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Chasing Chaos: My Decade In and Out of Humanitarian Aid, by Jessica Alexander
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Review
“In Chasing Chaos, Jessica Alexander serves up a sharp critique of the multi-billion dollar humanitarian aid industry, wrapped in a tender coming-of-age story. Her quietly evocative prose recreates the painful, poignant, and sometimes hilarious experience of marching into 'the field' of armed conflict and disaster to relieve suffering, supported by donations from those who expect heroism. With remarkable honesty and empathy, Alexander reveals how absurd and presumptuous it is to imagine we can fix the world and, even more profoundly, why we must continue to try. An important book.” —Sheri Fink, New York Times bestselling author of Five Days at Memorial“Terrific new memoir...It's Wild in Sudan.” —Nicholas Kristof, New York Times columnist“In her new book Chasing Chaos, Jessica Alexander offers a poignant, clear-eyed look at the world of international disaster relief and her own addiction to aid work…Chasing Chaos is a reminder that happiness is an act of delicate and ever-evolving inner compromise. The book makes you simultaneously want to pack your bags and never leave home.” —The Daily Beast“Enlightening...eye-opening...Chasing Chaos is a solid contribution to what is hopefully a growing genre of writing about a sector that deserves more attention and oversight.” —Associated Press “Jessica Alexander's book, Chasing Chaos, is not only a candid portrait of the life of a humanitarian aid worker, but a wonderful coming-of-age story that will resonate with any woman who has questioned how to have a more meaningful life.” —Mia Farrow“Refreshingly absent in Chasing Chaos are any declarations of grandeur or of superior moral fiber. Rather, Alexander’s honesty about her own ignorance on the true severity of the conditions in the places she visits is precisely what makes her remarkable story so accessible. Even now, after a decade working with multiple humanitarian organizations, the author still makes plain how much she has to learn. Alexander is proud of her achievements, and certainly should be, but it is in her detailing of the vast room for improvement in the system that she focuses, with a dry wit and healthy dose of honest self-evaluation, that we are able to connect with her experiences on a more personal level. We are all the more fortunate for it.”—Bustle.com“I think that is what Jessica does so well: puts a human face on aid work. And not just her face, but the faces of her international and national colleagues…Jessica reveals the inconsistencies, the ambivalence of aid work as she takes us to Sudan, Sierra Leone, Sri Lanka, New York, and Haiti. But, she also offers valuable lessons for the next generation.” —Brendan Rigby, whydev.org“What Mary Roach does for the alimentary canal in Gulp and Robin Nagle does for garbage collecting in Picking Up, Jessica Alexander does for global catastrophe in Chasing Chaos...An entertaining memoir of life on the front lines of global catastrophe reveals as much about its author as the world of humanitarian aid.”—Shelf Awareness“A no-holds-barred description of what it is like to travel to world disaster sites and engage in the complex, challenging, nitty-gritty work of making a difference across lines of culture, class, age, gender, and perspective. In telling the story of her decade as a young and passionate humanitarian aid worker, Jessica Alexander also manages to tell us the best and the worst of what this work is like and to speculate on the aid establishment—how it has changed, where it works and what its limits are. A must read for anyone with global interests—and that should be all of us.” —Ruth Messinger, President, American Jewish World Service“Chasing Chaos examines the lives that aid workers lead and the work which aid workers do with honesty, clarity, and warmth. While the book is peppered with hilarious anecdotes—it is also salted with tears. Honest, genuine, heartfelt tears. This life and this work that aid and development workers embark upon so often oscillates wildly between stomach bursting laughter and shoulder seizing weeping—Chasing Chaos captures these oscillations, and the doldrums in between the ends of the spectrum, perfectly.” —Casey Kuhlman, New York Times bestselling author of Shooter “During ten years of working with the sick, the hungry, and the injured, Jessica Alexander touches and is touched by victims of genocide, earthquakes, tsunamis, and bombs. The compelling quality of this book is Alexander’s honesty, sharp observations, and conversational prose. With humor and insight, she shares the intimate details of her everyday life. Even if you’re a seasoned traveler, this entry into the world of humanitarian aid organizations—the good, the bad, and the frustrating—is fascinating.” —Rita Golden Gelman, author of Tales of a Female Nomad “In Chasing Chaos, Alexander takes us to a place where few outsiders can go, cracking open the rarefied world of humanitarianism to bare its contradictions—and her own—with boldness and humor. The result is an immensely valuable field guide to the mind of that uniquely powerful and vulnerable of beasts: