A Girl Named Lovely

by Catherine Porter

  For months I’d been collecting cute outfits that Lyla and Noah had grown out of and, instead of dropping them off at a neighbor’s home, put them in storage bins in the basement. Friends and colleagues added dresses and shoes they no longer wore, which I tucked aside for Rosemene and Rosita. A couple of days before leaving home, I’d done a quick shopping trip, buying golf shirts for Elistin and Enel, as well as some Tylenol, toothpaste, and toothbrushes for all the kids.

  Part of it was just practical: I was flying to Haiti; I had all these things and no longer needed them, and they did. So why wouldn’t I bring them? But part of me wanted to play the role of Santa Claus. I enjoyed giving Lovely and her family small gifts that brought them joy.

  Lyla, despite her continued anxiety and sadness about my trips to Haiti, had slipped a Dora the Explorer doll and a small pink chicken in my bag the night before I left. She also added a few of the colorful rubber bracelets she loved to wear and said they were all presents for Lovely. Even though they had never met, Lyla was building a relationship with the other little girl in my life.

  Once in Haiti, I carefully laid out all the clothing into piles on my bed: Lyla’s size-three dresses, shirts, and pants for Lovely; Noah’s size-two clothing for Jonathan and Lypse; a size-four dress for Jenanine; the small women’s dresses for Rosemene and Rosita.

  When Dimitri arrived to pick me up, he lifted up one of the women’s dresses, held it before him, and laughed. “That is way too big for Rosemene,” he said. He picked up a skirt and dress I had set aside for nine-year-old Sophonie. “This will fit Rosemene,” he said. “And this could be a nice skirt for Rosita.”

  He picked up two of Noah’s cast-off sweatshirts, one of them emblazoned with a Canadian maple leaf. They were both size two. “These will fit Jenanine,” he said.

  I looked at him, aghast.

  “Those no longer fit my two-year-old son,” I said indignantly. “Jenanine is four.”

  “Catherine,” he said. “Your son is healthy. These kids are skinny. They are not normal sizes.”

  When Lovely returned from school later that day, she raced into her family’s room to try on the clothes I had brought.

  I could hear Lovely giggling. When she emerged, Lyla’s pink dress hung almost to her ankles and gaped open at the back of her neck. Dimitri had been right: the clothes were massive on her. But she loved them. She paraded up and down the yard like a model, putting her hands to her hips and shifting them back and forth as she walked.

  “Comme ça. Like this,” she said, pursing her lips. Her visits to the dentist had been a success. Her teeth were no longer causing her chronic pain.

  It was a glorious afternoon. The light in the yard was speckled, casting a soft glow over everyone’s faces. I sipped a coffee Rosita had brewed for me using a filter stitched from the sleeve of one of her husband’s old dress shirts, and watched Lovely doing her supermodel walks. I had a strange sense of being in two places at once. It was like an image of my daughter cast from the projector of my mind and transposed over Lovely, and I could see what she had been doing the last time I remembered her wearing those clothes. Bringing them to Lovely had seemed like a practical gift, but once they were on her, they felt freshly intimate. Just as Lyla was beginning to share her world with Lovely, it seemed that Lovely was inadvertently joining Lyla’s.

  While we sat talking, Enel’s cell phone rang. It was Michel Martelly, the bawdy musician known as Sweet Micky who wore diapers onstage as a stunt and who was now running for president. That is, it was a prerecorded message by Martelly telling Enel that if he wanted the price of rice to go down, he should vote for the bald guy with the bull insignia on the ballot. Sweet Micky’s party’s name was Repons Peyizan (Peasant Response), and the bull was its symbol. Since there are so many parties running in every Haitian election and so many Haitians are illiterate, it’s important that parties have strong symbols voters can recognize on a ballot.

  “I don’t know who to vote for,” Enel said. “I only know two candidates.” The last time he had voted for Préval and been disappointed.

  “Even if I had an electoral card, I wouldn’t vote,” said Rosemene, who was still bending over the laundry tub. “They have all lied to us. This government, every government. They put money in their own pockets and not in ours. Food is byen chè. School is byen chè. I don’t trust any of them.”

