“Okay,” he said. “I told her I wouldn’t tell you all this, so don’t look surprised or shocked.”
One night not long ago, he recounted, Lovely was very sick. She’d been gripped by a fever and her throat had become so swollen, she couldn’t swallow. Rosemene rushed to a church to pray for help and met a neighbor there who told her Lovely was the victim of maji.
“She told her it had happened because all these white people are coming to their house,” Dimitri said.
I knew very little about Vodou, other than it was a religion brought here by slaves from West Africa and that it had an elaborate pantheon of gods who could possess followers during ritual dances. I’d learned there was a dark side to the religion, like in Catholicism, but I was weary of the images of pincushion dolls and zombies from American horror movies.
I did understand how neighbors might be jealous of the attention Lovely’s family was getting, though. I imagined all of them watching Dimitri’s SUV roll up, bringing me one week and another Star reporter the next. Even if we weren’t helping the family, the neighbors would assume that we were. The irony of the situation struck me: our help might do more harm than good by drawing envious attention to the family and inspiring attacks they wouldn’t have otherwise faced. Was this a parable about aid and good intentions going wrong?
I asked Dimitri what he thought I should do.
“Basically, they don’t give a shit what the neighbors think. They are happy you are helping them,” he said. They wanted us to stay the course.
As we sat there, more and more people joined us. Lypse, Rosita and Elistin’s son, barged into the room, throwing a plastic bag around like it was a ball. Jenanine from next door crept in beside Lovely and the two of them clapped their hands together in a game. Rosita arrived with Elistin, and I noticed Enel sitting shyly by the door. A couple of my colleagues from the Star showed up, and I assembled sandwiches from the supplies I had bought that morning and handed them around while the adults briefed me on their work—or lack of it. A pile of our kicked-off shoes had grown by the entrance. Lypse approached them, pulled down his pants, and then peed. He’d been aiming out the door but fallen short, and splashed all the shoes with his urine. The room, which was warm now from the heat of our huddled bodies, erupted in laughter.
Later, after the kids were asleep, Rosemene confided that her business was going terribly. She was down to selling just bleach, washing detergent, and coffee. Her resolve to not eat her supplies had broken in the face of her kids’ hunger. She was no longer selling in the market but out of the house, which meant she had even fewer customers. Enel had found another job in construction in a nearby town, but the owner had refused to pay him in full, pocketing one of every four weeks’ pay because he said Enel hadn’t finished the job. So Enel had quit in protest. In my mind, three weeks seemed better than none, but Rosemene said it was the principle of the thing. The work was hard and he should be paid.
She needed to head out and make money, because the family couldn’t survive like this, she acknowledged. It hurt her to see her children hungry.
“The weight is heavy on me,” she said. “It’s hard for women.”
When it was time for me to go, I kissed Rosemene good-bye and made my way back to the car. My colleagues were leaving, too. We decided to convoy out, with their driver leading the way in his golden Nissan Pathfinder. As Dimitri began to reverse, we heard loud shouting from behind us. The Pathfinder had slipped and one half of it hung precariously over the edge of a steep embankment that separated the road from an adjacent farm field. It all happened so quickly, it was as though a giant hand had swooped down and flicked the Pathfinder aside.
Young men appeared instantly, seemingly out of thin air. By the time Dimitri and I leapt out of his car and rushed to the rescue, there were already a dozen of them surrounding the car. Do they watch the blans through the cracks in their walls? I wondered. How did they all get here so quickly? One seemed to have arrived straight from bed, wearing only a pair of shorts pulled just halfway over his buttocks.
“Gade! Gade!” they all yelled, as more emerged from nowhere and joined the commotion. They were all vying to lead the rescue operation.
“Look! Look!” shouted one young man with the broad shoulders and wide face of a rugby player. “We have to pull it from the front.”
“Gade! Gade!” shouted another—this one plump. He’d invited me into his small home once and told me his plans to start a night school for the area. “We have to pull it from behind.”
