Grasping for the Wind

Kharaz Refugee Camp. It sounds matter-of-fact, but I don't know where to start. A cacophony of images, faces and stories swirl out of the word itself.

Kharaz.

It is difficult for me to pronounce with anything but a mix of hardened resignation and frustration. I think of my former roommate and colleague Ranya squeezing her eyes closed and squealing “Kharaz!” on a weekend night before she would need to return. “I just can’t wrap my mind around the difference,” she said earlier that day, afloat in the ocean at the Sheraton beach. “It’s like: are these places even on the same planet? The mindfuck is really killing me." For people who work at this place, the weekend is a bridge over trouble, the camp itself a cesspool of trouble, distress, broken lives and dreams.

The two-hour drive to the camp from Aden is monotonous, but not unremarkable. Running along the coast, it spans a seaside desert speckled with clumps of jerry-cans and other containers capable of holding water. Amongst a bunch of perhaps twenty such vessels, one woman will crouch, taking refuge from the sun under a scrubby tree with fabric tied over its bony aperture to provide shade. But we are not the water trucks they await, and so we speed by, sipping bottled water and leaving them to their dust. The sea glitters 100 feet away, and from time to time, groups of Africans walking along the road raise their hand to flag down a ride. Have they come from the red sea cost, from Kharaz camp, from the next village? We can't know because we leave them to their dust as well.

The reality of the place settles in as we veer off the road, winding through dirt paths on rocky terrain, through the village surrounding the camp. In the last year, the camp and its caretakers have been beset with security problems from the host population. No sooner were disputes settled with the immediately neighboring community (whose complaints that we help the refugees but not then really resonate when one takes into account that malnutrition rates there are consistently higher than the camp) than further flung tribes moved in to seize the opportunities presented by big, brassy NGOs driving through the desert. In one of the deep gullies leading up to the camp, our car was hijacked back in May. A man from the village tried to protest, and the hijacker, belonging to a further-flung tribe, pointed a gun to his head. “Do you want it to be you instead of the foreigner?" In the end, both our staff and the villagers realized the situation was serious, and let the gunman take the car. They rode off into the morning and my colleagues were force traverse the remaining 5 minutes drive in 30 minutes walk, weighed down by possessions, and stockpiles of food and water. Our car was the first of three (and counting) to be hijacked in this manner.

Once we have safely reached the camp and honked our way into the compound through a perennial throng of refugees clustered outside the door, my colleagues retreat to their accommodation to unpack before beginning the workday. Living quarters for the implementing partners – that is, the NGOs funded by the UNHCR to do its bidding – are shabby. Rooms are dorm style, two people share a room equipped with twin bed on either wall, a small cupboard, table, and refrigerator. Thank god that they are air conditioned and that there is a refrigerator, but this is not always reliable, as the camp’s failing, overworked generators frequently fade in a flickering of lights and whirring of electrically confused appliances. There are scheduled outages each day, among them from 6-8am. In the stifling summer heat (for several months, the daytime temperatures rarely drop below 100°, this means waking up drenched, each morning. There is no kitchen, just a small gas stove and the bathroom sink for dishes.

Then, of course, there’s the UNHCR housing – or “the palace” as the NGO workers have named it. With its attractive stucco, inviting courtyards, full-time chef, private, outage-immune generator, it is the cause of bitterness and envy among the aid workers, as well as a less easily defined sense of the kind of mentality these disparities symbolize.

With our personal affects stashed away, we re-emerge into the blazing desert sun, beneath a broad and merciless sky, the wind whipping dust across the barrenness.

“Vanity of vanities,” says the Preacher.
“Vanity of vanities, all is vanity.”
What profit has a man from all his labor
In which he toils under the sun? (Ecclesiastes 1:2-3)

What profit has a man from his idleness, from death-defying journey across the sea concluding in this growing wasteland. What was at the start of the year barely 12,000 is now14,000 people surviving instead of dying, but perhaps dying all the same. What kind of life is the meager existence existence with their small ration, the bare concrete walls many have called home for decades. (Many of the newer arrivals, who have only be in Kharaz for a year or two, are still living in a tent.) If there are (official) unemployment rates of 35% in Yemen for Yemenis, they are considerably higher Somalis.

