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

pronunciation? My voice? My accent?
    Before bed, they came out of the room they shared with Gloria and Betty carrying combs and gestured for me to sit down so that they could brush my hair. They each took a side and every so often stopped to quietly stroke my head to feel the wispy texture. They touched my white arms with intrigue, losing themselves in their curiosity. When they looked up to see me smiling at them, they would turn away, clutching their embarrassed smiles with both hands. I was the first white person they had ever gotten this close to.
    Betty was a nurse and more soft-spoken than Gloria. She was older and her eyes revealed years of grief. She walked slowly but authoritatively. Her hair was tied tightly in cornrows on her head, and she had a large space between her teeth, which only made her occasional smile even more endearing. She paced the house humming, which sometimes turned to singing, like she was lost in her own head, not noticing or caring that others could hear her. Gloria’s nephew Lawrence also lived in this house. He was close to my age, spoke English, and worked at a bank downtown. Every morning he’d sit at the breakfast table before any of us were dressed wearing the same white button-down shirt, green pants, and a checkered blue tie that stopped mid-belly. He called it “dressing smart.” Lawrence asked me a lot about America. He wanted to know what music we listened to and which movies we watched, whatmy friends did and what we ate. He looked at the pictures of my family and asked what they did, what our house looked like on the inside. He wanted to know whether I had ever seen snow and what it felt like, how many channels my TV had, whether I had met Michael Jordan or Madonna. I thought back to the questions my college friends at home asked before I left—Was I scared I would encounter lions? Did I have to pack my own water there? How was I going to charge my laptop without any outlets?—and Lawrence’s curiosity didn’t seem so absurd.
    But I quickly got a sense of why my colleagues shrank with horror from the rigors of living with locals. The interior of Gloria’s house seemed to be made of unfinished surfaces, crumbling walls, and floors that never got clean no matter how diligently they were scrubbed. The bathroom always had a soggy feel and a tangy odor. There was a toilet, but flushing it meant pouring in a large bucket of water at a rapid enough speed that it all gurgled down in one swallow. I’d usually find someone else’s turds floating at the top. My bed smelled like earth and if I sat down on it when the light was shining through the window, a mushroom-puff of dust arose from inside.

    I walked home from work every day. It was about fifteen minutes from the office to Gloria’s by foot, and theroad I took to get there was lined with half-constructed houses. That’s how people built their homes: when they had enough money to start, they’d put down a foundation. Then they waited until they had enough money to build the first wall. And then the second, and so on. Although there were banks in town, people didn’t usually make enough to save money the way I’d known people to save in America. All over, homes were in various stages of construction, grass and weeds growing inside the open rooms. I wondered how long it took some of these people to finish, and how old they would be when they finally moved in.
    Children followed me during my walk home. All that was needed was for one to spot me and scream “
Muzungu!
” and kids of all ages would come streaming out of their homes to walk with me. “How are you?” I asked. Some only knew one answer to this question: “I am fine!” You could tell whether children attended the morning or afternoon session of school because regardless of what time it was some would always shout “Good morning!,” while others inevitably greeted me with “Good afternoon!”
    Initially, I was flattered. They wanted to be near me and get to