Copyright © 2013 by Jessica Alexander

All rights reserved.

Published in the United States by Broadway Paperbacks, an

imprint of the Crown Publishing Group, a division of Random
House, Inc., New York.
www.crownpublishing.com

BROADWAY PAPERBACKS and its logo, a letter B bisected on the

diagonal, are trademarks of Random House, Inc.

Library of Congress Cataloging-­in-­Publication Data

Alexander, Jessica.
Chasing chaos : my decade in and out of humanitarian aid /
­Jessica Alexander. —­First edition.
pages cm
1. Humanitarian assistance—­Sudan—­Darfur. 2. Sudan—­
History—­Darfur Conflict, 2003-­I. Title.
HV555.S73A44 2013
361.2'5092—­dc23
[B] 2013008182

ISBN 978-­0-­7704-­3691-­9
eISBN 978-­0-­7704-­3692-­6

PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

Book design by TK
Illustrations by TK
Cover design by TK
Cover photography TK

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

First Edition

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 All Skin and Grief
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I awoke as I did every morning. The call to prayer

erupted at 5:30 a.m. and was so loud I could have
sworn the muezzin set his amplifier right next to my
pillow. But the scratchy voice that shrilled through the
old speaker came from the roof of the adjacent mosque.
Someone make him stop. Please, just make it stop.
When the muezzin paused to take a breath, a ­chorus

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 2  JE SSICA A L E X A NDER

of chickens, goats, and a baby crying in a house nearby

filled the momentary hush. I peeled the mildewed towel
from my face—­the one I had drenched with water and
placed on my forehead before bed. It was the only way
I could fall asleep in the smothering Darfur heat. Every
evening I’d dunk my pajamas in water and lie on the
foam mattress, eyes shut tightly, reveling in the cool
wetness clinging to my skin, hoping I would fall asleep
before it evaporated in the dry night. That almost never
happened.
As the muezzin continued, I got out of bed listlessly;
I had to get to the camp early that day. Close to one
hundred and twenty thousand displaced people lived
around the city of El Fasher, the capital of North Dar-
fur; twenty-­four thousand of them lived in the camp
where I worked, Al Salam. Families would be sitting
outside the main tent this morning, already lined up
and waiting for the camp processing to resume. Since
the other two camps—­Abu Shouk and Zam Zam—­
were at full capacity, we had to make room for the new
arrivals. We registered, screened, and distributed food
to the weary families as quickly as possible, but each
day an endless flow of colored specks in the sandy dis-
tance moved closer to the camp: men and women car-
rying babies in their arms and bundles on their heads,
donkeys trudging slowly by their side. It was a war.
People kept coming.
I went to the small bathroom in our compound,
thinking that maybe, miraculously, the water would
work. I turned the small faucet, hoping for a trickle,

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 C H A S I N G C H AO S  3

but it just coughed and sputtered. My calves and arm-

pits hadn’t seen a razor for weeks. My hair hung in oily
clumps around my face and smelled like dirty dishwa-
ter. I pressed the lever to flush the toilet, but it went
limp beneath my fingers. The day before we’d acciden-
tally left the lid open and bugs had swarmed around
the seat. Today the lid was down but it smelled like
rotting shit.
I brushed my teeth with the bottled water we had
on reserve. Lila, my Kenyan colleague who lived in the
same compound, walked into the bathroom and saw
me, water bottle in hand. “Still?” she asked. She was
wrapped in a bright pink sarong, holding soap and
shampoo, hoping to take a shower.
“Still,” I said through a mouthful of toothpaste.
The water problem was supposed to be fixed days
ago, but as with everything in Darfur, we waited.
“Adam, mafi moya,” I had said the day before.
(Mafi moya means “there is no water.”) Adam, our Su-
danese colleague, was responsible for maintaining the
guesthouses where we lived. “When is the pump going
to be fixed?”
“Hello, Testicle.” Adam couldn’t pronounce my
name—­Jessica—­so it always sounded as if he were
calling me a testicle. “Water will be there today!”
“Adam, you said that yesterday and the day before
and we still have no water.” I was so tired and defeated
that the words came out flat and quiet.
“I know. Tonight, inshallah!”
Inshallah—­God willing—­qualified most Sudanese

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 4  JE SSICA A L E X A NDER

commitments. “Inshallah, I’ll be there.” “It will be fin-

ished by the end of the week, inshallah.” “Your visa
will come tomorrow, inshallah” If God willed these
things to happen, they would. In my experience, God
tended to be unwilling.
Dressing in my baggy, worn-­out khakis and long-­
sleeved shirt, I didn’t need a mirror to see how awful I
looked. With a layer of sweat and dirt already covering
my face, my skin couldn’t absorb the SPF 55 sunblock
so I walked outside into the unrelenting sunshine with
a filmy white clown mask.
As it did every morning, breakfast consisted of a
hard-­boiled egg and Nescafé. Lila was already sit-
ting inside the small kitchen. It had been ransacked.
Canned goods were scattered everywhere and the floor
was sprinkled with flour and rice; their ripped burlap
bags slunk low. “Are you kidding me? Again?” I said.
“Those goddamned cats.”
“I don’t know how they keep getting in.” Street
cats roamed our compound, keeping away the hedge-
hogs who scurried through North Darfur like squir-
rels in Central Park. Before Darfur I had never seen
a hedgehog. They looked like miniature porcupines;
some people thought they were cute. To me they were
prickly nuisances, leaving stinky turds under our beds
and in the back of our closets. But the cats were worse.
We locked the door to the kitchen every night, but they
managed to slink under the small crack at the bottom.
I’d imagine them hanging up a disco ball as they par-