Nuseiba knows about their struggle, and tries against the odds to find a redeeming value in it. She has been working at the camp for three years, longer than almost anyone else here. She is institutional memory in a place where the ground under everyone's feet seems constantly to be changing, even as they live out a monotonous, dull existence of waiting. She knows everyone, but most of all the long-time residents, who have spent nearly two decades agitating for change. Knock at the doors of the NGOs, get on their list, prove that you've got it so bad that you just HAVE to be resettled to Sweden. Day in, day out, screaming, trumpeting for attention. But in the end there is no one listening - people come and go with the movement of the seasons. Very few are left to remember you.

...indeed, all is vanity and grasping for the wind.
What is crooked cannot be made straight,
And what is lacking cannot be numbered. (Ecclesiastes 1:13-15)

Another former colleague calls Kharaz "the circus." The working of things seem to defy logic, residents have long learned that the easiest way to get service is to get attention.

I am walking with Nuseiba from the field office to the main compound and we are stopped at least a dozen times along the way. There is a woman wailing and carrying on, screaming that her aunt is sick, her aunt is sick, sick, SICK! Nusaiba explains to me that her aunt is in a nearby city; she wants bus fare. Budget line items flash through my mind – community self-management, leadership training, daycare center, literacy and English. Assistance in the form of food for the very sick, weak, young, and disabled? Does she really expect that we’ll cover a bus ticket, given what our actual activities are? But really, it’s simple – certain people have simply resolved to take what they can get, and they realize that they might just get something if they make a large enough commotion. It happens often enough.

The circus does not even stop at the 25-foot concrete walls of the compound which houses the sleeping quarters of non-refugee staff and NGO offices. Theoretically it is guarded and separated from the rest of the camp. The reality though plays out in front of my eyes: I’m sitting at the desk in the office trying to get things done when I see him: Ibrahim. Concrete and crowning barbed wire can’t keep out people like Ibrahim. Similar in behavioral pattern to the likes of Aisha, he is a determined old man we all know very well. It's not clear what he wants, really, I have concluded that it might well simply be attention as an end in and of itself rather than a means to any assistance, resettlement, or other demand. He masterfully navigates his way back and forth between Kharaz and Basateen, requesting help from any organization he comes into contact with, raising hell in the meantime, and hiding the skill with which he works the system behind his doddering movements. Like Aisha, knows that we are here because we at least used to care, back when we were less browbeaten by the stubborn realities on the ground. He plays on this fact, and our beats our brows further into the ground.

I first encountered him in Basateen. We had provided him with a shelter in Kharaz, enrolled him in the feeding program for elders (so that they can receive prepared food rather than the dry rations given to camp residents capable of cooking for themselves) and generally cared for his well-being. But one day he disappeared from Kharaz and re-appeared in Basateen, claiming to have been referred by our office in Kharaz. When pressed (after we cross-checked and called his bluff) he confessed that conditions were too hot in Kharaz, and that he preferred for us to find him a place in Basateen.

Today, he wanders into the office and begins gesturing and pulling at my sleeve. He is looking for Siad Barre, and won’t leave the office until we give him his number. I'm not sure if such a maverick can really be senile, but, like the rest of my colleagues, I have to give him the benefit of the doubt and be gentle. I call Nuseiba, who is the only one who he will listen to. She talks him out of our office and out of the compound. "Who let him in?" I demand angrily, once she returns. “He was making problems for the guards,” she says, shrugging.

