At 4 p.m., we stopped by a water and sanitation workshop where an agency was training people how to wash their hands properly, how long to boil water before drinking it, how to clean their children thoroughly. Half an hour later, I met with the water engineers to find a place in the camp where the ground was solid enough to support what was called a water bladder or a pillow tank because it basically looked like a giant pillow filled with water.
These meetings were scheduled with precision in my date book, but nothing ever went according to schedule. Time was a flexible concept: there were the numbers on watches and clocks, and then there was the actual pace of camp life. People showed up when they could, closest to the time they said they would; but if things came up, which they always did, time, appointments, and schedules were just ignored.
For my job I didn’t actually do or build anything. I just made sure the people responsible for doing and building things did what they said they would. If the water pump in block A17 was broken, leaving two hundred people without water, I got the news from Ahmed or another member of the committee. I’d go to Oxfam and see when they could fix it. When the roof blew off the school in block C23, I waited at the Save the Children office for the person who was responsible for replacing it to give me a timetable for getting it done. A latrine collapsed in block F3? I went to check it out, made sure no kids were inside, and told Islamic Relief to fix it. I was the shock absorber for everyone’s frustration—the camp residents, who were upset because things weren’t moving fast enough, and the people from other agencies, who bristled at my requests because I wasn’t actually their boss, and couldn’t I just leave them alone? But I found that if no one was pushing, if no one was showing up every day to make sure the roof was being patched or the water pump repaired, it would be days or weeks before the roof or the pump actually got fixed. It still may have taken days or weeks to get things done anyway, but at least people knew that someone was there paying attention and holding everyone to account.
Once a week, the aid agencies convened around a table to make sure that camp needs were covered and that people in one part of the camp weren’t getting more assistance than another. It was important to make sure that we were all providing equitable services—that the clinic serving blocks A–F had the same quality materials as the one for people in blocks W–Z, for instance, or that if Refugees International hired people in the camp to serve as hygiene promoters, they were paying their workers the same amount that NRC (Norwegian Refugee Council) was paying their promoters. If this wasn’t coordinated, the camp population would find out about the disparity and become angry.
The agenda for these meetings was always the same. I’d start by apprising everyone of the latest reports from the camp’s committee members, and then each agency would go around and give updates on their projects.
“We’ve seen a rise in malaria in under fives around blocks A12 through B14. We think it’s because the covers for the latrines still have not arrived,” the health coordinator explained. Without the covers, mosquitoes could get inside the pit latrines and use them as breeding grounds.
We all looked at the representative from Oxfam, which was responsible for getting the covers.
“They’re coming. They’re still in Khartoum.”
“And people are defecating everywhere. There are piles of crap all over the place,” the health coordinator continued.
The heat baked a bubbling poop stew in the enclosed latrines, so you couldn’t blame anyone for not wanting to go inside them. I knew this from personal experience: one time I was in the camp with a colleague and had to pee so badly that if our Land Cruiser went over one more bump I was certain I was going to burst.
“Hey, can we stop at one of the latrines?” I asked.
“You’re gonna go in there? You can’t wait until we get back to the office?” Lindsay, my colleague, a Brit in her midtwenties, asked.
“Yes!” I cried, and she pulled over.
Inside the latrine—a box-like structure, made of blue plastic sheeting held up by four sticks—mounds of crap were piled around the hole—as if it were there just for decoration. The putrid stench made my eyes water. I found a safe place to park my feet around the hole, pulled down my pants, and squatted. Then I got it, why people crapped around the hole, not in it. As soon as I started peeing, dozens of flies swooshed up from inside the foul pit. I stood up quickly and came out with a wet spot on my leg.
“Don’t say anything,” I said to Lindsay, getting back in the car. She laughed and pulled away.
Back at the meeting I asked, “What can we do to speed this up? You’ve been saying this for three weeks. Can we procure any of this locally?”
“We’ll see, but I’ve gotten assurance from Khartoum that they should be here this week. They’re on the truck.”
Someone from the IRC clinic chimed in: “We’ve been seeing a number of kids with cuts on their hands from the unfinished hand pumps. This is mainly in the northern part of the camp.”
All eyes went to the representative from the agency responsible for drilling the boreholes where women and children pumped water to fill their jerry cans.
“The protective covers have arrived and we are going to be attaching them starting tomorrow.”
As the discussion turned to the delivery of medicines, my cell phone buzzed. The hot Australian and I had maintained an increasingly flirtatious text correspondence since Khartoum, and contacted each other as often as the network actually worked. At night, with my other entertainment options consisting mainly of computer solitaire and a dwindling stack of paperbacks, our flirtation felt like a lifeline. But it was unusual to get a text from him while the sun was still up; intrigued, I clicked it open. “I want you sitting on my face .”
