Three of them came to meet me in Gilberte’s dusty yard, where a bougainvillea along the property’s boundary wall dripped fuchsia-colored petals at our feet. None of the students knew why they had been called there. Gilberte wanted me to break the good news to them in person. As soon as one of the women, Ketcia, heard what I had to say, she put her hands over her face and burst into delighted laughter. Even before the earthquake, she’d been behind on paying her school fees and had taken to arriving at school early each day to sell lunch snacks to her fellow students. Now she was even worse off: the earthquake had destroyed her right hand and her family’s rented house. She had decided just that morning to drop out of school because she couldn’t afford to pay the tuition.
“This is the best thing I’ve heard in months,” Ketcia said. It meant she could continue her dream of becoming a physiotherapist.
I decided to tell the women about Lovely. After all, she was the reason I was here. I unloaded my anxieties about her future, describing her illness and hunger and how no one could help her with her homework, since neither of her parents could read or write. I worried aloud that education was not enough; she needed so much more to succeed.
“That’s my story,” said Ketcia. Her parents were also illiterate. She grew up hungry. “Sometimes I had no money to eat. Often, in fact.”
The other two women agreed. One of them was the first person in her family to finish high school. Her mother had never attended school, and her dad, who was a plumber, had only made it to grade five. Her stomach was empty the day of the earthquake; she’d eaten nothing. The other had missed a year of schooling and worked as a seamstress when her parents couldn’t afford the tuition.
They all agreed fervently that education in itself was all Lovely needed to change her family’s future.
“She can be anything she wants,” said Ketcia, her face still beaming. “Même la présidente. Even the president.”
• • •
I decided to take Lovely to the dentist. If hunger was the main culprit for her absences from school, pain was a muscular accomplice. She complained regularly about how badly her teeth hurt; peering into her mouth, I could see why. A brown line arched across her upper front four teeth. Crescent-shaped chunks had fallen out of two of them, making them look like they’d been yanked out and stuffed back in upside-down with their roots sticking out. Dark brown holes gaped from two molars in the back of her mouth.
I printed out a photo and canvassed the opinions of dentists, both in Haiti and Canada, about the cause of the problem. Theories ranged from a fever Rosemene might have had while pregnant with Lovely to rot from sugarcane, which was plausible, given Enel’s former job.
On my way to the dentist with Lovely, I thought back to Lyla’s last checkup. Her dentist’s practice focused specifically on kids, and the office felt more like a children’s playground than a medical center. One corner of the waiting room had a cave filled with plush cushions and a treasure chest of toys, and each dental chair had a television screen placed seamlessly in the ceiling. Before picking their flavor of laughing gas, each kid got to choose which cartoon he or she wanted to watch during the procedure. At the end, Lyla left with a loot bag of stickers and pens.
Going to the dentist in Haiti was nothing like that.
The dental clinic was just up the street from Lovely’s school, set in the Baptist mission headquarters, a series of stone buildings built around a large church. The mission funded many schools around the country, including the one Lovely’s cousin went to. Here, it offered a restaurant and bookstore, a dusty museum, a dilapidated zoo, some greenhouses, and a hospital. The dental clinic was on the ground floor of the hospital.
Its waiting room was furnished like a simple church, with whitewashed walls and long wooden pews all facing the direction of a white paneled door, on which was tacked a printed list of services ranging from 10 Haitian dollars (US$1.20) for a consultation to 70 Haitian dollars (US$8.40) for fixing a tooth.
The mission subsidized the clinic, but even with those low prices, most people opted for the cheapest solution: pulling out a tooth. I sat in a back pew with Rosemene and Lovely, watching in horror as patient after patient raced out with their hands clasped over their mouths.
The receptionist didn’t offer much confidence, either. He was tall and gaunt, with Albert Einstein’s wild gray hair and a clear dislike for his job. He didn’t greet patients so much as bark at them, revealing a mouth almost entirely devoid of teeth.
