The driver has left me. He will be back in two days, he says, waiting for me near the checkpoint, but I do not believe him. My trust only goes so far, and I will not pay him in advance for the privilege of ferrying me out of this place. So he will forget, or die, or think I have forgotten, or died, whatever eases his conscience if a shred of his conscience still remains.
I walk deep into the camp, my pack slung over my shoulder. My easy walk, my relatively clean clothing, and my pack mark me as a newcomer, as someone who doesn’t belong.
The heat is oppressive. There’s no place out of the sun except the tents the Red Cross and its relative out here, the Red Crescent, have put up. People sit outside those tents, some clutching babies, other supervising children who dig in the dirt.
Rivulets of mud run across the path. Judging by the flies and the smell, the mud isn’t made by water. It’s overflowing sewage, or maybe it’s urine from the lack of a good latrine system or maybe it’s blood.
There’s a lot of blood here.
I do no Miming, record no images. The Western world has seen these places before, countless times. When I was a child, late-night television had infomercials featuring cheerful men who walked through such places with a single well-dressed child, selling some religious charity that purported to help people.
Charities don’t help people here. They merely stem the tide, stop the preventable deaths, keep the worst diseases at bay. But they don’t find real homes for these people, don’t do job training, don’t offer language lessons, and more importantly, don’t settle the political crises or the wars that cause the problems in the first place.
The aide worker has a harder job than I do, because the aide worker—the real aide worker—goes from country to country from camp to camp from crisis to crisis, knowing that for each life saved a thousand more will be lost.
I prefer my work, focused as it can be.
I have been on this assignment for six months now. Writing side pieces. Blogging about the bigger events. Uploading pieces that give no hint of my actual purpose.
My editors fear it will make me a target.
I know that I already am.
Whoever called these places camps had a gift for euphemism. These are villages, small towns with a complete and evolved social system.
You learn that early, in your first camp, when you ask the wrong person the wrong question.
Yes, violence is common here—it’s common in any human enclave—but it is also a means of crowd control.
Usually you have nothing to do with the extended social system. Usually you speak to the camp leaders—not the official leaders, assigned by the occupying power (whoever that may be), but the de facto leaders, the ones who ask for extra water, who discipline the teenagers who steal hydrogen from truck tanks, who kill the occasional criminal (as an example, always as an example).
You speak to these leaders, and then you leave, returning to the dumpy hotel in the dumpy (and often bombed-out) city, and lie on the shallow mattress behind the thin wooden door, and thank whatever god you know that you have a job, that your employer pays the maximum amount to ensure your safety, that you are not the people you visited that afternoon.
But sometimes, you must venture deep into the enclave, negotiate the social strata without any kind of assistance. You guess which tents are the tents of the privileged (the ones up front, nearest the food?), which tents are the tents of the hopelessly impoverished (in the middle, where the mud runs deep and the smells overwhelm?), and which tents belong to the outcasts, the ones no one speaks to, the ones that make you unclean when you speak to them.
Never assume they’re the tents farthest away from the entrance. Never assume they’re the ones nearest the collapsing latrines.
Never assume.
Watch, instead. Watch to see which areas the adults avoid, which parts the parents grab their children away from in complete and utter panic.
Watch.
It is the only way you’ll survive.
The people I have come to see live in a row near the back of the medical tent. The medical tent has open sides to welcome easy cases, and a smaller, air-conditioned tent further inside the main one for difficult cases. There is no marking on the main tent—no garish red cross or scythe-like red crescent.
No initials for Doctors Without Borders, no flag from some sympathetic and neutral country.
Just a medical tent, which leads me to believe this camp is so unimportant that only representatives from the various charitable organizations come here. Only a few people even know how had things are here, are willing to see what I can sec.
Even though I will not report it.
I’m here for this group within the camp, an enclave within the enclave. I must visit them and leave. I have, maybe, eight hours here—seven hours of talk, and one hour to get away.
I’m aware that when I’m through, I may not be able to find a ride close to the camp. I must trust again or I must walk.
Neither is a good option.
The tents in this enclave are surprisingly clean. I suspect these people take what they need and no one argues with them. No children lie outside the flaps covered in bugs. No children have distended stomachs or too thin limbs.
But the parents have that hollow-eyed look. The one that comes when the illusions are gone, the one that comes to people who have decided their god has either asked too much of them or has abandoned them.
I stand outside the tent, my questions suddenly gone. I haven’t felt real fear for twenty years. It takes a moment to recognize it.
Once I go inside one of these tents, I cannot go back. My interest—my story—gets revealed.
Once revealed, I am through here. I cannot stay in this camp, in this country, in this region. I might even