Chasing Chaos: My Decade In and Out of Humanitarian Aid (2 page)

It was 2005 and the Darfur crisis had already displaced nearly two million people and claimed the lives of another seventy thousand. People were terrorized off their land by the Janjaweed, the government-backed militias who set fire to farming communities, landing their residents in displaced persons camps throughout Darfur.

“S
ALAM
A
LAIKUM
,” I said to Yusuf, the guard who lay outside the door to our compound. He slept there each night, supposedly protecting us. It was like plopping Grandpa on a rocker in front of our door. If there weren’t teenagers with A
K-
47s kidnapping and murdering people, it would have been a funny joke.

“
Alaikum Salam. Keif Elhaal?
” he asked cheerfully, standing up—how are you?

If I had known the Arabic to say,
I haven’t bathed in a week, haven’t eaten in a day, my fatigue has reached hallucinatory levels, and it’s 6:30 a.m. and I’m headed to the camp where I’m pretty sure I’ll have to face thousands more people and tell them that we don’t have enough supplies for them. So, actually, Yusuf, I’m pretty shitty. How about you?
I would have.

But the only response I knew to this question in Arabic was
Kulu Tamam
—all is good.

Nothing around me was good. Like the horse who was slowly starving next door. Every morning when I passed it tied to the tree outside our neighbor’s compound, I wondered whether the animal, all skin and grief, would be alive when I returned. The family still used it to carry bundles of firewood, sacks of grain, barrels of water—whatever could fit on the rickety cart they strapped to the horse’s back. Its neck drooped low and its spine and rib cage jutted out in sharp relief, loose hide sagging toward the ground.

It was a short walk from the compound where Lila and I lived to the office. Woolly scrub bushes lined the roads; I trudged through the rust-colored earth, kicking
up cinnamon sand with each step. Children often teased us expats on our walk to work. Sometimes they’d run up behind us and laugh and giggle screeching “
Khawaja
!
Khawaja
!”—white person. Other times they’d sneak up close, touch our hair, and run away. The soldiers who worked for AMIS (African Union Mission in the Sudan) had corrupted some of the boys and it wasn’t uncommon for them to yell “suck my cock” or “big tits” when white women passed. The rowdier ones sometimes even tossed rocks at our backs. But they were gentle tosses, meant to get a rise out of us, testing us to see how we’d react.

This morning, I saw a bunch of them in the distance.

Not today kids
.

I walked past them.

They waited until my back was to them and two pebbles hit me—one on my shoulder and the other on my heel.

You little shits. That did not just happen
.

I snapped, all the indignities and frustrations of weeks past converging into a bullet rage. My back teeth clamped down so tightly it felt as if they had welded together. Whipping around, I seized a dusty fistful of rocks from the road and cocked my arm. We froze, staring at each other that way; like a Wild West showdown, for what seemed like minutes but was only seconds. I can’t imagine what I must have looked like to them: a crazy white lady—frayed, displaced, and alone on their streets. They turned and scurried down the
dirt road, laughing at me, skipping and pushing into each other, turning back to get another look, and running farther and faster away. I tossed the rocks aside, my hands stained brown from the scooped earth.

I need to get the hell out of here
.

By now I’ve heard it all. “You’re like a young Mother Teresa,” a family friend—a corporate lawyer, a doctor—will say, cooing over me and telling me what amazing work I do. “You’re just like Angelina Jolie,” they tell me. “The world needs more people like you,” a friend will remark while looking through my pictures.

I am a humanitarian aid worker. I’ve organized food and shelter distributions for tens of thousands of people displaced by conflict. I’ve bargained with stubborn customs officers looking for bribes to get shipments of lifesaving supplies across borders. I’ve managed programs to provide children education opportunities in the aftermath of war. I’ve slept in tents with rats and gone many a hot West African day without bathing. But most of the time I work behind a desk staring at budget lines and spreadsheets cataloguing the number of jerry cans delivered or latrines built. I write a lot of reports and send plenty of dull e-mails. But I’m not
a famous actress, I’m no hero and I’m certainly not a saint.

