A Girl Named Lovely

by Catherine Porter

  Just beyond the statue was a large wall with a big blue metal gate, guarded by United Nations soldiers in flak jackets and blue helmets. Over the gate was a sign: PARC INDUSTRIEL MÉTROPOLITAIN, SONAPI (Société Nationale des Parcs Industriels).

  What I found on the other side of that gate looked more like a disorganized campground than a medical clinic. Set around a muddy patch of grass and a brick courtyard were a smattering of tents: silver camping domes, large, heavy canvas shelters, and a big army-green party tent, now full of the Air Canada supplies. Chickens and a rooster scratched in the spaces between them.

  The place was eerily quiet. The buzz of activity and crowds of injured patients I’d expected from Alphonse’s description were conspicuously absent. Sundays, it turned out, were convalescence days for the Greek doctors who worked with the large medical NGO Médecins du Monde. The clinic was officially closed.

  A few volunteers milled about, including Alphonse, who walked over to greet me.

  “You’re here!” he said warmly. “Let me introduce you to Jonatha.”

  The miracle child was sitting under the shade of a tree in the center of a crowd of adorers. She was small, with birdlike bones—barely taller than my one-year-old, Noah, but with the coordination of my three-year-old, Lyla. Her hair was fluffing out from a neat row of cornrows that someone had lovingly tended to.

  She was sitting on a small ledge, between adults, dressed in a white tank top that slid off one shoulder, a pink corduroy skirt that was also too big, and a plastic pink play cell phone that hung around her neck on a cord.

  She did not look like a refugee who had lost everything and survived hell. She looked healthy and happy, as though she were spending another afternoon in the sandpit at a local park. I watched her snatch the baseball cap off the head of one of her adult admirers and plop it teasingly on her own head.

  She repeatedly returned to the side of a woman with an auburn bob and brown crinkly eyes named Michele Laporte. A retired psychiatric nurse from Montreal, Michele had flown to the Dominican Republic two days after the earthquake to meet her daughter, and together they had rushed over the border by bus. She called the decision an impulsive “cry of the heart.” She had never done anything like this before.

  Michele had spent her first few days setting femur and tibia fractures on the ground, often without anesthetic.

  “How can people suffer so much?” she asked wearily.

  Then, six days after the earthquake, Jonatha arrived.

  The clinic was in such chaos then, no one noted where the ambulance was from.

  “We don’t even know how many patients we had this week,” Michele said.

  The Greek doctors examined Jonatha and were shocked to find no broken bones, no open wounds, not even any scratches. The only things physically wrong with Jonatha, medically speaking, were long-term malnutrition and giardia, a common digestive tract parasite; neither condition a result of the earthquake. But, psychologically, she was distressed. She curled up in the fetal position and cried for days, refusing to talk except when calling out weakly for her mother.

  Michele had decided, simply, to hold Jonatha constantly, keeping her on her lap during the day and curling around her at night. She’d become a human rescue blanket, transmitting warm love from her body into the child’s, and it had worked. Jonatha had stopped crying the day before I arrived. She had started to speak again, too. That morning she’d had another breakthrough: while Michele was sorting medication in their tent, she heard a noise behind her, and turned to find the little girl shaking a pill bottle like it was a rattle.

  “She made a smile,” Michele recounted. “It was illuminating. I thought she would never smile again.”

  Most survivors are pulled out of the wreckage within the first twenty-four hours of an earthquake, disaster experts say. Adults are unlikely to survive more than three days without water. For children, it is even less. Michele couldn’t fathom how Jonatha survived, but she assumed the same grace had not spared her parents.

  “Will we ever know?” Michele said.

  While I listened to the story, I casually studied Jonatha, looking for signs of what she’d been through. A volunteer brought over a Styrofoam container of food, and she was eating like a linebacker: shoveling rice and beans into her mouth, sucking the meat off the ribs, and then crunching the bones and swallowing those, too.

