Chasing Chaos: My Decade In and Out of Humanitarian Aid by Jessica Alexander

Author:Jessica Alexander [Jessica Alexander]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780770436926
Publisher: Crown Publishing Group
Published: 2013-10-15T00:00:00+00:00

THERE WAS AN URGENCY about this situation that felt new. Perhaps it was the personal relationship I had with Ahmed, but whatever it was jolted me into action. The attacks in Tawila, the Janjaweed raping women, the rainstorms—these were all out of my control. But a sick child? That I could actually do something about. I went to Mark.

“There’s a girl in the camp. She has hydrocephalus.”

“What’s that?” he said, looking up from his laptop.

“It’s swelling in the brain or something. Her head is huge, Mark. She needs treatment. The family has exhausted all their options here. We’ve got to get her on a plane to Khartoum and soon.”

He leaned back in his chair, sighed, and combed his fingers through his hair. “WFP won’t let IDPs on the flights. You know that.” The World Food Programme was the UN agency that transported aid workers in and out of Darfur by plane.

“Yeah, I know. But can’t we pay for her and her family to get on a commercial flight out there?”

“We can’t do that. We can’t pick and choose IDPs to fly to Khartoum for medical treatment.”

“OK, well, then I’m going to pay for their flights,” I informed him.

“I don’t think you can do that, either. It will be seen as coming from our agency even if you are paying out of your own pocket because you’re employed by us.”

I called the Khartoum office and asked them. But I got the same response. “Last month there were a few IDPs with heart conditions who needed to be sent to Khartoum,” the emergency coordinator told me. “We couldn’t do it. We can’t send some people to Khartoum and not others. It would just be chaos.”

I talked to the health coordinator in one of the clinics who said the same thing. “There were people with lung issues in the camp a month ago,” she told me. “We couldn’t take them all to Khartoum.”

“So what happened?” I asked.

“Two of them have died already,” she said.

With every rejection, my resolve intensified. I hadn’t been confronted with this degree of clinical detachment before. How could I go back to Ahmed and tell him that there was nothing I could do, nothing that the humanitarian community could do, to help? That I was sorry, but he would have to watch his niece die. For the next week, I spent my nights dreaming of exploding heads, and my days negotiating with WFP, UNICEF, UNDP, none of which would agree to help get the girl on the flight because it wasn’t “in their mandate”—it wasn’t, in other words what they had come to Darfur to do and, therefore, they weren’t responsible for it. Large aid agencies like these developed programs for tens of thousands of people—large-scale operations that provided a little to many. But working at an individual level—a case-by-case basis—wasn’t what we were in the business of doing.

I sat across from Wilbens, the logistics officer from the United Nations’ World Health Organization (WHO), which oversees health care in emergencies.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.