  The family’s radio was broken, so they hadn’t listened to any election broadcasts. But the teledjòl—Kreyòl for “mouth television,” or the rumor mill—was working just fine. Since so many Haitians couldn’t read and didn’t have electricity for television or radio, word of mouth was often the only way they got their news. Given their penchant for answering their phones at any time of day or night, the teledjòl was incredibly effective. It had brought dirty rumors about another of the presidential candidates having many illegitimate children.

  “Kraze fwaye. He’s a homewrecker,” said Elistin, arriving from a neighbor’s stoop where he was sewing children’s school uniforms on a borrowed machine. “How can you trust a guy like that?”

  He was the only one in the family with an electoral card for this election, which would permit him to vote. But he was nervous about the election. The teledjòl had also brought news of recent deadly riots against the United Nations Stabilisation Mission in Haiti (Mission des Nations Unies pour la Stabilisation en Haïti, known by its acronym, MINUSTAH) in the northern city of Cap-Haïtien. Elistin wondered if the riots might spread here.

  “Do you know the story of Ruelle Vaillant?” he asked me. “Don’t you think that could happen again?”

  The story of Ruelle Vaillant would scare anyone from voting. It is the name of a street in downtown Port-au-Prince where, in 1987, there was a polling station inside a school. That year was the first time Haiti had seen democratic elections after three decades of dictatorship. While people lined up downtown to vote, the deposed dictator’s hired thugs—known as Tonton Macoutes—marched through the streets with their guns. They opened fire on the people waiting to vote on Ruelle Vaillant and killed twenty-nine.

  Politics in Haiti has always been a dangerous sport.

  Still, I was planning to join Elistin for the morning when he voted. That thought reassured him. Maybe he wouldn’t be shot if he was there with a blan. He told me to come early the morning of the election so he could vote and then go to church. As I said my good-bye, Lovely reached for my hand and walked me down the path to where Dimitri had parked his car.

  When we got there, she wanted to come with me.

  “Are we going to the hospital?” she asked. “I like the hospital.”

  • • •

  I did visit the local Baptist mission hospital a few days later, but it was on my own. There was an ancient X-ray machine, two operating rooms, a laboratory, and a small pediatric ward. Like the dental clinic, the waiting rooms were all lined with long wooden church pews, so varnished that they gleamed, adding a dignity and saintly calm to the place.

  Some of the programs and staff here were paid by the government, and the costs in the general ward were very low. But its surgeons and specialists worked as independent contractors and had to be paid in full by patients, and that was expensive.

  The administrator led me to the accounting office, where I filled out some rudimentary paperwork for Lovely’s family, slowly printing out the names of each member on a page to ensure that all of them would be able to get free service here. Then I counted out US$1,000. I figured, given that a family visit we’d made here together in June had cost US$26, this might cover a few years of basic health care and medication. If they had an emergency, they would run through it much quicker—but that was the point. I wanted to prevent any further pointless deaths in the family if I could.

  The rest of the money I’d spent on the family, to my mind, had fallen into a long-term development plan. Even though Rosemene’s business had not taken off as I had hoped, the idea behind giving her monthly grants was still to boost her back to b
eing self-sufficient like she was before the earthquake. Paying for two years of Lovely’s, Sophonie’s, and Jenanine’s educations similarly seemed like an investment toward their family’s eventual escape from poverty.

  In contrast, this medical payment was short-term aid, plain and simple. There was nothing sustainable about it. Once the family ran through the account, they’d likely go back to paying out of pocket when they could and going without health care the rest of the time—unless the government came through with its health care plan to provide free medical service to the population, starting with young children and pregnant women. Even that wonderful improvement would be partial.

  But how could I not create some health insurance for them? I believed health care was a human right. Having grown up in Canada, I had never had to pay for a planned visit to my family doctor or a rushed one to the hospital. It all came out of our collective taxes. It seemed criminal to force people away from treatment because they were poor, particularly during a cholera outbreak.

