Chasing Chaos: My Decade In and Out of Humanitarian Aid (36 page)

From New York headquarters, it was even easier to lose sight of my connection to the field and affected populations. This was classic office grunt work—I sent e-mails, wrote reports, circulated memos, developed log frames. My job was to evaluate a new method for financing aid which supposedly delivered money to disasters faster. People at headquarters wanted to know whether the streamlined process was turning into speedier aid delivery at the field level. My job oversaw a painfully inefficient process, requiring input from at least two dozen people at different agencies scattered across the globe. The perpetual overreliance on consensus slowed proceedings down even more. “It’s one big
kumbaya
session,” my boss said, frustrated that before we could move on with anything we had to wait for feedback from Geneva, Rome, Nairobi. “This place needs a dictator to just lay down the law and make decisions.” Meanwhile, we had to play the never-ending game of interagency politics, appeasing all vested parties in order for anything meaningful to occur.

My daily routine in New York—going into the office, contacting people, negotiating with them, waiting for people to sign off on a decision, then starting all over the next day—was admittedly far less exciting than the life I had lived abroad. But if you wanted some of the steady normalcy of home, working at an agency’s domestic headquarters was an attractive option.
What I didn’t realize until I was working in New York is that the more senior you become in this profession, the less interaction you have with the parts of the job that keep people motivated: seeing human resilience in some of the toughest situations imaginable, knowing that children are back in school due in part to work you’ve done, giving people a place to sleep, even if temporarily. Several years later, I still remembered the expressions of people standing in line for food distributions in Darfur, the interactions that I had with children who had been assisted after the war in Sierra Leone, the names of asylum seekers in Rwanda. Even though it was flawed, the work there helped people at the times when they needed it most. Writing reports and drafting memos from headquarters, I had to remind myself of this every day.

AND IT TOOK TIME TO
adjust to headquarters bureaucracy language, too. Words not recognized by a proper English dictionary were regularly passed off as actual vocabulary, adding to the already brimming bowl of bureaucratic alphabet soup.
Complementarity
of processes,
sectoral
coverage,
evaluability
of impact,
operationalization
of the concept—eventually enough of these invented phrases were dropped in documents or e-mails that people stopped wondering if they held actual meaning. “Modalities are in place” was the response you got almost every time you asked how
a project was progressing. I never got a clear answer about what a modality actually was or how you would go about putting one in place. But eventually I was able to translate it from aid-speak to actual English myself: it was an admission that we’d put that one on the back burner, indefinitely.

These words not recognized by Microsoft spell-checker or any other dictionary, were used to compose what were basically nonsense sentences, which resulted in e-mails literally devoid of any actual meaning: “
The Inter Agency Real Time Evaluation Interest Group (IA-RTE IG) is meeting for a full-day workshop to agree on procedures and methodologies for IA-RTE (to be presented to the Inter Agency Steering Committee Working Group—IASC-WG), inter alia also a ‘logic model’ that could be used to assess effectiveness and results. Reading all the issues and options for discussion with the Consultative Group, I feel that there are clear linkages between the two ‘Working Groups’ and that we shall strive to maintain and strengthen the relationships so that each can benefit from the other’s work
.” Years later, I still have absolutely no idea what that e-mail means.

Every agency had an Evaluation Office that analyzed the effectiveness of the agency’s response to a particular disaster or crisis. But then someone else would be hired to evaluate the quality of the Evaluation Office’s evaluations: these reviews were called “meta-evaluations.” The reports issued by the meta-evaluators
often recommended that they create a subcommittee to review the recommendations and create another report to summarize and report back on actions taken.

No one could make up their minds about what language we should use when referring to ourselves or the people for whom we were working. “Beneficiaries” was widely used until it was deemed disempowering and people started using “affected populations” instead. Some agencies called them “people of concern.” Others used words like “clients,” “aid customers,” “aid recipients,” or “program participants.” The humanitarian community was referred to by some as “change agents.” Others made this distinction: they were “rights holders” and we were “duty bearers.”

Days were assigned causes: World Refugee Day, World Humanitarian Day, United Nations Day. Even this practice quickly came to seem like a parody of itself—it wasn’t long before we started getting e-mail reminders about World Breastfeeding Week, Global Handwashing Day, World Toilet Day.

But a lot of the time only people who worked in the UN could understand the lingo. A typical sentence from a UN e-mail: “The initial phases of the CERF (Central Emergency Response Fund) evaluation will need to consider CHF (Common Humanitarian Fund) countries where there has been a CAP (Consolidated Appeal Process) or CHAP (Common Humanitarian Action Plan). The NURD (Northern Uganda Recovery and Development) donor group will be funding
part of it but we’ll have to rely on the ERFs (Emergency Relief Funds) and HRFs (Humanitarian Relief Funds) to finalize the rest.” When I read a report that Violence Against Girls had been shortened to VAG it was undeniable: the absurdity of the bureaucratic speak had gotten completely out of hand.