For every Ibrahim, – there are any number of genuine cases outside the door and many more who are too shy to ask for help. And really, who’s to draw a clear line between those genuinely needing help that they can’t give to themselves and the attention-seekers? They all came here seeking a better life, and all they have done is traded violence for boredom, many dropping their standard of living. The people in Kharaz are the ones who are trapped, and can’t move on – the very old, very young, single mothers, the disabled. If they could move on, they mostly likely would, in the direction of Saudi Arabia (where they can make some real money) or at the very least Aden.

Theirs is a bad situation, with the hope of tangibly improving it slim. Uncertain future, a past mangled and broken, a country trodden to the ground. The prevailing sentiment was summed up most clearly when I overheard a Yemeni ask a Somali whether he would return to his country if he could. The latter shook his head. "مفيش بلد، مفيش أي شيء. بس الرماد" There is no country, there is nothing.Only ashes.

The statement put a lump in my throat, and a sense of frustration at the senselessness of it all. Ashes for what? To think that all of the suffering caused by this extended brutality was the result of conscious human decisions spun out of control... It is nearly unbearable. Miles and miles of blood, sweat and tears spilled over what? Nothing. Nihilistic violence. I picture the impossibility of turning back the clock, and at the same time dream of the suffering which could have been prevented if... If what? If things had been different? My thoughts turn to human nature, and I wonder if they could have been different, or if we are all destined to revert back to a state of nature in which life is nasty, brutish and short. Could the same self-destruction be all of our destiny, the seeds of our demise but waiting to be unleashed and to spin out of control?

I see what I see, and feel the deadly ambivalence that blankets this entire godforsaken outpost creeping into my thoughts.

I have seen everything in my days of vanity:
There is a just man who perishes in his righteousness,
And there is a wicked man who prolongs life in his wickedness.
Do not be overly righteous,
Nor be overly wise:
Why should you destroy yourself?
Do not be overly wicked,
Nor be foolish:
Why should you die before your time? (Ecclesiastes 7:15-17)

Shortly after Ibrahim's cameo and before the 1-4 siesta break, a boy comes into our office. He is perhaps nine. He walks up to me with a serious expression on his face."إشتي بسطين." he barks gruffly. I want [to go to] Basateen

“أيش?” I ask, annoyed at having to pause from my work. What? He repeats himself.

Why do you want to go there? I ask him. It's better to stay here with your family.

My mommy is in Basateen. We came here on a bus and now she went back.

Where is your daddy?

He stares at me dully and says nothing, then reasserts himself. I want to go to Basateen

I look around the room to see if anyone seems to recognize this boy, if there’s an angry parent around the corner who will come haul him off by the ear. No one. I probe. So you came here today?

Yes.

What did your mommy say?

Goodbye.

Oh. Do you have relatives here that you are staying with?

No.

He pushes his foot into the floor then gazes with interest at my pen, as I jot down the notes of his case. Yes, the boy (who I learn through successive questioning is named Ismail) has become another case in our perennially growing caseload. I am momentarily overcome by a wave of sadness, a keen feeling my own powerlessness juxtaposed against a situation I would like to change. It continues to wash over me as I give him the pen, tell him to sit at the vacant desk across from me and draw for awhile, call in a community mobilizer from our counseling team, leave Ismail to draw on my documents while we speak in hushed tones at the other end of the office. Earlier today, Ibrahim came into the office, crying uncontrollably. They took him to the daycare to play with other kids and figure out what had happened. His mother seems to have abandoned him here in Kharaz.

Now Ismail will go home with the community mobilizer – himself a refugee – to eat lunch.Okay Ismail, he says cheerfully, it’s time to go. Let’s go eat lunch. Ismail refuses. I want to go to Basateen, he insists, a slightly quivering lip the only thing betraying his stone faced stare. I nod approvingly and try to appear optimistic as the community mobilizer continues to holds out his hand.