A few weeks later I had my first day off since arriving in Sudan. It was scheduled for my birthday: I would be turning twenty-eight. As exhausted as I was from work, I decided to go to Khartoum for the night. Days before, the president of South Sudan’s plane had mysteriously crashed, an event eerily similar to the one that had sparked the Rwandan genocide. The North and South of Sudan had been in conflict for decades, and it was only in January of 2005 that the government and rebel leadership in the south had signed a peace agreement, ending the twenty-two-year-long Second Sudanese Civil War—a war largely independent of the crisis in Darfur. After the crash, southern Sudanese thought that the northern troops were to blame for the president’s death and riots erupted on the streets of Khartoum. A colleague in Khartoum happened to be walking down the street when the riots turned particularly violent and a spear landed in his back. He survived, but was sent back to America on the first flight out. Aid workers were advised not to leave their homes, and all flights from Darfur to Khartoum were cancelled.
While my friends in New York were checking Hop-Stop to see if the L train was running, I was checking Al Jazeera to see if people had stopped burning tires and throwing rocks into windows long enough for me to get to Khartoum and get laid. When the normal flight schedule had resumed, I packed my most enticing outfit (baggy jeans and a tight-ish long-sleeved shirt that revealed a silhouette of just enough cleavage) and hopped on the next plane to Khartoum.
Years later, preparing to depart for an assignment in Juba, South Sudan’s capital, I decided enough was enough: I wasn’t going to spend the whole time looking like a frumpy librarian. I packed a few nice outfits, makeup, and even fancy face cream, and I was so determined to have them with me that when the security guard at Heathrow told me my suitcase weighed too much I bought another one. Approximately five minutes after disembarking in Juba, I watched that very suitcase fall off a baggage cart and land in the middle of the runway, where it was promptly run over by a truck. Its contents—including the toiletries I’d carried for thousands of miles—went spilling all over the tarmac. The world was getting its point across to me, loud and clear: fancy face creams weren’t meant for places like Sudan.
Even if such things did make it into the country, they
rarely made it out, for one reason or another. We washed whatever we had in our suitcases so frequently with dirty water and harsh soaps that even a new shirt would be faded and threadbare by the time we were packing to go home. Once, when one of my friends was preparing to leave, she packed two bags, one full of the clothes she wanted to take with her, which included a Donna Karan dress she had worn to a friend’s wedding in Europe. The other she filled with everything she planned to leave behind. She gave both bags to her maid, asking her please to ship the former and keep whatever she wanted from the latter. The next day, my friend’s coworkers—locals, and apparently friends with her maid—showed up at the office, one wearing her silk scarf, another her fitted blouse: the maid had gotten the bags mixed up. What was I supposed to do, my friend said when she told me what happened, Ask them to take off their shirts in the middle of the conference room? So my friend left, and her clothes stayed, and somewhere in Sudan her maid’s sister is wearing that Donna Karan dress.
WHEN I LANDED IN KHARTOUM, Carla picked me up at the airport and we drove to a small party, where I knew the hot Australian would be. This time I went home with him. At that point, it didn’t even matter who he was. After so many long, hot days made worse by lonely nights, just touching another human being felt incredible. I had one night with him, and we stayed up until the sun rose, me savoring every affectionate hour knowing I’d soon be returning to nights of eating tuna stew and playing Marco Polo with a mosquito humming inside my bed net.
The next morning he drove me to the airport and waited as I checked in. It turned out my authorization to go back to Darfur had expired, and I would have to wait in Khartoum for a few days while it got renewed. I was ecstatic—another meal or two at the Italian restaurant, a few more warm showers, good cell phone coverage, and sex! I came out of the terminal bouncing. The hot Australian looked pleased, but also panicked.
“So how long you think it will be until you get the visa sorted?” he asked.
“Depends how long it takes our visa section to process it—and you know they’re about as efficient as the Nigerian postal service,” I joked.
He chuckled, but seemed distracted.
The next morning the hot Australian was up before me. When I opened my eyes, he was already showered and dressed, sitting on the side of the bed.
“I need to tell you something,” he said.
“What,” I said, edging back, pulling the sheet up to my chin.
Oh, please don’t tell me you’re HIV positive.
“The thing is,” he said slowly, “I have a girlfriend. And, well, she’s arriving tonight. So, you can’t stay here.”
Carla was right. This guy had turned out to be an asshole. Although the hot Australian was just a cheating jerk, and I passed it off as such, eventually I realized that he was my first encounter with how hollow this work could make you—how easy it was to shirk attachments, when you are always leaving one place for another, and how hard it was to build anything resembling a sustainable relationship.
Darfur was a lonely time. I developed rituals: on the way back from the office, I’d stop at the small shop that had a freezer full of cold drinks. The shopkeeper knew me and after a few days had my plastic bottle of mango juice waiting when I arrived. It wasn’t every day that the juice was cold—it depended on whether the shop had power to keep the freezer on. It didn’t matter; cold or not, I’d take it back to the compound, drag one of the kitchen chairs outside, and drink the juice slowly. It came out thick like a sweet sauce and I sat there, savoring each gulp.
Our compound was within walking distance of the market, where I’d go to purchase tomatoes and other vegetables, or just to have something to do. One time, I went with Lila to buy a chicken.
“Which one do you want?” she asked, pointing to a fenced area where more than a dozen chickens pecked at the ground.
The only chicken I had ever bought before was wrapped in cellophane. I wasn’t sure how to choose. “I don’t know. Which one looks good to you?”
