A Girl Named Lovely

by Catherine Porter

  I couldn’t find Jean, so I asked one of the volunteers to translate for me. The woman, who was just sixteen, asked if I’d take her unborn child; she already had two babies and couldn’t afford them, let alone a third child.

  My translator was a twenty-one-year-old college student. She asked for a piece of paper from my notepad and scribbled down the woman’s cell number. I figured she was planning on helping this girl with money or clothing. But that wasn’t it at all.

  “I’m going to ask my friends to see if anyone is looking for a baby,” she said.

  I was speechless. What kind of poverty would make both these things possible—that a person would give up her child to a complete stranger she’d met on the street, and that the complete stranger’s first impulse was to take the child?

  I realized that Lovely’s living condition was not an anomaly in Haiti but the norm. And that whatever project the Star did here, it risked becoming a version of handing out containers of macaroni—helpful to some people for a short time but not much in the grand scheme of things.

  • • •

  The rainy season was in its full-throated rhythm. Most afternoons, dark, woolly clouds rolled in and unleashed a torrent of water—sometimes for just an hour and other times for much of the night. The clouds had already gathered by the time we made it out of Cité Soleil and started climbing toward Lovely’s home. It felt good to shed the city’s filth and be embraced by the green of the mountainside. Historically, Haiti had been the most productive colony of not just France’s empire but of all the colonial empires, because of the fertility of the soil and productivity of slave labor. When kidnapped African slaves escaped the sugarcane plantations, French troops found it difficult to chase them through the dense forests of mahogany and cedar. That was hundreds of years ago. Most of the country’s trees had long been cut down for charcoal. But as we climbed the mountain and passed under the majestic umbrellas of a few, I got a sense of what the country once looked like.

  When we arrived, the family was waiting for us. Lovely’s neighbor Jenanine—whom I’d also enrolled in school—raced toward me and leapt into my arms. Lovely held back and looked at me coyly. She did not wear her heart on her sleeve.

  After introductions were made, we settled down in the yard. As I looked around, I saw a shelter made from corrugated metal that I hadn’t noticed on my first visit. Inside, there was a fire pit where Rosemene’s sister, Rosita, made all the family meals. Just beyond it were a few meager fields of corn and pumpkins, which Rosita’s husband, Elistin, farmed.

  John had stuffed his bag with gifts for the kids: books, crayons, and a soccer ball. He pulled them out and handed them to Lovely’s parents. Michael doled out Skittles to the children.

  And then we sat there, wondering where to start. In the past, my visits folded along the hard spine of purpose—to get the story or to enroll the kids in school. But here we were, three privileged white people from a world they could not imagine, coming simply to say hello. It was awkward.

  To break the silence, I asked Rosemene to tell us the story of the goudougoudou again, and she did, with her two kids jumping on and off her lap.

  When the rain broke, crashing down in plum-sized drops, Elistin hurried us into the room where his family had lived before the earthquake. He didn’t own it; he was the custodian of the land, and his payment came as free rent. There was a single bed, a chest of drawers, a wooden side table, and a rod hanging from the ceiling that acted as a wardrobe for Elistin’s shirts. A single lightbulb hung down, illuminating the room. There was barely enough space for all of us, but we squeezed in, our hosts giving us the chairs and sitting themselves on the bed.

  Quietly, I told Rosemene I had to go to the washroom, and she motioned for me to go around the building we were in. I dashed outside in search for what I assumed was an outhouse. I was wrong. There was nothing there, not even a hole. So I squatted under the eaves of the tin roof and went pee like I did when I was camping.

  When the conversation inside the cinder-block room came to its natural end, everyone shook hands and I kissed both Lovely and her mother goodbye. I handed Rosemene her second US$100 installment. I had intended to send it by Western Union, but delivered it in person instead. Looking around one last time, I realized Lovely and her aunt and uncle’s daily life was like a camping trip. And that, like the daily lives of the residents of Cité Soleil, it had nothing to do with the earthquake.

