Chasing Chaos: My Decade In and Out of Humanitarian Aid (41 page)

“Hey, Claude.” I turned to my driver. “Can we actually go back?”

Claude looked at me, confused.

“You forgot something?”

“No, I just can’t be here with this going on,” I said, pointing to a group of white women holding babies and taking photos of themselves with them.

Claude smiled. I wondered what he thought of this spectacle. Of all of these people—myself included—stomping through his country, there to “make a difference.” To Claude and to the rest of the Haitians, I was probably just another white face among the thousands of do-gooders, no different from any of the other disaster tourists. Revulsion clenched my stomach whenever I thought of the people I saw at the camp, and yet still I
knew I recognized myself in them. Perhaps my motives for coming here weren’t so different from theirs. These church groups wanted to
see
Haiti, wanted to touch it—wanted, in other words, to be part of an extraordinary experience. But so did a lot of the people I worked with, who updated their Facebook statuses every two minutes in order to keep everyone they had ever met apprised of their latest activities in Haiti. Why should Claude have been able to distinguish me from them, or from anyone else working there?

As they did in every emergency, organizations in Haiti competed with each other for funding from big governmental donors. Agencies—mine included—needed these multimillion-dollar grants in order to carry out their projects. But watching these contests play out in real time was like moving from the nosebleed seats to the orchestra: for the first time, I could see what this maneuvering actually entailed, and it struck me as crude and shameless. As field workers scrambled to hand out tents and provide water and rebuild schools, staff from headquarters in the United States and the United Kingdom flew in to take pictures and cherry-pick details for the profiles they would write about the people we helped, which would be featured in press releases and websites. Once, someone from the PR/Marketing
team asked a program officer if he could put Christmas lights on the tents in a camp where he was shooting a promotional video. “We know it’s not Christmastime now, but the video will be airing at Christmas, and we think it would have a better impact,” the producer said.

“First of all, there’s no electricity in the camps,” the program officer told him. “And anyway, you can’t string lights up on people’s tents and take their photos like they’re props.”

That much was obvious, but the argument went that if the video tugged at heartstrings at Christmastime, more people would donate money, and that money could then be directed back to those people living in the camps. Celebrities were also part of the equation, as a single photograph in
People
could boost donations significantly. But celebrity visits took work, since whole teams had to rearrange their schedules to be available to fulfill requests from the visiting luminary on a moment’s notice: What is the make and model of the helicopter we’ll be using? Can you accommodate vegetarians? Do the vehicle and hotel have air-conditioning? Can someone who speaks English drive with us to the Dominican Republic and explain the sights?

“Demi Moore makes a statement about vulnerable children in Haiti and I have to spend half my day responding to her in the press?” fumed one of my colleagues, who had been conscripted to manage the fallout from a
New York Times
article that criticized
our organization for not doing enough to support vulnerable children. He was furious. “What the fuck do you know about vulnerable children, Demi Moore? Go back to Hollywood!” Some journalists were no better. One photographer asked a bunch of children to sit in a partially collapsed school so he could take pictures whose message would be impossible to mistake: look how eager Haitian children were to return to their educations! When the child protection team heard about this, they forbade the photographers from working with their programs again.

The fundraising worked exactly like a business except in one critical way. Because Haitians weren’t paying for what they received, their requests and opinions were rarely taken into account. Although Haitians were the “consumers” of the aid industry’s “product,” agencies didn’t rely on them for their own institutional survival. Only the donors could put an aid organization out of business by refusing to fund it. In a typical free market relationship, consumers have a choice of goods. If you don’t like Crest, you’ll choose Colgate. If enough people choose Colgate, Crest will either go out of business or adapt to the demands of the marketplace. But in the world of aid, the “customers” don’t choose what kind of soap they receive or the quality of the tarpaulins that are distributed. And they don’t decide when these things arrive—or if they arrive at all. In almost any other circumstance, businesses couldn’t survive if their end users repeatedly criticized their products. No company that wants to stay in business would conceive
of not asking its customers how they were experiencing their product.

But in aid, that’s exactly what we did. “It’s basically a take-it-or-leave-it relationship,” an older female colleague once told me. “There’s no situation where the power between two groups is more lopsided. Except,” she added carefully, “maybe prison.”

