Chasing Chaos: My Decade In and Out of Humanitarian Aid (8 page)

“I just can’t wait to get to Jinga this weekend,” one would say, inhaling a cigarette deeply.

“Where’s Jinga?” I asked.

“You’ve never been to Jinga? Oh, it’s
fabulous
. You have to get there before you leave. It’s the start of the Nile not far from Kampala. We go rafting there.” She turned to her friend, “Edward, you cannot fall out of the boat this time!” Her tone was so detached, as if we were living in some parallel universe, no part of which resembled the Africa that I had imagined from home.
Eventually, with my personal life under control, I was able to settle into work. Rwanda seemed to have closed the chapter on the genocide. The identification cards introduced by the Belgian colonialists that differentiated between Hutus and Tutsis—like the yellow stars that classified Jews during the Holocaust—were abolished. People no longer referred to themselves as Hutu or Tutsi, but as Rwandans.

Still, it was impossible to meet someone who hadn’t been touched by the genocide in some way. Taxi drivers spoke candidly about family members who were slaughtered. Opening their desk drawers, my colleagues removed pictures of siblings who had been murdered. Waiters told stories about living in the crowded Tanzanian embassy, or hidden beneath a canopy of banana leaves, during the hundred days of hell.

Somehow people went on with their lives. They got dressed in the morning and went to work. They sent their children to school, if they could afford the fees. Some worked Rwanda’s soil to feed their families. Their resilience and ability to put the past behind them with such stoic resolve almost seemed unnatural. I didn’t think anyone I knew at home could be so brave, so dignified after seeing what humans are capable of.

For the aid community, though, the Rwandan genocide had been eclipsed by new conflicts. Afghanistan was the disaster of the day and donors redirected funds there. For aid workers, the allure of Rwanda was long gone—there were newer, more exciting places to work.
Although thousands of cases still needed to be processed, both within and outside of Rwanda, the office was operating with the amount of funding and staff that would suggest that the refugee crisis had nearly been solved. And so while people continued to flock to the office seeking help, while camps were still over-populated, and while resettlement cases remained unresolved, the agency was being forced to scale back—closing field offices, letting employees go, stopping certain programs altogether—because donor attention and money had shifted elsewhere.

From my window, I watched dozens of people, many of them from Congo, Uganda, or Burundi, waiting outside the office, in order to find out if they were eligible for benefits as a refugee, or follow up on a resettlement request, or make an appointment for a refugee status determination interview. Women sat on the ground breast-feeding. Men, their shoes freshly shined in preparation for their interviews, milled around, reading in silence or chatting with friends. People were patient and calm. Occasionally they stood up to stretch, but mostly they just sat for hours on rocks around the office compound, in the hot sunlight in hopes of getting some kind of help. Whatever that help might be, they believed, it sure was better than where they came from. Looking at the stacks of file folders on my desk and then over at the ones spilling out of the cabinets all along the hallway, I knew that these were only a few of the many who waited. And I knew that they’d be waiting for a long time.

After I had spent a few weeks rewriting refugee status determination interviews, Kassim decided that I was ready to conduct interviews on my own. Uganda had been colonized by the British, so English was the spoken language, and it was to their cases that Kassim assigned me. These were just initial interviews to get basic information—where they came from, what happened to them, when they left and how they got to Kigali. Later in the process someone else would ask more pressing questions to determine if their stories were true, if it really was too dangerous for them to stay in Uganda, and if they could, in fact, seek legal refuge in Rwanda.

My first few interviews, I shadowed Katrin. “You have to ask them for details. You have to ask them to describe who they campaigned for and when,” she instructed me. “What they did and where. What happened to them to make them flee. It may sound harsh, but do you know how many people come in here trying to claim refugee status who don’t actually qualify?”

One day, we interviewed a man in his early forties who came with his five-year-old daughter. He wore a wrinkled suit, she a blue frilly dress, and white ribbons in her hair. We walked into the interview room, and his chair screeched loudly as he pushed it back to stand up and greet us. We both shook his hand, and then Katrin motioned to him. “Please, sit.”

I colored with the man’s daughter at one end of the
long wooden table while Katrin interviewed him at the other. This man’s wife had been jailed for campaigning for the opposition party in Kampala, the capital of Uganda. After she was released, she and her family fled to Rwanda, where she was granted resettlement to the United States. She went. Her husband and daughter were still waiting to get their resettlement statuses confirmed. If they returned to Uganda, her husband feared that he, too, would be thrown in jail.

“How exactly did you come here?” Katrin asked.

He looked up at the ceiling and raised his eyebrows, recalling the route.

“Did you go through any other countries on your way?”

“For how long was your wife in prison?” Katrin inquired, while nodding and scribbling his answers.

And then in a higher pitch, “Where was her prison exactly?”

“Do you remember the names of her prison guards?”

This gentleman, a former teacher, answered slowly and deliberately, sometimes pulling on his tie as he spoke. When Katrin finished the interrogation, he quietly asked a question of his own. He looked at his daughter, who was sitting in my lap, and then back to Katrin: “When can I tell her she can see her mother again?”

“We will do what we can as fast as we can,” Katrin said.

He nodded and waited, in a moment of deep thought. Then the man stood up, walked toward where I was
sitting with his daughter, scooped her up, and held out the picture she had drawn.

