Chasing Chaos: My Decade In and Out of Humanitarian Aid (29 page)

Unpacking, I couldn’t find bracelets—silly, inexpensive bracelets—that I had carried with me all this way. I hurled a shoe at my bedroom wall and slammed a cabinet.

“Where the hell are they? I know I packed them!” I was yelling and stomping like a child.

My father looked at me as though he didn’t recognize me anymore. “What’s wrong with you, Jess?” he said, and walked away. I looked out the door of my bedroom and saw him, still in his pajamas, perched at the edge of the stairs, holding his head in his hands and shaking it.

Reintegrating into my life at home was hard, but a lot of my anxiety was attached to a decision I knew I had to make, and soon. In Darfur, I learned that I had been awarded a Fulbright Grant to study child soldiers in Sierra Leone. I’d applied for the Fulbright when I graduated from my master’s program, before I’d gone to Sudan. Now I only had two months to decide whether or not I was going to go. As the deadline approached, my anxiety intensified. I pulled my hair and bit my cuticles until my fingertips were red, raw stumps. I was prescribed Xanax. I took long baths. I got a massage and went to the gym. I did yoga, Pilates, meditation. Nothing worked. But after two weeks, my
friend Joanna called. I hadn’t seen her since we parted ways outside her office before my first assignment to Darfur.

“Enough of this. When are you coming to New York?” she asked.

“I’m not.”

“What do you mean you’re not? I want to see you.”

“I’m not going into the city. I don’t want to. I just want to stay here.”

“Stay there and do what?”

“Not leave bed. I don’t know. Jo, I look like shit. I don’t want to talk to anyone. I just don’t want to do any of it.”

“Whatever.” She let me off the hook for a few days. And then she called me back. “If you don’t come in this weekend, I’m coming out there and dragging your ass back here.”

So I went. I stayed in her Brooklyn apartment and the first night we drank beers and ordered Chinese food and huddled around her space heater because her heat wasn’t working.

“I don’t know why I feel so lost. I kept thinking that home was going to be so great. I couldn’t wait to get back where things seemed to make sense. Back to what was normal. But everything feels different. I don’t even know what normal is anymore.”

“It’ll probably take some time, but you’ll be OK,” she reassured me.

“Will I? And what will OK look like, anyway? I’m
supposed to go on this Fulbright to Sierra Leone and I don’t even want to. The thought of leaving again, of going to another unfamiliar place, of being so far away, again, so soon, I don’t know if I can do it.”

“Then don’t,” she said matter-of-factly.

We finished one six-pack, then another. We opened a bottle of wine and finished that, too.

“There’s a party in Fort Greene. You want to go?”

“Not really.”

“Come on. Let’s get you out. It will be fun. And if it sucks, we can leave.”

At the party, dozens of people my age were crammed into the living room. Pounding music came from one of the bedrooms, now a dance floor. I met a guy in the kitchen while pouring myself a vodka soda.

“What do you do?” he asked.

I didn’t want to get into it. “I’m a middle-school teacher.” Admitting to running a camp in Darfur would make me stand out as much as being the only white face in a sea of Sudanese.

“That’s cool.” We chatted for a few more minutes and parted. Later, he found me in the living room.

“Your friend just told me you were in Darfur! That’s amazing! You should be telling everyone. You’re like a good person! The world needs more people like you!”

By now I was used to this kind of reaction but I still didn’t know what to say. It wasn’t false modesty; I really couldn’t point to what I had done to warrant such praise.
I abandoned the camp. I almost lost my mind
out there. I almost threw rocks at children. I make my living off of the suffering of strangers
.

By virtue of our chosen profession, aid workers are automatically ascribed certain qualities: bravery, righteousness, badass-ness. We never had to actually prove that we possessed these attributes—the job title spoke for itself. And if that didn’t convince people, all we had to do was drop the name of a country where we had worked, a war or natural disaster we had been on the ground responding to, and the assumptions were confirmed. “I feel better about myself just hanging out with you!” a friend in finance once told me.

But people didn’t understand that this work hadn’t turned me into a saint. People like me, out there “doing God’s work” and “saving the world,” wanted to get drunk and laid, too. We have the same concerns—ageing, putting on weight—as anyone else. It just so happened that the dull, daily work of caring—the familiar task of living our lives—was played out against a backdrop of humanitarian catastrophe.

People asked me how long I could afford to volunteer. What no one seemed to understand was that I was paid to do this work, just like they were paid to do their jobs. Yes, I was committed to aid work and the difference I still believed it could make, but I went to these places not only out of philanthropy. Like other aid workers, I had plenty of selfish motives as well: the building of a career, the adventure of travel, the excitement of meeting different people. Except unless people
were fleeing, dying, ailing, or starving, I wouldn’t have a job. “See you in the next one,” people said at their farewell parties in the field. We’d all be reunited at the following war, flood, or earthquake.

