Amina made samosas. “I’ve never made these with goat before, so no promises that they’re edible,” she said, walking in with a big tray. Amina cooked food for us on certain occasions—when one of us had a birthday, or if someone was returning from R&R. She said it was her true pleasure, that it reminded her of home. Amina’s husband lived and worked in Nairobi, and she had hung photos of him alongside her bed. You could tell that a piece of her was missing. “We met in northern Uganda,” she told me once. “We worked for different agencies. It was worse than here, if you can imagine that. But at least there we had each other.”

Christine plugged her iPod into small speakers, stopping the African music and turning up A Tribe Called Quest. She started dancing. “Come on guys! Get up!” She bent her knees, put her hands on her lower back and gyrated her hips to the beat in an overtly sexual way that would be inappropriate in any setting, let alone Darfur.

People were starting to worry about Christine. It had been eight weeks since her last R&R, and although everyone apparently got testy right up until the point they got out, her attitude was more toxic. As the
finance officer, she had three local staffers working for her. I could sometimes hear her chastising them from my office. “Habiba, is it possible that your English has gotten
worse
since you started this job?” she’d ask. We’d often find her home early from work, sprawled out on a mattress on the floor smoking cigarettes, watching back-to-back-to-back episodes of
Sex and the City
.

Over dinner, she complained about her job. “They just don’t understand anything,” she’d huff, clanking her plate.

“Christine, you can’t talk to them like that,” Dmitri told her. “They’re trying.”

“No they’re not, Dmitri! How many times have I told them to turn off the computer when they leave? And what does Yusuf do today when he leaves? He leaves his computer on. I mean, how could he forget again unless he was just doing it to spite me? I end up having to do everything by myself. It’s faster if I just do it than explaining to them for the fifth time how to enter the numbers.”

“We’re here to build their capacity, Christine. You need to work with them and train them. It’s part of your job.”

“Yeah, well, I also have a job to do and deadlines to meet. And I just have to redo everything that they’ve done anyway, so I should just do it and let them sit there and play their computer games. That’s all they want to do, anyway.”

All of us worked with local counterparts who would
take over our responsibilities when we left. The goal was to work ourselves out of a job, to make ourselves redundant, training local people and building up their capacity so that they could manage the program. It was hard to know what to expect from them, regardless of their enthusiasm and desire to learn. Some were using Microsoft for the first time, others had never even placed their hands on a keyboard. When you needed to complete a spreadsheet that was legible, accurate, and presentable to donors, and you were working under a very tight deadline, sometimes it
was
just easier to do it yourself.

That Friday, we were occupied with alcohol and music, and none of us noticed a Sudanese woman walk into the compound. Alison, the gender-based violence advisor whose agency was hosting the party, saw her and rushed to the door. The woman looked frightened. Behind her, a woman lay on her back in a donkey cart. She had been raped. Her friend had pulled her on a cart all the way from the camp to the office.

Alison scolded us. “You guys need to get out of here.”

“We know. We’re leaving,” Laura said.

“I mean, this is really terrible,” she said. “No time for a party.”

“We know. We’re leaving,” Amina repeated, carrying her half-eaten tray of samosas.

Alison actually looked excited that there was something she had to tend to. She scurried around, satellite phone pressed to her ear as she called a doctor to come and do a medical exam, her scarf falling off of her head
and her bright blue panties showing through her white linen pants.

Laura went into the room where the woman was being treated to see if she could help; as a rape counselor, she had years of experience working in these situations. As Laura spoke to the doctor, Alison hovered behind her, pacing. Finally, she snapped.

“Look, Laura, she came to our agency, not yours. We have it covered.”

“Yeah, I can see that. I just …”

“It’s fine—we can handle it.” Alison leaned into the room, turning her back to Laura.

As we left the compound, Laura sighed. “That girl sucks.”

In the same way that businesses competed for customers, agencies competed with each other for beneficiaries. All of them wanted to be able to tell donors back home about the good things they were doing. Heroic tales could be converted into more donations. Individuals did it, too: for Alison, this tragedy could represent a huge professional victory for her.