A Girl Named Lovely

by Catherine Porter

  “She needs parents now,” he said.

  Two UNICEF workers had arrived to collect Jonatha, but the volunteers refused to let her go with them.

  “They didn’t have any identification,” the French fisherman said. “We can’t give her to anyone.”

  This struck me as richly ironic and reassuring at the same time. Jonatha’s safety net was stronger than I’d feared.

  When the little girl looked up at me, she offered no glimmer of recognition. Her dark eyes fixed on me flatly, then returned to her lunch. She wasn’t a charmer, like my daughter, Lyla, who always plays to the crowd. She wasn’t happy-go-lucky and oblivious like my son, Noah, either. She was hard-baked, weary, and incredibly self-possessed. This crowd of adults was flocking around her because, to them, she represented the country’s fragility—a helpless human rescued from the rubble. But to me she seemed more to reflect the country’s weary resilience. She was a survivor.

  She wasn’t the only one in the makeshift medical clinic. A group of fifty children were also wolfing down macaroni and cheese nearby. They were from a damaged orphanage and now lived under a tarp on a nearby field. None of them was as clean or well-dressed as Jonatha. A few wore sandals that were at least two sizes too big, and others had no shoes at all. I watched them line up quietly next to the row of wheelchairs to wait for a pickup truck to take them back to the orphanage, and wondered if Jonatha would be joining them soon.

  I set off down a cobblestone road, heading deeper into the Sonapi industrial complex. Before the earthquake, it had been the country’s premier sweatshop zone, filled with factories making T-shirts for Western companies. Now the factories were not operating, but catering trucks hummed around them. A small Canadian flag fluttered from a spindly tree on the edge of the road, and I wandered past it and up a footpath to where five turbaned men sat in plastic chairs in a circle under a tarp, grating ginger and washing kidney beans for dinner. They were volunteers with Sikh United who’d come from Brampton, a suburb of my hometown Toronto, more than a week ago, to cook 2,500 free meals a day. I was stunned.

  “God gave us a lot,” said their leader, a truck driver. “Why wouldn’t we share with somebody who has nothing?”

  • • •

  That seems like the obvious response of a human being faced with the suffering of other human beings. Even the New Jersey boy, whom I’d dismissed as a yahoo upon stepping off the plane, had good intentions and loving instincts. But the cardinal rule of journalism is to remain objective, which means staying emotionally detached and not getting personally involved. Our job, we say, is to record stories and recount them honestly in all their gruesome and delightful fullness, without bending or influencing them. We are witnesses, not actors, in the world.

  That’s how it works on paper, at least. In practice, I was finding it difficult. Every day I was beseeched on the street by people asking for èd—the Kreyòl word for aid. They were hungry; they asked me for food. They’d lost their livelihoods; they asked me for work.

  I repeated the same refrain: “I am a journalist, not an aid worker. I don’t have money. I don’t have jobs. I don’t have food. I am here to tell your stories.”

  Usually they nodded in resignation but asked me to jot down their names and cell phone numbers, just in case. When I gave my business card to one man who was among the lucky few to get a temporary job shoveling up the rubble downtown, I was immediately swarmed by his colleagues. They all stuck out their hands, demanding a business card. Despite what I told them, they all hoped I would help them somehow.

  The problem was, I didn’t believe my own words. I could feel my money belt along the flat of my belly, still thick with American cash, and in my bag was a fistful of granola bars. I could help them, but my job demanded that I not.

  While every other blan—foreigner—I’d met had dropped his or her life to rush here and assist in some way, I had to make the conscious decision, time and again, not to offer even the smallest help. In theory, I knew the stories I was writing would contribute to the larger cause by inspiring Canadians to pay attention and hopefully send money. But in the moment, those abstract thoughts were poor comfort. The guilt and horror piled up inside me like the jumbled debris that clogged the roads.