It’s better you go with him, you have lunch, we can sort everything out. We need to make arrangements, arrange the transportation, I tell him briskly, as if these are the normal course of events. I suppose the label "normal" is true after all, if incomplete. Once again, we will try to reconnect a severed cord without allowing the mother to use her son as an instrument to gain monetary assistance. The darker part of this reconciliation be to try to find his mother to report her to the police, as we seem to do so often, alongside our “awareness-raising sessions” that abandoning a child is a crime and other related topics. I want to keep this kid safe from the harm and trauma that is only just beginning for him, adopt him as my own and raise him like a child should be raised. But there are too many, too much to do, and as much as I hate to admit it, this place is fleeting for me."The passer-by is always reasoned and wise, offers good and intelligent words for everything, then passes by."

And so, another day in Kharaz bears witness to the birth pains of another thorny issue - an organizational headache and a personal tragedy. I will be distressed about it today, next week, maybe even for as long as I stay here. Longer than most people. In the end, though, I am just passing by, I don't have to live this life. But still, it marks me.

Therefore I hated life because the work that was done under the sun was distressing to me, for all is vanity and grasping for the wind. (Ecclesiastes 2:17)

Flight

I am sitting in my office with would -be donors, talking to them about projects. I explain to them the our suite of interventions and the services we currently provide, the target population and the way they were defined, by vulnerability. They inquire as to specific profiles of people. Do you help women who have had complications during pregnancy? What about minors at risk of trafficking? I talk about the UNHCR-defined special needs categories that form the parameters of our service provision.

But while I am still talking, a hear a distant rumbling. I remember - today we have the clothing distribution, this must be the people coming to claim their due. I glance out the window and see people pushing, shoving, clawing their way to the door where the clothing is being handed out, children running circles around screaming all the while while their parents look on - an uncontrollable, wild, a free-for-all. While I speak, I glance at the behavior. Some beneficiaries accept gladly. Others take and walk sullenly away. A few, however, throw the clothes on the ground in disgust, spit on them to indicate inadequacy.

I stayed sitting, talking to the donors, knowing that my staff will handle the distribution. The ruckus outside continues, and scold the guards when occasionally a beneficiary occasionally slips past them and enters the room where we are sitting, wild-eyed and hungry for more. We give give give, it seems, and it is never enough to satisfy. To the contrary, as the ones on the front lines of the giving, we are blamed in the case of dissatisfaction.

My next meeting ends early, and so I go to help with another distribution. I hear the rumbling and we brace ourselves. I rush to the center of the room, ahead of the rumbling. The crowd enters and stones start to fly. "You've got to run!" someone screams. "They all know that you sign the checks!" I am frozen for an instant as the stones begin flying from all corners, the air thick with them. I look toward the ceiling and leap towards it, suspending in midair, using a strength that is not there, not strength but rather willpower. There is a mountain to climb but not strength to climb - I will the strength out of my reserves, deep within myself. I climb higher into the air, lift through a hole in the ceiling and collapse on the floor of the other side, gasping. It's a different world, a calm, orderly world. No stone throwing, no anarchy, no hostility, no sense of entitlement. I sigh in relief and drop into a deep sleep.

Then it is morning and I wake up for work with a jolt, realizing as I rub my eyes that it was all a dream - I have yet to fly away.

I am not a field person.

For the past several months, Mustu and I have been talking about the distinction between field people and non-field people; respectively, those working in international development whose dispositions incline them toward actually implementing the programs and living in the countries where they take place and, on the other hand, those who are better off sitting in a desk in DC.

SIPA grad that he is, he knows it takes all kinds. He knows true field people, people who think they are field people, but aren't in reality, and, finally, people who embrace that their professional lives will be largely confined to corridors in Washington, DC. The question that spurred this discussion was of course, a personal one: am I a field person? My current position has taught me that I've definitely got the ability. I've been managing projects start to finish, and they are nearing completion - successful completion, I'd say - despite any number of confounding variables. I can speak the language, interact with the locals, get the job done by pragmatizing my way out of sticky situations.

Even if I can do this, though, do I want to? More than a question of ability, Mustu proposed, it's a question of personal preference. If you're going to stay on the field, the life there has to make you happy and fulfilled. That and/or home needs to make you unhappy.

