My family recently celebrated my son Noah’s second birthday in Florida with presents and cake. It seemed to me Lovely should have that, too. A loose plan began to form in my mind. My plane ride out of Haiti was April 28. I would take a day off on Lovely’s birthday and drive a party up to her shed. Maybe I could offer another surprise present, one that would make Rosemene happy: a year’s school tuition. How much could that possibly cost?
• • •
A number of readers contacted me with the same idea, responding to my regular columns about Haiti in the Star with offers to send money to enroll Lovely in school. As I thought more about my plan over the next day, I augmented my original idea. Lovely hadn’t been the only girl in her little compound. There was her eight-year-old cousin, Sophonie, and her four-year-old neighbor, Jenanine. If I was going to pay for Lovely’s school, I surely should pay for their tuition, too; that seemed only fair. Otherwise, we might sow jealousy and create more problems than we solved. I also felt we should help Rosemene get her small business going again so she could support her family and start saving money in a new tin can.
I’d volunteered with a development agency for a year in northern India before I was married, and the concept of providing people with livelihoods rather than things had been drilled into me. I wrote an email to the readers who’d contacted me, proposing that we pay the girls’ tuition for two years and give Rosemene US$100 a month for six months—long enough, I figured, to get her grounded and going again. They all wrote back in agreement.
On Lovely’s birthday, my last day in Port-au-Prince, Jean took me on a morning shopping spree around Pétionville. We inched our way through the clogged streets to visit a half-empty toy store where I bought dolls and a soccer ball, a bookstore where I got pens and some notebooks, the grocery store for cookies and juice, and a bakery, where I purchased a cake.
When we arrived at Lovely’s home, she and her family were waiting for us. Enel was there, too—thin, shy, and very young looking. He was, in fact, more than five years younger than Rosemene. He had taken a day off the job he’d found, clearing rubble from a yard down in Port-au-Prince, for the special occasion. They wanted to register the kids in school first and party later. So all of us crowded into the car and we bounced back down the same dirt road past a small cemetery to stop before a simple elementary school hidden behind a wall. The classrooms were set around a concrete yard with a naked basketball hoop and a flagpole. Peering through the screen windows, I saw kids in uniforms sitting in long rows at desks, student art taped to the stone walls, and teachers standing at blackboards, leading lessons.
This was a school run by the Baptist Haiti Mission. The tuition was subsidized by the church, but, even so, many families were not able to pay the reduced fee for their children—including Sophonie, the principal informed me. I pulled out my money belt and paid her outstanding bill, as well as next year’s fees.
Waiting in the courtyard, Rosemene shook her head adamantly when I told her I would happily enroll Lovely there, too. Rosemene had her heart set on a different school. We all piled back into the car and slowly bumped up the rutted road, the kids bouncing like popcorn in the back seat. Farther up the mountain, we turned down a thin road that snaked between houses and a field of corn and stopped abruptly at a maroon gate.
The school didn’t look like a school in the Western sense. It was a large house with a big parking pad. There was no playground equipment, but the walls were decorated with cartoon characters. A group of kindergarten children sat on small wicker chairs in the courtyard, where their teacher led them in a song about cochons—French for pigs. The little girls were wearing red tunics and many had white bows and plastic barrettes in their hair. The boys wore tartan red shirts and red shorts.
The administration office was at the end of the courtyard under a heavy concrete overhang. There we met the directrice, a round woman with painted nails, a starched white dress shirt, and a firm handshake. She took us on a tour of the classrooms on the ground floor while reciting the curriculum and learning objectives in classic French. Despite the earthquake, her students’ parents were still paying tuition, which was more than double what it was at the previous school we’d visited.
This was a school for middle-class kids, I realized. I assumed that was why Rosemene had picked it. She must have thought the education was better, and I figured she would know best.