  My normal way of dealing with stress is to shove my feet into running shoes and set out for a hard run. But I hadn’t brought my running shoes, and even if I had, I couldn’t imagine running alongside the mounds of rubble, past people sleeping on the road. So I started to bum cigarettes from other journalists and wealthy Haitian businessmen staying at the hotel after filing my stories.

  I’d smoke them on the hotel patio, ten kilometers and a world away from the darkened city below.

  • • •

  Days later, I was standing outside a pale yellow house in a dense neighborhood with Jony St. Louis. He was a physiotherapist and a translator for a local clinic that included the country’s only prosthetic limb workshop. This had been his home before the earthquake.

  From the outside, it looked like the building hadn’t suffered too much damage—just cracks in the walls, a few gaping holes. But, peering through one, I saw a kitchen on the first floor that Jony explained had come from two floors up. The outer walls had stayed standing, while the floors inside had collapsed like descending cards in a shuffling deck.

  Jony had lived in the basement with his wife, Annia, who was a doctor, and their two young kids. On the afternoon of the earthquake, Annia returned from the hospital, sent their children upstairs to play at the top-floor neighbors’, and lay down in bed for a quick nap.

  Two stories of concrete and furniture collapsed atop her.

  Jony was across the city at the time, working with a stroke patient in her home, when the three adjacent houses all came crashing down. He described how, after calling the patient’s son to let him know she was fine, he jumped on his motorcycle and raced home. The streets were full of unconscious and bleeding people. Ten minutes from home his motorcycle stopped dead, so he abandoned it and ran.

  “With each breath, I said ‘My wife, my daughter, my son,’ ” he said.

  It was dark by the time he reached his home, so he used the light of his cell phone to guide his way to the spot where his home had stood. There, he dug for Annia with the help of some boys from the neighborhood soccer team he had coached.

  Before Jony guided me to the spot where he’d dug, we needed to prepare for the sickly sweet smell of death. A young girl had died in the upstairs bathroom, and her body was still there, decomposing. Around the city, I’d seen people walking with minty toothpaste smeared below their noses to block out the smell of death all around them. Jony had an upscale version of that: peppermint oil. He handed me the bottle and I wiped it on my upper lip, wondering at how the most grotesque rituals become pedestrian in such a short time.

  The houses in most neighborhoods of Port-au-Prince were packed tightly together, which explained how so many people died. You fled your crumbling house only to be crushed by the one falling next door. There was barely enough room to walk between Jony’s house and his neighbors’, and the path was now a course of jumbled hunks of concrete shards and cinder blocks. At the corner, we turned down an even tighter alley and stopped halfway down the width of the house, where there was a hole at the base of the wall. Strewn around it were items of Jony’s former life, yanked out as his team made its daunting progress: his six-month-old daughter’s peach baby blanket and a white sandal, two blue ties, an electronic piano. Jony squatted and picked up a small family photo album, flipping through its pages of happy memories. I crouched beside him and leaned in to peer into the hole. In the dark, I could make out the wooden board of a baby crib.

  The night of the earthquake, Jony could hear Annia’s faint voice calling for their two-year-old son, Semi. He and his team had pounded with a hammer and clawed with their hands, calling to her, asking her to knock against the ceiling that was pressed against her face. When they finally reached her eight hours later, one of
the boys slid through the tunnel on his back and pulled her out.

  “I carried her out to the road like a baby,” Jony said. “She couldn’t move her legs.”

  He rushed her to the closest hospital, the same one where I had seen the woman giving birth, but he’d found its dark grounds filled with innumerable patients and few doctors. So he took Annia to his mother’s courtyard. After three days, Annia told him she still had not peed. She needed a catheter.

  He turned the city upside down looking for one, all to no avail. Annia died that night, likely of renal failure.

  “Her family thinks I didn’t do enough,” he said. “I should have brought her to a hospital in the Dominican Republic. . . . I can’t sleep. I never drank alcohol before, and now I drink a lot of rum at night. That helps me to forget.”