  Besides, I saw the difference a few visits to the dentist had made for Lovely. What was the point of sending a little girl to school if she was feverous and moaning with pain? How would she learn?

  I now knew the stakes were much larger than a toothache. To haul herself and her family out of poverty, Lovely had to do more than learn. She had to stay alive.

  Chapter 8

  Whoever Is in Charge?

  It was hard to believe the country was running an election amidst the rubble and cholera. But in late November 2010, it was. The mantra at the time was stability. International donors said an election was important for rebuilding, and President Préval insisted it was important for the country’s young democracy.

  Reporters were issued special ID cards by the electoral commission so that we could get into the polling places and, in theory, get through the roadblocks that would be everywhere to contain any violence. There were no assurances, of course. Every rule was flexible here, particularly in its application. I thought it best to sleep somewhere in Fermathe near Lovely’s house so that I could be sure to meet Elistin early on the morning of the election.

  The two-lane highway I’d become so familiar with looked entirely different at night. It was empty—not a single car, person, or police checkpoint. Most of the lampposts that dotted the edges of the road were unlit, so it was very dark. The graceful trees and earthy cliffs looked ominous under the stark glare of our headlights, and the potholes that hopscotched the road appeared enormous. Dimitri gunned the engine and took the turns so quickly, I gripped my window handle, worried we’d fly off the road.

  Dimitri wasn’t speeding for the sake of it: he was trying to outrace any kidnappers he worried might be waiting to ambush approaching cars. Reports of kidnapping were routine in Haiti, particularly around Christmas, when many parents lined up at Western Union depots to receive transfers from family members in Canada or the United States for gifts and their children’s school fees. But the number of incidents had become alarming in recent weeks, and they were especially bad in wealthy enclaves such as the one we were roaring through on our way up toward Lovely’s family. The teledjòl buzzed with suspicions that ransoms were funding various political campaigns.

  I’d heard enough personal stories about kidnapping, so I didn’t second-guess Dimitri’s fear. At the end of one interview about the country’s health system, a cardiologist told me how, during the peak of the kidnappings just four years ago, armed men had walked into his waiting room, robbed all his patients, and then taken him. What frightened me the most was the gratuitous violence he described. They duct-taped him to a chair and tortured him, breaking his cheekbone and teeth, burning his skin with molten plastic, and cutting his legs. He was sure they would kill him. But after his family paid a ransom, they left him bound and blindfolded in a parked tap-tap and he stumbled to a nearby house. Now he was back in the same office, talking to me. Why had he returned? Because he loved his country and was a matter-of-fact fatalist. He would die when he was meant to die, he said. He wasn’t frightened, but his story scared the hell out of me.

  We found the farmhouse where we’d be staying, and thankfully the gate was open. Our room was musty, with one single bed in the middle of it and a mattress laid out on the floor. I fell asleep to the sound of Dimitri talking on the phone to his wife in New Jersey.

  It was still pitch-black outside when we set out the next day at 4:00 a.m. Elistin greeted us at his house in his nightcap and pajamas; he was brushing his teeth. Of course, in Caribbean time, 4:00 a.m. didn’t mean 4:00 a.m., so we waited for him to bathe from a bucket. It was incredibly quiet, with only the faint sound of a neighbor’s radio breaking the stillness. The sky above us sparkled with stars and a crescent moon casting the only light. It was cold—just 11 degrees Celsius, according to my phone. Dimitri and I jogged in place for warmth.

  When Elistin was ready to go, I set out with him on foot up the road, while Dimitri waited behind with the car. The lights of Port-au-Prince sparkled like phosphorescence in the distance below.

  The countryside, and the sun, were awakening.

  “Sa k pase?”—“What’s going on?” Elistin said, greeting neighbors on the road. “Bonjou.”—“Hello.”

  We reached the Fermathe market along with the first timachanns, pulling their baskets of parsley from their heads and setting up their stands. One swept garbage to the side of the road with an ancient witch’s broom.

  The voting station was inside the local high school, just down the road from Lovely’s school, where all the goute supplies were usually lined up. The grounds were erupting with noise as more than one hundred scrutineers rushed around like a swarm of agitated bees, shouting into their phones and loudly demanding they be allowed into the polling rooms.