the international aid worker.” —Jonathan M. Katz, author of The Big Truck That Went By: How the World Came to Save Haiti and Left Behind a Disaster“Not only is Jessica Alexander a wonderful writer—her clear, evocative prose transported me into refugee camps in Darfur, war-trials in Sierra Leone and post-earthquake Haiti—but she is honest about the complexity of 'doing good,' without being defeatist. Funny, touching, and impossible to put down, this book should be required reading for anyone contemplating a career in aid, and for all of us who wonder how we can make a useful contribution to a better world, wherever we are.” —Marianne Elliott, author of Zen Under Fire: How I Found Peace in the Midst of War “A fresh, very readable, highly personal account of the trials and tribulations of a young aid worker as she confronts the daily realities— the good, the bad and the very uncomfortable—of life dealing with some of the most important humanitarian challenges of the last decade.” —Ross Mountain, Former Deputy Special Representative of the Secretary General and Humanitarian Coordinator, United Nations“You'll start Chasing Chaos because you are interested in humanitarian aid. You'll finish because of Jessica Alexander's irresistible storytelling: her honesty, her humanity, her wackadoodle colleagues, her dad. I loved it.” —Kenneth Cain, author of Emergency Sex: and Other Desperate Measures“A hardened idealist's challenging look at the contradictions, complications, and enduring importance of humanitarian aid.” —Robert Calderisi, author of The Trouble with Africa: Why Foreign Aid Isn't Working"Jessica Alexander’s Chasing Chaos is a must read for anyone concerned with helping those in need. Americans are some of the most generous people on Earth in reaching out to those coping with disasters, both natural and man-made, but how we give and what we give can make the difference between saving lives and only making a bad situation even worse. The path to hell really can be paved with good intentions, as Ms. Alexander perceptively describes and as I have seen during my own twenty plus years working in Africa and the Middle East, including many tours dealing with the same countries Alexander portrays. She knows of what she speaks.” —Christopher Datta, Former American Foreign Service Officer and author of Touched with Fire: Based on the True Story of Ellen Craft
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About the Author
JESSICA ALEXANDER spent much of the last decade responding to humanitarian crises across the globe. A former Fulbright scholar, she has worked for various NGOs as well as UN agencies. She has a dual masters degree from Columbia and is currently working toward her PhD.
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Product details
Paperback: 400 pages
Publisher: Broadway Books; 9/15/13 edition (October 15, 2013)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 0770436919
ISBN-13: 978-0770436919
Product Dimensions:
5.2 x 0.9 x 8 inches
Shipping Weight: 5.6 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
Average Customer Review:
4.4 out of 5 stars
161 customer reviews
Amazon Best Sellers Rank:
#105,247 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
It’s 2005 in Darfur, western Sudan. Jessica Alexander, a young American aid worker, is woken at 5.30am by the call to prayer. The night before she put a wet towel on her forehead and soaked her pajamas so that they would keep her cool. Now she gets out of bed to face the heat again and go to one of the camps for the internally displaced. Brought to Darfur to do something else, Alexander has suddenly found herself needed to manage Al Salam, a camp of about 20,000 people. She is just 27. She now spends her days trying to ensure that new arrivals are registered and that the kids don’t drown in the sewage pits. (Not that those kids are always appealing. The African Union peacekeepers have corrupted them: “It wasn’t uncommon for them to yell ‘suck my c***’ or ‘big t****’ when white women passed,†she reports.)Was Alexander doing any good? If not, why not, and what should we do about it? In this thoughtful book, Alexander tries to answer these questions, and I think she sort of succeeds.Alexander hadn’t originally planned to be an aid worker. On graduation she joined a New York ad agency, thrilled with her new briefcase, a gift from her mother, and the sound of her high heels clacking as she crosses the floor of the hall. Disillusion sets in as she finds herself working on a frozen pizza account. “When I wasn’t stuffing my face with our own soggy, salty brand or comparing the fat content ...to that of our competitors, I was watching their ads,†she says. Then her mother dies. “If I could die at age fifty, I wanted a more meaningful profession than the one provided by Hot Pockets and Sunny Delight.†Alexander decides she’d like to work in aid and development. She joins the New York office of an NGO, but quickly becomes frustrated that she has never been to any of the places her colleagues are talking about. She decides to do a Masters in development, and winds up doing a summer internship with the UN in Rwanda.It is at that point that this book takes off. Alexander finds herself transcribing people’s interviews for refugee status. She finds out that these take a long time to process, being approved in Kigali and Nairobi and going eventually to Geneva. She is also less than impressed with her fellow-expats. “Most expats lived ...in spacious houses situated behind high walls, some with barbed wire at the top ...