Chasing Chaos: My Decade In and Out of Humanitarian Aid (18 page)

It got late and the crowd was thinning. Carla came over to us. “We’re leaving.” She turned to me. “You coming?”

I looked at her with begging eyes—
I don’t want to go
. She looked at him and then back at me with an expression I recognized immediately—
Don’t go home with this guy
. Something about him—possibly just his out-of-place hotness—made it clear to her that he was probably going to turn out to be an asshole.

We exchanged numbers and I went home with Carla. The next day my travel authorization came through and I was put on the next flight to El Fasher. I never got to say good-bye to the hot Australian.

The office in El Fasher was a few minutes’ drive from downtown, on the way to the three main IDP camps there—Abu Shouk, Zam Zam, and the recently planned Al Salam. Al Salam was the camp I’d been hired to work as the community officer, which meant I had a budget to oversee, and an important role liaising with community representatives from the camp.

But plans, it quickly emerged, had changed. I hadn’t been at the office for two weeks when Mark, the acting head, informed me that the camp coordinator for Al Salam had left, and I was being deputized to replace her. Mark was a small guy, and looked a few years older than me. In one hand, he held a clipboard with papers crinkled brown at the edges, in the other, a VHF radio. I looked at him with his Red Sox baseball cap and his clumsy stance and couldn’t believe someone so young was in charge of this entire operation. Maybe he had been hired for a different job, too.

The office was a flurry of activity, with the mostly Sudanese staff hurrying through the hallways or darting in and out of meetings. Our workplace was made up of various interconnected rooms designated as offices with makeshift signs hanging on the doors: Women’s Health, Basic Health, Child Protection, Water and Sanitation, Logistics, Finance, IT. Because our agency was one of the largest working in the region, we covered a number of humanitarian sectors. The walls were mostly bare and there were many windows with screens, to get as much of a cross breeze as possible.
Mark led me through a labyrinth of rooms until we reached his office at the end of the corridor.

A beat-up couch and a small coffee table sat on one side of the room, his desk on another. Pale sunlight spilled through a row of uncurtained windows and a floor-to-ceiling map of Darfur hung next to the couch. A large fan swiveled slowly, ruffling a stack of papers held down with a brick on Mark’s desk. With each rotation, the papers fluttered softly, as though they were sighing. Mark sat down and took off his baseball hat, combing his hands through his sweaty hair.

Although I had not yet come to realize it, Terms of Reference (TORs) for jobs were so loosely written that sometimes people ended up with completely unexpected responsibilities. As long as the job didn’t require technical expertise, like constructing shelters, designing latrines, or delivering health care, there was always the chance you’d be the one to do it. People ended up filling in for their colleagues, as in Mark’s case, and also mine. Years later, when I landed a new post, a friend offered the following advice: “Don’t let anyone around here see that you’re competent. You’ll end up doing everyone’s job.”

When Mark broke the news to me, he tried to put a positive spin on it—“Your first day, and already a promotion!”—but I wasn’t persuaded. I was twenty-seven, and had spent only a few months working at a camp before—how would I be able to serve as the primary person overseeing activities in the camp? Mark pulled a thick manual off the wobbly bookshelf behind
him:
Camp Management Toolkit
. He plopped it on the desk. I left Mark’s office with the handbook and a name: Ishaq. “He’s great,” Mark promised. “He’ll show you around.”

When I arrived in El Fasher, aid agencies were in the process of moving twenty-four thousand people—residents of the village Tawila, which the Janjaweed had attacked a few weeks earlier—from one camp, Abu Shouk, across a river to the new one, Al Salam (its name meant “peace”). There was no other option: Abu Shouk already housed fifty thousand people, and couldn’t absorb tens of thousands more. The new arrivals huddled around the perimeter of the camp, building shelters with whatever scraps of cloth and sticks they could find. They came inside the camp to use the latrines and get water, already in short supply. But without being officially registered, they didn’t have access to the food distributions, and were not permitted to send their children to schools in the camp or receive other basic services. With so much extra use, the pit latrines were filling up fast. Eventually, some had to be sealed shut.

The aid workers who found the land for the new camp hadn’t had an easy time of it. It took weeks to negotiate with the government, which had to authorize the use of more land for the displaced; consult with
the community leaders to explain the plan; arrange for twenty-four thousand displaced people to move across the dry riverbed, or
wadi
; and finally settle them into the new camp, Al Salam. Busses were provided for elderly and sick but the rest came by foot. It wasn’t too long a journey: you could see one camp while standing in the other.

