Chasing Chaos: My Decade In and Out of Humanitarian Aid Read Free

Pennsylvania, the only exposure I had to humanitarian aid was a chance encounter with a Peace Corps flyer in the student center. I entered college in 1995, during the Clinton years, when graduates were receiving job offers from multiple banks and international humanitarian crises like Rwanda and Bosnia happened somewhere far, far away.
    In college everyone was studying hard to break into more straightforward fields—business, media, law, medicine—and initially I was happy to follow a more typical professional track, knowing that would please my parents, who were both doctors—my father an MD and my mother a PhD—and had similar expectations of me and my two younger brothers. After graduation, I had no idea what I wanted to do. I did some temp work; I babysat on the side; I browsed the LSAT study guides at Barnes and Noble. I even auditioned for the Rockettes. I showed up for the first audition with seven years of childhood tap dancing lessons under my belt, plus a freshly printed resume featuring my college GPA and spring semester internship at NBC Studios. All the other girls were professional dancers. Somehow, I made it to the second round, where I stood shoulder to shoulder with fifty other girls exactly my height andweight doing high kicks and double pirouettes. The stage manager informed me they’d call if I made it to the next audition. They never called.
    Soon after, I got a job as an assistant marketing executive at a New York City–based advertising agency. On my first day of work, I revolved through the doors of the midtown office building and found myself in a soaring atrium. I felt as if I were on a movie set, playing the part of a young girl just starting out in the city. My heels echoed as I crossed the sunny space, clutching the briefcase my mother had bought me—a real gift, for my first real job. I was giddy by the time I pressed the elevator button.
    But the fantasy vanished quickly. I was assigned to the Totino’s Pizza Rolls account—not to be confused with their Party Pizzas or their Pizza Stuffers. Those were covered by other departments. But our department? Our department
owned
the Pizza Roll.
    I spent my days researching the frozen pizza market, analyzing the cuisine preferences of our consumer base in the Midwest: White Castle and Wendy’s. Once, I had to go to the supermarket and buy out the entire frozen pizza aisle. I carried stacks of freezing cardboard boxes back to the office, microwaved them all, and sat in the small kitchen taste-testing them myself. When I wasn’t stuffing my face with our own soggy, salty brand or comparing the fat content of Totino’s to that of our competitors, I was watching their ads. The singsong jingle—“What you gonna have? Hot Pockets!”—was the soundtrack to my life.
    I switched jobs a few months later. My new employer was a marketing consultancy firm, and my client list included Fidelity Bank and Sunny Delight. Instead of tasting mini-pizzas, I was leading focus groups with pre-retirees to discuss their financial plans, and ten-year-olds hyped up on Hi-C and Sunny D. Technically, this was a promotion, and although I didn’t feel like I really belonged there, it was more money than I could have ever imagined making fresh out of school. I didn’t really know what else to do, anyway.

    Then, in May of 2000, my mother died, a week after her fiftieth birthday. I was twenty-two. All the clichés turned out to be true: what once had seemed important no longer mattered at all.
    My mother had first been diagnosed with lymphoma five years earlier, when she was forty-five. It had felt then like the thing she was most upset about was having her life fantasy—the dream she had built with Dad over the past twenty-five years—crushed by disease. The whole cancer thing just wasn’t part of their plan. Or her personality: Mom had always defied exhaustion and illness. She would burst through the front door after work and yell in a singsong eruption through the