I’d come here at 8:30 a.m., when the place was packed, to take a number, and now, five hours later, it was our turn.
We shuffled anxiously through the white door into a room where two dentists worked side by side on their patients. There was a bucket on the floor between them. I stared, dumbfounded, as they both yanked out teeth and threw them in the pail.
The dentist on the left was a large man wearing sunglasses and a green gown that was askew, falling off one shoulder. He ordered Lovely up onto his chair and promptly dug into the back of her mouth with a wooden tongue depressor.
My stomach lurched as I watched her small body coil in pain.
“See this,” he said, peering over at us. “This is very bad.”
Her cavities were deep. He said he’d seen it “many times before.” He declared his theory with authority: they were the result of in utero malnutrition.
“It depends on the health of the mother during pregnancy,” he said. “If she didn’t eat a lot of vitamins and minerals, this happens.”
Her adult teeth would be fine, as long as she brushed regularly. But she would need at least five fillings. Adding in the medication for freezing, which wasn’t included on the listed prices, it came to 410 Haitian dollars, or C$51. No one in Lovely’s family had ever spent money on a filling; she would be the first.
On our way out the door, Rosemene asked if I would carry Lovely. I picked her up and she snuggled right in immediately, nestling her hot, damp forehead under my chin, just like Lyla did when she was sick or tired.
• • •
It was dusk, and Dimitri was driving me back to the Healing Hands guesthouse after another grueling day of back-to-back interviews. I was sitting in the front seat of his car, going over my notes, when my cell phone rang. It wasn’t the cheap Haitian phone I’d bought and loaded with minutes to make local calls. It was my Canadian phone, which I used sparingly while traveling to avoid the outrageous roaming charges.
A number flashed on the screen with Home above it.
My stomach tightened with anxiety. Any unexpected call from home likely carried bad news.
The sound that greeted me was like a squeaky wheel. It was Lyla. She was sobbing so hard, she could hardly push out the words.
“I . . . don’t . . . want . . . you . . . to . . . go . . . to . . . Haiti . . . any . . . more.”
Nothing had happened. Lyla just missed me. Over the past two months, I’d come to Haiti twice, each time for ten days.
“Oh, baby,” I said soothingly. “I will be home soon, my love. And then I won’t come back to Haiti for a while. I’ll just be with you.”
Slowly she quieted and her little bird voice returned.
“Okay,” she said. “Promise?”
Chapter 6
Poto Mitan
(Cornerstone)
My little girl and I were connected again, our bodies clicking together like spoons in a kitchen drawer each night as we lay in her single bed and untangled all the day’s events, sorting them into categories of fun, wonder, interesting, and hard/sad.
I had kept my promise and taken a good chunk of August 2010 off work to marinate in family time, mostly at cottages on the shores of Georgian Bay. Now that September was here, I was back working—but not in the newsroom. I wrote my columns on my bed and at home so I could delight in what my children did and said, even from a floor away.
I eavesdropped one afternoon as Lyla put Noah to bed for a nap in her bedroom down the hall. First, she pretended to read him part o
f Pippi Longstocking, the book we’d been chipping through over the past few weeks. Then she tucked him in and told him lovingly that she would be there when he woke up. Listening to her, I intuitively understood why Lovely had been calling for Jonathan those days after the earthquake. They were truly best friends and each other’s principal playmates. Up until now, my kids’ world was a shared tree fort of daily games and collaborative ideas, which Lyla would soon be leaving to start her own, solitary adventure: Lyla was going to school for the first time.
Her new school was around the corner, a four-minute walk from our front door. Its imposing stone façade looked like a castle behind a moat. The front entrance was so grand, you could imagine knights entering on horseback. Out back, there was a large fenced-in yard with trees, a baseball diamond, and a vegetable patch. Inside, her classroom offered a water table, reading library, and craft area furnished with painting easels and a Play-Doh station. All of this we got for free: I didn’t have to pay for a single pencil, let alone tuition.