Some aid workers made cracks about the impact we were having from so far away. Someone would get up at the end of lunch and declare, “Well, guess I’m going back to my desk to save some more lives now,” and everyone would laugh. “Saving a life one keystroke at a time” became the running joke. We all missed life on the ground. Daily field engagement is critical to making the issues real and giving legitimacy to the work of the international agencies. But as time goes on, it’s harder for aid workers rising through the ranks and wanting a life in the West to have regular access.

There was constant jockeying among HQ staff to be selected for short missions in the field. Meetings would get tense as soon as the announcement was made. “You just got back from Afghanistan—give someone else a turn!” someone would snap. “I haven’t been to Asia in months,” another person would say mournfully, while others rolled their eyes. All of us needed to go back and be reminded of what drew us to this career in the first place. Because it certainly wasn’t what we were doing from New York.

That year for my job, I often traveled from New York to Geneva—the “Peace Capital” of the world and seat of the UN’s humanitarian assistance and human rights operations, as well as host to a vast assortment of other international agencies. In graduate school I read somewhere that when you’re in a place like Geneva, you can’t imagine a place like Africa even existing. And when you’re in a noisy hectic African capital, a place like Geneva cannot exist. The idea stuck with me, and when I landed in Geneva for the first time, it was clear. In Geneva, the air smells of croissants, chocolate, cappuccinos, and wealth. It’s a place obsessed with time; clocks are everywhere, from the bus stops that tell you the minute the next bus will arrive, to the Rolex and Tissot stores on every corner. Litter doesn’t exist in Geneva, and the city streets are scrubbed clean of life and character. Shops close exactly at 6 p.m. each night, except Thursdays, when they stay open until 8 p.m. The whole city shuts down on Sundays. A friend told me that she was given a list of rules when she moved into her apartment: vacuuming was not permitted, except on Saturdays, and flushing the toilet after 10 p.m. was absolutely forbidden.

Such a pristine city, so governed by rules and so admiring of orderliness: nowhere on earth was farther away from Africa, with all its haphazard chaos, its constant upsetting of even the best-laid plans. Yet life in Africa was affected by the decisions made and policies implemented at meetings in Geneva. The UN building was a palace, with long echoing hallways and
offices adorned with Persian rugs. The walls were lined with maps and photos from Africa and Asia, but they may as well have been postcards from other planets: places so far away, and so hard to imagine. The manicured lawn outside the United Nations overlooked the still and silvery water of Lake Léman, and the white Alps glowed pink at sunset. Some days I’d come out of a meeting about aid distribution in African countries and seeing the lake and the mountains made me feel like I was living in a snow globe—a cold and perfect sphere, a world unto itself, apart even from our own.

A few months later, I got another chance to travel abroad when I was sent to Jerusalem for two weeks to plan the logistics of an upcoming evaluation. It wasn’t until after I landed that I realized it was the ninth anniversary of Mom’s death.

My mother died in Israel. She wasn’t there for spiritual reasons, to be closer to God or to be in the Holy Land. When the cancer returned after the first bone marrow transplant, the doctors at home shrugged and shook their heads. They said we were out of options. But Dad, refusing to give up, found a doctor in Israel who offered to perform a kind of bone marrow transplant that was not yet approved in the United States.

I remembered a night nine years ago, when all five of us—Mom, Dad, my two younger brothers, and I—had
cuddled next to each other in Mom and Dad’s bed, talking about whether Mom should go. She was scared. We were all scared. She didn’t want to live out what might be her last few months or weeks in a foreign place, far from friends and family. But as we lay there discussing the options—Mom and I under the covers, the boys sitting among overstuffed pillows—my younger brother, Ben, his head resting against my mother, got to the point. “If you stay here, there’s nothing left to do, right? You’ll die. So there’s really not a choice, is there?”

“No, I guess there isn’t,” Mom said softly, staring blankly at the ceiling and mindlessly stroking Ben’s hair.

A week later Dad left work and Ben transferred to an international high school in Jerusalem. When they moved, Dan and I stayed behind—he was in college and I had just graduated and started my new job. Mom refused to have us join them. “Look,” she said, when I pleaded with her. “This is already disrupting Dad’s and Ben’s lives. You don’t need to come. I don’t want you quitting your job. It will make me sadder having you there than if I know that you’re getting on with it in New York. What are you going to do there anyway? Sit by my bed and watch me? Stay. Live your life.”

She spent that last week packing and tying up as many loose ends as she could—making last-minute phone calls, sending e-mails, showing me where she kept her jewelry, closing out professional obligations
and appointments. She wrote a letter to each of us. There was so much to do. How do you prepare to leave your life, potentially forever?