Where do I stand? When we started the discussion we were both on the fence.

One evening when I'm in Sana'a, Mustu goes out for fish with the NGO/UNHCR crew. He makes some mention about Aden being the field and is reproached. This is not the field. To Sana'a maybe, this is the field. To Cairo though, Sana'a is the field. To Geneva, Cairo is the field. It's all relative, though. To Aden, Kharaz [refugee camp] is the field. To Kharaz, Mogadishu is the field.

This relativity begs the question of what "the field" even means. What's the definition of this concept? It's a series of challenges, a series of dares. You have to be more "daring" to live in Sana'a than in Cairo, more daring still to live in Aden, and then Kharaz, and down the line. But where does it end, and what does this scale even mean? Increasing degrees of self-deprivation, relinquishing the things that create life as we know it, and seeing what you can make of it. What is left after all of the familiar affects are gone is the field. What we make of it depends on whether you're a field person or not.

Why go to the field? You might instinctively think that the answer lies in helping other people, but I'm inclined to think it's intensely personal. To make a career out of this, you have to like it, on some level. So what's to like, what selfish reasons are there to choose this path? I've observed in some of my colleagues several key motivating factors.

1. Bragging rights, adrenaline and a life less ordinary. It sounds harsh, but there are definitely people out here because they were nothing special where they were. Nothing like a little foreign adventure to make you more interesting, right?

2. Danger Tolerance. Some people thrive on the feeling of constant danger, or just block it out. Or at least, they must, based on where they choose to go. One woman I know just got back from a 3-month tour in Pakistan. I asked her how it was. She describes the beauty of the country, how interesting the colleagues were. "Of course," she says, "it was difficult because we lost three colleagues in the first week I was there." I raise my eyebrows and inquire further. Shooting, bombs, etc, she explains, her tone striking a perfect balance between calm and compassion. She quickly moves on to her frustration at not being able to travel, due to the restrictions placed on aid workers.

I leave her office shaking my head. I don't know if it's courage and commitment, or insanity and lack of respect for one's own life. I suppose the meaning is intensely personal, like the decision to live this life.

3. Dissatisfaction with life in the West: Many of the people out here report difficulty living a "normal" life in the West, for boredom at the lack of adventure, or guilt at living a comfortable life when so much of the world lives in harsher conditions. "My family sent me a picture of them eating at a diner," a colleague tells me, "and it occurred to me: in America, you can have whatever you want, whenever you want. It's so boring. Where's the excitement, where's the challenge?"

I was thinking: home, like the field, is what you make it.

So here's my take on why I'm oriented back from whence I came.

The challenges in life in the West are elsewhere. They are just not manifested in street protests, corrupt and inefficient bureaucracy (unless you're talking about NYC post offices), electricity and water outages, constant parasites in one's digestive system. The problems one faces in the developing world are not glamorous, yet the constant struggling with them seems to imply to many a sheen of glamor in asceticism - just how much can you have taken away from you and still feel like yourself? Or maybe the point is to forget yourself, forget the boredom you see in your own context, move apart from the context and live your life as a rugged individual. It sounds better than it is, at least for me. I need the context, need the culture.

I need the alt rock concerts, the museums, the art galleries, the cafe culture that I so liberally took part in when living in New York, Berlin, to a lesser extent places like Washington DC and Brussels, on down the line to Budapest and Cairo. In Aden, there's not even a movie theater. There are no concerts. The only museum is the military museum. Most importantly, there seems not to be any ferment for these things, no creative energy directed at anything but love of god. It's happiness for some people, but not happiness for me. As the outposts get more remote and the pursuit of happiness more monolithic, I yearn for the variety and depth found only in the cosmopolitan.

And that, in a nutshell, is why I'll be coming home.

Assimilation is the Answer, Part 346

Once again, I have been reminded why I take such pains to blend in, wearing a veil and an abaya, though many of my fellow whities do not.