It came from our collective taxes. I’d been a supporter of Canada’s social welfare system before, but my time in Haiti had made me appreciate its genius and generosity in a personal way. Haiti was the perfect libertarian state: it worked for you as long as you had the money to buy water and security and schooling and hospital visits. But if you didn’t have the money, there was no safety net to catch you.
Lovely had unwittingly put new lenses on my view of Lyla. Her body, though small and light, seemed sturdy and dense to me now. When she settled into my lap, she felt like a mastiff—all muscle and brawn—compared to Lovely’s hollow bird bones. And when she asked me how to spell words, I sounded them out with both pride at her gaining skills and sorrow at how Lovely would never have this kind of support. Her bookcase, already stocked with more books than Lovely would likely own in her life, reminded me each night of the world’s unjustness. How could one little girl be nonchalantly given so much, while another was afforded so little?
My time in Haiti had also scratched the veneer of casual assuredness from life’s coating. It had made me feel vulnerable even in Canada, where there were so many protective systems. I now understood how easy it was to lose everything.
The first day of school, I helped Lyla dress in her special outfit, chosen specially for the occasion: white tights decorated with silver butterflies, a fuchsia tutu, a white top, followed by silver Mary Janes. Her short caramel hair was pushed back from her face with a new silver headband.
We skipped hand in hand to the schoolyard and spotted Lyla’s teacher, wearing a fluorescent orange crossing-guard vest. Suddenly the line of students was moving. I watched my precious little daughter slip through those giant doors and disappear without even a worried look back or a wave good-bye.
• • •
Most of the time, I felt like I had landed on another planet when I arrived in Haiti. But there were fleeting moments when my shoulders relaxed and my eyes stopped darting for signs of wonder or danger, and I could ease into the autopilot that only comes from knowing a place so well, you don’t even see it anymore. Going to Giant Supermarket in Pétionville was one of them. If you looked past the armed guards with their knee-high combat boots and antique-looking rifles at the front door, Giant could fit in as a grocery store at just about any suburban shopping mall in North America. Step before the automatic sliding doors at the front entrance, and you were greeted by a blast of cool air from overcharged air conditioners. Behind the deli counter, men with white chefs’ hats shaved giant blocks of honey ham or American cheese with gleaming metal slicers, and in neat aisles you could find mixed nuts, cookies with no trans fat, and applesauce with mixed berries, just like I packed for Lyla’s school snack in the mornings. Though I find grocery shopping a chore at home, every time I felt the tires of Dimitri’s car drop from the grinding dirt and gravel onto the smooth concrete of Giant’s underground parking lot, I sighed like they did. This was a place where I didn’t need cultural or literal translation. I knew my way around. I fit in here. I was in my element.
The air-conditioning came as a huge relief. It was barely 9:00 a.m. that Saturday, three weeks after Lyla started school, but the city was already stewing outside. The heat dropped off my shoulders and upper lip. We’d had an appointment that morning with the dean at Quisqueya University, but he’d clearly forgotten all about it: when I got him on his cell phone, he’d told me he was away for the weekend. So I’d decided to make an unplanned trip up to see Lovely, who had another dental appointment that day. Ever since I’d discovered she wasn’t eating, I’d started a new habit: popping into Giant to buy sandwich supplies for me and the family. Lovely loved salami, it turned out, so I always bought that, along with some baguettes, cheese, and digestive cookies.
The night before I’d left for Haiti, I’d worked through our night-before-I-was-leaving ritual conversation with Lyla, lying in bed beside her.
“I don’t want you to go to Haiti,” she’d said in her little bird voice. “I don’t like it when you go.”
I told her the same thing I always did. “I have to go. It’s my job. I won’t be there for long.”
“Why do you have to go there?” she would say next. I reminded her of the earthquake and the people who’d lost their homes. And their schools. And that I was not only writing about them but helping them.
