chasing chaos my decade in and out of humanitarian aid

She is assisted by Ishaq, her ‘local’ assistant and translator.

In Darfur, Alexander is flown into the command of a committee representing the 24,000 residents of the El Fasher settlement. Hardship duty stations like Darfur… were where you moved up in the ranks and built your resume.” When she accepts an assignment in Darfur, despite resistance from her concerned father, she admits with disarming honesty, “If I wanted to keep doing aid work, I had to go to a place like Darfur. It works best as ethnography of a strange, and increasingly prominent and powerful tribe: the international aid workers, covering their motivations and contradictions.

Nor is it an in-depth assessment of the response mounted by the international community to natural disasters such as the tsunami (Alexander also covers the period she spent as an evaluator in Sri Lanka and Indonesia, covering the rehabilitation and resettlement efforts). But it is not meant to be a comprehensive examination of the politics underpinning the massive displacement witnessed in Rwanda or Darfur. From a statement on racism, the narrative switches to examine how well the two communities - those affected by crises, usually in Asia or Africa and those who responded on behalf of international agencies and NGOs, usually well heeled Europeans and North Americans - understand or even recognise each other.Ĭhasing Chaos is not an account of the crises per se details of the causes and complexities are glossed over.

This seemed like an uncannily apt metaphor for the central question raised by Alexander’s intimate and self-aware memoir of her years spent chasing humanitarian crises across the globe.

Melanie is the Canadian volunteer who works for another organisation, six inches shorter and with cropped blonde hair as opposed to the author’s long and dark hair. When Jessica Alexander drives into a refugee camp in Rwanda, her humanitarian aid worker colleague, surrounded by newly arrived refugees from Congo, asks her: “I wonder how the mothers keep their kids apart? Don’t they all look the same to you?” Alexander doesn’t respond to the question, coloured as it is by off-hand racism: don’t all black people look the same? Later, during her work with the community, she is often addressed as ‘Mel’.

Chasing chaos my decade in and out of humanitarian aid