  • • •

  The next day John and I went to the Canadian embassy for a meeting with a political attaché. I’d heard that the first thing a foreign reporter should do on entering a country is get an off-the-record briefing from a diplomat. It was immediately clear why. Sitting in the ambassador’s air-conditioned office, he gave us a hearty crash course on the country’s issues, ranging from overcrowded prisons to the country’s lack of land title system to a political system based on patronage and beset by bribery. The flip side of a country with such immense problems was that there were immense opportunities to do good—as long as it was done well. That was the big catch. Much of the aid that came to Haiti caused more harm than it relieved.

  Before the earthquake, the city had two new private hospitals. They had both served primarily the rich—people who could afford to pay their fees—but, still, they were promising signs of private investment and homegrown development. A doctor in one had recently performed the country’s first kidney transplant. After the earthquake, a lot of foreign doctors had come to volunteer their services—which was good. But many had stayed, and now they were treating patients with ailments that had nothing to do with the earthquake. As a result, the private hospitals had lost many of their paying patients and their staff, who had been lured away by international NGOs offering larger salaries than what the local hospitals could pay. One of the two hospitals had already closed down and the other looked doomed to the same fate. It was a clear example of what the diplomat called “catastrophic aid.”

  From there, we went to a school in Morne Lazarre, a hilltop neighborhood that had been decimated by the earthquake. The school’s principal, Rea Dol, had become a local hero, heading out in her brother’s truck to buy food and deliver it to her neighbors the day after the earthquake.

  The school was called SOPUDEP—an acronym that translated to Society of Providence United for the Economic Development of Pétionville. Like most private schools in Haiti, it was run out of a former family home. Most of the classrooms were squeezed into bedrooms, and the narrow halls were meant for a handful of people to pass one another, not hundreds.

  Rea had a heart-shaped face and a booming laugh she unleashed often, particularly when discussing chilling things. Laughter, she told me, was her antidote to misery. That and social activism. The school was bursting with more than 550 students, all of whom were poor and half of whom didn’t pay any tuition.

  “How are you able to fund the school, then?” I asked Rea.

  She told me about Ryan Sawatzky, a thirty-three-year-old amusement park designer from Orillia, Ontario, a town an hour from my home. He and his father had arrived in Port-au-Prince three years before the earthquake with plans to raise money for computers in the school. But after a student had fainted from hunger at their feet, they had decided to fund a lunch program instead. Their commitment had continued expanding, and now they were paying the salaries of all fifty staff as well as funding the lunch program. The world seemed incredibly small again.

  “Every day I pray for him,” Rea said, clapping her hands and looking up at the sky. “Ryan is a bon bagay.”

  Rea’s school provided the inverse lesson to the pregnant girl in Cité Soleil: one person, or maybe two together, couldn’t change the world, but they could certainly improve a part of it and change the lives of many people. Rea had unwittingly provided me with the formula for an impactful project the Star could launch in Haiti: one part foreign money, two parts local activism. I wondered how we could apply the same thinking to help Lovely’s family get their life back
in order.

  • • •

  The day after visiting Rea, I was back on another plane with John and Michael, basking in quiet victory. We had not been kidnapped, maimed in a car accident, mugged, or even humiliated and gastronomically crippled by dodgy food. We almost missed the plane because the concierge had lost the key to the safe-deposit box with Michael’s passport. But that was already another humorous anecdote.

  I knew both John and Michael enjoyed the trip. It was a full-throated adventure. But I wasn’t sure what they had taken from it or if they’d decided on a project for the Star in Haiti.

  A few days later I was called into a meeting in the publisher’s boardroom. John was waiting inside, along with Michael and my editor. Two senior features writers who had also reported from Haiti had been summoned as well.

  There, we were informed of the Star’s plan: the three of us would write about Haiti’s reconstruction efforts through Lovely’s family. They would be our personal, intimate lens on the country’s dreams and efforts.

