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

more. She gained weight because of the steroids they put her on, her face puffing and swelling. They cut open her chest to install a shunt, then cut her open again to remove it when it got infected. She had a bone marrow transplant that landed her in the hospital for three months. It failed. The lighthouse in my life switched off.
    Even though we had had five years to come to terms with her illness—and the chance that she might not survive it—after my mother’s death I was in more pain than I could have ever imagined. I spent a lot of time in bed. To me, ours was a fortunate, normal family, with weekend soccer practices and dance recitals, neighborhood barbecues, and plenty of sleepover parties.Thursday nights, my brothers and I took breaks from our homework and jumped into bed with Mom and Dad, where we’d share a fresh bowl of popcorn and watch
Seinfeld
together. Weren’t happy endings just part of this story? This wasn’t supposed to happen to the Alexanders or to my indestructible mom.
    I thought about the news of Mom’s death spreading through town—the lady who did her nails, the checkout person at the grocery store, the receptionist at her doctor’s office—all the people who had known her well. I imagined how shocked they must have been to learn that Mom, the woman whose laugh you could hear in the next room, was dead. The two images just didn’t belong together. For a girl raised in a sheltered New England town, protected from tragedy, with a mother who could do anything, it was the first time I contemplated that bad things could happen to us, too.

    If I could die at age fifty, I wanted a more meaningful profession than the one provided by Hot Pockets and Sunny Delight. I had inherited Mom’s vivacity, her can-do spirit, and the memory of her strength emboldened me with newfound nerve. I wanted to live life to the fullest, and that meant breaking the conventional course that I was charting. Impulsively, and against the advice of my father and all the career counselors I had met with at Penn, I quit the marketing firm without anotherjob in the wings. I didn’t know what I was going to do next, but I also didn’t care.
    That summer I decided to go to Central America—alone. It was my first time traveling by myself, and my first encounter with such foreign conditions: I jammed inside busses filled with people and chickens. I got welts on my arms and legs from insects living inside my mattress. I bartered for fruit at the market in a language I barely spoke. It wasn’t all that exotic, as there were plenty of backpackers and tourists in the towns I visited. But during that trip, something clicked. I was for the first time encountering inequality close up—visiting towns where there was no running water and where treatable diseases went untreated. I met expats who worked in these countries, embracing a different and intriguing way of life. I saw something out there far bigger than my own New York existence, and I wanted to be a part of it. I returned home determined to pursue aid work.
    At the time, I’m not sure I understood what I was getting into. Even now, it’s hard for me to distill my feelings into a single, succinct motive. Part of me was enticed by the idea of traveling to foreign places and being part of a global community. I imagined my life abroad would be filled with adventure and rewarding, intellectually intriguing work. Another side of me
was
looking for a way to dodge the painful repercussions of my mom’s death. A career that would bring me to the most extreme places on earth could do just that. I would be distracted, from the grief that still lingeredat home, and inside me. There was other suffering out in the world, and I wanted to touch it. Whatever my intentions, subconscious or not, they led me to the conclusion that the traditional grind could wait: I was young and free and animated by a newfound sense of possibility—the urge to move out into the world, and to be moved by