  Michele took hold of the container to pull it away, and Jonatha gripped it firmly and narrowed her eyes. Her eyes were dark and exacting, like those of an old woman the world could no longer trick. There was a toughness in this kid I didn’t see in my children. Is that what had kept her alive all those days under the rubble? What horrors had she witnessed? Had someone sung songs of comfort to her, like I often sang to my children, or had she heard nothing but the moans and cries of despair? I hoped her mother had held her for a time before passing away.

  Tomorrow, Jonatha’s small life was about to be upended again. After ten days Michele was going back home, as were many of the other catastrophe missionaries. Who would care for Jonatha?

  “We don’t want to take her to an orphanage. They are all broken rubble. She needs stability,” Michele said. “But what can we do?”

  Less than an hour before, I had been under the UNICEF tarp, set up in the United Nations compound just down the road from the airport. The UN camp resembled a set for the 1970s television series M.A.S.H. Many agencies’ headquarters had been destroyed, so they had set up under dusty tarps with hastily scrawled signs poking from the gravel outside.

  There, I learned UNICEF had established three clandestine safe houses around the city for children who had lost their families. Sitting beside Michele, I emailed a contact at UNICEF about Jonatha. He replied within minutes: an officer would be by soon.

  “Do you think the care there will be good?” Michele asked. “There are a thousand families in Canada who would want her. I hope she ends up with a good family and can take painting classes and ballet and do all the things our kids get to do.”

  I hadn’t been in Haiti for a full day yet, but from what I’d seen that morning and what I’d read about the country, I doubted the care at the safe houses would meet such high standards. After all she had been through, Jonatha seemed destined for an internally displaced persons camp or a broken orphanage, which in Haiti rarely came with school, let alone ballet lessons. Looking down at the petite girl, I was overcome with pity. It was incredible she had survived, but for what? She’d lost her parents and now she was going to be abandoned again.

  I checked the time. I had to go. My deadline was looming.

  I crouched down and said good-bye to the little girl the way I did to my kids’ friends: with a pat on the shoulder. As I walked away, I looked back to see Michele lead her away by the hand for a washroom break. Her pink corduroy skirt slid down her backside, revealing a pair of diapers.

  • • •

  I met a lot of little kids over the next few days. Kids living under tarps in the street; shoeless kids lining up for bottled water; filthy homeless kids locals disparagingly called “street rats” who darted in and out of traffic offering to clean windshields for pennies.

  Some had uplifting stories. The day after visiting Jonatha, I came across one six-year-old girl on a bed in the middle of the street. It was surrounded by dozens of others and protected from the sun and rain by tarps, converting the road into a giant communal room. The girl’s aunt was combing her hair in preparation for her first outing since the earthquake. A Dominican charity had organized a camp for the kids on her street. I rode in a truck with them to a large house with a walled-in yard, where they sang songs and did jumping jacks. It was a rare moment of joy, one that a select lucky few seemed able to embrace. Most of their stories were heavily stitched with despair.

  Later that day, a giant hospital came into view through the car window, and I asked the driver to pull over. It was the public hospital for Delmas, a suburb of Port-au-Prince, called Hôpital Universitaire de la Paix
. The earthquake had cracked it but not leveled it, and inside the main courtyard, staff were conducting their first post-earthquake meeting. The parking lot and patch of grass outside were crowded with patients lying on gurneys and mattresses. Many had been discharged but had no homes to return to, so they fashioned their own rooms with sheets and green hospital room dividers.

  Inside, I met an obstetrical nurse from Spain who, upon hearing I was a journalist, ushered me into the hospital’s birthing room. The room was cavernous and bare except for a metal table set in its center. Upon it lay a large woman, entirely naked. She was in the midst of labor, grunting and gasping for air. Between her legs, I could see the crown of her baby’s head pushing out.

  “Among all this catastrophe is this beauty,” the nurse said. Then he pulled out his digital camera and started flipping through photos of dead babies he’d delivered after the earthquake.