Later, on another mission, I would meet a woman who told me how she handled the imbalance. As an individual, she felt powerless to change the backward dynamics that made the overwhelming pressure to answer to donors and the media more acute than ensuring quality services to the people who needed them. When the bureaucracy felt more pressing than the work, when reporting to headquarters was prioritized over going to the field, when she was scolded for not cc’ing people in the right order on e-mails—those were the times, she said, that she looked at a photograph she kept on her desk of a child she had met on a field mission. “I look at that picture,” she told me, “and I think:
This is my boss
.”

Seeing Charles in Haiti was like opening a time capsule that I had buried years ago in Rwanda. He reminded me of the person I had been in those days: idealistic and energetic, intent on making things better and undaunted by the work that would require. It
was exactly that enthusiasm—and that patience—that had made me good at my job. I had been in Haiti a few months when Jenna, a young blonde woman, was hired to work on PR. A bubbly Canadian, she had only just completed graduate school, and this was her first field mission: Haiti was where she’d cut her teeth. I introduced myself and asked how long she would be in Haiti. She smiled and said, “One year.”

A year was a long time, longer than Jenna probably realized. I had been that naive once, too—we all had—and now I was treating her as I felt I’d been treated in Rwanda, when I sat alone in my room wishing somebody would be my friend, or at least talk to me. I should have been kind and welcoming to Jenna, but I wasn’t. I was tired and worn out, and I couldn’t muster the energy to show her the ropes. She would figure the job out for herself, just as we all had.

Still, I was glad that Jenna was there—people on their first field postings brought a certain kind of urgency to the work. The shock of what Jenna was seeing allowed her to challenge people who had already seen it all and had become complacent and burned out. New people, even if they were young, provided a foil to our cynicism.

Meanwhile, after six months away, my phone conversations with Jack were starting to grow tense. The
longer I was in Haiti, the harder it was for us to communicate with each other, and the clearer it became that the situation was unsustainable. Before I left, I had promised Jack—and myself—that I could successfully inhabit two worlds at once, living a life in Haiti while maintaining the one I’d left behind in New York. But that had been wishful thinking. Not only was three weeks a long time to go without seeing each other, but our everyday realities couldn’t have been more different. I’d often text him from a chaotic food distribution where people were on the verge of rioting, pushing each other up against barbed-wire fences, while others were collapsing in the sweltering Caribbean heat. Picking their way through this chaos would be uniformed MINUSTAH soldiers, assigned to patrol the crowds. I tried to picture Jack receiving these texts: he would be at a board meeting, wearing a tailored suit and sitting around a polished table with a bunch of other white men in equally nice suits. I imagined platefuls of bagels and pastries, trays stacked high with fresh fruit, thick carpeting, and unobstructed views of the Hudson River. New York was only a three-hour flight from Haiti, which sounded close enough, on paper. In reality, leaving one city and arriving in the other felt like traveling to another planet—and Jack and I were worlds apart.

After six months in Haiti, I realized our one-year anniversary was approaching, so I came home to spend a weekend with Jack. We drove up to Lenox, Massachusetts, near Tanglewood, to spend the night.

“It’s been a year, I can’t believe it!” I said, toasting him.

“Well, it hasn’t really been a year.”

“What do you mean?” I had been of the opinion that I had a boyfriend who I had been with for a year.

“Jess, you’ve been away for six months of it. The relationship’s stalled. We’re not where a couple who has been dating for a year would be.”

I had taken time for granted: a year was a year, I told myself, the same no matter how you spent it. The months I was in Haiti I was also in a serious relationship—or so I had been able to delude myself. I knew I didn’t want to end up as one of the Sheilas of the aid world, so I had convinced myself I could have both a career abroad and a stable relationship at home. But that equation became harder to understand. And now it was clear: one of the two had to give.

Charles met me at the airport and before I got on the plane we hugged for a long time. Charles would stay in Haiti as long as he could—he knew that the benefits he reaped as an international aid worker were worth holding on to. I thought that in another time, another life, things maybe could have worked out differently for us.

“Bye,” I said softly, as we pulled away from each other.

“Good-bye, my dear,” he said.

“Do you remember promising you would see me again when you left me at the airport in Kigali?”