Chasing Chaos: My Decade In and Out of Humanitarian Aid

It’s 2005 in Darfur, western Sudan. Jessica Alexander, a young American aid worker, is woken at 5.30am by the call to prayer. The night before she put a wet towel on her forehead and soaked her pajamas so that they would keep her cool. Now she gets out of bed to face the heat again and go to one of the camps for the internally displaced. Brought to Darfur to do something else, Alexander has suddenly found herself needed to manage Al Salam, a camp of about 20,000 people. She is just 27. She now spends her days trying to ensure that new arrivals are registered and that the kids don’t drown in the sewage pits. (Not that those kids are always appealing. The African Union peacekeepers have corrupted them: “It wasn’t uncommon for them to yell ‘suck my c***’ or ‘big t****’ when white women passed,” she reports.)Was Alexander doing any good? If not, why not, and what should we do about it? In this thoughtful book, Alexander tries to answer these questions, and I think she sort of succeeds.Alexander hadn’t originally planned to be an aid worker. On graduation she joined a New York ad agency, thrilled with her new briefcase, a gift from her mother, and the sound of her high heels clacking as she crosses the floor of the hall. Disillusion sets in as she finds herself working on a frozen pizza account. “When I wasn’t stuffing my face with our own soggy, salty brand or comparing the fat content ...to that of our competitors, I was watching their ads,” she says. Then her mother dies. “If I could die at age fifty, I wanted a more meaningful profession than the one provided by Hot Pockets and Sunny Delight.” Alexander decides she’d like to work in aid and development. She joins the New York office of an NGO, but quickly becomes frustrated that she has never been to any of the places her colleagues are talking about. She decides to do a Masters in development, and winds up doing a summer internship with the UN in Rwanda.It is at that point that this book takes off. Alexander finds herself transcribing people’s interviews for refugee status. She finds out that these take a long time to process, being approved in Kigali and Nairobi and going eventually to Geneva. She is also less than impressed with her fellow-expats. “Most expats lived ...in spacious houses situated behind high walls, some with barbed wire at the top ...At dinner parties like these we drank alcohol from Italy and ate cheese from France. The expats sat around, complaining that their guard was caught sleeping again....” This needs a pinch of salt. Not all expats in aid live like that, especially if they work for NGOs. Still, some do. And as Alexander’s career progresses, she finds the aid worker’s expat way of life bizarre. “It wasn’t out of the ordinary when in any humanitarian setting to get an e-mail with the subject line “War Children Party— Thursday Night— Festive Attire Required!” or “Center for Survivors of Torture— Fancy Dress Night Friday.”Alexander went on to do research in Sierra Leone (she is more positive about this) and eventually to help evaluate the responses to the 2004 tsunami and the 2010 Haiti earthquake. In Colombo, she hears that post-tsunami that there is actually too much money, chasing too few projects; NGOs building child centres, for example, and then competing for the children. There are also economic distortions from the influx of aid, and she meets a teacher and a judge who work for local NGOs because there’s more money in it. Meanwhile in Darfur there was too little money, and northern Uganda and Congo got no attention. In Haiti, where more than 220,000 people were killed and approximately 180,000 homes were wrecked, she finds that cars bound for aid agencies are held up in customs because (it is said) officials are getting kickbacks from car rental companies.Working at New York HQ is no better, as she must confront the language of bureaucratic obfuscation. “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.” As an editor in one of the big aid organizations, I have to weed this noxious self-serving rubbish out of reports (I have banned the word modality). So I can confirm that Alexander has a point.It sounds from the above as if this book telling us that all aid is a waste. In fact, Alexander is more nuanced that that. She points out that while aid may be an unregulated industry, it is a self-critical one, and it is considering its failures and increasing its transparency. She is right about this; one wishes the banks could do the same. She finishes by talking about innovations like cash transfers and mobile technology – again, this is true; UNICEF, for instance, is putting a lot of effort into innovation. Alexander also puts the aid “biz” in perspective. The sums spent are large ($ 17.9 billion on humanitarian crises worldwide in 2012) but are dwarfed by the $ 114 billion for Katrina relief, the $ 50 billion for Storm Sandy, and the $ 13.7 billion spent on the 2012 London Olympics. Neither does Alexander ever say that humanitarian aid is a waste of time. What she wants readers to understand is that aid cannot fix the world. Good government is needed too.I did have reservations about this book. It’s a bit longer than it needs to be, and occasionally repetitive. At times Alexander is too negative about the people who work in aid. In fact some of them are profoundly committed and do lose their lives, as seven – four from UNICEF – did in a bomb explosion in Somalia in 2015. I wondered, too, if everyone in this book would really have wanted to be. Some deserve Alexander’s scrutiny, but perhaps not all. In particular, staying with a local family in Kigali, she records there was often someone’s turd floating in the toilet bowl; did she need to tell us that? I also found Alexander a little privileged at times. When she first decides she wants to do aid work, she is told to go into the Peace Corps to get some ‘field cred’. 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.” I started as a volunteer and served for nearly five years. I also wondered whether she realised how lucky she was to get her student internship in Rwanda.Still, she made good use of it, and has clearly not been afraid of hardship. Few people would live and work somewhere like Darfur by choice. Also, while Chasing Chaos has no literary pretensions, it’s well-written. The beginning was immediately evocative for me, as I began my own international career in Sudan, albeit many years before. I could feel the extreme heat and hear the scraping of the zinc doors, and taste the very sweet tea and imagine the bleached-white sky at midday.And in general, I did like this book. Alexander is clear about the frustrations, and clear about their causes. She appears to be someone with values and common sense. She also accepts that while her business should not exist, it also cannot not exist, at least for now; and she is responsible and practical. Chasing Chaos is an honest and readable book about life at the sharp end of humanitarian aid. Despite some reservations, I strongly recommend it.

