Chasing Chaos: My Decade In and Out of Humanitarian Aid (3 page)

I thought about the news of Mom’s death spreading through town—the lady who did her nails, the checkout person at the grocery store, the receptionist at her doctor’s office—all the people who had known her well. I imagined how shocked they must have been to learn that Mom, the woman whose laugh you could hear in the next room, was dead. The two images just didn’t belong together. For a girl raised in a sheltered New England town, protected from tragedy, with a mother who could do anything, it was the first time I contemplated that bad things could happen to us, too.

If I could die at age fifty, I wanted a more meaningful profession than the one provided by Hot Pockets and Sunny Delight. I had inherited Mom’s vivacity, her can-do spirit, and the memory of her strength emboldened me with newfound nerve. I wanted to live life to the fullest, and that meant breaking the conventional course that I was charting. Impulsively, and against the advice of my father and all the career counselors I had met with at Penn, I quit the marketing firm without another
job in the wings. I didn’t know what I was going to do next, but I also didn’t care.

That summer I decided to go to Central America—alone. It was my first time traveling by myself, and my first encounter with such foreign conditions: I jammed inside busses filled with people and chickens. I got welts on my arms and legs from insects living inside my mattress. I bartered for fruit at the market in a language I barely spoke. It wasn’t all that exotic, as there were plenty of backpackers and tourists in the towns I visited. But during that trip, something clicked. I was for the first time encountering inequality close up—visiting towns where there was no running water and where treatable diseases went untreated. I met expats who worked in these countries, embracing a different and intriguing way of life. I saw something out there far bigger than my own New York existence, and I wanted to be a part of it. I returned home determined to pursue aid work.

At the time, I’m not sure I understood what I was getting into. Even now, it’s hard for me to distill my feelings into a single, succinct motive. Part of me was enticed by the idea of traveling to foreign places and being part of a global community. I imagined my life abroad would be filled with adventure and rewarding, intellectually intriguing work. Another side of me
was
looking for a way to dodge the painful repercussions of my mom’s death. A career that would bring me to the most extreme places on earth could do just that. I would be distracted, from the grief that still lingered
at home, and inside me. There was other suffering out in the world, and I wanted to touch it. Whatever my intentions, subconscious or not, they led me to the conclusion that the traditional grind could wait: I was young and free and animated by a newfound sense of possibility—the urge to move out into the world, and to be moved by it.

I started my search confident that I would easily find work. How hard could it be? But every opening posted online, even entry-level ones, required field experience. Some asked for a master’s degree. I sent résumés and letters every day; all went unanswered.

I was shocked and humbled. Back then, I assumed that “helping people” who were poorer than me and in need of whatever the well-off and educated could offer would be something anyone could do. I had no idea what the jobs entailed or what it meant to be qualified for one. People advised me to go into the Peace Corps, claiming that was the best way to get the field cred I needed to break into this industry. I balked at this: a month traveling around Latin America I could handle, but I wasn’t exactly prepared to commit to living in a remote village in Burkina Faso or Guatemala for a whole two years. Not at this point, anyway.

After months of rejection letters, I found a public relations job at a small but growing international development
organization in New York. I had just spent a year doing marketing. I figured that I could handle PR. It was an entry-level position, and it would get me in the door.

The first few weeks on the job were unlike anything I’d ever experienced. The office culture was nothing like the corporate environment I had just left: small, windowless cubbyholes were packed with up to three senior staff members. Junior staffers sat in the hallways, surrounded by stacks of books and papers. Cabinets with half-shut drawers exposed a haphazard filing system. The photocopy machine broke all the time and we always had to wait several days before someone would come to fix it. But everyone who worked there was young, smart, and dedicated. They casually referenced their recent trips to Guinea or Gabon, and I’d scurry back to my computer to look up whether those countries were in Asia or Africa. They spoke authoritatively about HIV in Uganda and microcredit in India, female genital cutting in Senegal and child rights in Afghanistan. Just overhearing their conversations made me feel smarter.

The new job helped me move past the loss of my mom; so did a new relationship. I started dating Michael, a kind and soft-spoken man a few years older than me. I had met Michael within weeks of returning from my trip to Central America. He was the most patient, comforting person I could have been with during those months. In 2002, after a year and a half of dating, he proposed. It was the night of my twenty-fifth
birthday, and I said yes. With my job at the development agency going well and my new fiancé, I felt as if everything were finally coming together.