Elistin emerged from his home with a long, thin piece of metal rebar. There were now more than two dozen men swarming the scene. The women were gathered in the distance, standing on the mound of gravel Elistin had bought to eventually use in building his house.
The rugby player twisted one end of the rebar around Dimitri’s front axle and the other around that of the tipped Pathfinder, and the men gathered under the hanging wheel to hold the vehicle up. I looked down nervously from the edge of a nearby field of blooming potato plants. I was sure the car was going to roll, and then what would we do?
Dimitri hit the gas. His wheels spun in the mud. But the Pathfinder didn’t budge. The rain, which had subsided, started up again.
A sleek, polished SUV pulled up behind us, with a bald white man at the wheel. He was dressed right out of a Patagonia catalogue: hiking boots, shorts with pockets, a crisp short-sleeved collared shirt. He lowered his window and addressed us.
“What will it be, English or French?” he said. Then he drummed his fingers on his forehead. “Right, sometimes one head is better than twenty. Don’t worry. Be patient. Give me five minutes.”
The night-school entrepreneur approached his window and then shot off up the road past Lovely’s home until we couldn’t see him anymore.
Dimitri whispered to me, “Can you believe it? He sent that guy to get him a glass of wine.”
Sure enough, after the bald man had emerged from his SUV, pulled out a long, flat rope from his trunk, and lay down in the muck of the road to tie the rope to the rear axle of the Pathfinder, the glass of wine appeared and was offered to him. He took a sip and handed the other end of his rope to one of the gathered men, who were no longer shouting. They’d decided to listen to this strange apparition.
When the rope was ready, the crowd of men reassembled around the Pathfinder to lift and push it as the bald man reversed. The aspiring night-school teacher pushed with one hand as the other held a slightly mud-smeared glass of red wine.
The SUV backed up. The men pushed and then jumped out of the way as the tipped Pathfinder swerved, barely missing an electrical pole, and flopped up on the road like a seal emerging from the ocean onto the safety of ice.
“Hooray!” we yelled. Fists pumped into the air. The man exited his car and was received with hugs and lots of backslaps. The Gade! Gade! men vanished from the road as quickly as they had appeared. The bald man got back into his SUV, refusing to pose for a photo.
“I’m not supposed to be here,” he said. He rolled up his window and disappeared. It all seemed so inexplicably fantastic and bizarre.
As we rode down into the city, I wondered what to take from this colonial moment, other than whiplash. Was this three hundred years of racism at work? Was it classism? The bald man was rich, the others poor.
Another lingering thought chased me down the mountain. Would Rosemene think maji had caused the near accident? If she did, what should or could I do about it?
• • •
The longer I stayed in Haiti, the more I understood the truth of what Rosemene said: life for women in Haiti was unbearably hard.
As a feminist, I often wrote about women’s rights back in Toronto. I advocated for more money for women’s shelters and more attention to domestic violence, the pervasive and pernicious problem of rape, the fact that women still earned 31.5 percent less than men on average, the lack of affordable childcare, and the underrepresentation of women in government and on the boards of Fortune 5
00 companies. Researching these stories, I often felt depressed, like I was fighting the same battle my mother helped fight in the early 1970s. But my time in Haiti opened my eyes to what progress Canadian and American women have made since Betty Friedan published The Feminine Mystique and Laura Sabia threatened to lead 2 million women on a march to Ottawa unless the government agreed to host the Royal Commission on the Status of Women.
Sexism still existed in North America, for sure. But it took a more subtle form. In Haiti, it was blistering and blatant. The culture was painfully patriarchal, and it was openly held that the man’s role was to work and the woman’s was to raise the children and look attractive. If a man had money, he was expected to have a few women on the side and do what my friends called a pa chat—cat path—between work and home, visiting his lovers or second wives. A woman was not given the same rights, no matter how rich she was. In fact, up until recently, a man was legally allowed to murder his wife—and her lover—if he caught them in the midst of an affair. If she caught him, her only legal recourse was to fine him—for just US$50.
