A Girl Named Lovely

by Catherine Porter

  “Regardez! Regardez!” The girls’ bows flapped up and down while they bounced to the song.

  I was definitely looking, mouth ajar. It was too much to take in—the joy, the noise, the shell of a building. The only thing left of Fleurs de Chou was the exterior walls. The rest had been destroyed in the earthquake and carted away. The children were singing from behind rows of wooden desks set out in an empty courtyard. Their only shelter was some white canvas screens donated by Plan International—a large global development organization that had brought me here, presumably to show Canadians where their donations were going. I wondered if the singing and dancing had been staged for me.

  But then, after the song subsided, a teacher stood up in front of the crowd with her back to me, raised her hands, and boom, they started again—a new song, more dancing, hundreds of little arms waving and waists twirling.

  Haitians didn’t need to fake their emotions from the earthquake; they were raw and huge and personal, indifferent to outsiders. This was what true happiness looked like. The reason the kids were so happy would seem surprising to many Canadian children: they were back in school.

  The mood of the entire city had reversed since I left two months before. Instead of being tinged with despair, Port-au-Prince felt like a bubbling cauldron of optimism and industry. I spotted the change minutes after stepping off the plane. The airport was operating! My first arrival, when I finally found the building in the dark, I almost tripped over the sleeping customs officer, who was curled against a long wooden desk that blocked the entrance of the arrivals hallway like a river dam.

  Now there was a band of troubadours inside a wooden arrivals hall, where three customs officers sat in freshly built plywood boxes, waiting to stamp passports.

  On the streets outside, the SOS sheets had been replaced with colorful canvases: bold, African-style paintings of market women, hung up on walls and fences like makeshift galleries. The most telling sign of life returning, though, was kids in uniforms and backpacks walking along the edges of the streets en route to school. The government had restarted the school term that week, and many schools had reopened in fields under tarps and on the cleared footprint of their former selves.

  Fleurs de Chou was the first I visited. It had been a massive primary school in the nearby town of Croix-des-Bouquets. Before the earthquake, it housed 1,500 students in two adjacent two-story buildings. One was kraze by the earthquake, as the Haitians said. Smashed. The other was still standing but badly cracked. Luckily, the school hadn’t been offering night courses to students, so the building had been empty when it collapsed.

  This was the second day of classes, which principal Marie Florvie Dorestan admitted would be just songs and games for the first week.

  She had written to the mayor’s office asking for help to rebuild her school. But, after weeks of waiting and hearing nothing, she had decided to do it herself. She sacrificed her savings and borrowed money to hire a forty-person crew to remove the rubble and salvage what furniture and equipment wasn’t destroyed.

  “The kids were just walking around the neighborhood. They told me they wanted to come back to school. Their parents wanted them back at school,” Marie said in Kreyòl.

  Many of her students would no longer be able to pay their monthly tuition fees: they were living in tents; their parents had lost their jobs or means of working. It was unlikely Marie would be able to pay their teachers—at least, not without going more into debt.

  The government had promised to compensate principals like Marie, but she doubted that would ever happen. Fleurs de Chou, like 85 percent of the schools in Haiti, was private. The government barely managed to pay the principals and teachers at the public schools at the best of times. Now they had bigger problems.

  But Marie worked anyway.

  “I’m helping my country in the way I can,” she said.

  It was her contribution to Haiti’s recovery.

  • • •

  The city was awash in help: aid workers, university volunteers, American missionaries in matching T-shirts that said things like Help Haiti and Mission Haiti. Once in the city, you could spot them from afar, for everyone seemed to have rented the same white SUVs—the symbol in Haiti for white aid workers and wealth. The few hotels still functioning were filled with them.

  I hadn’t expected this and had foolishly left my hotel booking until the week before. What tourist in their right mind would be visiting the ruins of Port-au-Prince? I called every hotel I knew about in town, but none had space for me. One receptionist told me the rooms had been blocked off for the entire month by an aid group. I hadn’t appreciated how lucky we’d been on the last trip to secure a hotel room.