This was all true. But as time went on, I recognized that I was using the Star’s unconventional project as a mop to soak up my own guilt from a completely unexpected source: home. I wasn’t just going to write stories and advance my own career, which would be unabashedly selfish. I had a nobler purpose: helping people. So that made leaving my children acceptable.
It was a language Lyla could understand.
“Did their schools fall down?” she would ask, loosening her grip on me. In the three weeks since she’d started school, she’d decided she liked it. She’d made a new friend, a little boy named Tyler with whom she held hands. “Are you helping them build new ones?”
I was caught in a constant contradiction. The earthquake had awoken my awareness about how precious time with my children was, because they could be taken from me at any moment. But at the same time, it had presented me with the professional opportunity I’d always wanted, which, by definition, took me away from my children. I felt like I was doing both, neither of them very well.
Back in the car, we drove up out of the city, shedding the heavy heat with every twist in the rising road. We slowly nosed our way into the Fermathe market, with its wooden stalls bunched together on a muddy square. Women lined both sides of the street, sitting behind their straw baskets of cassava and flattened bread. Some sat beneath faded red umbrellas, while others squatted on their haunches in the open. It had started to rain faintly and the women hugged their arms into their sides but stayed resolutely put.
We crept up the road slowly, when suddenly I recognized one of the vendors.
“Stop,” I said.
It was Rosita, Rosemene’s older sister. At first glance I thought it was Rosemene herself; the two looked strikingly alike, except that Rosita was stockier and less quick to smile.
Rosita was leaning against a pole with a ratty black cardigan pulled over her head. Spotting us, she ran up to the car window. I asked if she would show me what she was selling, so she led me down to her meager basket, filled with garlic and bouillon cubes. Then she all but pushed me back into the car and told Dimitri we should leave.
Dimitri thought she was just being considerate and didn’t want me getting soaked in the rain. But I remembered Rosemene’s story about the witch at the market who was casting spells on people. Was Rosita pushing us away before we brought any more unwanted attention to her?
We continued down the rocky road and pulled up to what I would always think of as Lovely’s place—even though, in fact, she was technically a houseguest. Rosemene greeted us wearing a long red scarf wrapped around her head and the same yellow shirt and jean skirt she’d had on the day I met her in
April. She kissed me on both cheeks and asked after my kids.
“Bebe yo byen?”
Lovely was quiet and sullen. Snot leaked out of both her nostrils. The whole family was sick again, or maybe they had never really gotten better.
We hurried out of the rain, which was now gaining strength, and into the concrete room, where they were still sleeping. Inside, it was dark. Their single electric bulb hung impotently from the ceiling. It was fed by a wire jacked into the home of a nearby government official; electricity in the country was both notoriously inconsistent and notoriously stolen, by the poor and rich alike. But, government connections notwithstanding, it came to life for only a few hours a day; sometimes it remained dead for the whole week.
As my eyes adjusted to the dark, I noticed the smudged white walls were now mottled with writing in red marker. They were passages from the Bible that Enel had written out, copying each letter carefully, since he couldn’t read.
I recognized Psalm 23: “Even though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil, for you are with me . . .” It ended more ominously in this version than I remembered: “J’habiterai dans la maison de l’Eternel jusqu’a a la fin du monde”—“I shall dwell in the house of the Lord until the end of the world.”
Rosemene explained that the quotes were there to bless the family. I thought about Rosita hurrying me out of the market and asked Dimitri to dig more into it. While I unwrapped the cookies for Lovely and Jonathan—who was playing on the floor with just one blue sandal on—Dimitri leaned in towards Rosemene and began a long, whispered conversation. The rain pounded onto the thin tin roof, making such a racket, it was impossible for me to pick up any of their words.
“What is she saying?” I asked again impatiently.
Dimitri flapped his hand at me as if to say, “Calm down. I’ll get to you.”
When they finally finished, Dimitri turned and fixed his eyes on me.
A Girl Named Lovely Page 10