“How pretty!” he said cheerfully. He turned to me and cupped my hands in his. “Thank you. Thank you.” I hadn’t done anything, and felt funny receiving a thank you. Maybe he thanked me because I looked more sympathetic than Katrin, who was still at the other end of the table scribbling notes. The man looked defeated. I wondered how long he had waited for this interview, how he must have anticipated it with such hope, thinking that by the end there would be an answer, some kind of resolution to his messy life. He walked out still holding his daughter in his arms. Giggling, she waved back at me over his shoulder. I felt ashamed by my powerlessness.
I’m just an intern
, I wanted to say to him. But he wouldn’t understand. Katrin handed me the file and said, “I used to cry after every interview. But it gets easier. You just see so many like them.”

But it didn’t get any easier. I walked out of most interviews speechless and nauseous. I met with teenagers who fled after their family members had been killed, struck with machetes until they choked on their own blood. I met with a boy who saw his cousin’s “manhood” cut off, and another who fled after returning home to find his house burned down and his father’s decapitated body behind it. I met dozens of people like this during my short stay in Rwanda. Similar cases came through this office for more than fifteen years.

The work in Kigali was going well, but I was still itching to go to the camps. Kassim and I had agreed that for my internship I would work in two other areas, including Kibuye, the town where Kiziba—the camp that held fourteen thousand Congolese refugees, and one of the red dots I’d seen on Kassim’s map that very first day—was located.

Eventually, my pleas were heard, and everything was arranged: I would be going to Kibuye at last. Kassim would be accompanying me on the two-and-a-half-hour journey from Kigali. Even though he had been in a senior position here for over a year already, this was his first visit to the camp, too. He sat in the front seat of our air-conditioned Land Cruiser, equipped with radios, bottles of water and peanuts, and a medical kit.

Over the weeks, I had gotten to know Kassim. He was in his late forties and recently divorced from his wife of eight years, the details of which he never explained. He hated working in Rwanda and this was his first, and probably last, mission in Africa. “Africans are lazy,” he said on my first day there. “You’ll see.” I wondered why he had come here in the first place; why he decided to move to this country, this continent. To him, Rwanda was just another posting, a chance to make a break from his ex-wife, a promotion he couldn’t refuse. Here he could save a lot of money and climb another level in the bureaucratic UN system, all the while living in his gated house, with maids and
cooks, keeping his head down until his posting was over in a year.

We made our way along a paved road, passing women with babies on their backs and bundles of firewood or food on their heads. Young children carried bright yellow jerry cans full of water under their little arms. Some balanced them on their heads. Until now, I had only seen the city, and the people there, for the most part, looked healthy and well-fed. Outside Kigali, the signs of poverty were more apparent. Homes made of mud dotted the hills, distended bellies weighed children down, rags and bare feet were the uniform. Most children were out of school—it was summer—and makeshift football fields sprouted up everywhere. Boys played barefoot, or in flip-flops, with balls made of plastic bags or banana leaves rolled together. Women stopped pounding maize in preparation for dinner to look up at our car as we passed through their villages. Others continued working their land as we drove by, their backs extended in perfect angles, knees bent and arms outstretched in positions that would make a yoga instructor envious.

Out of the car window I saw men sitting on the side of the road, taking rest under the shade of a tree. Others strolled topless; their stomachs were lined with muscle like the rows of a xylophones.

Each inch of the Rwandan terrain was terraced and cultivated, making a patchwork of undulating shades of green. In the mornings, the mist rose and hung between peaks, like steam that lingers after a hot shower.
At late day, the sun hit the hills in such a way that it seemed as if lightbulbs were glowing inside them.

It was the dry season. Whenever a vehicle drove on the dirt roads to and from villages, it sent clouds of ruddy earth swirling into the air and left everything in its path blanketed with dust. A few months earlier, a mandate was issued by one of the humanitarian agencies ordering drivers not to exceed 30 kilometers per hour on dirt roads, so as to limit the spray produced by moving vehicles. It sent the wrong message to go into a community, run a workshop about health and safety, and then on the way out leave everyone coughing and choking on dust.

TO REACH THE CAMP
, we pulled off the main road and drove up a dirt one for forty-five minutes, switchbacking our way up the steep mountainside. With each turn we got another view of the twinkling lake and the taffeta grasses below. Just over the perch, I could make out the lush hillside sprinkled with plastic sheeting where the community of refugees resided. We passed through the security check—a piece of string held up by two twigs. A refugee, hired as a guard, slowly got up from his chair and lowered the barricade to the ground. We drove over it with our truck.

The driver parked in the center of the camp where a clinic, three schools, a water hole, and some administrative offices stood. Immediately, screaming children surrounded us on all sides.
“Muzungu! Muzungu!”
Within seconds, I had one child holding each finger, all of them wanting to take me somewhere, to show me something. The little ones at the back were desperate to get in on the action, too, as were the adults slowly making their way over to the vehicle. It was rare that a foreigner came to the camp—usually, Kinyarwanda-speaking local staff led food distributions, held community meetings, and managed day-to-day affairs. Some stared like Gloria’s grandchildren did, as if I were a celebrity walking down a crowded street. Except they didn’t have cameras or cell phones that took pictures. They had their eyes, which followed my every move.