A secretary in the office pulled out an old-fashioned wooden stamp and a blue ink pad and proceeded to pound each registration form with authority and flourish. This was my first taste of the bureaucratic rituals the Haitians retained from their former French slave owners, whom they’d driven off the island more than two hundred years ago. The secretary then pulled out a roll of tartan fabric and cut enough to make four collared shirts—two for Lovely and two for Jenanine. The girls would start school as soon as their uniforms were tailored.
It seemed a perfect development plan, clean and simple. I look back on that afternoon today with both tenderness and weariness. I didn’t expect to see Lovely again; I only imagined her sitting among those perfectly coiffed, doll-like children, singing her heart out about pigs. I had no idea if she would succeed or not, and I honestly didn’t think I’d find out. I figured the newspaper’s interest in and budget for Haiti would expire soon, so it was unlikely I’d be back again in the near future, if ever. Still, I was filled with joy. It felt wonderful to give an open-handed, no-strings-attached gift. What I was doing was as much for myself as it was for them. After all the horror I had passively witnessed and all the cries for help I had pushed away, here was one small but meaningful way I could respond not as a journalist but as a human being.
Many foreign correspondents are renowned for their exaggerated personalities and drinking or drug addictions, and I think I now know why. Passively witnessing tragedy and injustice is corrosive to your soul. The mantra that a journalist’s objective work is important as a record, and the principle that it often heralds larger changes, is true. But in that moment of witnessing deaths and hunger and violence you know you can personally stop, even for just one person, well, philosophy doesn’t offer any tonic. You feel like an accomplice to a crime. Kevin Carter, a South African photographer who documented famine in Sudan in 1993, famously spent twenty minutes framing a photo of an emaciated girl, Lovely’s age, curled in a barren field under the hungry gaze of a nearby vulture. Carter later said he was waiting for the vulture to spread its wings, but it never did and he eventually chased it away. The girl didn’t die that day—she later got up and walked to her parents on shaky legs. The photo won Carter the Pulitzer Prize—the Olympic gold medal for journalists. But he also came under withering criticism for choosing to spend that precious time framing his photo rather than helping the child. The decision haunted him and he died by suicide soon after.
After the party that afternoon, I handed Rosemene a US$100 bill and told her my plan. I stated clearly that I’d pay for Lovely’s school for two years. Then it would become her responsibility again. I couldn’t help forever, and I wanted to set my boundaries clearly. I wasn’t a fount that Rosemene could sip from whenever she needed money. But my grandmother had been a refugee, leaving Hungary on foot with my mother after the 1956 revolution. She often said, “Life happened to me.” I hoped the money would help Rosemene regain some control over her family’s life—that they could make choices rather than constantly react to greater forces.
More than anything, I hoped that, after the unimaginable horror she had endured, Lovely would get the chance to thrive.
Rosemene was exuberant. “Thank you, thank you, thank you,” she chirped in her singsong voice, hugging me good-bye. “I will pray for you.”
I was exuberant, too. It was the best—and only—day off I had taken in Haiti.
Chapter 4
Crossing the Line
A couple of weeks later, I was buckling my seat belt in the back of an American Airlines plane, heading again to Port-au-Prince. Beside me was my bos
s’s boss, the Star’s publisher, John Cruickshank, who was coming down for three days. He wasn’t the only one with me, either: Michael Cooke, the paper’s top editor, was sitting farther up in the airplane.
“What do you want to see while we are there?” I asked John.
“Whatever is most useful to you,” he responded, smiling at me from his seat. “I’m in your hands.”
My eyes widened. It was unprecedented to have a publisher join you on an assignment—not just for me but for any journalist I knew. That in itself made me nervous. Up until now, I’d been blissfully ignorant of the trip’s objective. Now that I knew it was to support my greater plan, I had another reason to be nervous: I didn’t have one yet.