  But then they announced another unusual directive: We would spend the money sent to me to pay not just for Lovely’s schooling but also to cover tuition for other Haitians just like her. The money in the account was far more than would be needed for just one child, and many readers had sent money not specifically for Lovely but, inspired by her, to send other kids to school. Other readers had sent money with no instructions, and we’d use that to help Lovely’s family along the way. So, if Enel needed funds to restart his business, we would give him some. If Lovely’s uncle Elistin would benefit from an agriculture program, we would enroll him. As we informed readers about the theoretical and historical pitfalls and shortcomings of development in Haiti, we’d be witnessing their effects through Lovely’s family. There were no clear guidelines as to what we would fund and what we wouldn’t; we’d have to make those decisions along the way.

  The only fixed rule for us, as journalists, was this: we would be clear and honest with readers about how we’d influenced the story we were reporting and exactly how much money we’d spent where. As a news organization, on this singular project, we’d all torn up the journalist mantra of objectivity. In its place was our new philosophy: transparency.

  I left the meeting buzzing with excitement. Instead of maligning my decision, my bosses had endorsed it and joined in. That meant many more trips to Haiti for me. It also meant Lovely’s chances of escaping poverty were better. It wouldn’t just be me helping her now; Canada’s biggest newspaper would be behind her. I pictured her standing between her parents, watching water roll past their feet in that shed. I hoped, at the very least, her life would become more comfortable.

  By then, the money that generous readers had sent for the project had swollen to C$13,663 in its savings account. And it was still growing.

  Chapter 5

  Not Just One Girl

  It was a Wednesday morning in late July 2010, and I was gingerly navigating the sharp stones that jutted from the road like shark teeth, wishing for once that I had worn hiking boots and not silver flip-flops. Threaded between my fingers were Lovely’s little fingers. On her other side, her mother, Rosemene, strode with purpose beside Enel.

  It was only 7:30 a.m. but the sun was already hot, beating down on the back of my neck. I surveyed the dusty road for shade. There was none—just a thin, black cow grazing on the edge of a meager field of cabbages and a home’s perimeter wall crowned with barbed wire. I had peeked inside a few such compounds when their large metal gates were open to make way for their dark SUVs. There I’d glimpsed Haiti’s elite—their lush green lawns, pools, and paved driveways—who were said to own more than half the country’s wealth. In Haiti, extreme poverty and extreme wealth live cheek by jowl in a way that was uncommon in Canada. But while poverty was hidden back home in high-rise buildings and homeless shelters and wealth pronounced itself with big lawns and bigger houses, here the inverse seemed true: poverty paraded the street freely, and wealth was barricaded away.

  Lovely was immaculately dressed in a checkered red-and-white shirt tucked into a red pleated dress. On her feet were clean black oxfords below cloudy folds of lacy white socks. Her hair was twisted into cornrow braids and adorned with white bows and red hair clips. If you’d seen her, you might have thought she was going to a christening or a birthday party in one of these mansions, but this was just a regular Wednesday, and we were walking to school.

  What Rosemene went through every morning to get Lovely looking like this was exhausting to think about. She got up at 5:00 a.m. to bathe her daughter in a plastic tub she filled with cold water that she lugged from a neighbor’s cistern. Then she built a campfire in their kitchen shed to boil a pot of water for coffee. To twist Lovely’s hair into braids, she used the natural oil of seeds she collected from a local plant called maskriti, also known as the Palm of Christ, or castor.

  We were three months into the two-year plan to get Lovely, now three years old, started in school. Her teachers told me she was feeling more at home in the classroom—drawing, making collages and friends, and singing along with her classmates. I’d seen her sing in the muddy yard of her home, too, marching her brother and Jenanine up and down in a line and commanding them in the French of her schoolteachers: “Epelez maïs pour moi, je vous dites”—“I’m telling you, spell ‘corn’ for me.” But the school secretary also mentioned that Lovely was missing school often—one to two days a week—because she was sick. Even now, on our walk, it was clear she wasn’t well. Her nose was running.

  “Dan mwen ap fè m mal,” she said. Her teeth hurt.