But one day on the job, I realized there was a lot more to it and maybe it wasn’t
all
so together. I presented a press release about a program we ran in response to Hurricane Mitch. Our work was based in Tegucigalpa, the capital of Honduras. I spent hours researching the place, the local agency we were partnering with, and determining how we had helped the people affected by the storm. “So,” I began, “the article will focus on the work happening out of Tegu-whatever-it-is, not as much in the rural areas.”

The Latin America Program Manager—a young woman from Honduras—looked up. “You mean Tegucigalpa?”

“Yes, Tegoo …”

“Te-goosy-galpa,” she said slowly, as if pronouncing it for a three-year-old.

I repeated the capital slowly back to her, left the press release on her desk, and walked out of the office. If I was planning to stay in this field, maybe a master’s degree wasn’t a bad idea after all.

I was sixteen when I pulled
TIME
magazine out of the mailbox. The cover read: “There are no devils left in Hell. They are all in Rwanda.” Rivers overflowed with dead bodies. Neighbors hacked each other to death with machetes. Children were separated by tribe, and those from the wrong ethnic group, butchered. A pregnant
Tutsi, the article reported, was cut open and the infant inside her ripped from her womb.

I gazed with disgust at the images from this country that, at the time, I could neither pronounce nor find on a map. But it was May; I had my PSAT scores to worry about and summer jobs to apply for. I could easily forget about Rwanda.

I didn’t understand until nine years later, when I saw church walls stained with the blood of Tutsis who huddled together before grenades hit them, when I saw their belongings—a comb, a coloring book, hollow clothes—scattered throughout that church, when I watched men rip thick bush with one swing of their machete. Only then did I know that people died this way.

Rwanda was not the first African country I had been to, but for me, it will always be the one whose spell I first fell under—the place that, in my memory, represents everything good about being young, idealistic, and free.

I arrived at night, tired after an eighteen-hour journey from New York for the start of a summer graduate school internship. I had enrolled in a masters program the previous fall and in between my first and second years went to put my studies into practice. The fat Belgian man sitting next to me was snoring in his seat,
bored by an experience he clearly had too many times. I was on the edge of mine, straining to make out the blurry capital city below—Kigali.

Although Rwanda is small—slightly smaller than the state of Maryland—its ten million residents make it Africa’s most densely populated country. Rwanda is called
les pays des mille collines
—the land of a thousand hills. The sequined lakes of Rwanda had been described to me as some of the most magnificent places on earth. As excited as I was to see this beautiful place, I was nervous, too. Yet I could easily imitate my more experienced graduate school classmates talking about Rwanda and what I’d be doing there in that casual, cocky air they affected so convincingly. I had to get all of the necessary shots for the first time—the names of which were terrifying enough (yellow fever, typhoid, hepatitis) and spent an absurd amount of money on anti-malarial drugs. I even bought an East Africa guidebook and a new backpack for the occasion.

The primary languages spoken in Rwanda, a former Belgian colony, are French and the local language, Kinyarwanda. Although English was made the third official language in 1996, most people didn’t speak it. My French vocabulary consisted of “merci,” “merci beaucoup,” and “voulez-vous coucher avec moi.” The French phrase book I brought was of no help either. I ruffled through it on the flight, but “I’ll have the fondue” was meant for someone going on a glamorous Swiss holiday. There was no translation for “The goat
stew is full of gristle. I am unable to eat it.” The index unhelpfully had no entry for “explosive diarrhea” or “convulsive vomiting.”

The stewardess sent me off the plane with an “au revoir!” as perky as her tailored starchy blue uniform. I walked slowly down the stairs and onto the tarmac, taking in my first breath of the honeyed African air. Above the terminal, the neon lights spelling out Kayibanda International Airport flickered like a N
O
V
ACANCY
sign on a roadside motel in the middle of nowhere.

I walked to the terminal casually, trying to act as if I were as cool landing in Kigali as I would be landing in Denver. I shifted my new backpack from one shoulder to the other in what I hoped was a laid-back sort of way, as if the biggest thing on my mind was the fact that my bag was too heavy. I put my hair in a low, messy ponytail, trying to invoke my mental image of a seasoned field girl.