Would 100% recommend this book to anyone who's interested in humanitarian aid.

From the moment I read the Yahoo! News article regarding this book, I immediately knew I had to read it. I got it just a few weeks back and I seldom put it down until I finished reading it.On the surface, this story is about humanitarianism, but I came away from it feeling as though it was actually one person's reflections regarding the human condition. The totality of experiences that we attribute to our lives as humans is featured in Jessica Alexander's tale of her career in humanitarian aid. We see moments of tragedy (mostly moments of tragedy), with a few small victories here and there. People suffer loss, people experience incredible highs, only to be brought back down to unbelievable lows. We see wide-eyed idealism washed away by the brutal and unforgiving realities of the world we live in, followed by "growing up" and both an acceptance of the ways of the world and a newfound perspective on the things one has no control over. All of this set against the backdrop of disasters whose scale is unfathomable. During and after reading this book, it will be impossible for a reader to not look inward and examine their own lives, emotions and feelings and wonder what it all truly amounts to.If Jessica Alexander were a fictional character, she would be one of the most endearing characters of her time. She truly bares her soul here and writes with a purpose, as if she has carried such a heavy burden for so long and wishes to let it all go by sharing her experiences with the rest of us. Ms. Alexander has no problems portraying herself as flawed, imperfect and vulnerable; she readily admits that altruism was not the biggest reason for her choosing the career field she is currently in. While I am worlds apart from her in terms of background, life course and outlooks, she is someone I felt I could relate to very well. Her humanity really shines through and Alexander comes through like the kind of person you would feel very glad to have known. While her tales of her experiences in humanitarian aid and in foreign lands are certainly captivating and the focus of the story, Alexander's "character," for a lack of a better term, really surfaces when she speaks about the loss of her mother. Not all of us can work in humanitarian aid (as the book describes, it is not an easy field to get into and is most certainly not for everyone), but all of us can at least contemplate the loss of a loved one. The emotions and recollections she shares with us regarding that unfortunate moment in her life are difficult to read, but it will make a reader take a deep look within themselves and evaluate our own lives, decisions and experiences. These tales, coupled with her incredible storytelling, plain-talk, bluntness and infectious humor, makes for a person whom you feel so much empathy and a strange sense of "loyalty" to.It was only fitting that I finished this book on Thanksgiving. A thought that came up frequently while reading this memoir was just how fortunate I have it here in the United States. The incredible amount of human suffering endured by so many people around the world is truly humbling and more than enough to make you realize how far the U.S. and the rest of the developed world has come. While this book may not transform you into an aid worker, it ought to ensure that you never take plumbing for granted ever again!

Firstly to start by saying this was my first book bought on the subject. What a eye opener... very informative.From the everyday struggles in the field from beginner to experienced.......Personally the struggles between swapping from being in the field to back home city living lifestyle...... showing you a insight into this, something people can do? Can you achieve a balance?The book covers the thoughts and terms people a guess would think but wouldn't really express verbally. In regards to tackling those HUG Vacations( People on self feel good helping people/selfie holidays) the harm they do? how there perceived from NGOS?Covering briefly the corruptions.. governments working with or against agencies......Very personal account.I could go on however all you need to know this was worth a read, brilliant eye opener for the first book.

I bought this book after it was suggested to me by a friend and I enjoyed reading it a lot! It reads very well; the author includes the history of the countries she visited, a lot of details on how the aid industry work and her point of view and feelings. The contents are interesting and made me think about aid differently. Recommended!

Excellent read and highly recommended

Fab book

Book arrived as described. Good seller.