But the plant was clearly no longer operating. Peering through its brown metal fence, I saw no sewage trucks, no de-sludging workers in rubber boots, nothing but a couple of parked tractors and brittle, knee-high weeds. A custodian stepped out of the glass office by the entrance to talk to me, along with a thin security guard toting a shotgun. “The plant has been closed for over a year,” the custodian said. It had operated for only six months before the vinyl liners had ruptured, and they had not been repaired.
People were back to dumping their excrement into canals and streams or waiting until the rains washed out their simple latrines for them. During the torrential rains the previous fall, cholera cases had spiked, and once again the government hadn’t been able to respond. If Médecins Sans Frontières had not been in Port-au-Prince and swiftly opened 180 cholera-treatment beds, the country’s death count would have shot up again.
All the setbacks would have been enough to irritate the journalist in me before. But development in Haiti was long past being just a professional interest for me. It was personal.
I drove up to Fermathe the next afternoon to check on Rosemene and meet with the hospital’s lead doctor. I found him in his office at the end of one hospital wing, surrounded by medical students in their white jackets, stethoscopes hanging around their necks. He was holding court.
There was hardly room for another body to squeeze into his room, but he waved me in and paused in his lecture to brief me about Rosemene’s case in front of them all.
Her hypertension was extremely high. He’d admitted her for bed rest and prescribed some medication in an attempt to bring down her blood pressure. The hope was that she could stay in the hospital for another month, until the baby was considered full-term, and then he would schedule a C-section with an obstetrician.
“It depends on how she responds to the medicine,” he said. “What worries me a bit is the baby. If there is too much pressure on the cord, it will die.”
Rosemene’s blood pressure was 220 over 130. Hearing this, the students in the room shifted and widened their eyes like spooked horses. Normal was 120 over 70, one whispered to me. Her blood pressure was deep into stroke territory.
“Wouldn’t it be best, then, to take Rosemene to the Médecins Sans Frontières obstetrics hospital?” I asked. I’d visited the hospital a couple of years earlier for a story and knew it specialized in high-risk pregnancies just like this.
“There’s no reason to take her to a specialist hospital,” the doctor said. “I will continue to follow her. If her case becomes urgent urgent, we can take her there by car.”
I found Rosemene in a private room just down the hall. Enel was in the chair beside her, and her brother Arnold was nearby. Rosita sat at her feet, with her head in her hands.
“She’s worried if I have a cesarean, I’ll die,” Rosemene said. “I’m not scared. I’m with Jesus.”
She’d just moved out of the general ward, she explained sheepishly, because last night two women in beds near her had died.
“My stress went up,” she said. She was also worried about drawing on the family’s account at the hospital. A private room was much more expensive than a bed in the general ward, which looked like a scene from Annie—the beds stretching down each side of the room in two long rows.
“Don’t worry about money,” I responded. “There is enough in the account to cover this.”
After a while, the room emptied and I sat in Rosita’s spot, stroking Rosemene’s calves and swollen feet.
“I thought they were so swollen because I walk so much,” she said wanly.
A half dozen people arrived from Rosemene’s church. They crowded around her bed, held their hands up to their shoulders, and began to sing hymns. They were praying for her. I slipped out of the way and stood just outside the door so I could watch.
“Every day, every hour, we need you, Jesus,” their voices rang out.
Rosemene half sat up, resting her shoulders and head against the wall. She held her hands up as if she were cupping a basketball, closed her eyes, and accepted their prayers. Both of her legs trembled noticeably beneath her floral skirt.
• • •
Protests had become a weekly occurrence in the city. I watched one that surged through the slums—mostly men running and shouting slogans and dancing to the music played by rara bands that peppered the crowd. “Martelly has stolen the country,” one man behind me yelled. “We are hungry.”
President Martelly was now ruling by decree. He was on his third prime minister, who’d been appointed without parliamentary approval because there was no parliament to approve him. Martelly blamed the opposition for blocking his most recent electoral plan; the opposition claimed that it had been Martelly’s plan all along to claim absolute rule.