Yet, I can’t blame people who make grand assumptions about the lives of aid workers. When I first started in this career, I was equally unsure about what this life would look like. As an undergrad at the University of Pennsylvania, the only exposure I had to humanitarian aid was a chance encounter with a Peace Corps flyer in the student center. I entered college in 1995, during the Clinton years, when graduates were receiving job offers from multiple banks and international humanitarian crises like Rwanda and Bosnia happened somewhere far, far away.

In college everyone was studying hard to break into more straightforward fields—business, media, law, medicine—and initially I was happy to follow a more typical professional track, knowing that would please my parents, who were both doctors—my father an MD and my mother a PhD—and had similar expectations of me and my two younger brothers. After graduation, I had no idea what I wanted to do. I did some temp work; I babysat on the side; I browsed the LSAT study guides at Barnes and Noble. I even auditioned for the Rockettes. I showed up for the first audition with seven years of childhood tap dancing lessons under my belt, plus a freshly printed resume featuring my college GPA and spring semester internship at NBC Studios. All the other girls were professional dancers. Somehow, I made it to the second round, where I stood shoulder to shoulder with fifty other girls exactly my height and
weight doing high kicks and double pirouettes. The stage manager informed me they’d call if I made it to the next audition. They never called.

Soon after, I got a job as an assistant marketing executive at a New York City–based advertising agency. On my first day of work, I revolved through the doors of the midtown office building and found myself in a soaring atrium. I felt as if I were on a movie set, playing the part of a young girl just starting out in the city. My heels echoed as I crossed the sunny space, clutching the briefcase my mother had bought me—a real gift, for my first real job. I was giddy by the time I pressed the elevator button.

But the fantasy vanished quickly. I was assigned to the Totino’s Pizza Rolls account—not to be confused with their Party Pizzas or their Pizza Stuffers. Those were covered by other departments. But our department? Our department
owned
the Pizza Roll.

I spent my days researching the frozen pizza market, analyzing the cuisine preferences of our consumer base in the Midwest: White Castle and Wendy’s. Once, I had to go to the supermarket and buy out the entire frozen pizza aisle. I carried stacks of freezing cardboard boxes back to the office, microwaved them all, and sat in the small kitchen taste-testing them myself. When I wasn’t stuffing my face with our own soggy, salty brand or comparing the fat content of Totino’s to that of our competitors, I was watching their ads. The singsong jingle—“What you gonna have? Hot Pockets!”—was the soundtrack to my life.

I switched jobs a few months later. My new employer was a marketing consultancy firm, and my client list included Fidelity Bank and Sunny Delight. Instead of tasting mini-pizzas, I was leading focus groups with pre-retirees to discuss their financial plans, and ten-year-olds hyped up on Hi-C and Sunny D. Technically, this was a promotion, and although I didn’t feel like I really belonged there, it was more money than I could have ever imagined making fresh out of school. I didn’t really know what else to do, anyway.

Then, in May of 2000, my mother died, a week after her fiftieth birthday. I was twenty-two. All the clichés turned out to be true: what once had seemed important no longer mattered at all.

My mother had first been diagnosed with lymphoma five years earlier, when she was forty-five. It had felt then like the thing she was most upset about was having her life fantasy—the dream she had built with Dad over the past twenty-five years—crushed by disease. The whole cancer thing just wasn’t part of their plan. Or her personality: Mom had always defied exhaustion and illness. She would burst through the front door after work and yell in a singsong eruption through the house, “Hello!
Kids!
It’s
Mom
! I’m
home
!” In the car, she played the cool radio stations—Z100 and Power 95—and tapped the steering wheel to Marky
Mark or Madonna. When I was a kid, she always had enough pieces of gum in her pocketbook for me and all my friends, and at our birthday parties she stuffed everyone’s little plastic goodie bags until they looked like trick-or-treat take-ins. Mom could make even the most mundane tasks fun—whether it was taking out the trash or learning the state capitals before a social studies test—there was always an accompanying song or dance move. As we grew older, my girlfriends all wanted to be her friend, and my guy friends thought she was hot.