  It was all surreal. In Toronto, if I had wanted to witness a labor for a story, it would have taken days of bureaucratic approvals, waiver forms, and stringent communications procedures. Here, I was waved in casually, and this woman’s most vulnerable, intimate moment was simply a backdrop. The mother in me was repulsed. I had given birth to both my kids without pain medication, and I knew how agonizing and intense it was. The thought of some stranger popping in unannounced in the middle of any of it was infuriating. But I was that strange journalist, and I was there for a reason.

  My initial fears about missing stories for the paper were unfounded: they were on every street corner, each one more compelling and alarming than the last. The only challenge was picking which ones to focus on. Did I stop at the mound of rubble that had once been a school, where an excavation team was pulling out four decomposing bodies of dead students? (I did.) Or did I go to the nearby Digicel building, the city’s tallest tower, where the company’s staff was having a giant prayer service on its ground floor? (I did that, too.)

  At the back of my mind, Jonatha lurked. I worried not only what would happen to her in the long run but what today or tomorrow would bring. Her crew of adorers seemed kind and well-meaning, but only the Greek doctors and the Dominican Republic Civil Defense volunteers reported to an official organization. The rest were a ragtag group who had flown to Haiti on a compassionate whim and glommed together by chance. What if one of them was there on false pretenses? No one had screened them, and no one was keeping tabs on them.

  In the scramble of patients coming and going, volunteers arriving and departing, and Michele leaving, how long would it take for someone to notice that Jonatha was missing? The thought of my own kids in her situation filled me with anxiety. The following day, when the blue Sonapi gate flashed on the side of the road, I asked my driver to pull over. I, too, was suffering a “cry of the heart.”

  I found Jonatha wandering between the tents in a sundress, happily eating a banana with Michele following behind her. The retired nurse had delayed her departure by a couple of days to continue caring for the girl. In the meantime, another orphan—a twelve-year-old boy named Carlos—had shown up. Both were reported to the Haitian government. Relieved, I pushed on.

  • • •

  I was sharing a hotel room with Brett and Lucas, who had decided to remain in Haiti for another week. The hotel was full, packed with aid workers, along with journalists from Fox and ABC News who had converted the rooftop patio into their command centers, complete with hulking satellite dishes and humming generators.

  The hotel was located at the top of a steep cobblestone driveway high up a mountain of Pétionville, Port-au-Prince’s rich lofty suburb, which offered television reporters a great backdrop for their evening newscasts. The city below looked beautiful from this distance, all the destruction softened by the glimmering Caribbean Sea. In fact, if you lay on one of the patio chairs by the pool, you would have no reason to believe something terrible had happened and that the city was in the grips of misery.

  Our room was on the ground floor, and we left the glass patio door open at night so we could rush out in our pajamas if we were awoken by another earthquake. Inside, there was a wooden chest of drawers that we’d filled with granola and protein bars from Canada. For days, that’s all I ate. There were two double beds, and the men graciously offered to bunk together so I had one to myself. We barely slept. Instead, we spent most of the night scrolling on our phones through stories from other news outlets, too jacked up on adrenaline and raw emotion to talk much. But by 6:00 every morning, after a few fitful hours of sleep, I was climbing back into a car, heading out with my laptop over my shoulder and bulging money belt around my waist to report.

  The reporting was exhilarating. I never knew what story I would find, and invariably whatever story I stumbled upon was more gripping than any other I’d covered before.

  Early one morning I went to the national soccer stadium to stand in a women’s food line. Rationing centers had turned into thrashing mosh pits in the past couple of days, with peacekeepers frantically trying to command control by liberally dousing the crowds with pepper spray. So the World Food Programme had decided to distribute rice only to women, figuring they were less likely to riot and more likely than men to feed their families.

  It was barely 7:30 a.m., and already hundreds of women were in line, holding each other’s hips to guard their places and chatting excitedly. I quickly learned that life for women in Haiti is hard in a way most North Americans can’t imagine. Most are single mothers who have to pay for everything: water, school fees, hospital visits. They have no real national system of welfare, and spousal support is laughable. Many more die in childbirth than anywhere else in the western hemisphere, and the rate of rape is terrifying. Since the earthquake, many women were now sleeping under cotton bedsheets, with no protection from the criminals who escaped the central prison.

