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

kitchen and she opened the refrigerator. “Oh good, she managed the pasta!” Nisha said. “Last time you should have seen the mess she made of it!” Nisha was referring to her cook. And when she said that we’d be cooking, she meant making a salad, and this was because she didn’t trust her cook to wash the vegetables in bottled water. All of the other items for the dinner party—the large pasta dish, grilled chicken, vegetable stew—were already prepared. The table was set and all we had to do was light the candles with the matches placed neatly next to them.
    Nisha offered me a beer and we went out to her porch. “Tim will be home any time now,” she said. Her husband Tim was still looking for work in Rwanda. Nisha had gotten a good job here and he had followed her out, hoping to find work when he arrived. “Next posting is his turn,” she explained. “Once my contract is up here, I’ll follow him wherever he gets work. But I like it here. I hope we can stay for a while. At least another year.”
    Eventually the guests arrived—ten people in total, all of them aid workers from various agencies. At some point I went to the bathroom and as I was coming out heard someone calling my name. “Jessica?”
    It was Katrin. “I didn’t know you were coming here! I just came straight from the office! I would have given you a lift if I knew you were coming!”
    By now, I had shared an office with this woman for three weeks. Nisha had been warm and inviting, a quality that I would certainly find in others, but most people, once they learned I’d only be there a few months, were distant. Looking back, I couldn’t really blame Katrin; keeping some degree of distance from the short-termers was how we dealt with the transience of this existence. Eventually I, too, would begin to regard people the same way—anything to protect myself from the constant emotional jolts of this life. Maintaining personal stability became important in ways I’d never imagined, and in ways I wasn’t at all prepared for.
    AS THE WEEKS WENT ON and I got to know more expats, I realized how odd my living situation actually was. Most expats lived like Nisha, in spacious houses situated behind high walls, some with barbed wire at the top, others with broken glass bottles crammed into the cement. They had guards who opened the gates when they returned home, and generators that ensured they always had electricity. The houses that I visited had porches and backyards, air conditioners and DVD players, stereo equipment that rivaled my dad’s surround sound system at home. 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
, that their driver was on the verge of getting fired after being late
again
, that so and so came into work drunk
again
.
    “I just can’t wait to get to Jinga this weekend,” one would say, inhaling a cigarette deeply.
    “Where’s Jinga?” I asked.
    “You’ve never been to Jinga? Oh, it’s
fabulous
. You have to get there before you leave. It’s the start of the Nile not far from Kampala. We go rafting there.” She turned to her friend, “Edward, you cannot fall out of the boat this time!” Her tone was so detached, as if we were living in some parallel universe, no part of which resembled the Africa that I had imagined from home.Eventually, with my personal life under control, I was able to settle into work. Rwanda seemed to have closed the chapter on the genocide. The identification cards introduced by the Belgian colonialists that differentiated between Hutus and Tutsis—like the yellow stars that classified Jews during the Holocaust—were abolished. People no longer referred to themselves as Hutu or Tutsi, but as Rwandans.
    Still, it was impossible to meet someone who hadn’t been touched by the genocide in some way. Taxi drivers spoke candidly about family members who were slaughtered. Opening their