Anything Can Begin to Seem Normal After A While

by Michael Bear

category: Humanitarian Relief

Published September 21, 2009 @ 11:21PM PT

Anything can begin to seem normal after a while, even refugee camps, or the sound of a mortar exploding in the distance, like a door being slammed. Then again, there are some experiences that don’t fade into a comfortable familiarity – even after almost two years back in the States, there are some memories that remain jagged.

Talking to women in eastern Congo, rape survivors dressed in their Sunday best. All of us huddled together in a small, dilapidated building, in a town too poor to appear on the maps. Each woman sat quietly, spoke quietly, which made their stories of mass rape even more horrific to hear. Then suddenly one woman started to cry, describing how after she was raped her husband accused her of being unclean and kicked her out of her house, away from her children. I stared down at my hands as she cried.

Or the food distribution in Sudan, outside of Khartoum. The wars in Sudan had produced an endless stream of refugees, millions of displaced from the south, from the east, from Darfur. The Sudanese government wanted to empty the capital of these poor, uninvited, unwanted guests, and so began rounding them up and trucking them to a barren camp far from town – a camp in the middle of the desert, in the middle of nothing, like an early day of creation. Aid agencies rushed to provide food and water and shelter, as the government knew they would. Yet there was never quite enough. When I heard a team was heading out to distribute plastic tarps for shelter, I decided to tag along, more out of curiosity than anything else.

There’s a brutal calculus, an acronym arithmetic when the number of IDPs – internally displaced persons – outnumbers the supplies of NFIs, or non-food items. As the last tarps were distributed, those left in line began to press forward, incredulous and then more than incredulous. Word quickly spread that there were no more tarps, and suddenly an angry mob surged forward, demanding plastic sheets. We slowly backed away as my colleague repeated “move towards the trucks, move towards the trucks,” and then as the mob surged forward again we climbed aboard and drove away, leaving behind only a settling cloud of sand and dirt.

Those memories are a reminder that, at the end of the day, aid workers are no more than privileged visitors to the land of misery, able to leave when we choose, to fly back to a world that’s mostly sane and mostly knowable.

N.B. - God - sometimes I'm pretentious. But, as they say, so it goes, so it goes.

[Town in eastern Congo - photo from author]