“
YOU MUST HAVE SEEN SOME
horrible things,” people would say to me, but I hadn’t seen death the way they imagined. Yes, suffering was all around me, but people coped. They were strong and alive and doing their best to rebuild their lives. I grew accustomed to impoverished surroundings in a clinical way, like an ER doctor getting used to seeing multiple gunshot wounds. But the cumulative effect of those months had eroded me. My depression wasn’t just about feeling out of place at home, but the sense of disorientation I felt in all worlds. I certainly couldn’t live in a place like Darfur for the long term, but living in New York now felt just as strange.

I had heard that at some point many people in the aid industry continue to return to the field because they drift so far from home they no longer recognize themselves in it, just as a soldier might keep signing up for duty because the chaos of war feels more comforting than the banality of paying electric bills, fixing the dishwasher, and picking the kids up from soccer practice. I had been warned about the disaster addicts, the emergency enthusiasts, the aid junkies—and now I was worried I had become one of them. The world I came from told me that by the time I was twenty-eight I
should be making money, getting an apartment, thinking about establishing roots somewhere. But I didn’t have a boyfriend, I wasn’t dating anyone, the last person I had slept with was somewhere in Bangladesh now. At least in Africa, as an expat, I may not have been part of the culture, but I was part of a subculture. I knew where I stood. It wasn’t the novelty pushing me to these places anymore. Now I kept going because I saw myself as someone who kept going, and so did other people. It was how they defined me, and it was how I defined myself. As much as I may have wanted to slow down, I couldn’t. If I wasn’t the person pushing herself to the next scary place, then who was I?

After a few weeks of being unable to shake the grim mood that had clung to me since my return, I decided to see a therapist in Connecticut. He had come highly recommended, and I hoped for some relief.

“Do you think I understand where you’re coming from?” he asked, stroking his tie.

“I don’t know. I guess so.”

“I think I do. And you know what I think you could use? A spa retreat. Just a few days away at a spa. A patient came in here a few months ago—she was going through something similar—and I recommended she go to a spa for a few days. She came back refreshed and so much more relaxed. It’ll take the edge off.”

He didn’t understand where I was coming from at all. The last thing I wanted to do was to pack another suitcase and be alone at a spa, getting pampered by strangers. Other therapists were worse.

“You were where? Darfur?” one said, leaning back in her chair, looking at me over her little glasses, pencil poised to take notes.

“Yeah.”

“Interesting …” She started jotting something down. I have no idea what since I hadn’t even started talking yet. I looked around at the fancy degrees, matted and framed, hanging on her wall. On the table between us was a box of tissues, perfectly centered.

“What do you think that says about your family life? Your relationship with your father? It sounds to me like you’re looking for an escape.”

I looked for an escape from her office and left.

I had delayed starting my Fulbright for so long that if I didn’t arrive in Sierra Leone by the end of March, I’d lose the grant. But I still wasn’t sure whether I wanted to go. One cold night in January, I sat with my father in front of our roaring fireplace. Since Mom died, Dad kept a running tally of which of his three children he had to worry about the most. “You came home, and
just slid right into first place,” he joked. I laughed with him.

“Look, I know it’s hard to think about leaving again,” Dad began, in his cool, reassuring voice, “but it’s a great opportunity. I think you will regret passing this up.”

I didn’t want to lose the opportunity either, but I just wanted to sit still for a bit longer—sit here, in my father’s house, where a fire kept me warm during the bitter New England winter. I didn’t have the desire or energy to pack my suitcase, leave for another country, meet new people and start all over again. But the research project I had proposed still interested me and I really wanted to see it through.

During a summer internship in graduate school I had worked with a research team in Mozambique, investigating what happened to boys who fought in the civil war. The organization wanted to know what kind of adults these children had become. Did they turn out to be the lost generation, the future barbarians, as everyone had assumed? Or were they integrated into their communities as fathers, husbands, men with jobs and social connections? It turned out that—although their ability to reintegrate largely depended on how long they were in conflict, the role assigned to them by the rebels, and the circumstances under which they were recruited—for the most part, the boys, now men, were working members of their communities and contributing members of society. I was so inspired by the research that while searching for jobs for after graduation,
I applied for a Fulbright to repeat the same study in Sierra Leone, where children had been abducted by the fighting forces, as they had in Mozambique. By now, four years after Sierra Leone’s war ended, the people said, “
War don don, peace don cam
”—The war is done, peace has come.

“How about this,” Dad said. “We’ll go for a week. I’ll come with you; if you hate it, you don’t stay.” Although the offer was sweet, it seemed a bit too Mom-holding-my-hand-into-class-on-the-first-day-of-kindergarten. He offered another idea that made more sense. I’d buy a round-trip ticket that brought me back to New York after six weeks. Technically, I couldn’t leave the Fulbright grant that early, but it was an out, and it was a way to break up the ten-month commitment into something I could handle.