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....†This needs a pinch of salt. Not all expats in aid live like that, especially if they work for NGOs. Still, some do. And as Alexander’s career progresses, she finds the aid worker’s expat way of life bizarre. “It wasn’t out of the ordinary when in any humanitarian setting to get an e-mail with the subject line “War Children Party— Thursday Night— Festive Attire Required!†or “Center for Survivors of Torture— Fancy Dress Night Friday.â€Alexander went on to do research in Sierra Leone (she is more positive about this) and eventually to help evaluate the responses to the 2004 tsunami and the 2010 Haiti earthquake. In Colombo, she hears that post-tsunami that there is actually too much money, chasing too few projects; NGOs building child centres, for example, and then competing for the children. There are also economic distortions from the influx of aid, and she meets a teacher and a judge who work for local NGOs because there’s more money in it. Meanwhile in Darfur there was too little money, and northern Uganda and Congo got no attention. In Haiti, where more than 220,000 people were killed and approximately 180,000 homes were wrecked, she finds that cars bound for aid agencies are held up in customs because (it is said) officials are getting kickbacks from car rental companies.Working at New York HQ is no better, as she must confront the language of bureaucratic obfuscation. “Complementarity of processes, sectoral coverage, evaluability of impact, operationalization of the concept— eventually enough of these invented phrases were dropped in documents or e-mails that people stopped wondering if they held actual meaning. “Modalities are in place†was the response you got almost every time you asked how a project was progressing.†As an editor in one of the big aid organizations, I have to weed this noxious self-serving rubbish out of reports (I have banned the word modality). So I can confirm that Alexander has a point.It sounds from the above as if this book telling us that all aid is a waste. In fact, Alexander is more nuanced that that. She points out that while aid may be an unregulated industry, it is a self-critical one, and it is considering its failures and increasing its transparency. She is right about this; one wishes the banks could do the same. She finishes by talking about innovations like cash transfers and mobile technology – again, this is true; UNICEF, for instance, is putting a lot of effort into innovation. Alexander also puts the aid “biz†in perspective. The sums spent are large ($ 17.9 billion on humanitarian crises worldwide in 2012) but are dwarfed by the $ 114 billion for Katrina relief, the $ 50 billion for Storm Sandy, and the $ 13.7 billion spent on the 2012 London Olympics. Neither does Alexander ever say that humanitarian aid is a waste of time. What she wants readers to understand is that aid cannot fix the world. Good government is needed too.I did have reservations about this book. It’s a bit longer than it needs to be, and occasionally repetitive. At times Alexander is too negative about the people who work in aid. In fact some of them are profoundly committed and do lose their lives, as seven – four from UNICEF – did in a bomb explosion in Somalia in 2015. I wondered, too, if everyone in this book would really have wanted to be. Some deserve Alexander’s scrutiny, but perhaps not all. In particular, staying with a local family in Kigali, she records there was often someone’s turd floating in the toilet bowl; did she need to tell us that? I also found Alexander a little privileged at times. When she first decides she wants to do aid work, she is told to go into the Peace Corps to get some ‘field cred’. But: “I wasn’t exactly prepared to commit to living in a remote village in Burkina Faso or Guatemala for a whole two years. Not at this point, anyway.†I started as a volunteer and served for nearly five years. I also wondered whether she realised how lucky she was to get her student internship in Rwanda.Still, she made good use of it, and has clearly not been afraid of hardship. Few people would live and work somewhere like Darfur by choice. Also, while Chasing Chaos has no literary pretensions, it’s well-written. The beginning was immediately evocative for me, as I began my own international career in Sudan, albeit many years before. I could feel the extreme heat and hear the scraping of the zinc doors, and taste the very sweet tea and imagine the bleached-white sky at midday.And in general, I did like this book. Alexander is clear about the frustrations, and clear about their causes. She appears to be someone with values and common sense. She also accepts that while her business should not exist, it also cannot not exist, at least for now; and she is responsible and practical. Chasing Chaos is an honest and readable book about life at the sharp end of humanitarian aid. Despite some reservations, I strongly recommend it.