I was abyan beach smoking shisha with Soo-Rae and Ranya. The beach is an amazing respite from the boiling city - shacks that serve shisha, tea and other snacks line the shoreline, and customers are free to sit either at plastic tables on the boardwalk, or to sit on mats on the beach below. Pillows are supplied to make sure that you feel like you've never left your diwan. We've brought a large mat and settle in the middle of the beach. I am happily confused by the quietness of the beach tonight - it seems uncharacteristically free of the lounging shisha smoker's only natural predators - kids on four-wheelers tearing up and down the beach, using the mats as cones around which to carve hairpin turns. Could it be? This would be the perfect evening...

(L)Right. (R) Wrong.

Sadly it is not to be. No sooner to we delve into earnest discussion that the bubbling pipes are drowned out by the four-wheelers. Like the demonic Stygian Triplets from Dogma, a dull, almost imperceptible buzz warns one that the four-wheelers are approaching. The buzz quickly becomes a roar, and the speeding vehicle is visible, aiming at the mat and swerving away at the last moment, or peeling inches from the mat, sometimes splattering it with sand. It seems worse today than usual, and I realize the potential source of the problem. Ranya and Soo-Rae are both without veils and I too have let mine slip most of the way off my head.

Another four-wheeler speeds by.احذر بالك , I roar. Watch it!

He turns around and comes back. "ايش قلتي؟" , he asks. What did you say?

I said, watch it, I tell him. He feigns puzzlement. You're speeding by us. I don't want to die. The track is over there. I point at the other end of the beach. (There is in fact, no marked path, given that we are (techinically speaking) sitting not on a racetrack but on a beach. Anyway...)

He shrugs and drives away. Twenty minutes later, a turbaned young man in a long white gown chugs past slowly and stops. Where are you from? We studiously ignore him. He repeats himself several times. "From China!" Soo-Rae yells in English. "Go away!"

This of course has the opposite effect. We ignore their slow drivebys and catcalls, but the situation becomes inflamed when they circle our mat at a high speed, throwing up dirty sand and knocking over our shisha. I stand and snarl at them.

"!امشي! ما امك، يا كلب؟! عيب" Get out of here! What's wrong with your mother, you dog? Shame! Ranya follows my torrent of insults with some in English and throws a pillow. They drive away, leaving us boiling. The waiter who has been periodically been coming to the beach to refresh our coals silently uprights our shisha and helps us clean up. He disappears back into the shack and the triplets come back. I stand as one circles slowly, hurling the same admonitions and insults. He smirks. I seize the jar of hot coals. He steps on the gas, but I hurl it at his receding machine before it is out of range. He yells in protest and stays away this time. Perhaps that last counter-attack made it clear that our previous protestations were not just coy flirting. The shisha attendant walks out and sheepishly hands us concrete block the size of a small coffee can. Use this, he says, if they come back.

Ranya tosses it in her right hand with relish, but they do not return. I breathe deeply into the previously peaceful night, trying to regain a sense of calm, but it's gone. We leave ten minutes later, and on the ride home I think the same thing over and over: I can't handle this country much longer.

I can't take the noise and congestion at the supermarket caused by everyone completing the outing with their family of 9 (no exaggeration on the average family size), or the game of chicken that is driving, to the inability of the government (lacking a monopoly on the use of force outside major cities) to control the countryside, or the impunity of harassers and stone-throwers one thing is becoming clear to me. I cannot, can not handle this anarchy forever.

--------

The next day I am translating for Ranya at the Yemenia office when the attendant abruptly changes the conversation ."ليش أنت تغطي الشعر؟" Why do you cover your hair?

I give my standard answer. ".احترام و عدم التحرّش" Respect and lack of harassment. She assures me that it's fine in Aden, you can go around without a scarf, no one cares. I've heard that line before. Many Adenis cling stubbornly to the claim that the north is intolerant and stifling in its social conservatism, while the south is the heartland of liberal renaissance. Well, I hate to break it to them, but the veils were raised more than a decade ago, and by now the south seems to have assimilated such it's scarcely different than the north. There's no way not wearing a veil will lead to anything but harassment and a sense of personal insecurity.

