Chasing Chaos: My Decade In and Out of Humanitarian Aid (5 page)

WE WAITED AT THE ENTRANCE
of the three-story compound for uniformed guards to lift the heavy gate and wave us along. Inside, I took a seat in the lobby while someone summoned Kassim, the man who had hired me. We had communicated a few times over e-mail after my professor had put us in contact. Moments later, he appeared. A short, balding Lebanese man, he wore a pressed shirt and khaki pants and his glasses slipped down his nose as he put his hand out to greet me. “Jessica!” he said enthusiastically. He hadn’t asked my name, but it was a pretty safe bet: I was the only white person sitting in the lobby.

I followed Kassim to the third floor, where he led me past half a dozen rooms along a corridor. The building was cleaner than I expected, the walls and
tan tiled floors smooth and shiny. Kassim’s office was a huge room with a large window overlooking one of the forested ridges surrounding the city. Lush green light spilled in from outside.

“Wow,” I gasped.

“Yes, it’s not bad. Here, have a seat.” He pulled a chair out across from his desk. “Do you want some coffee? Tea?”

“No, thank you.”

“I’m going to have some. Henry!” Kassim yelled. A short Rwandan man wearing an old collared shirt and faded khaki pants appeared in the doorway.

“Tea, please,” he said. Henry scurried away.

A huge map of Rwanda and the surrounding countries hung behind Kassim’s desk. Red pushpins dotted the map. He stood up and pointed to it. “Let me get you oriented. We’re here,” he said, pointing to Kigali. “This is where we process all of the resettlement cases, handle all of the urban cases, and coordinate the camps in the country. In this camp, Kiziba, there are fourteen thousand refugees from Congo who have been here for over five years. We do a lot of GBV [Gender-Based Violence] programming there. In this one—” he pointed to the red dot near the Burundi border—“Burundi refugees live. We manage both of those camps. You’ll visit them and see.”

I listened intently, took out my notebook, and started jotting down words:
urban cases, two camps, Kiz-something
.

“We have field offices here and here,” he said, indicating
one town near the border with Congo and another near the border with Burundi. “We also have a temporary field office here in Kibungo but will be closing it by year end.” This red dot was in the southeastern part of Rwanda, close to the Tanzanian border.

Tanzania usually had an open-door policy for refugees, but the massive influx after the 1994 genocide had them reconsidering their usual protocol. As Kassim explained, now that Rwanda was a stable country, Rwandans in Tanzania could no longer claim refugee status and the Tanzanian government went so far as to call them illegal immigrants. Beginning in 2002 the Tanzanian government removed these people from Tanzania, all twenty-three thousand of them, in a period of three months. Although organized by the United Nations, the repatriation to me seemed nothing more than a glazed-over forced removal of the Rwandan refugees for the benefit of the Tanzanian government.

After so many years in another country, most people didn’t have roots or family to return to. Their land and homes in Rwanda had been reallocated to others, and basic social services—health care, schools, water—were lacking. “We’ve been dealing with the returnees there, registering them at the border, providing them with initial supplies, and making sure they are safe to return. There are only a few left who need to be processed and given NFIs [non-food items], so in a few more weeks we’ll be shutting down that office,” Kassim explained.

He sat down and sipped the tea that Henry brought on a big round brassy tray.

“So I hear you are good writer,” he said.

“Sure, I guess …”

“Well, we need a good English writer here to write up the refugee status determination interviews.”

I spent much of those early days pretending to understand the lingo before hustling back to my desk to figure everything out before anyone caught on to the fact that I had no idea what they were talking about. But now, sitting across from Kassim, I listened intently, nodding without fully comprehending, and eventually, I caught on: in Kigali, close to twenty-three hundred urban refugees and about three thousand asylum-seekers of various nationalities were receiving limited assistance. Those were the cases I’d be working on.

“A lot of the interviews were conducted by nonnative English speakers, so we need someone to correct them in solid English so that they’re in good shape to send to Nairobi.”

Again I nodded.
Nairobi, English, interviews
.

“OK, I have to go to a meeting at UNICEF now, but Katrin will show you around and get you started.”

Kassim yelled for Henry, who appeared within seconds, as if he’d been standing behind the door waiting for his next order that whole time.

To Henry: “Get Katrin!” Then, to me: “Have you found a place to live yet?”

“No, I’m staying at a hotel.”

“Oh, OK.” He paused. “I’m sure you will find something soon.”

“Do you know
where
I could find something?” I asked.

“It’s hard to get a temporary rental here. I don’t know. Ask around. I’m sure it will work out.” I wasn’t as sure. Who was I supposed to be asking?

Katrin appeared at the door and Kassim introduced us. She was a tall, stocky woman from Ukraine who looked only a few years older than me. She had cropped blonde hair, a plump face, and a wide smile.

Kassim seemed relieved to get me out of his hair and ushered us out of his office. “Show her around and give her that extra desk in your office.”

I followed Katrin as she led me from office to office introducing me to the staff, people representing a mixture of cultures, races, and backgrounds—some from Canada, Europe, other African countries, and many Rwandans. The staff at the time totaled sixty-one, the majority of them being locals. The Rwandans at the office were happy to meet me and stopped whatever they were doing to chat. “Welcome to Kigali,” they said.

