Jessica Alexander arrived in Rwanda in the aftermath of the 1994 genocide as an idealistic intern, eager to contribute to the work of the international humanitarian aid community. But the world that she encountered in the field was dramatically different than anything she could have imagined. It was messy, chaotic, and difficult—but she was hooked. In this honest and irreverent memoir, she … she introduces readers to the realities of life as an aid worker. We watch as she manages a 24,000-person camp in Darfur, collects evidence for the Charles Taylor trial in Sierra Leone, and contributes to the massive aid effort to clean up a shattered Haiti. But we also see the alcohol-fueled parties and fleeting romances, the burnouts and self-doubt, and the struggle to do good in places that have long endured suffering.
Tracing her personal journey from wide-eyed and naïve newcomer to hardened cynic and, ultimately, to hopeful but critical realist, Alexander transports readers to some of the most troubled locations around the world and shows us not only the seemingly impossible challenges, but also the moments of resilience and recovery.
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When we think of international aid workers at all, we tend to think of them in one of two ways (mostly depending on our political leanings): selfless saints or intrusive busybodies. Strangely enough, Jessica Alexander, the author of this memoir, agrees with both views after a fashion.
Chasing Chaos is Alexander’s story, a recounting of her baptism-of-fire in crisis-area fieldwork for various NGOs. Her mother’s death from cancer spurs her into doing something to “make a difference,” which sends her to various of the world’s hellholes over the following ten years. There she faces the exhilaration of handling nonstop emergencies, the bewilderment and displacement that come from being thrown headlong into alien environments, the triumph of small victories, the terror of being faced with one’s own shortcomings, the seemingly endless grind of working too much to get too little done, primitive living conditions, bureaucracy, loneliness, crumbling relationships, and the expat’s curse of feeling as if she doesn’t belong anywhere.
Alexander is a lively, engaging guide through all this. She’s well aware (often too much so) of her early inexperience and her skills deficits, yet plunges in anyway with a moxie that can be infectious. She draws clear portraits of the many people who cross her path: fellow expats, coworker “nationals” (the people who call the hellhole “home”), refugees, visiting officials, the occasional hookup. Her descriptions of life in NGO compounds, refugee camps, guesthouses, and no-star “hotels” are atmospheric and easy to visualize. She teaches the reader a goodly amount about how the international aid game is played without making it seem like homework. Despite the occasional sturm und drang, this is a very fast read; I polished off the almost 400 pages in a single afternoon.
My quibbles are few. The chapters concerning her brief intervals in the U.S. between assignments aren’t nearly as interesting (to us or, evidently, to her) as those set in the field, though I suppose they add roughage to a narrative that sometimes risks floating away on its own airiness. While it’s good that she explicitly acknowledges that at bottom, she’s a privileged white New York City girl parachuting into other people’s messes, she can belabor the point.
This book reminds me of nothing so much as Blowing My Cover: My Life as a CIA Spy, another tell-all memoir written by a young woman who, in a burst of idealism, joins another globe-spanning organization to do some good and is undone by the messiness of the world and the dysfunction of the agency. It’s more than a little ironic that the respective authors’ parent agencies — the UN and NGOs on one hand, the CIA on the other — could switch books and the outcomes (and narratives) would be much the same.
Chasing Chaos is for anyone who reads a newspaper and wonders what really goes on when Doctors Without Borders or Save The Children lands in the middle of a disaster or war zone to try to save the day. Like Alexander, you may come out admiring the sheer grit of the individuals in the field while shaking your head at the overwhelming scale and general hopelessness of the work they undertake. You’ll probably enjoy your few hours in the author’s company and be glad someone like her is around to do these things — someone who isn’t you.