The three of us were there because of the column I had written about my last day in Haiti. Upon returning to the newsroom, I burst into my favorite editor’s office and told her all about Lovely’s birthday party. I clearly wasn’t thinking straight: I’d broken the cardinal rule of journalism, and here I was happily telling my boss. But she didn’t admonish me; in fact, she convinced me I should write a column about it. “You are supposed to take positions and be partial,” she said. “It’s an incredible story. I think you should tell it.”
The response from readers was instant and enormous. The first email message arrived within minutes of the story going up Friday night. It was titled, “It was a Lovely thing that you did :).” Within an hour, dozens of other readers had written to say they wanted to do the same thing: enroll destitute kids like Lovely in Haitian schools.
By Monday morning, I’d received 160 emails from readers demanding to join what many called “the project,” and they kept on coming. When I got to work, the first donation check—written out to me personally, to direct wherever I thought best—was already waiting at my desk. It was for C$100.
The diversity of the readers reaching out was remarkable. There were chartered accountants, translators, day care workers, school principals, provincial bureaucrats, and shelter workers all begging to help me. While some were well-off, many disclosed they were single parents or retired pensioners on small, fixed incomes but that they wanted to pull something from their thin budgets.
Mondays were usually crunch days for me, when I had to research and write a column in just eight hours. Clearly, it wasn’t going to be a regular Monday, and I wasn’t going to write about something new; the day was going to be spent replying to emails. But what to say?
My response was the standard one most journalists offer: “I am not a development worker. I suggest you send your money to one of the organizations I saw working in Haiti, including Médecins Sans Frontières [Doctors Without Borders], Oxfam, and Save the Children.” But already I’d found those lines wanting. A weary skepticism about large international charities and development organizations emerged in the emails. Many readers feared that much of their money would be soaked up in overhead and that, by donating through me, they could be sure all the money would go directly to help Haitians. They trusted me.
That put me in an awkward situation. In my column I’d declared the long-standing code of journalists—impartiality at all costs—foolish. So how could I hide behind it now? I had decided to personally help; was I going to block other people from doing the same?
I didn’t have any answers. But I was sure about two things. First, I had to be very careful with the money arriving. The Star had its own credit union, four floors below the newsroom. I went there, opened a new account, and deposited that C$100 check into it.
Second, the newspaper had to decide if it did have a project in Haiti, and, if so, what it was. I couldn’t make that decision alone. I proposed to Michael Cooke that he come down to Haiti with me for the weekend to see what the pitfalls and possibilities were. He jumped at the idea, and the next thing I knew, Michael, John, and I were on our way to Port-au-Prince.
I spent much of the flight fretting. This was not a role I was used to. I was an expert at finding stories, convincing people to talk to me, asking critical questions, and writing—all of which were gloriously independent and solitary activities. For the next three days I would have to act as a secretary, social convener, and tour guide in a city that was not just physically devastated but dangerous.
I hired Jean again to drive us around and translate. Over the phone I implored him to get one of Jefferson’s good, roomy cars with air-conditioning. He promised that he had. But a few minutes out of the airport it was clear he had been lying.
Jean greeted us, standing in the sweltering Haitian heat in his trademark jeans and extra-large T-shirt that hung down to his knees. He led us across the street and stopped before a white, mud-splattered, rusty jalopy. It was so low-slung that Michael and I had to hunch down to squeeze into the back seat, our knees and elbows jumbled together. There was no air-conditioning, so we hastily rolled down the windows.
To start the car, Jean punched a metal button on the dashboard. After a few failed efforts it sputtered to life and we pulled out of the muddy lot, creaking past the airport grounds, which were now jammed with tents and makeshift shelters.
A few minutes later, as we mounted a hill, the car’s engine died. The smell of burning plastic wafted up from under its hood. Suddenly we began rolling backward.
Jean pounded on the metal button like a cardiac nurse, and the engine coughed back to life. He then proceeded to do a nine-point turn, halting traffic on all sides and startling the timachanns with their wares set up on the edges of the road, until we were heading back downhill to where we started. But even with the generous boost of gravity, the engine’s burbling didn’t last long. Soon, Michael and John were out on the street, pushing the car to the side of a busy four-lane road, past a dozen motorcyclists all lounging on their bikes.