  Rosemene told me everyone in the household had been felled by colds and the flu, which didn’t surprise me, given their meager housing. They’d moved out of the crowded, muddy shed and into Elistin’s family’s room a month ago. But it was still cold and damp, and they were sleeping on a concrete floor. Washing their hands was a production—I had rarely seen them do it—so illnesses passed around quickly.

  As we walked and talked idly, Rosemene carried a red cooler over her shoulder with a strap. I asked her what she had packed for Lovely’s goute (snack). In response, she held it in the air and rattled it.

  “It’s empty,” she said. “Every morning, I go with this empty.”

  By then I’d given Rosemene US$400 to relaunch her business. She was selling little bags of rice, oil, coffee, soap, and bouillon cubes from baskets in the nearby Fermathe market. But price inflation and the location were killing her. Where she used to pull in US$10 to US$15 a day in sales, she was now making just US$2 or US$3—and that was before she subtracted her costs. Part of the problem was the price of bulk items sold in the big markets in the city below had shot up, but those increases had not trickled up to the local market, where the timachanns charged the same price as always. Before the earthquake, Rosemene had hawked on a busy downtown street where there were lots of shoppers. Here, she was in the sticks, where many families grew their own food and market days were just three times a week. She was also convinced a bad woman in the market used spells to ensure competing vendors lost money. This was maji—sorcery—something I was learning Rosemene believed in deeply, despite being devoutly Protestant. The reason she’d dropped out of school in grade one, she said, was a witch had cast a spell on her, making her deathly ill for two whole years.

  Lovely’s dad, Enel, wasn’t bringing in any money, either. He’d never been paid for the job clearing rubble, so after a month he’d quit with nothing to show for it.

  That left no money for food, and Rosemene said she didn’t want to eat her merchandise. In principle, this was great, as it showed her dedication. But in practice, it was very concerning.

  “What did you have this morning for breakfast?” I asked.

  “Nothing,” she said.

  What about yesterday? Did Lovely have anything to eat then?

  “A Rice Krispies bar,” she said. Oh, and she’d had some thin soup with plantains and vegetables from her uncle’s garden.

  Wh
en was the last time they ate a real meal?

  “Sunday,” she said. “Diri ak sos pwa.” Rice and bean sauce.

  That was three days ago. I thought about Lovely, sucking the meat off those ribs and crunching the bones in the makeshift clinic when I first met her. The doctors there said she was malnourished. She’d been clearly making up for a couple of years of starvation. And now, she was famished again. No wonder she was sick.

  A block from Lovely’s school, a line of timachanns lined up each morning to sell snacks for parents, many of whom were arriving in cars. There were hot dogs and beef patties, plantain chips, and fried hunks of pork. The prices were cheap—just 10 gourdes (20 cents US) for a beef patty—but even that was too much for Rosemene and Enel right now. I stopped and bought enough to fill Lovely’s lunch box for the day.

  When we got to school, I asked the secretary what happened when children didn’t have a snack. Her answer was telling: They had to bring food in their bwat. That was the normal job of parents. She lived in the other Haiti, the one with manicured lawns, where it was unconscionable that someone wouldn’t have 20 cents for a beef patty.

  Unlike the Baptist mission school where I paid for Sophonie to go, at Lovely’s school there was no free lunch program funded by the World Food Programme. Rosemene might have assumed this school was better because middle-class children went there, and she was likely right, as middle-class parents who were educated themselves would be more demanding of the teachers. But neither she nor I had thought through the complications this choice would cause.

  • • •

  Since the team at the Star hatched the project to enroll more kids in school, I’d been interviewing education experts in the country. What I’d learned was alarming.

  Long before nearly one-quarter of the country’s schools—80 percent of which were in the Port-au-Prince area—collapsed in the earthquake, Haiti’s education system was badly broken. According to one Canadian education development worker, the earthquake only exposed the fragility that had been there for twenty years. “None of this is new to Haitians,” he said. “It’s just now everyone’s talking about it.”