  Prospective voters had already formed into a tight line, their bodies touching, and we pinched in. Up front, a man held a radio to his ear, and we all leaned in to hear the news about violence breaking out in the central part of the country.

  A sugarcane seller set up shop from a wheelbarrow. A vendor arrived with heaping bowls of fried pork and pate kòde, deep-fried patties filled with salted herring, and set up her table before us.

  Two hours after the polls officially opened, the gate to the school was yanked aside and we rushed inside for what felt like a game of capture the flag.

  There were polling booths set up in eighteen classrooms.

  I ran after Elistin as he rushed up the stairs. He held up his ID card to an election worker in the first room.

  “Which office is it?” he asked. I noticed the door was marked A to C and figured Elistin just had to find the door with the letter E on it, for his last name. But he didn’t know that, so we raced back downstairs, heading to another room.

  He wasn’t the only one confusedly running around. Everyone seemed to be. An eye doctor we’d met in line said she’d been to every room, and her name was simply not on the list.

  We raced around the back of the school, up a different set of stairs, and then back down.

  “Have you found your room?” the farmer ahead of us in line asked, once we landed upstairs for the second time.

  “No!” Elistin shouted.

  Such delicious disorganization. It’s moments like this, I thought, that some upper-class Haitians long for once they’ve moved into the safe, efficient world of North America. “When I wake up in Haiti, life pinches me,” one had told me the other day. “A trip to the store requires some problem-solving.”

  Elistin eventually found the classroom with the letter E on the door. The desks were in a large jumbled barricade against one wall, and a dozen scrutineers crowded the edges to watch.

  The ballots were the size of posters, filled with the photo, number, symbol, and name of each candidate. Elistin was handed three—one for deputies, one for senators, and the last for presidential candidates. He had arrived with only a plan to vote for Mirlande Manigat for president; he’d told me he thought it was time for the steady hand o
f a woman to steer the country. The farmer friend in line had instructed him to vote for senator number 11 and deputy number 41, which he dutifully did.

  Then I watched as his giant ballots were folded and stuffed into three see-through boxes. An election official stamped Elistin’s right thumb with indelible purple marker so he couldn’t vote again, and it was all over.

  Finally, we could get into Dimitri’s car and drive back to Lovely. But as we passed through the market, Dimitri’s right wheel started to make a too-familiar squeaking noise. Breakdowns, along with cigarettes and the granola bars I continued to pack for lunch to save time, were becoming a regular staple of my daily Haitian life.

  When we stepped into Elistin’s yard, it was speckled with light filtering through the trees. The family was all up and Lovely was waiting for me. She wanted to draw pictures of cows and robots in my reporter’s notebooks.

  • • •

  I’d covered many elections as a reporter, mostly when I worked at Toronto City Hall. At the Star, during provincial and federal elections, every reporter is assigned an electoral district to follow both in the runup to and on election night, so I’d also dipped my feet in federal and provincial races.

  Recently there had been a heated race for the mayorship of Toronto. One of the candidates was a loud, populist councilor named Rob Ford, who would later admit to doing crack cocaine on the job, but only after vilifying the reporters who uncovered it. His positions were as unorthodox as his lifestyle. He took pride in not researching topics and shooting from the hip. I went to four debates in ten days in between trips to Haiti and shook my head when I heard him declare his strategy for addressing climate change: get rid of speed bumps so cars wouldn’t slow down and spew extra exhaust from their tailpipes.

  So I had recent experience covering nutty elections. But the election in Haiti took things to a whole new level. For president alone, there were 19 candidates on the ballot, whittled down from an initial 34 who had registered. Then add in nearly 900 candidates running for 109 deputy and senate seats—the numbers and the accompanying buzz were dizzying. Port-au-Prince was plastered with campaign posters. The graffiti on walls denouncing the UN and cholera were replaced with politicians’ names and their slogans. Tap-taps were converted into campaign vehicles equipped with loudspeakers repeating theme songs and political messages.