She scanned the chickens running around and pointed to one with black feathers. “That one.”
“OK, that one then,” I said, gesturing at the little old woman sitting on the ground, surrounded by her chickens, to show her which bird I meant. She grabbed the one we wanted violently, the bird’s wings flapping hysterically. She held the chicken upside down, wrapped its feet in straw, and handed it to me.
“Wait, now what?” I said.
Lila started to laugh. “You silly muzungu. You want her to kill it for you?”
Was that even a question? Of course I wanted her to kill it for me.
“It will cost extra, you know.”
“I don’t care. I’m not killing that chicken!”
By now the chicken vendor could tell what we were discussing and started laughing, too. She was still holding the chicken upside down, but it had stopped flapping.
“You want it feathered, too?” Lila asked.
Of course, I wanted it feathered. “Uh-huh.”
“It’s also going to cost you more.”
“I just want a dead, featherless chicken.”
Most nights though I cooked pasta with tuna or egg on the tiny gas stove in the kitchen. The Internet didn’t work at the residences and I plowed through my books so quickly that I had to space out my reading. There were occasional parties on Thursday nights, but most of the time people were just too exhausted to do anything. I made up an exercise routine that I did around the compound, using water bottles as arm weights and a piece of rope from the NFI package as a jump rope. Lila would just sit there, looking at me. I could hear her voice in my head as she rolled her eyes: You silly muzungu.
THE GEOGRAPHIC SPAN OF DARFUR was massive—the region is roughly the size of France—and the problems were always changing. I never felt I got a grasp on the overall situation, but in this small part of North Darfur, I understood the challenges, the context, and for the first time since I started doing this work, I felt I played a big part in it. Even so, the job was hard and frustrating and many of us often felt we weren’t doing enough. Every time things seemed to be on track, there would be another setback. A village was attacked; another rainstorm flooded the camp; a key staff member got malaria and was out for two weeks; a car was ambushed and all movement stopped until it was safe again to drive the streets.
If fighting should break out nearby, there were sketchy evacuation plans for internationals, but none whatsoever for local staff. And they were the ones who were more vulnerable to attack—after all, there were more of them, so the odds that they would be on a road that was ambushed were higher. Before militias discovered there was a high price tag for expat releases, kidnapping or harming foreigners was considered a political risk not often worth taking.
Our Sudanese colleagues had to sit in security briefings as Mark explained the evacuation procedures. I knew this was the norm for agencies that operated in insecure areas, and we couldn’t evacuate them. This was, after all, their country. Every expat worker was just an individual; a national came with his whole family. We couldn’t be responsible for getting entire families out, and staff wouldn’t leave without them. Even if we wanted to shoulder that obligation, the logistical hurdles would be too great. Oftentimes expats were evacuated across borders; with Western passports, they could easily get a visa. Some of our national staff didn’t even have passports, and probably wouldn’t be eligible for visas. When expats left the country, they were simply in transit; when nationals left the country, they were making an escape.
I had spoken to expat aid workers who still felt guilty after being evacuated in Rwanda and having to leave their Tutsi friends and colleagues behind. I couldn’t imagine having to tell Ishaq that I was leaving him in a war zone after his family had shown me such kindness. I looked over at him; he sat with his legs and arms folded, his head cocked to one side. I was sure he had heard this speech dozens of times by now. This was what he had come to expect. I just hoped that it would never come to that in El F
asher.
Years later, I knew that many aid workers were being kidnapped and abducted in retaliation for the International Criminal Court’s warrant for President Omar al-Bashir’s arrest. But at the time, it wasn’t that dangerous in Darfur. Petty theft was the biggest risk then. Often we’d have to pull off the streets in downtown El Fasher and wait until a convoy of twenty or so military trucks filled with Sudanese soldiers passed. They’d be sitting on the backs, all in Rambo-style camouflage uniforms. Some of them left their weapons resting on the floor. Others held their guns pointing outward, at the road—at us.
“This scares the shit out of me,” said Mark, as we sat in the car on our way to the camp.
“Why? They’re not going to shoot us,” I said.
“No, not intentionally. But how many of those guys thought to put the safeties on those guns? How many of them even know how to put their safeties on? A wrong bump and one of those AK-47s goes spraying.” That was the fear. Not that we would be directly targeted—at least not during the time I was there—but that if fighting broke out between militias, we would be caught in the cross fire.
Mark instructed us to drive with the windows up.
“I thought we were supposed to drive with the windows down?” I asked. Back in Zalingei, Dmitri made sure we always kept the windows down. He and Laura had been driving home one night after curfew. They didn’t see any guards, and no one told them to stop. Then Laura heard the cock of a gun.
“Dmitri, stop!” she shouted.
Three guards, all armed, jumped out of the bush. Maybe the guard would have shot if they kept driving, maybe not. But if her window had been up, Laura wouldn’t have heard the gun.
After that, Dmitri scolded us, “I swear, I see another person driving with the windows up, I’m going to smash them all.”
Mark had a different position, though. “No, you drive with them up. In case people throw things at the car.”
Chasing Chaos: My Decade In and Out of Humanitarian Aid Page 14