After receiving my “promotion,” I followed the advice Mark had given: “Go up to the camp and poke around.” I hopped in an agency vehicle that was on its way to the camp, asking the driver to drop me at the registration tent. It took about ten minutes to get from the office to the camp, and the driver sped through the open stretches of desert, lining the tires up with the grooves created by previous cars. All around us was sand, scattered trees, and a few
tukuls
. He turned up the song on the radio—a repetitive, mantra-like Sudanese tune, a male singer’s voice ranging all over the scales, the sitar and steady drum beat playing behind him. The hot Darfur air blew in through the open windows, and my hair flitted across my face, strands sticking to damp patches on my skin. I pulled it back in a tight ponytail, using sweat as hair gel.

SOON, I COULD SEE THE
new camp—a sweep of sand the size of more football fields than I could count—stretching out before us. Small flags marked its perimeter. A few tents made from plastic sheeting had sprung up near the edges, but most of the wide, dry land was
empty. Families were arriving at the registration center, a large domed tent perched at the top of a hill. When I saw the people waiting outside it, the lines curling down the slope, I realized it wouldn’t be long at all before all of the land was occupied.

The inside of the registration tent seemed orderly and efficient. About ten desks were lined up in rows, and male and female Sudanese registration officers sat behind each of them, calling families in one at a time. Communities in Sudan are arranged by tribe; there are close to a hundred tribes in all of Darfur. Al Salam held tribes from five regions: Jebel Marra, Tawila, Dar Zaghawa, Jebel Si, and Korma. Each group was headed by a leader, or
omda
, who acted like the governor for that community. The tribes were broken down into smaller groups, and every group was led by a sheikh—the equivalent of a mayor.

To organize the move, sheikhs provided camp workers with lists of families who planned on arriving together. Families presented themselves to the registration officers, who crossed-referenced their names with the lists provided by the sheikhs. The officers carefully entered each family’s information into ledgers written by hand. In rows drawn with a ruler, they recorded the number of family members, their ages and genders, and their community of origin. A special note was made if it was a female-headed household. All of this information was copied by hand again onto a wallet-sized card, which was given to the family.

Families were then ushered into an adjacent tent to
receive medical screening. Babies were weighed, children were checked for malnutrition, and any noticeable ailments were referred to the doctor. Next, families were issued a certain number of household supplies based on family size. A distribution team checked the card, stamped it, and dispensed an array of NFIs (non-food items): plastic sheeting (one piece per five people), iron poles (to hold the sheeting up), and rope (to tie them together); as well as jerry cans, soap, kitchen utensils, and a plastic pot for washing.

The camp was divided by region of origin, and each family was given a plot of land, determined by the size of the family, within that division. Families walked to their lots slowly, their new items clanking at their sides, and any personal effects they had brought from their villages strapped to donkeys, or balanced on their heads. Even small children were expected to carry things. Anyone who had arms and legs and could hold something, did.

Unlike most instances of displacement, where communities flee and haphazardly squat on new land, in this case aid agencies had the opportunity to coordinate a more orderly, systematically designed camp, with carefully measured distances between living quarters, latrines, clinics, and schools. It was one of the first times during a humanitarian crisis that a camp was developed this way and so far things seemed to be going according to plan.

Aid agencies need to collaborate to provide people
with material relief—and ideally, help them preserve a sense of human dignity—and there were over twenty such agencies working in Al Salam. A single organization doesn’t have the resources or expertise to do it all. If one organization builds a school, another must deliver water and a place for kids to go to the bathroom. If another organization doesn’t provide a meal in school, children will typically go hungry and be too exhausted to study. And if yet another organization doesn’t come in to assist parents in finding and maintaining their livelihoods, they might not be able to afford to send their kids to school, or pull them out to work instead. If there isn’t a clinic nearby where a child can get treated if he gets sick—well, then he wasn’t going to be coming to school anyway. People didn’t need just one kind of intervention. They needed a package of services, and agencies had to come together to provide comprehensive support. It’s like building a house: you need a contractor to pour the foundation and erect the walls, an electrician to install the lights and outlets, a plumber to put in the sinks and toilets.

Unlike Zalingei, where the expat staff lived in one compound, in El Fasher we were spread across guesthouses within a quarter of a mile radius of the office. Since El Fasher was a larger town, there were plenty
of these small homes to rent. My agency had leased five of them, and I was assigned a room in Guesthouse Three with Lila, a tall, thin Kenyan woman who had a six-year-old daughter back in Nairobi. Many Kenyans were in Sudan working for aid agencies. For most expats, going home meant traveling for at least two days. But for Kenyans, getting from Khartoum to Nairobi was an easy two-hour flight.

“I’m setting up a women’s center,” Lila told me. “It will be a place where women can come to learn a new trade, where we teach them about women’s health, give them a space to go to just relax.” Her eyes opened widely as she spoke about the center, her smooth, cropped hair (that I later learned was a wig) shining in the sunlight. She had built one with success in Congo the year before with the same agency, but here they were having trouble procuring some of the necessary supplies.