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

diaper. With a nervous chuckle he muttered, “I wonder how the mothers keep their kids apart? Don’t they all look the same to you?”
    I smiled weakly at his attempt at irony, the all-black-people-look-the-same joke. But he was panicking, and I realized he was serious.

    I had imagined refugee camps to be like this. Homes made of mud were crowded together in tight clusters. They looked as though they just sprouted from the earth, like human-sized sand castles. Cracks on the walls created a zigzag pattern, like a large road map. I couldn’t imagine how these homes didn’t melt in therainy season, but somehow a combination of cement and mud held them together. The alleys between them were lined with sewage, and children ran up and down the pathways, dodging the soggy strips on either side. Windowpanes were made of the tins from cooking oil containers that read “Gift of USA,” which was how the United States labeled its food donations so that recipients were certain to know where their meal came from. Some camp residents played makeshift board games or cards, squatting among goats and chickens in the alleys. Already a layer of brown dust caked my pale skin and linen clothes, but the residents looked clean and fresh, their faces smooth, their skin radiant.
    For clothing, most people at the camp made do with Salvation Army donations—mementos of experiences they had never had, expressions they had probably never heard. Adults wore “Don’t mess with Texas” T-shirts and shirts that said “Shit Happens.” Kids dressed in novelty jerseys (“Co-ed Naked Field Hockey: We Know How to Handle Sticks”) and keepsake boxer shorts (“I boogied my pants off at Jenny’s Sweet 16”). And once I saw a grandmother wearing a T-shirt emblazoned with the words “Tug my Jugs.”
    DURING THE WEEKS I SPENT in Kibuye, I worked out of the agency’s three-room field office. It was run by Meredith, a French-speaking Canadian woman in her late thirties who had already been there close to a year. She worked with two Rwandan program staff and oneadministrative staffer. I was the only other person in the office with whom she could communicate in English and I think she appreciated it.
    “You know, I don’t even know if that camp population figure is right anymore. We’ve been using it for over a year now, and I don’t know when the last census was even taken.” She revealed this on my first day in Kibuye, as we sat in her small office by Lake Kivu. Refugees moved fluidly in and out of the camp, so we never knew at any one time how many people were housed there. But Meredith was concerned about an emergent underground market, where people traded and forged their ration cards, adding additional children or relatives to get more supplies.
    That became my task—to reregister families and check the agency’s records. With a team of three Rwandan staff, we went door-to-door numbering houses with white chalk and writing down how many people lived inside. It was a simple job that didn’t require a lot of skill, but it allowed me to explore the camp, enter people’s homes, see how they lived. Most families crammed inside these small cracked homes, pushing all the mattresses to one side, where they’d sleep close together. When I visited, it was usually the women and girls who were at home, cooking or braiding hair, sweeping the floors, nursing infants, pounding cassava.
    After visiting for a few weeks, I started to be recognized by camp members. They invited me into their homes for tea, let me hold their babies, asked me to take their pictures. Many people in the camp confusedme with Melanie, a Canadian girl who worked for another organization. She had cropped blonde hair (mine was long and dark) and she was a good six inches shorter, never mind thirty pounds heavier than I was. No one would have ever confused us back at home, but I tried not to be insulted when people shouted “Mel!” as I walked through camp. I remembered Kassim’s