Chasing Chaos: My Decade In and Out of Humanitarian Aid (32 page)

One afternoon, I spoke with a group of teenage girls who had participated in a vocational-training program when they were returned. They had just left class and were still dressed in their brown uniforms. We sat together on a picnic bench outside their school. “No one would talk to us. The boys all thought that we had sex with our captors. They said we were damaged goods,” one girl explained. They giggled together as they recounted the story. A small NGO had come in and created a microcredit program for girls. Soon they were earning not only enough to pay back their loans, but to be the breadwinners of their homes. “After that, the boys all wanted to be with us. We told them, ‘But I thought we were “damaged.” Why do you want to be with us now!?’ ” They laughed and slapped their thighs.

AFTER HEARING SO MANY STORIES
of pain and anguish from civilians, I didn’t understand how people—my friends—could defend the perpetrators. “Look, this whole international criminal tribunal thing would be a circus if there wasn’t a good defense,” my American friend Scott said. He was in his thirties and had worked in corporate law back in New York, but was taking two years out of the grind to do something more interesting. I was back in Freetown, and he had come over to my apartment for a typical meal of rice
and chicken. We were sitting on my terrace, eating and drinking as the sky began to turn soft and dark above the city.

“Everyone—even a war criminal, Jess—has a right to a fair trial. The prosecution would have a field day with these guys if we didn’t hold them to some standard. They might very well have been war criminals, but it was for particular acts at particular times. They didn’t do everything in all places at all times, which is what the prosecution is throwing at them.” With so many warring factions, all of which had members who had committed grave human-rights violations, culpability wasn’t just in the hands of a few people or even one fighting party. Everyone, regardless of which side they’d been on, had to be brought to justice for the country to recover.

Sierra Leone was in what the aid industry referred to as a post-conflict development stage. Now that peace had come, international aid workers and local civil society groups were undertaking longer-term projects. When the political climate has stabilized and the first, frenzied stage of emergency has passed, humanitarian actors generally exit the picture and development folks enter. Development agency staffers typically stay in countries for longer periods of time, trying to restore
the country’s infrastructure and create a stable, sustainable foundation for civic life and economic health, which would hopefully be resilient enough to endure future crises.

Some of my friends worked for the ministries, advising them on policy formulation on everything from economic growth to improving health systems. A couple of Brits started a development fund with money raised back home and invested it in local businesses in Sierra Leone. Others founded an organization that provided legal aid for women who were being held in prison for petty crimes or serving sentences on behalf of their husbands, who were nowhere to be found. One friend capitalized on the rich music scene in Sierra Leone and arranged concerts across the country to promote safe sex and HIV/AIDS awareness.

The expat community was as active as anywhere else, but in Sierra Leone, so were the Sierra Leoneans. They were confident and loud; they had attitude and flaunted it. Our lives intermingled at work and outside of it—they came to our parties and we went to their bars. Many of my expat friends, both men and women, were dating Sierra Leoneans.

Regardless of how integrated we were, we would always be reminded that we were first-world people in a foreign land. One night, for instance, Amy, an American friend who worked as a reproductive health nurse, sat down at dinner and lit a smoke. “Well ladies,” she said exhaling, “some days you are just a
white lady explaining genital discharge to Muslim primary-school students in West Africa.”

We laughed. All of us had been in some situation like that at one point or another. “How about going through customs in Somalia and having the male inspectors pass around your tampons, thinking they were biological weapons? I had to explain—pantomime and all—what they are used for,” another friend, Claire, recalled.

Stories like this could go on all night. My contribution was a story about something that had happened just a few days before, while I was away on a trip doing research.

“You know when I was in Kailahun last week?” I began. They nodded. “I was staying in a container and stupidly left my light on when I went to dinner.” (A lot of times agencies used prefab containers as bedrooms; a group of them together looked like a trailer park.) “Well, when I got back, I thought the door to my container was moving. I got closer and realized that the entire thing was covered with slithering bugs.”

“Ew!” my friends screamed in unison.

“No, you guys, it gets worse, seriously,” I promised, as I went on to tell them the rest of the story. Eventually, I found the bug spray and hosed down the door, sending bugs everywhere. Some of the ones that died were so big they actually hit the ground with a
thud
. When the coast was clear, I ran into my container and killed the bugs that followed me with my flip-flop.

I considered the problem solved until I woke up a few hours later, having to pee. My neighbor had left his light on and another ecosystem of bugs was now flying around his door, which I’d have to walk past to get to the bathroom. I decided that instead I would pee in a small bucket I had in my room and then empty it out the window. I completed the first part of the mission and was carrying the bucket to the window when I slipped—banana-peel style—on the giant, wet corpse of one of the bugs I’d murdered earlier. The bucket jolted in my arms, and I drenched myself with my own fresh urine.

Occasionally I’d think about that night and wonder if it weren’t an apt allegory for working abroad, for the particular stance you had to take toward the unexpected and uncontrollable. Living in Sierra Leone meant practicing radical acceptance: sometimes, you just had to stand there in your own piss. That’s what one of my trips to Liberia felt like, when I had a ticket on a flight scheduled to depart at noon. Noon came and went, and we hadn’t even boarded the plane. There was no sign or announcement saying that the flight would be delayed. You have to make a conscious decision to embrace patience in Africa, but I had a meeting that I couldn’t miss. I got up to ask the woman at the counter when we would be taking off. She checked her watch. “Noon.”