  Out of desperation, I emailed a Canadian doctor who had been traveling to Haiti for ten years. She directed me to a guesthouse run by her organization, Healing Hands for Haiti, a nonprofit that worked with amputees and other disabled and injured Haitians. While the organization’s workshop was damaged, its guesthouse survived the earthquake and the grounds were beautiful—lush, crowded with pawpaw and mango trees—and there were two resident chickens, Mark and Emily, that scooted through the antique house and outdoor patios.

  I dropped my bag in the room I would be sharing with four other people and jumped back into the car, hoping to get a tour of downtown before sundown, which in Haiti comes like a falling blind. But just outside the guesthouse gates I was introduced to another sign of Haiti’s rousing life and aid influx: blokis. The perfect Kreyòl word for gridlock. Traffic in the city had been bad before the earthquake—the result of stuffing 3 million people into a place built for fewer than 1 million without expanding the road system. But the growing mounds of rubble that house and business owners were sweeping onto the roads had made things infinitely worse. The two-lane Avenue John Brown that weaved past the guesthouse was choked with cars and packed tap-taps—Haiti’s version of buses, effectively pickup trucks with benches thrown down the back and metal awnings painted brightly and decorated with hopeful mottos like Jesus watch over us.

  I wouldn’t make it downtown and back in two hours, let alone see other parts of the city. So I shortened the tour to a single stop: the nine-hole Pétionville golf course ten minutes up the road.

  Before the earthquake, the golf course had been the playground of the country’s rich elite. It was the only one in the country, set among large barricaded properties, their walls dripping with bougainvillea and guarded by men with shotguns. Overlooking the golf course were a clubhouse, where members came after work for a drink, and tennis courts. This was the other Haiti—the one of comfort and culture and American Ivy League education.

  The evening of the earthquake, thousands of survivors escaped from their crowded, kraze neighborhoods and came here—a place they deemed safe because of its open space. There were no lethal buildings nearby, no poorly constructed walls that could fall down and crush you in one of the many aftershocks.

  I had visited the golf course many times on my first trip to Haiti. The unplanned camp was a study in group dynamics under extreme stress: men lying prone and blank-eyed; women bathing their potbellied children in the now fetid brook; a small hospital; and three church services a night, with hundreds of people waving their hands in the air and singing. It was a reporter’s treasure chest, bursting with stories of personal tragedy and triumph.

  Two months later I walked over the hill from the golf course clubhouse and arrived to a town the size of a healthy Ontario suburb. Some 60,000 people were living there in homes built out of blue and orange plastic tarps. Many had been upgraded into miniature sheds using scraps of corrugated metal. Some, I noticed, even had wooden doors with padlocks. There was a veritable sea of them, clumped shoulder to shoulder as far as I could see.

  The rivulet paths that once wove between and through tents were now planned, bustling thoroughfares lined by sandbags. A main road was now lined with timachann, or market vendors, who wore giant straw hats and sat on stools behind their wares—charcoal, f
ish, coconuts, padlocks. Small boutiks—stores made from wooden shelters selling radios and cell phones—had been erected, too. Down the center of the road, a man pushed a cart topped by a giant block of ice that, for a few Haitian gourdes, he shaved into a paper cone and doused with whatever sweet syrup you wanted from his collection of bottles.

  There were barbershops with swivel chairs and saloon mirrors, beauty parlors offering hair extensions, and even small restaurants with lace tablecloths and flickering televisions powered with stolen electricity from nearby lines. I peeked through a crack in the door of Cine Paw, a makeshift movie theater that charged 10 gourdes (24 cents US) for a seat to every night’s screening.

