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

group was ordered to pick up the pace so that no Tutsi was left.”
    While children roamed through the crowd, radios played softly in the background, and cows passed through the judge’s circle. The accused spoke freely and mildly about the murders he had committed, as if he were merely commenting on the weather.
    The community didn’t get up and scream. They didn’t run up to the people who killed their family members and rip their eyes out. They sat quietly and listened, poised and calm, and then stood up one by one to cross-examine the prisoner. “I saw you kill my cousin.” “You took my goats.” “You went in a truck with my brother and then I never saw him again.”
    The next man on trial named the people he killed. None, he said, were children. A woman from the crowd remembered his involvement differently, though.
    “You came and knocked on my door. You came into my house and tapped the side of my arm with a machete, telling me to shut up while your friends searched the ceiling and under the bed for my son. And when you found him, you killed him.” Surrounded and supported by her remaining friends and family, this woman pleaded with him to admit to this act.
    Finally, he responded. “I didn’t actually kill the child,” he told her, “but I was in the group that did. Bring the Bible here so I can swear on it.”

    Although it was a small town, I met more aid workers in Kibuye than I had in Kigali, and on our days off it turned out there was a lot to do: take boat rides on Lake Kivu, drive to the tea plantations, visit the mountain gorillas. I crossed the border into Congo for $30, which seemed like a lot of money, until an American friend reminded me that it was essentially a cab ride from the Upper West Side to Brooklyn and to get over it. I got over it. In Kibuye I awoke to the sounds of birds and chickens, walked to the office on a path beside the lake, read on the porch at sunset while frogs and crickets softly announced the end of the day.
    My posting after Kibuye would be Kibungo, a small border town near Tanzania, where the majority of the more than twenty-three thousand Rwandan refugees were returning from Tanzania were lodged. It was there that I fell in love.
    I MET CHARLES AT THE field office, a small building on the side of the road whose staff oversaw the returning refugees. Charles’s parents had fled Rwanda to Uganda in the late 1950s, when the wave of violencebetween the Hutu and the Tutsi struck the country. He was raised in the capital, Kampala, where he went to the English school. He was tall and smart and funny and didn’t care that I was American. He wasn’t like the other Rwandan men who had either asked me to get them a visa or to marry them within hours of our meeting.
    Charles supervised aid distributions to returning refugees in Kibungo, and I was sent there to help him. The refugees were loaded onto the backs of trucks at the Tanzanian camps, driven over the border and dropped off in Kibungo, where they were registered and supplied with food (rice, oil, and salt) and NFIs (the non-food items that Kassim had explained)—bars of soap, cooking materials, tarps with which to make temporary shelters. In most cases, the refugees’ property in Rwanda had been taken over by other families and their belongings lost. Everything they owned, they carried.
    One evening, a scheduled food delivery was delayed and the repatriating refugees waited overnight without anything to eat. When we arrived the next morning, they flocked to the car, surrounding it before we had even parked. They were frantic and flailing, shoving papers in Charles’s face, speaking wildly, each one needing help and attention. With the calm of an airline ground attendant after a flight has been cancelled, he walked through the crowd, writing down the requests, assuring each person one at a time.
    There were limited resources, and he had to distributethem to a group of people whose needs far exceeded our ability to