I was at a press conference downtown, listening to two prominent Haitian lawyers talk passionately about what they saw as corruption by Martelly, his family, and his government, when Richard showed me his phone. It was a text message from Rosemene asking if we could bring some blood pressure medication to her, since the hospital’s pharmacy was out. Clearly it wasn’t stocked with medication for preeclampsia.
We got into the car and made our way up to Pétionville. We couldn’t find the medicine at the first couple of pharmacies, but we finally found it at Giant, the upscale supermarket. I picked up some groceries—pita bread and cheese and pear juice and Lovely’s favorite salami—along with the medication. I figured we’d quickly drop off the meds at the hospital and then have lunch with Lovely and her siblings. We weren’t in a rush. Rosemene hadn’t indicated this was “urgent urgent.”
When we were back in the car, on the winding road up the mountain, my phone rang. It was Rosemene, wondering if we were bringing the medication.
“The doctor is asking,” she said.
“We’re almost there,” I said.
Her room was dark when we arrived. Enel was standing by the door. He grabbed the medication bag I was carrying and ran down the hall, looking for the doctor.
Rosemene lay in a nest of duvets and pillows. She had the white scarf wrapped tightly around her head. She was feeling awful. The swelling in her feet and hands had gone down, but her head throbbed and now her chest hurt. Her brother had descended into the city to get the medication himself, but he had purchased the wrong one, and the doctor hadn’t let her take it.
A nurse entered the room to take Rosemene’s blood pressure, which had gone up even more, to 240 over 140. A young female doctor burst into the room shortly after.
“We can’t keep you here,” the doctor announced frankly. “We need to get that baby out, but we can’t do that here right now. You could have a seizure any minute.”
Rosemene sat up in her bed and asked about the urine tests she had just paid for. Shouldn’t she wait until the results came back?
“Would you prefer to wait for the results and die?” the doctor snapped. “Or just lose that money?”
“I don’t want to die,” Rosemene responded softly.
We were clearly in the “urgent urgent” zone. The doctor promised that the hospital would organize Rosemene’s swift delivery to the Médecins Sans Frontières obstetrics hospital using the Baptist mission’s single ambulance, donated by an American evangelical NGO after the earthquake. But the ambulance had broken down again, and the American parts were difficult to find in Haiti. There was a new ambulance service in Port-au-Prince, stocked with a few dozen vehicles, but its central yard was located near the airport, and it could take hours to get there and back—if it was dispatched at all. No, we’d take Rosemene immediately in my rental car.
The stillness of the room popped suddenly, as though pricked by a pin, and we all sprang into action. Enel and Arnold yanked free Rosemene’s bedding and stuffed it into plastic bags. I emptied her side table and looked under her bed. Richard ran out to get the car and we all raced after him, arms full.
Rosemene remained calm. She rose slowly from her bed and stretched her arms out
in the shape of the cross in the empty room.
“Jesus,” she said. “Please protect me.”
She drifted down the hospital’s main hall and floated briefly into the general ward, where she’d stayed her first night, to say good-bye to the women who’d been her neighbors.
“Pray for me,” she chirped to them, her voice high and singsongy.
Each second felt infuriatingly long. Finally, we got her into the back seat of the car, and Richard roared out of the parking lot.
My hands were soaking wet. Sweat leaked down my wrists and dripped off my fingers. I was panicking.
What if Rosemene died in our car? What would we do? I dried my hands on my lap and punched the number for my editor back in Toronto into my cell phone. I had to let her know that, once again, I’d stepped into the story. When I heard her voice on the line and started explaining what was happening, my throat constricted with emotion and my voice cracked.
“You have to remain calm!” Richard bellowed beside me. He gripped the steering wheel, weaving around slowing tap-taps and giant potholes. Whatever happened, he’d been through worse. For all his faults, Richard was a rock in the storm. He calmed me by getting philosophical about Rosemene’s situation.