At the height of her illness, Mom threw on a wig, put on makeup, and forced herself to get up and go, if only to show everyone else that things were all right. If she did have moments of mental frailty, it was behind her bedroom door. With us, she put on a happy face and bubbly voice; she was still the blonde beauty Supermom. I knew she was sick, but I never actually believed my mom could die. I just assumed she’d beat this just like she took on every other obstacle—with determination and fervor until she won. At that time, Mom was more than a mom. She was my friend. I went to her for boy advice; I called her from the high school lobby pay phone during teenage meltdowns. She was the person who advised me on everything from what topic to pick for my English paper to what I should wear to prom.

But eventually the illness caught up with her. Parties were cancelled. Vacations were called off. My youngest brother decorated her hospital room with his
newly won tennis trophies from matches she wouldn’t have dreamed of missing a year ago. She wore a pin on her jacket that explained exactly how she felt: “Cancer Sucks.”

During my senior year of high school, I would come home and gently turn the knob to her bedroom door. She’d be in bed, lying on her back, the comforter tucked under her chin, her wig on the bedside table. The sunlight from the window grazed the tips of her blonde buzz cut. It looked as if it had been sprinkled with gold glitter.

No one says
cure
when they talk about cancer—at least they never did to my mom—and even during her healthy stretches, there was always a pestering voice in the back of everyone’s head.
This may not be the end of it
.

Mom fought hard. One morning while I was getting ready for school, I heard her arguing with Dad in their bedroom. The door was closed—they didn’t want to worry us—but I opened it anyway.

“Jessica, tell your father that I am not going back to the hospital!” She was on the floor, still in her nightgown, sitting next to a large red stain on the carpet. She reached into a bucket full of sudsy water, holding a rag that was also stained red. She pulled the rag at both ends furiously, dripping pink suds onto the floor. Mom started sobbing again. I went over to console her. Dad stood at his closet, already dressed for work. As a doctor, he was used to seeing patients in the hospital, trained to deal with them in a removed, clinical way.
He now had to adjust to sharing a home with a chronic patient. Bedside manner is taught in medical school, but no one tells you what to do when the person you’re treating is your wife.

“Honey, you just threw up a lot of blood. We have no idea what is going on,” Dad said.

“I feel fine!” She knew Dad was right; she was arguing with the cancer. Eventually, Mom gave in. Not only that time, but time and time again. There were weekly stints in the hospital for radiation, then chemo; then more radiation. Daily, it seemed, doctors drew her blood to check low red blood cell counts and high white blood cell counts until the thin blue veins in her arms collapsed and they had to start poking her legs. She went to an herbal specialist who gave her immunity-boosting teas. Her hair fell out and then grew back again, only to fall out twice more. She gained weight because of the steroids they put her on, her face puffing and swelling. They cut open her chest to install a shunt, then cut her open again to remove it when it got infected. She had a bone marrow transplant that landed her in the hospital for three months. It failed. The lighthouse in my life switched off.

Even though we had had five years to come to terms with her illness—and the chance that she might not survive it—after my mother’s death I was in more pain than I could have ever imagined. I spent a lot of time in bed. To me, ours was a fortunate, normal family, with weekend soccer practices and dance recitals, neighborhood barbecues, and plenty of sleepover parties.
Thursday nights, my brothers and I took breaks from our homework and jumped into bed with Mom and Dad, where we’d share a fresh bowl of popcorn and watch
Seinfeld
together. Weren’t happy endings just part of this story? This wasn’t supposed to happen to the Alexanders or to my indestructible mom.