Programs for refugees happened in the camps, out in the countryside. The Kigali office was where the basic administration, such as financial procedures, donor reporting, IT, and HR, took place. My office with Katrin was spacious enough to fit two desks, and we both faced a balcony overlooking the busy street. The tall bookshelves lining the walls were filled with
unmarked blue binders. Katrin had a tackboard next to her desk where she had hung a typed paper titled
1951 Refugee Convention
, a scribbled note marked “Nanny” with a phone number, a typed list of office extensions, and a small photo of a snowy city which I guessed was somewhere in her home country, Ukraine.

Katrin handed me at least fifteen forms to fill out: waivers to ride in agency vehicles, registration for my computer, forms for taking pens and staples from the limited supply closet. I signed confidentiality agreements about the refugee cases I would interview and report, and was given a five-minute security briefing by the Rwandan security advisor: don’t talk to strangers, don’t eat anything weird, and don’t walk around alone at night. Any questions?

Noticing the way my African colleagues were dressed, I regretted having packed so many “field outfits.” I had figured I would need comfortable and disposable clothing, but now looked down abashedly at my sensible brown linen dress, as wrinkled as an elephant’s hide after days of travel. The Rwandan women were amazingly put together and stylish. They dressed traditionally, in long skirts and fitted shirts decorated with loud greens and oranges, shocking purples and yellows—colors that white women could never pull off. Our skin was just too pale. I learned later that the secret ingredient to their outfits was wax—it was put in the cloth in order to repel dirt and prevent wrinkles.

My first week in the office, I’d walk around introducing myself to people at the canteen, in the bathroom, along the hallways. Perhaps it was because I was painfully naive, annoyingly exuberant, green to the point of repulsion that everyone but Kassim pretty much ignored me.

“Hi! I’m Jessica,” I practically screamed at a woman standing at the printer one day. She looked a few years older than me, her hair overgrown and tied in a loose ponytail. She wore faded khaki pants that hit her mid-calf and a loose, colorful shirt that looked like she had bought it in India or Nepal.

“Hi,” she replied, “I’m Susan. Ugh,” she said, looking at the pages coming out of the printer. “There’s no toner left. I told Henry to get some a week ago.”

I shrugged. “What are you working on here?”

“Women’s health.”

“How long have you been here?”

“Too long. Two years.”

“So how do you like it? How has it been?”

She seemed annoyed that I was even speaking, let alone expecting her to respond. “I don’t know. I mean, lately bad days have turned into bad weeks, which have turned into bad months. The time just kind of goes, you know? I’m just so ready to get out of here,” she sighed, ripping up the pages coming from the printer and throwing them in the trash.

I had thought all these people would be so happy
to be here. I certainly was. I wanted to hear how they ended up in Rwanda, what they knew about the place, and how they got into this career. Where were they before? Where were they going after? “I’m here for the next couple of months. I’m sitting down the hall with Katrin. If you want to have lunch or anything some time, just let me know.”

“OK,” she said, smiling weakly.

When the sun went down I sprayed myself with DEET because I heard that this was the time when mosquitoes were the worst. “Have you ever gotten malaria?” I asked Katrin one evening as she was getting ready to go home.

“Yeah, twice.” She said it as if she were talking about getting a cold.

“Was it bad?”

“Yeah, it feels like death. Well, the first time did. The second time wasn’t so bad.”

“Are you taking anything? I’m on Malarone.”

“No. I don’t take anything. After you’re here for so long, you just stop. That stuff will destroy your liver.” She turned around to watch me rubbing the repellent onto my skin. “Sorry, can you spray that stuff outside? It’s getting really stuffy in here.”

That week, I plunged into the blue binders lining our office wall. Refugees arriving at the camps were given
refugee status on a prima facie basis, meaning due to the urgency of the situation, it wasn’t possible to determine refugee status for each individual and therefore they were accepted as a group. But for those who came to the capital, where they either had friends or relatives or thought that they could find work, their status as a refugee had to be proven through a Refugee Status Determination interview. Each applicant’s file came in a red folder with a passport-sized photo stapled to the front. Inside were photocopies of whatever documentation he or she had and a draft of their interview transcript. Kassim was right—many of the English translations were indecipherable—but I sat with the files until I could make whole sentences out of the notes.

Determining refugee status was not a fast process at all. Staff in the Kigali office interviewed the applicants, wrote up their cases, and put them into the red folders. When they were edited and approved in Kigali, the folders were sent to Nairobi where they then had to be approved for a second time. The Nairobi office was the regional hub, processing thousands of asylum seekers from all over East Africa. Rwanda wasn’t its only concern, and things moved slowly. For resettlement cases, once that hurdle was cleared, there were more. The red folder was sent to Geneva, where someone at the global headquarters would have the final say. The whole process could take more than a year.

It was hard to believe that humans could endure the trials written in these pages: if they themselves
hadn’t been mutilated, or subjected to rape or torture, they had witnessed it done to their relatives. I couldn’t imagine which would be worse. As I read, I kept flipping back to the small photos stapled to the front of the red folders, trying to match the events to their stoic faces. I didn’t know then, but I would be meeting these people in the coming weeks, and I would be hearing their stories—their voices—myself.