It wasn’t until 1982 that women were deemed adults by Haitian law and gained the right to inherit land themselves or own businesses without their husbands’ permission. And only in 2005 were they protected by strong rape laws. Before then, rape was considered a moral crime, and often, if the victim was not a virgin at the time of the assault, the judge delivered a lighter sentence, since her honor had not been breached. It was no surprise that the people making laws in Haiti continued to be almost entirely men. If I thought it was bad that only 26 percent of Canada’s politicians were women, in Haiti only 4 percent of the elected parliament was female in 2010, and by 2016 that number would shrink to zero.
Women in Haiti faced huge amounts of sanctioned violence—not just in the form of rape, which was considered an epidemic in the country, but domestic violence. One-third of women reported they were victims, but many of them agreed they deserved to be beaten for things like going out without telling their husbands or misspending money. Girls were more often pulled out of school before boys, or never sent at all if the family was poor. As a result, women were less educated, which meant their chances of landing good jobs—if their husbands let them work—were much lower.
The majority of Haitian women did work, but they did so at the bottom rungs of society. Three of every four people working the “informal” economy were women who had no benefits, no sick days, no security, and very little money. Like Rosemene and Rosita, many were timachanns, making US$2 to US$3 a day by selling goods on the side of the road.
When people say Haiti is the poorest country in the western hemisphere, they should say that Haitian women are the poorest.
I thought I understood all of this from reading reports, but it wasn’t until I descended into the bidonvil of Bobin that I saw what it truly meant.
Bobin was another poor neighborhood of Pétionville, made of cinder-block houses that clung to the side of a valley. Like Vallée de Bourdon, the homes in this bidonvil were so densely packed, you couldn’t drive to many of them.
Dimitri and I parked at the top of the neighborhood, where we were greeted by a group of men hanging out at a bar drinking kleren—sugarcane liquor—near the road. A couple were so drunk, they came out to serenade me with a song. It was midafternoon.
By foot, we set off into the bidonvil, stepping between houses and under staircases and at some points walking right down what felt like apartment building hallways—doors on each side, and a roof overhead. As we descended, we passed women carrying avocadoes in baskets and buckets of water on their heads, and others leaning over tubs, scrubbing laundry. The farther down the valley we went, the fewer men I saw, until there were none. This was the domestic realm of women.
We came to a dry streambed choked with giant mounds of rotting garbage that a few massive pigs were nosing through. Hanging over it all was a bunker—a single room made of cinder-block walls, with a tin roof and a tin door held in place by a plastic flip-flop. A woman greeted us carrying a tiny baby. Her pink shirt was askew and done up with just one button, her black skirt smudged with dirt and gaping open at the back. Her hair stuck up in tufts. She wore no shoes, and her feet were filthy. She had six children, including the baby, and all of them hung off her, touching her shoulders and back as she spoke to me. None of them went to school, because she had no money to send them.
What about their fathers? I asked.
They all have the same one, she said. He was very much alive. “Once in a while he comes by,” she said. “Whenever he’s got something, he gives it to us.”
This was not unusual in Haiti. In fact, it was the norm. There is an official system of alimony, but, like most laws in Haiti, it is rarely enforced. Women in Haiti hold all the responsibility and none of the power. In this way I saw how lucky Lovely was. She had a father in her life.
I was in Bobin because of Rea Dol and the women’s collective she had started in the area. The members, mostly timachanns and single mothers, had built a one-room school atop the house of one of their members. Their children attended it during the day, and in the evenings the women themselves went there for lessons in reading, writing, and basic math.
When I arrived, a dozen of the adult students were waiting for me. One of them stood up and explained how, as a child, she had never been permitted to go to school.