This is a great exposé of the international development industry/community. It does have a few annoyances to it, but I suppose any kind of memoir like this would. And to be fair, some of these annoyances are contextually important. Some reviewers have claimed that Alexander shouldn't have mentioned her love affairs. This is, however, a big deal for people who spend years and years overseas. We often find ourselves falling into a lot of short-term relationships that get rather steamy. And the parties that NGOs throw paralleled with the poverty around them is also an important revelation that she dwells on. I currently work in South Sudan and have been to some outrageously lavish NGO parties where I actually left in disgust - but I'm at the stage in my career where I'm a bit older than most of my colleagues (and manage some of them). I'll leave that part alone for the rest of the review.What she does get right, she gets right in a fantastic way. I appreciate this book for not being an all-out assault on the international development community. In my own blog, afterdevelopment.blogspot.com, I explore a lot of these issues. NGOs generally lack coordination, and Alexander goes into great detail about this when she discusses the tsunami response. There are a lot of duplications of efforts, distributions of unhelpful donations, and jobs given to international staff that would be better handled by host country nationals. The "do no harm" approach that NGOs swear to is often inadvertently broken.I would have appreciated it if she had explored the differences between emergency, recovery, and development a bit more thoroughly. This is a kind of emerging theme in the international development world, and I think an important one. Some NGOs are concerned with simply responding to humanitarian crises, while others try to establish or facilitate long-term resilience within communities and countries. In a way, her chapter on Sierra Leone talks about this in a social sense. But in terms of sweeping issues like food security, public health, and other more long-term issues, there is no real discussion here.I loved the book and couldn't put it down. I've been wanting to write a book like this myself, but I think I'll wait until I have a few more years of experience (even though I just hit the 10 year mark working in Ghana, Ethiopia, and South Sudan).Most of all, I want to say a big thank you to Alexander and to all humanitarian workers who sacrifice their time (and sometimes their lives) to make this world a better place. Because I know that we do, even though we are some of the most self-critical people in the world. Society at large doesn't show humanitarians enough respect or thank us enough. Cheers.
If you've ever wanted to save the world and wondered how (and how not) to do it, Chasing Chaos is the book to read. Chasing Chaos is neither an academic treatise nor a muckraking expose, and readers should not expect to find either prescriptions for or blanket condemnations of the current aid effort. The book is an extremely readable and engaging personal memoir that charts one young woman's education in the challenging, maddening, and ultimately heartbreaking world of humanitarian aid.The reader will learn a great deal about the ways that valiant aid workers like Jessica Alexander strive to confront some of the most difficult humanitarian situations of our time. In her years of work in the field, Alexander experienced a wide range of different aid scenarios and the book does an excellent job of revealing the particular complexities and challenges of each, giving the reader a compelling and thought-stimulating overview of the significant challenges that "doing good" poses for everyone concerned, and it does so in a way that is engrossing, sympathetic, and often quite funny.Readers will be drawn in by Alexander's personality and the way she vividly writes about her own development in the developing world, from wide-eyed ingénue to someone who is critical of many aspects of the aid effort, but also deeply hopeful about the difference that coordinated aid can make in people's lives. There will always be disasters, both natural and man-made, so you can read this book and be thankful that people like Jessica Alexander are willing to go to places that most of us would not want to visit, much less live, and marshal their intelligence, financial resources, and empathy in humanitarian service to some of the most dispossessed people on our fraught planet.
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Juni 30, 2014
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