I looked down at my own watch. It was half past twelve. I told her it was half past twelve.

Her face remained expressionless. “The flight,” she repeated, “will take off at noon.”

I stood there, unsure whether she had understood what I was saying. Should I even try to engage with this woman or just sit back down and wait? I decided to return to my seat, because essentially she was saying,
Look, white lady, I don’t know what to tell you. Deal with it
.

Eventually, I went through security with the rest of the passengers and more incompetence ensued. We took off our belts and shoes, placed our bags in trays, and walked through the metal detector. None of the security guards were paying attention. As I waited to retrieve my bag from its tray, I turned back and noticed that the monitor was blank. The security men were looking at a blank screen. And the metal detector? It wasn’t plugged in. The airport had no power. But they put on a good show anyway, as if to say,
Maybe if we pretend it’s working, it will
.

Making friends in Freetown was easy. Perched on one of the many hills in Freetown, near the US embassy, sat IMATT—the International Military Advisory and Training Team—a compound of mostly British soldiers who were deployed to Sierra Leone to train the fledgling Sierra Leonean army. On the weekends, they drove around Freetown in their 4x4s with the windows
rolled down, Bon Jovi blasting from their radios, wearing wifebeaters and sporting cute buzz cuts. Most had come back from tours in Iraq and Afghanistan. This was a vacation for them, and they paraded their freedom.

I started dating one of the British soldiers—Sam, a six-foot-five human G.I. Joe.

On weekends, with surfboards strapped to the top of the car, coolers filled with beer and soda, a bunch of us sped through the bumpy back roads to the beach where we’d camp for the night. For supplies, we had military equipment—sleeping bags, netting, tents, and fluorescent glow sticks, which we’d hang from the branches of trees, and would light up our campsite all night. On our way to the beach one afternoon, we passed a man fixing the holes in the road. He used a shovel to dig up the rocks and then smoothed the craters with his hands. He toiled in the thick jungle air. Sam stopped the car.

“Hey, can you grab a soda from the cooler?”

I handed him a can of Sprite.

Sam rolled down the window and offered it to the man who put down his shovel and took the can. Sam shook his dusty and calloused hand and said, “Here you go, buddy. Thanks for the work.” The old man smiled and nodded. I think he was hoping for money.

Sam rolled up the window and sped off. He took out a small bottle of antibacterial gel and wiped some on his hands. “Hearts and minds, Jess. Hearts and minds.”

We continued the drive and passed a bridge that looked over a river where people always gathered to bathe. Men swam wearing only underwear; children went naked, splashing and jumping off rocks. The women, whether they were cleaning themselves or their clothes and dishes, usually went topless. The IMATT boys called it “Titty Bridge.”

They frequented the nightclubs in town. Most were teeming with prostitutes. Usually the boys took multiple women home at once, their Land Cruisers brimming with eager, scantily dressed women. Others stayed at the bar drinking and dancing. Dancing inevitably led to one guy taking off his shirt. Then another would take off
his
shirt. Before you knew it, all of the big white guys were shirtless, dancing, flexing their pecs, and drinking vodka straight from the bottle. Then one of them would up the ante and pull down his pants. Another would follow. And you’d look up and there’d be a group of boys—some in boxers, some with just cowboy hats on—swinging their cocks around to the beat and shouting, “Jim’s got the biggest schlong I’ve ever seen!”

I had never met people like this at home. No one I knew joined the Army. Yet, as wild and rowdy as they were, I could relate—they were like fraternity boys you’d see on spring break. Amidst everything else I was doing in Sierra Leone, meeting people like the IMATT boys reminded me of part of what I loved about this work: the preposterous range of people who you not
only meet, but who you end up going surfing and spear fishing with on weekends.

We spent lots of time talking about their experiences in Iraq and Afghanistan. I wanted to know what it had been like for them. It was hard to believe that these young, silly boys were the same people carrying out air raids while wearing night goggles, jumping out of helicopters with AK-47s, fighting Al Qaeda and searching for Osama bin Laden. One soldier, Mike, tall and quiet, drunkenly told me about a night in Afghanistan that still clearly shook him. He had a slightly overgrown buzz cut and one of his front teeth tilted back, pressing behind the others.

“It was dark, and there was a guy who was speeding toward base camp. There were lots of signs along the way to slow down, checkpoints, warning shots fired, the whole thing, but the guy just kept coming. He was driving really fast. It was a quick decision, and I didn’t know what else to do. We fired at the car and killed the driver.”

“Why didn’t you shoot at the tires? Why did you have to kill him?” I asked.

“That is stuff you only see in movies, Jess. Do you know how hard it is to hit a moving tire? It just doesn’t work like that.”

“Who was the guy?”

He sighed. “It turned out he was coming to fix our air conditioner,” he said, turning away. “I was the one who hired him to come to fix the damn thing.”

Three years later, I learned that Mike was killed by an IED in Afghanistan. I read it online and saw his picture next to the article. He was the first person I knew who died in the war.