“My father sent my brothers to school,” she said. “But he didn’t want to waste money on sending a girl to school because I might get pregnant.”
She pulled out a book and showed me how she could now make out the letters on the page. Then she went to the chalkboard and wrote out a line in Kreyòl.
“I can sign my name now,” she said. “I’m proud of that.” She wanted to learn to read well enough that she could help her three children with their schoolwork. “What my dad didn’t do for me, I’d like to do for my children.”
Rea sat in the middle of the growing group, laughing at their stories and jumping in with her own. Her partner had left her and their three children for another woman and never so much as looked back. That was the reason she turned to community activism to help other women in her situation.
As we sat there, more women filed into the room until they were shoulder to shoulder. I looked at the reading posters tacked to the yellow-and-blue walls, listing the names of fruit and colors, and realized they were for these women as much as they were for children. Then they all stood up and launched into a song.
“Solidarity—that’s how we develop ourselves,” they sang, their voices rising and falling in harmony. “Solidarity—it’s how we combat misery.”
I was incredibly moved, looking around the room at the forty or so women who swayed and clapped in song together. I had intended to fund ten of the night students here. But when Rea told me the salaries of the five teachers who cycled in to teach all 120 women was just US$3,200, I decided to fund their salaries for a year. To help a whole community of women better themselves, and in turn help their children, would cost less than scholarships for three university students. I was confident that readers who had sent me money to put toward school tuitions would agree that this was a good investment.
• • •
The issue of rape had become big news in Port-au-Prince—at least among international journalists, aid groups, and human rights organizations.
In the days after the earthquake, many women reported being raped by armed men in the rubble of their homes. Some blamed the escaped convicts from the city’s main penitentiary. But the reports continued for months, with women telling horrific stories of masked men cutting through the canvas tents and raping them in front of their children or dragging them into ruined, abandoned buildings to attack them. A midwife working at Médecins Sans Frontières told me they were treating six to twelve terribly injured women a day.
Among Haitian feminist organizations, the stories were a political point of contention. Some of the long-established groups said the problem was ov
erblown by women aiming for attention and aid. The leading candidate in the ongoing presidential campaign, a former first lady named Mirlande Manigat, said she thought the accounts were exaggerated.
The idea that women would lie about rape triggered myths I had carried with me from Canada. I knew this pernicious argument and had seen how it was used to dismiss and silence women back home. It infuriated me. Given how patriarchal Haitian society was to begin with, I didn’t understand why women’s groups and politicians wouldn’t support the victims and see their plight as one that could advance the entire feminist cause.
What I was learning, however, was that the underlying issue was class, and that class in Haiti trumps everything. The women from those long-established feminist organizations—not to mention a former first lady—were from the country’s elite. They had property, education, and careers. It was the poor women living in the squalid camps who said they were being raped—just as they had been raped in the slums after Haiti’s two political coups.
After the second coup in 2004, a group of rape survivors formed a support organization and called themselves the Commission of Women Victims for Victims—Komisyon Fanm Viktim pou Viktim (KOFAVIV). Their members had been trying to help victims go to hospitals and police stations to report the attacks, although they said in most cases the police didn’t take their complaints seriously. In the first five months after the earthquake, they’d counted 250 cases of rape—most by groups of armed men.
One of the recent members of KOFAVIV was a woman named Marie-Carline Marcellus. She lived on the edge of the giant Champs de Mars camp in a shack made of pieces of corrugated metal. Normally she pulled her chair outside to sit, but with all the rain, a muddy moat had formed at her shack’s entrance, so we decided to talk inside. A sheet stretched across the shack on a wire, dividing the bed from what you could generously call the living room, which held a metal table, some chairs, and a shelf set on the dirt. The room’s only adornment was a pair of polished brown brogues nailed neatly side by side to the tin wall above the bed. Marie-Carline explained that they were all she had left of her husband, who had been crushed to death in their home during the earthquake.
A Girl Named Lovely Page 11