  I often cry when interviewing people who are emotional themselves. Sitting beside Jony, I wept not just with sympathy but with horror. I imagined what it meant to be buried alive. To be conscious that your life was ending but to remain trapped and unable to do anything about it. I thought about the heroics of Jony’s neighbors, risking their lives to enter the house while aftershocks rattled and threatened to maim or kill them, too.

  The futility of it all was haunting. All that effort, to be left with nothing but guilt and uncertainty. What, I wondered, was a human life worth?

  • • •

  I left Port-au-Prince ten days after I arrived. Brett and I were loaded onto a bus at the Canadian embassy and driven down one of the city’s main boulevards toward the airport. As we passed the statue of three hands, I craned my neck to see the blue gates of the industrial district where Jonatha was likely still living. I didn’t have a chance to say good-bye to her.

  Most of my fellow passengers were Haitian Canadians, dressed in their Sunday best for the trip. They wore straw hats, flowery sundresses, and suits. We walked in a long line onto the airport tarmac and boarded the giant gray Canadian military plane up its back ramp, as though we were trudging into Moby Dick’s open mouth.

  Inside, the plane was stripped of all its guts; all that remained was a rim of metal seats along the walls and the cold metal floor on which we all sat, strapped into place by long belts that stretched across many laps before being ratcheted down. Our luggage towered under a net behind us.

  The noise of the engine as the plane reversed was tremendous. It sounded, I realized, like an earthquake. The women around me raised their hands over their heads and began to pray and scream. The whites of their eyes flashed. For a moment it seemed like they were reliving the horror of that evening. They were all traumatized.

  Before I’d left that morning, I had done a final interview with Gaëlle Delaquis, the Canadian embassy employee coordinating my evacuation. Her nails were immaculate, her high-heeled shoes expensive, and her thick, dark hair pulled into a glossy ponytail. She was the picture of poise; I felt like a slob in my hiking boots and baseball hat.

  As we shared a cigarette on the back steps of the embassy, she told me her story of the earthquake. She was driving home from work when the road had transformed into a roiling river. She managed to maneuver the car to her street, where she found every house destroyed except for hers. Her neighbor was on the road screaming hysterically. The woman had just stepped out to buy some lemons, leaving all four of her kids at home, and now they were all buried beneath the remains of her house. Gaëlle rushed to her garden shed to look for tools, but she found only shovels and a “girly hammer.” Still, for four days, she and her neighbors dug for the children until their voices stopped calling out. In the end, they pulled out only dismembered arms.

  I realized Gaëlle’s immaculate appearance was a conscious attempt at control. On the inside, she was a broken mess. Her story, like every other one I’d heard over the past ten days, was intimately raw and emotionally overwhelming. I felt honored she trusted me with it. Each story was an intimate gift. I told myself I had the responsibility to use them well.

  Some of my dispatches from Haiti had made the front page of the newspaper. I hadn’t missed anything; on the contrary, I’d dug up good stories and delivered them on time. I had always wanted to be a foreign correspondent, and here I had proved to myself and my bosses that I could do it. But that’s not what I thought about, sitting on the cold floor of the plane, surrounded by refugees and traumatized survivors returning to their second home in Canada.

  After telling me her story, Gaëlle pointed her manicured finger across the grounds of the Canadian embassy to a security guard.

  “That woman over there,” she said. “She comes here every day smiling in her uniform. She lost her family and is living on the street.”

  Gaëlle’s point was that in the mountain of tragedy that was Haiti right now, she was relatively unscathed. Others had it worse and were bravely holding up the appearance of normality, so Gaëlle tamped down her despair and did the same.

  I ripped open my knapsack. Before I had left Toronto for Haiti, I had rushed out to the outdoor equipment store and hastily bought a thin sleeping bag and a tent, in case I couldn’t find a hotel room and needed to sleep outside. Both were still sealed in their packages.

  I dug both of them out and handed them to Gaëlle.

  “Give her these,” I said.