“If you go back to the beginning of this story, you have to go way back,” he said. “Go back to the poverty, the weak infrastructure, the broken state, the Duvaliers . . .”
“Slavery,” I added, “the restitution agreement, the American occupation . . .”
We stopped behind a dump truck full of construction material as it turned into the driveway of one of the nearby mansions.
“The corruption, the class system,” I continued.
The back seat was stone silent. Enel and Arnold sat like statues, eyes forward, saying nothing. Rosemene leaned her head against the window. Her eyes were closed but her lips were moving. She was quietly praying. I rubbed my left hand dry on my pants and reached back to grab hold of one of hers, just like I often did with my kids.
“Breathe,” I said aloud, to both her and myself. “Breathe.”
The minutes grudgingly nudged by. There were more dump trucks and braking tap-taps. Even if we had been in an ambulance, we wouldn’t have been able to go much faster. The road was so narrow, there was no room for cars to pull over.
We made it to Pétionville, where the blokis got even worse. I wanted to unroll my window and start screaming at people. Didn’t they see this was an emergency? We were trying to outrun death!
Breathe. Breathe.
Time slowed to a trickle, and while my mind was hollering at it to hurry up, my eyes snapped vintage photographs out the window that I still carry in my mental album today. Snap: a newly expanded luxury hotel with drivers all standing by the entrance, waiting for the politicians they were chauffeuring to emerge. Snap: another renovated city park, with mosaic tiles and businessmen in suits sitting on the benches. Snap: a man on the side of the road with a puppy in his arms and, beside him, a white van with an A-frame sign on the roof declaring, Foreign dogs, buy and sell. Snap: women with baskets on the side of the road, selling mangoes and secondhand shoes.
I pleaded with God for Rosemene’s life. Take the baby, I thought, but please leave her alive. If she died, Lovely would be left with nothing. Rosemene was the family’s poto mitan. Without her, all the children would be lost.
The faded MÉDECINS SANS FRONTIÈRES sign appeared and we pulled up to the hospital’s brown gate. A guard came out and peered into the car, then nodded. The gate was heaved back and Richard edged the car into the gravel parking lot.
I checked my phone. It was 3:37 p.m. The trip had taken us exactly forty-nine minutes.
My body was flooded with relief. My limbs felt like they were deep underwater, they were so heavy. My hands were still slick with sweat.
Rosemene stepped slowly out of the back of the car and gingerly walked inside the hospital with Enel and Richard beside her. She was admitted immediately.
Richard overheard the intake nurse say she was lucky to be alive.
• • •
The baby was born the next afternoon at 2:00 p.m. It was a little boy, weighing just over 3 pounds.
I gazed down at him through a glass window. He was tiny and light-skinned, with a large head and little frog legs. He looked malnourished, with ribs poking out down his chest. The doctors said he would be fine, and compared to the baby in the bassinet next to him, he seemed huge. Both were lucky to be in one of the few hospitals in the country with a well-equipped and functioning neonatal unit. If they were going to survive anywhere in Haiti, it was here.
The hospital was made entirely out of blue shipping containers joined together into a modular one-story building, with a couple of small green gardens in the center. It was plain, simple, and very clean, with running water and electricity and gleaming operating rooms.
Unlike most other hospitals in Haiti, Médecins Sans Frontières had very strict protocols. There were visiting hours and a two-visitor limit for each patient. There was even a press relations officer to make sure journalists couldn’t just walk in and start interviewing patients. He had met me in the gravel parking lot out front that morning and given me a choice that perfectly captured my perennial predicament in Haiti: I could visit Rosemene as a reporter, in which case I would be accompanied by him, or I could visit as a friend, which meant I could go in alone, albeit without my camera or notepad.