I smirk and answer noncommittally."ممكن"

Or maybe not.

The Ugly American

In the middle of a meeting at the office of a colleague organization, I get a call from the office. I silence it, in keeping with my attempt not to give in to the Yemeni practice of interrupting any and every meeting by answering the call. But then it's two calls, then three calls, one after another. I don't reject the third. On the other line is chaos.

هم يرموا الحجراء إلى المكتب! Sabri yells. They are throwing stones the office! It takes me a moment to register. What? Who!? Who is throwing stones at the office? And why?

It's a group of women, he tells me. They're protesting the recent election. They want [previously elected shaikh of Basateen] Mohammed Dirie.*

I ask Sabri to call the police and to call our operations manager, Khaled. The breaches of security are so many and so frequent, I've become perhaps too complacent in these issues, delegating getting security situations under control to Khaled and other member of the logistics team and then trying to continue with my work. Otherwise, I'll never get anything done.

After an hour of chasing (literally chasing the stone-throwing women away from our office, figuratively chasing down the police to try to make them do something) Khaled has resolved the situation. The marauding women escape capture by the incompetent, largely apathetic police, but linger only briefly at our office before moving on to throw stones at other NGOs. When I return from the meeting, things are calm.

Until, of course, the next day. The electricity begins its daily outage around around 10, leaving us to sweating as the temperature in our dark, staid office rises. The women come around 11, once everyone is good and hot and irritable. Again, the police are called, Khaled is on his way, I stay in my office trying to finish an overdue quarterly report.

After 5 minutes, one of the more spastic members of my staff - an American from Chicago - rushes into my office. "They are throwing stones at children! And Mokhtar [the gendarme assigned to guard our office in addition to two guards we hired ourselves] has a gun! He needs to shoot it into the air or something!"

My eyes widen. Mokhtar needs to shoot his gun into the air like we all need a hole in the head, and in fact this might be the result of this upping of the ante. "Mohkhar does not need to shoot his gun," I mutter, rising from my desk. "There are too many guns in Yemen. It'll start a firefight, if not today, tomorrow." I head for the door.

There is a crowd of staff and beneficiaries crowded outside on the veranda, originally seeking light (when the first stone was thrown the electricity had already been out for an hour) and now seeking shelter from a direct hit from stones. They titter with anticipation as the occasional stone lands in the open area near them. I peek around the wall, knowing that the sight of my face - everyone knows that I'm the one who approves the checks and calls the shots - will further inflame the situation. Mohktar has driven the women outside, but stones fly through the doorway. Someone closes and latches the door and we here the thud of stones against it, then of fists, then of bodies. The gate rattles on its hinges. I run out into the yard while the door is closed, shoo wide-eyed children and a couple of baby-wearing mother (how can it possibly seem acceptable to continue to stand in harm's way?) under the veranda and out of the reach of stones.

The situation continues in stalemate for fifteen more minutes while I remain in the yard, taking shelter behind a large water tank, on the phone with the police chief trying to convince him to send some reinforcement here, NOW. Finally, 20 minutes after we call them, the police are there with their paddy wagon (a pickup with a fence around the walls of the cab). They manage to round up four of the fifteen human catapults into the back, to be taken to the police station. I stand in the doorway, as they sneer in our direction from behind bars. I stare at them, stonefaced, and think "this is not what I came here to do."

The next day, the police want us to come in to the station. They are giving us trouble, Khaled says, they do not want to accept the written complaint we provided yesterday. Sheikh Dirie has become involved and is pleading with us to have mercy. After all, he points out ingeniously, they are women.

