town vs gown

Other than comparing it to the relationship between a very wealthy university placed in an inner city and the inhabitants of that city, I am hard pressed to explain the relationship that exists between Bahai town, the refugee camp and the people who work in the camp. There are at least 5 high walled, barbed-wire-surrounded compounds that enclose the private lives of aid workers. Most of us, for I suppose I must - however reluctantly - include myself in the ranks, have not learned the local language and know shockingly little about the place we live. I asked a co-worker the other day if she had any friends in town. The answer was an unapologetic no. The reasons: no time, no energy, and no need.*


The people who work here are nothing if not dedicated, but they are also jaded, worn out and tired. At the end of the day retreating to a compound where they can wear shorts and bare their shoulders without shame while indulging in silly shows on MTV (ah, yes, we have French cable!) seems their due. The aid workers I have met do care very much about what they are doing, do seem to believe in the rights of all people to have a safe place to live and work and find food, but they also feel put-upon, taken advantage of, under-appreciated and tired. These are emotions that I can sympathize with to a certain extent. The relationships the aid workers have with those in the camp are not friendships - they don't have local people on whom they feel they can depend for help, support and advice. This makes doing this kind of work very difficult. And then, we live here, in this town where in past months children threw rocks at any white person they saw (most of the Chadian staff speak Arabic, so can avoid some of the cultural barriers that lead to rock throwing children).

Life in Bahai without generator and wifi and cleaner can't be easy. The environment is harsh, food is expensive and hard to come by, it hasn't rained enough for any sort of farming in years, and there isn't enough water to go around. There is an elementary school, a hospital (staffed and supported by the NGO I work for), and a high school. However, the realities of life here make it difficult to entice government workers** to come and stay. Also Bahai’s proximity to Sudan means that the people here have lost many of their sons to war – not necessarily because they have been killed, but because they have been recruited into the rebel fractions that are currently fighting in Sudan. It isn’t hard to understand why a teenage boy living in a sandy, dull town would prefer to join in the fight to protect his country rather than go to secondary school and learn calculus.

The villagers of Bahai are very aware of what living in the camp means: free food every month, access to good, free health care,*** free mental health services, and access to whatever it is all these crazy aid workers are giving out. For while they know that we are here, see our fancy cars**** speeding through village in long conveys and run into us in market, I doubt that most of the village has any real idea of what we are doing here.




When I was a Peace Corps Volunteer in Cameroon I would scoff at the kind of life I am living now. I was insulted by the lifestyle of aid workers and missionaries who lived behind walls – their separation from the very people they were theoretically helping seemed to me to explain many of the reasons that development work fails. You can’t help people to affect change if you don’t understand their lives, their environment, and their culture. And, if you have immediate access to your own culture every time you turn on your computer or TV, then you will be simply too separated to really get what is happening on the other side of the wall. Part of me still really believes that. But, being in the situation that I am now, I also get why the gravity showers and French cable and the washer-woman are necessary. The work aid workers are doing here is exhausting – it rips at your heart and crushes you with impossibilities. You are constantly faced with reasons why positive change can’t occur and constantly forced to beg for money, time and attention. No one is ever satisfied with the way things are going, and often the blame for the base conditions in which people are living is laid at the feet of the aid worker. And that is just life in the camp. It then makes a crude sort of sense that aid workers just want to hide behind walls for a few hours each night.

But it still doesn’t seem fair to the people of Bahai. Because they are not refugees they don’t have access to all the services of the refugees – but they are just as poor, if not more so, and their lives have also been tinged with violence. It is useless to compare the worthiness of giving aid to one group as opposed to another, and resources are scarce. But even intellectually understanding the why of the way we live and who we work with doesn’t fully reconcile me to this aid worker life.



(All pictures are of Bahai town. The barrels in the first photo are used for gathering water, the second to last photo shows the Libyan market - so called because all the goods in market come from Libya, the final photo is the Koranic school)

*No need because you don’t need to make friends with your neighbors – you don’t need them to help you accomplish your work. It would be a nice bonus, but it isn’t a necessity.
**Government workers don't make that much money, and often are not paid for months at a time. Living far away from family, friends and any semblance of comfortable life in Bahai town can't be very appealing to the ambitious Chadian professional.
***Though, honestly, the health care in Bahai is just as free and just as good as in the camp. The fact that the people of Bahai don’t believe that just underscores the extent of the jealousy and tension between camp and town.
****The cars aren’t actually fancy at all. But they are rust free and in good working order, putting them far above the quality of the local jalopies.