  Signs of help were everywhere, too. The hospital at the crest of the hill had grown. It now had an X-ray center and a dental clinic. It had been joined by another four health clinics below. I walked by a little primary school set up under a tarp, complete with blackboards and yellow and red wicker chairs. Sanitation crews pushed wheelbarrows full of garbage up the paths. There were Porta-Potties and water spigots attached to giant water bladders.

  Staked into the ground were the names of large international aid groups. They served as both street addresses and rudimentary advertisements telling passersby—particularly those with cameras—that the silver “baby-friendly tents” came from Save the Children or that the giant bladders of water and Porta-Potties were from Oxfam. All the silver and white tarps that the American director of relief had talked about were prominently stamped with either USAID for the American aid arm or simply Canada.

  Not all the aid groups were so well established and internationally known, though. I met a wiry, bearded, ginger-haired man who introduced himself as Captain Barry. He was an American tugboat captain who had come here to help with a newly formed humanitarian organization named J/P HRO. Few in their group had experience, he admitted, but they were managing the camp.

  While we were talking, Sean Penn, the Hollywood actor, walked by. He was wearing army pants and the same blue shirt as Captain Barry. I was stunned. What was Sean Penn doing here, in the middle of the country’s biggest displaced person camp? He wasn’t surrounded by handlers or bodyguards or cameramen—he was alone. I watched as he joined a group of people handing out mattresses to a crowd.

  “Penn started the organization,” Barry explained. The letters in the group’s name stood for Jenkins-Penn Haiti Relief Organization. Penn, it turned out, was a catastrophe missionary who had been moved by the post-earthquake newscasts about rudimentary anesthetic-free surgeries, particularly because his own son had recently recovered from brain surgery.

  Penn’s friend offered to help him start up a charity. He then chartered a plane with supplies and assembled a team of doctors and other volunteers. They all ended up here, on the golf course, living in tents on the tennis courts.

  The light was fading. I had to go. My last glimpse of the golf course city was of Sean Penn wading into a fight over a mattress. I watched incredulously as he stepped between two arguing men, his hands raised.

  • • •

  Jonatha was never far from my thoughts during all of this. As soon as I had a spare moment, I set off in search of her. I returned to the Sonapi compound, but when I pulled through the gates, I was greeted by an empty parking lot. There was no sign of the clinic—no tents, no medical equipment, no patients—just a single uniformed guard asleep in a chair. He jolted awake but was of no help. The temporary clinic was gone, he confirmed. But he didn’t know where it had moved or who might know. It was as if I had dreamed it all up.

  I set off for the United Nations compound, hoping that the UNICEF office would have a record of Jonatha. The communications person I had spoken to on my last trip was long gone. In fact, nearly all the aid workers I’d met in January had left. Aid workers generally rotate in two-month shifts in emergencies so they don’t burn out, I learned, which meant the few contacts I had made months before were of no use.

  When I found the head child protection officer, she told me that out of the more than 750 children the agency had registered as “unaccompanied,” only 75 were reunited with their families. She didn’t know if Jonatha was among them.

  Haiti did not have a formal system of foster care or children’s aid. Poor parents from the country sometimes send their children to relatives or friends of relatives in the big city, hoping they will enroll them in school. In return, the children are expected to work as domestics, cleaning and cooking for the family. They are called restavèks, which literally translates to “stay withs.” Restavèks were notoriously abused. I hoped Jonatha was not among them now.

  I decided to walk around and see if I could glean any useful information or story leads. Reporting work often seems like deep-sea fishing. You cast out a bunch of hooks in hopes that a few will snag something.

  While one part of the compound felt like an internally displaced persons’ camp, a whole other established part resembled a small university campus, with paved roads and treed walkways curving between white low-slung buildings, each with their own plaque—UNDP, UNFEMME, OCHA, IOM. I learned that every morning the different departments got together for a press conference. That seemed like a good place to start.