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 C H A S I N G C H AO S  5

tied through the bins of food we hopelessly tried to

protect.
Lila crouched down to sweep the mess. I grabbed a
match and went to light the stove to boil water for our
coffee. It wouldn’t take. I tried again but only a rapid
tick-­tick-­ticking came from the stovetop. Lila sighed,
“I told Adam last week that we were running low on
fuel.”
“Can you remind me what he gets paid to do around
here?” I asked, still flicking the stove, the anger rising
in my throat.
Lila looked up and shrugged with the same resigna-
tion we all embraced to survive the lack of control over
our most basic needs.
Having lived in Darfur for close to seven months,
I felt at turns dizzy, tired, and depressed. A low-­level
rage had been slowly building for weeks. I had seen
people’s burnouts turn them nasty and cynical. But re-
ally I just wanted some water. To get the rank smell
of my own body out of my nose. My sanity relied on
so few things here—­water and fuel being the primary
ones. It felt as if even these were too much to ask for.

but it wasn’t only the loneliness or the living con-

ditions; it was the unrelenting feeling of futility within
the enormity of this war. The work my colleagues and
I were doing for international humanitarian agencies
wasn’t ending the country’s real problems: the merci-

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 6  JE SSICA A L E X A NDER

less horror of fire, rape, and murder that rode in on

horseback. All we could do was provide a few flimsy
plastic sheets, rice, and oil to fleeing farmers and their
families, some who had walked two weeks to get here.
Some came from Chad, some from the Nuba Moun-
tains to our east, others from one of the many small,
nameless villages scattered across the dusty Darfur
canvas. There was an endlessness to the crisis, and I
was on the verge of exhaustion. It was 2005 and the
Darfur crisis had already displaced nearly two mil-
lion people and claimed the lives of another seventy
thousand. People were terrorized off their land by the
Janjaweed, a government-­backed militia who set fire
to farming communities, landing their residents in dis-
placed persons camps throughout Darfur.
“Salaam Alaikum.” I said to Yusuf, the guard who
lay outside the door to our compound. He slept there
each night, supposedly protecting us. It was like plop-
ping grandpa on a rocker in front of our door. If there
weren’t teenagers with AK47s kidnapping and murder-
ing people, it would have been a funny joke.
“Alaikum Salaam. Keif Elhaal?” he asked cheer-
fully, standing up—­how are you?
If I had known the Arabic to say, I haven’t bathed in
a week, haven’t eaten in a day, my fatigue has reached
hallucinatory levels, and it’s 6:30 a.m. and I’m headed
to the camp where I’m pretty sure I’ll have to face
thousands more people and tell them that we don’t
have enough supplies for them. So, actually, Yusuf, I’m
pretty shitty. How about you? I would have.

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 C H A S I N G C H AO S  7

But the only response I knew to this question in

Arabic was Kulu Tamam—­all is good.
Nothing around me was good. Like the horse who
was slowly starving next door. Every morning when I
passed it tied to the tree outside our neighbor’s com-
pound, I wondered whether the animal, all skin and
grief, would be there when I returned. The family still
used it to carry bundles of firewood, sacks of grain,
barrels of water—­whatever could fit on the rickety cart
they strapped to the horse’s back. Its neck drooped
low and its spine and ribcage jutted out in sharp relief,
loose hide sagging toward the ground.
It was a short walk from the compound where Lila
and I lived to the office. Woolly scrub bushes lined the
roads; I trudged through the rust-­colored earth, kick-
ing up cinnamon sand with each step. Children often
teased us expats on our walk to work. Sometimes
they’d run up behind us and laugh and giggle screech-
ing “Khowaja! Khowaja!”—­white person. Other times
they’d sneak up close, touch our hair, and run away.
The soldiers who worked for AMIS (African Union
Mission in the Sudan) had corrupted some of the
boys and it wasn’t uncommon for them to yell “suck
my cock” or “big tits” when white women passed.
The rowdier boys sometimes even tossed rocks at our
backs. But they were gentle tosses, meant to get a rise
out of us, testing us to see how we’d react.
This morning, I saw a bunch of them in the dis-
tance.
Not today kids.

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 8  JE SSICA A L E X A NDER

I walked past them.

Seriously, not today.
They waited until my back was to them and two
pebbles hit me—­one on my shoulder and the other on
my heel.
You little shits. That did not just happen.
I snapped; all the indignities and frustrations of
weeks passed converging into a bullet rage. My back
teeth clamped down so tightly it felt as if they had
welded together. Whipping around, I seized a dusty
fistful of rocks from the road and cocked my arm. We
froze, staring at each other that way; like a Wild West
showdown, for what seemed like minutes but was only
seconds. I can’t imagine what I must have looked like
to them: a crazy white lady—­frayed, displaced, alone
on their streets. They turned and scurried down the
dirt road, laughing at me, skipping and pushing into
each other, turning back to get another look, and run-
ning farther and faster away. I tossed the rocks aside,
my hands stained brown from the scooped earth.
I need to get the hell out of here.

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