  But the feeling in the line wasn’t despair. It was giddy from relief that they were going to get food and the small scrap of power they’d been given. We were surrounded by men. At the front of the line were United Nations soldiers, sitting atop their hulking tanklike armored personnel carriers. They were dressed for war in camouflaged fatigues and helmets, and they rested giant guns on their laps. Beside and behind, angry Haitian men prowled like coyotes on the hunt. They shouted that they wanted coupons for rice and shoved women out of their paths. The women shared stories and held on to one another, but their conga line shifted nervously and flicked toward the traffic on the dusty adjacent road.

  I was pinched between a very pregnant woman dressed simply in a white nightgown and Paulette Paul, a forty-nine-year-old woman whose lined face and gray cornrows made her look decades older. Her right arm was in a cast; she’d broken it while fleeing her crumbling house. Her husband had been badly injured and they had ten children to feed. She held two empty rice bags and hoped that, finally, this time she’d leave with them full. It was at least her fourth attempt to get food.

  As we were talking, the nervous energy around us boiled over. Shrill whistles sounded. I looked up and saw that the UN distribution trucks were slowly pulling away. Soldiers on the ground were using their riot shields to push the women back and clear a way through. A wave of bodies rolled toward us. Paulette and I turned and began to shoulder against the women behind us to get out of the way. We rushed onto the road, beside cars that were stuck in traffic, but the scene ahead made us stop dead. Between two idling cars, three men were fighting. We watched as one lassoed the arms of another behind his back. The third man pulled a silver gun from his pocket and brandished it in the air.

  My heart thundered in my chest. Instinctively, Paulette and I locked arms at the elbow and leaned into the river of women barrelling down on us. We shouldered our way to the front of the idling car and then dashed across the road to a gas station.

  Once we were safely behind the pumps, we turned to see what had happened.

  It was as if my vision had slowed, and I could watch the scene in distinct photos. The silver gun rose up and struck the pinned man against o
ne cheek. It was brandished again and struck him against the other cheek.

  Then it was over. The man with the gun got back in his car and drove off.

  I never saw what happened to his victim.

  • • •

  I returned to the government headquarters. They had built a covered dais in the yard of the police station from which ministers could deliver official reports to the press. I watched Haitian president René Préval declare that the country needed many more tents, only to be contradicted moments later by the American lead on relief efforts, Lewis Lucke, who said plastic sheeting would be much better for temporary housing. Who was in charge of the country?

  When I left the press conference, the Trois Mains appeared through the car’s windshield. I was working with a new driver by then, a man with long, neatly manicured fingernails named Jefferson, as well as a young English teacher named David, who was translating for me. I asked them to pull over so I could go check in on Jonatha.

  The clinic was humming with patients this time. There was a row of heavily bandaged men sitting in wheelchairs under the tree where I’d first met Jonatha, and a long line of women holding babies leaking out from one of the manila tents where the Greek doctors were doing examinations and diagnosing mostly fevers, diarrhea, rashes, and malnutrition. The acute trauma had passed now, making all those supplies brought down by Air Canada useless. The medical team was now greeting dehydrated and feverish children. They had a whole new wish list, starting with baby Tylenol.

  I found Jonatha dressed in a little purple sundress, sitting on a thin mattress under a tree. She was eating again from a Styrofoam container, this one brimming with macaroni and cheese. Michele had left, I learned, and a heavyset Dominican woman had been tapped to watch over the little girl.

  In fact, a whole new group of catastrophe missionaries had arrived since my last visit. There was a political science student from Boston, a French fisherman, and a life coach from Mexico who had flown into flood zones in Venezuela and rescue camps in Argentina. The life coach had been working with Jonatha every day, getting her to play and separate from Michele so she wasn’t traumatized by the Montreal nurse’s departure. He thought she was improving.