  When I think back on that press conference, I shake my head at its obvious symbolism. First, there were only a handful of reporters there, and those who were assembled were all foreigners. But, more importantly, all the speakers delivering updates were foreigners, communication attachés from various arms of the United Nations. Not a single one was Haitian. And they conducted the news conference in English, a language that few Haitians outside the foreign-educated elite could speak. The press conference could have just as easily taken place in Bath or Regina or some small town in New Hampshire.

  Haitian development workers and community leaders, it turned out, had a hard time getting into the heavily guarded United Nations compound by the airport. While I was immediately waved in with my press badge, grassroots community leaders and humanitarians with local NGOs complained they weren’t told about the meetings, didn’t have the proper ID passes to get in, or couldn’t spare the time to travel through the city’s blokis to make it to the United Nations compound. That meant they weren’t participating in the vital “cluster meetings” where aid organizations shared information and, in theory, coordinated their actions. There was the protection cluster, the education cluster, and the “wash” cluster, which was aidspeak for water and sanitation.

  Already it was becoming clear that despite the government’s appeal for assistance and their hand in writing the recovery plan, the execution of aid and recovery was being led by foreigners.

  At the press conference, I learned that the looming crisis of the moment was the pending rainy season. Many areas of the city were at great risk of flash floods, which threatened to sweep away earthquake survivors in their ramshackle homes. Over the next few days, UN organizations would be moving 2,500 people to new temporary homes in planned camps. The next move was in two days, from the Vallée de Bourdon. I took down the directions to the community—go up Avenue John Brown, turn on Rue Garnier, head down to the bottom of the valley, and then walk along the river—and immediately set off.

  Jefferson, the driver I’d hired in January, had gone back to his full-time job driving for the Canadian embassy. He’d sent me a friend of his, Jean, to both drive and translate. Jean’s only qualification for the job was his command of English, which he spoke with a Washington, DC, slang. He was a deportee—a Haitian who had spent many years living and working illegally in the United States until he was pulled over for a small traffic violation and promptly arrested. He told long stories about his time in prison with other illegal workers from around the world, all waiting to be sent back to their home countries. He’d borrowed one of Jefferson’s cars, and it was clear, once we started driving around, that his grasp of Port-au-Prince geography was barely better than mine.

  Thankfully, Rue Garnier was marked with a street sign—one of a precious few I
had spotted in Port-au-Prince. It was a steep switchback dotted with massive potholes that stopped abruptly at the foot of a forest.

  We got out of the car and followed a worn path beside a thin stream, through a mango grove, and past a group of topless women washing themselves and their laundry. A giant black pig waddled by, ruffling through mounds of old plastic bags and pop cans. Garbage collection is spotty, especially in the poor neighborhoods, so ravines are unofficial dump sites in the city.

  When the path ended, Jean and I walked through the stream in our flip-flops. Finally, the bidonvil appeared.

  Bidonvils are Haitian slums. They are scattered throughout the city, atop hills and deep in valleys. They universally feature tightly packed, boxlike concrete houses, separated only by footpaths. You can rarely drive through a bidonvil; you have to walk, and often—like here—the path will squeeze so tightly between ramshackle houses that you need to swivel your shoulders and sidestep through them. These are what Haitian planners call “archaic developments”—full of the poor who moved to the city from the countryside in search of jobs and who have rented some unused land to build a small house on.

  “Blan! Blan!” kids screamed after me as we made our way down the path through the community.

  We walked past the shells of tiny one-room homes that had been reduced to jumbled concrete platforms. Tarps were strung up and metal siding hammered together to form slapdash walls. Stairs led up into the air: all of the second stories had collapsed. I snapped a photo of a man standing knee-deep in rubble, a metal cup in one hand and a toothbrush in the other. He reminded me of a heron standing in a lagoon.

  The path ended at the river, which was wider and deeper here. I approached a house ringed by plants in old tomato tins and knocked at the gate.

  An artist with thick black-rimmed glasses emerged to talk to me. Just as he began to tell his story about moving, I felt a hot rush in my bowels.