  I didn’t report on that woman’s story. In fact, I never spoke to her. So this simple act of kindness was not breaking any journalism credos. But it buoyed me.

  I felt, for a brief moment, like I wasn’t just a cold tape recorder indifferently capturing the sounds of suffering. I was a member of the human family, reacting with love and kindness.

  That thought warmed me on the cold flight home.

  Chapter 2

  Personal Aftershocks

  I stayed in bed for days. I was physically shattered. I had hardly slept in Haiti, but it was the emotional exhaustion that knocked me out upon returning. I felt drugged. I’d wake up at 11:00 a.m., look up at the shards of winter light that had evaded the drapes and slashed across the ceiling of my bedroom, roll over, and sink back into sleep. Sometimes Noah would escape our nanny and clamber upstairs to my room, appearing beside the bed, smiling, his loose curls softly haloing his head. The trip to Haiti had been our longest time apart.

  “Mama,” he’d say, and I’d pull him under the duvet for a brief cuddle until he got bored and bounded off again in search of a ball or hockey stick or, preferably, both.

  When my bladder left me no choice, I counted the seconds it took to swing my legs over the edge and stumble down the hall to the bathroom. Thirty-five was the magic number. That’s how long it took to cut off an arm, crush a woman napping after work, smother a whole family. That was how long the earthquake had lasted.

  The flight back to Canada had been only three hours, but I was traveling back to another world: one where fifty-story buildings stood impervious to danger, children were bundled up in snowsuits and carried off to drop-in centers, and radio DJs listed their favorite breakfast cereals, not the names of the missing and the dead.

  Certain images saturated my foggy brain. A Haitian woman inside a sweltering tent, leaning heavily on a physiotherapist while attempting to stand on her remaining limb for the first time since the earthquake. But instead of her it was my father sitting there helplessly, his powerful right leg a stump, his bulky right arm missing. I imagined his humiliation and loss and fear. How does someone rebuild themselves after losing half their body?

  I pictured arriving at my house at dusk to find it standing in a lagoon of rubble, then rushing to my garden shed in search of tools. I would resort to my cell phone for light, too, if the power lines snapped. I imagined hearing the voices of my neighbors’ children, and then, slowly, those voices fading to a muffle.

  I was haunted—not just by the horrors I had witnessed, but by the fragility and helplessness of life they had exposed. The world I knew ran on purpose and principle. We tell our kids that if you are kind and good and work hard and don’t rack up too much debt and don’t do drug
s, things will turn out all right. Ours is a world with ambulances and socialized medicine and building codes. For the first time I’d seen how indiscriminate and unfair death could be, and I understood that it doesn’t matter how much studying you’ve done late at night or how many charities you’ve built or lives you’ve saved: your skull will crack just the same as a serial rapist’s. Life was unpredictable, nonnegotiable, and indifferent. In thirty-five seconds the world—for me—had transformed into a scary, cruel place.

  My daughter Lyla’s fourth birthday was swiftly approaching. I imagined her trapped beneath the bricks of our home, crying and calling for me and her father. How scared she would be in the dark, all alone, and confused that no one was coming to help. How would she pass the time over six long days?

  • • •

  After a week in bed, I returned to work.

  The Toronto Star was the biggest newspaper in the country. Its newsroom was bigger than a football field, crammed with gray desks buried beneath piles of papers, bulky computers, and dying plants. No matter what time of day, fluorescent lights blinked overhead. When big news was breaking, the floor vibrated with stress and excitement. But on regular mornings, when reporters were out collecting stories and editors had not arrived yet, it was quiet.

  I was a social justice columnist, covering issues of women’s rights, poverty, hunger, climate change, and mental health. But at heart I remained a reporter. I rarely pontificated from afar; I preferred to see things close-up and in person. I’d usually spend equal time meeting people in the center of a story—illegal immigrant women facing deportation, poor people at food banks, environmentalists in the field—and studying the broader issues in the library, reading reports or talking to experts. I baked my opinions slowly, but once I formed them, I’d go hard.