Not only that, he continues, they have young children. We are here in Yemen to help the refugees, not to put them in jail. If we are truly a humanitarian organization, we will withdraw this complaint. We go to the station, where the women and their mewling children are waiting. Sheikh Dirie gestures at them as if to say "Look! Exhibit A." We are led to a room which gradually fills with 10 gendarmes, the women, and their children, and begin a spirited discussion, initiated by the deputy police chief, on why we should withdraw our complaint.

The women have agreed to sign a commitment letter stating that they will not throw stones at our office again, claims the deputy, and Sheikh Dirie. Forget it, we say. They sign that today and tomorrow we'll have twice the number outside office throwing stones to get assistance.

Have mercy, we are told. These are women with children and they didn't do anything.

Didn't DO anything? What?

Well, there was no result. There was no damage. No one hurt.

I am incredulous. I point out that there were children standing in our compound who they could have injured or even killed. I am told - with condescension - that the law in Yemen is not like that in America, that it's not the intention that counts, but the result. In the holy Quran, I argue, intention the most important. The debate gets louder. If the police don't take down our complaint, Khaled observes aloud after 45 minutes of back-and-forth, we will simply bring it to the district prosecutor and explain the situation.

Finally, a breakthrough. The police take down our complaint in hand-written Arabic which is recited as written. I sign and thumbprint the statement. My heart wilts.

This is not what I came here to do.

I should be clear: tt's not the lack of glamour or comfort of the job that gets me down. Rather, it's the lack of true intrigue. The conflict resolution that I spend so many hours of each day doing is not exciting. It is not productive. Often, it has no result but revealing the rotten, corrupt core of Yemeni institutions. It is in fact supremely boring, numbing to the senses. The fires I am constantly obliged to extinguish are related not our work itself, but rather to a host of negative externalises, most importantly south Yemen's shaky overall security situation. The need to rush from one emergency to another stands as a daily obstacle to executing our thoroughly thought-out plans

Echoing in my head is a latter day book review from the New York Times about William Lederer and Eugene Burdick’s 1958 chronicle, The Ugly American. Quoting a "proto-Peace Corps" type ("Homer") who is a main character in the book, the reviewer highlights the book's relevance to contemporary critiques of international development:

“Whenever you give a man something for nothing,” Homer warns, “the first person he comes to dislike is you.”

This is not what I came here to do.


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*I should back up a little bit. Why are there elections in Basateen (the slum community in which we work)? Basically, there were elections organized and held with the help of UNHCR in 2006 and again in 2008 to choose a local leader. A man named Mohammed Dirie was chose in both elections. Dirie was widely popular among Somalis and NGOs alike. He was generous with his time, making himself available nights and weekends for emergency cases, working diligently with NGOs to find foster parents for children abandoned at the doorsteps of NGOs, arrange medical care for the desperately poor with life-threatening illnesses, mediating extreme cases of domestic violence. Without a doubt, his was a position of power, affording him privileged access to the NGOs and their capital. to At the beginning of 2009, the Somali consulate in Yemen - no doubt having realized this - appointed a sheikh to replace Dirie.

This attempted usurping of power caused a considerable uproar in the community, a not-unsubstantial part of which originated from Dirie himself, who would clash with the appointee in the case that he appeared at public functions. The decision was made that Sheikh Dirie would be recognized as the rightly-elected leader, but that early elections would be held in 2009. Said elections were held at the beginning of July. The community is divided into blocks, each of which elected 2-4 leaders. Block leaders, in turn, elected the council of elders, which, in turn, elected the leader (sheikh) and his deputy. This time around, Sheikh Dirie was not elected. Because the elections were administered by the UNHCR, those not satisfied with the results accuse this organization and other NGOs of doctoring the results to our benefit. Of course this does not make any sense given our close and productive cooperation with Sheikh Dirie - truth be told, I'd prefer that he was still in office - but there is little that we can say in our defense that has not already been made clear, as the allegations have no basis in reality. It also doesn't help that the man elected as vice-sheikh happens to work for us as a guard.