I pulled out my phone to look at a map. From what I could tell, we were in one of the city’s red zones, where aid workers were warned not to stop without security. Many convicted gang members had escaped the city’s central prison during the earthquake and were still at large. Reports of armed robberies outside of banks and kidnappings had been circulating, including one about two Médecins Sans Frontières nurses who had been held hostage for six days. What if we were attracting the wrong kind of attention?
I implored Michael and John to take off their suit jackets and hide them in the trunk.
“Let’s walk down the street and rent a car,” Jean suggested meekly. In hindsight, that wasn’t a bad idea. But I had never seen a car rental place in Haiti, and whatever faith I’d put in Jean as a guide had completely drained. I’d have to figure this out on my own—and fast.
Desperately scanning the street, I spotted a white jeep with two large black letters down its side: UN. I raced across four lanes of traffic and knocked on the window. The driver rolled down the window languidly. My French was rusty, but I got my predicament across to him.
“Where are your bosses?” he asked suspiciously. I pointed to where Michael and John were standing by the trunk of the car. The United Nations officer nodded his head, rolled up his window, and opened the door of his car. “Follow me,” he said, and he strode across the street with purpose.
The officer halted before the crew of motorcyclists near us. It turned out that the motorcycle drivers were not shady layabouts or would-be kidnappers but taxi drivers. Here I was asking a UN officer to find me a taxi when in fact we were surrounded by them.
One of the men on a bike was a police officer, dressed in uniform. The UN officer struck up a conversation with him while I waited to the side. “He will help you get a car,” he said, before charging back to his vehicle.
The police officer stepped out into the street and began to flag down cars.
I negotiated a ride in a van that was so beat-up, the door was held together with duct tape. Once we were inside, I noticed that the gas gauge needle was at zero. I doubted if we would even make it to our hotel at the top of Pétionville.
Along the way, the driver pulled into one gas station after another. At each one
he was waved away. The city was facing a gas shortage. The island has no gas reserves itself—it imported all of its gas from Venezuela—so such shortages weren’t uncommon. The tanker was late again.
I masked my anxiety by acting like a cheerful tour guide for John and Michael, pointing out the giant pigs and markets until we pulled up the hotel’s steep cobblestone drive. Either God had chosen to be merciful or the driver’s gas meter was broken, but we arrived. I gladly handed over the fare and climbed wearily out of the van.
• • •
My role reversal was complete by noon the next day. My two bosses were gleeful children under my command. John was wearing my baseball hat to protect his head from the Haitian sun, and Michael had taken to calling me “Mommy.”
We ventured into Cité Soleil, the country’s most dangerous neighborhood, with a crew of middle-class Haitians who’d been inspired by the earthquake to help their fellow countrymen. Every Sunday they cooked up giant pots of food and distributed it to the neighborhood’s residents. Police officers accompanied our convoy into the heart of the slum, where we stopped in a large dirt field.
I had passed through Cité Soleil before on my way out of the city, but I’d never dared to get out of the car. What I saw now was worse than anything I’d seen in Port-au-Prince, even though the area had been left relatively unscathed by the quake.
The houses around us were rusted tin sheds, set shoulder to shoulder around a large dirt yard. A crowd of children was milling around, most of them dressed only in rags and some completely naked. Few had shoes. They looked like refugees, but they hadn’t lost anything in the quake; this was how they’d always lived.
The children quickly arranged themselves into long lines, ordered from shortest to tallest, to await their portion. Their patience and discipline was heartbreaking.
A visibly pregnant woman in line approached me. She looked exhausted; her face, eyes, shoulders all sagged. Her hair was unbrushed and she was barefoot. In her arms she carried a tiny baby.
A Girl Named Lovely Page 7