It was a clarifying moment for me. The choice was obvious. For too long, I’d been a divided person in Haiti—part social worker, part journalist. But increasingly I was playing a third role that seemed more important than either one: friend. Careening down that potholed two-lane road, I’d been sweating and praying for Rosemene, not for my deadline or my project.
I stepped through the hospital gate and into the visitors’ line, pinched between cell-phone-minute salesmen in their red pinnies and timachanns selling egg sandwiches and meat patties.
I found Rosemene in a small ward with only a handful of other patients. She was sitting up weakly, wearing one of my old dresses. Her feet were still swollen, and she said her head throbbed; but now that her baby had been born, her blood pressure was falling.
I sat down on the edge of her bed and we held hands as we whispered to one another.
“You saved my life,” she said. “If I had stayed in the other hospital, I would have died.”
I looked down at her and smiled. It was true. I had worried that she was going to die.
“You were crying in the car,” she said. I nodded again. We sat there for a moment in silence.
“I will get planin,” she said. “They do it here. It will last ten years. I can’t trust Enel to do it.”
“You can’t have another baby,” I concurred. “You can’t afford it.”
Most money I sent went to feed Rosemene’s kids, who were always hungry. Lovely, in particular. When they were out of money, they bought on credit, so any new cash was gone almost instantly. I gave her the US$200 I had tucked into my pocket.
“This is for food, then,” I said.
Rosemene hadn’t seen her baby yet. The doctor told her maybe tomorrow, once her blood pressure was down. “Will you take a photo for me?” she asked. When I brought back the picture on my phone, she craned her head to look at it and commented on how small and pale he was.
“What are you going to name him?” I asked.
She wanted a biblical name. Even this morning the doctor had said her case was touch-and-go and that they almost had to choose between her life and the baby’s.
“Jesus kept us both,” she said.
She asked me to think of some names from the Bible. I scrounged around my brain, uncovering and dusting off the obvious Old Testament characters. How about Moses? Or Noah with the flood? There was Abel . . .
She didn’t like any of those. So I started to dig deeper. Peter? Paul? They were apostles. Zachary? I couldn’t remember who he was, but I was pretty sure he was in the Bible.
�
��Zachary,” she said. “Yes. That one.”
And just like that, the little boy was named. I couldn’t remember who Zachary was in the Bible. I hoped he was a good man. Later, I was relieved to read that he was a Catholic saint, the father of John the Baptist. His name was actually Zacharias. It meant “The Lord has remembered.”
• • •
After visiting Rosemene, we drove Elistin home. He’d lost the house he had spent so many years building, but his landlord had shown him mercy and given him some money to leave. It didn’t cover his costs, of course, but it was enough to pay for a year’s rent. The family was now living inside a single room at the back of a house about ten minutes from where they once lived.
Inside, there were two beds, a night table with their valuables in a drawer, a small table piled with kitchenware, and a laundry basket bursting with dirty clothes.
Rosita, Lala, and Ananstania were all napping together. Rosita woke up, and I sat down on the bed across from her so that Elistin and I could fill her in on what had happened with Rosemene and the hospital.
“They take your money and do nothing,” Elistin said, speaking about the hospital. “Haiti is like that.”
It was a warm day, and sunlight splashed onto the floor through the open door. Chickens darted by, followed by a kitten. Lala woke up, and Rosita plopped her onto my lap. She raised her hand to my neck and left it there.
Elistin sat in a chair by the door and rubbed his head with his long fingers, as was his habit. “Bon,” he said. “We want you to be her marenn.”
I didn’t know how to respond. The word marenn meant so many things in Haiti. It translated to “godmother,” but it meant much more than that did in Canada, where godparents were largely just symbolic. If I accepted, I would be expected to offer wraparound support—not just with Lala’s education and health care but with bigger things, such as helping her get a job later in life. My impulse was to say no.
I sat quietly for a moment and then asked him why he wanted me to do this.
“You are the head of the family,” he said.
“No,” I responded. “You are the head.”
A Girl Named Lovely Page 25