“I loved my husband a lot,” she said. “When he was alive, I wasn’t suffering.”
Marie-Carline’s story was similar to the stories told by many of the other victims I’d met at KOFAVIV. She’d been raped twice, the first time two days after the earthquake when she’d ventured back to the rubble of her home to look for things to salvage. Four men armed with guns grabbed her and took her back to a tent, where they beat and raped her.
“People knew it was happening but they couldn’t do anything,” she told me, mopping her face on the hanging sheet.
When she reported the rapes at the police station, the officers dismissed her. “They said, ‘With an ass like that, it’s normal to get raped,’ ” she said.
In May she’d been raped in a nearby Porta-Potty by two men carrying ice picks. Again she’d waved down a police car, but the officer told her he couldn’t do anything unless she could identify the rapists.
So here she was, sitting in the mud, with no hope of justice.
“Haiti’s women,” she said mournfully. “We have the worst lives.”
After much political pressure by KOFAVIV, the UN and police began to patrol a handful of the hundreds of camps in the city. KOFAVIV workers distributed whistles that women could blow when they sensed an attack was imminent—but that required people to come to the rescue and put themselves in harm’s way. It was a response, at least, but a feeble one.
The air in Marie-Carline’s shed was oppressively hot and damp. Sweat rolled down my calves and beaded along my upper lip. In the middle of translating, Dimitri asked to be excused for a moment and rushed outside to gasp for fresh air.
“I feel bad asking your questions and listening to these stories,” he explained when I joined him. “Because I’m a guy, I feel guilty.”
Once we were back in the car, he ransacked the cup holder and glove compartment for change to buy cold water from a street vendor. He chugged it back. “I know I’m supposed to translate what you are saying. I want them to know I’m not asking these questions,” he said. “Most of the time you ask questions about people’s feelings. Even in our own families in Haiti, nobody talks about their feelings. It’s always a hidden thing.”
I fell silent. Dimitri’s words surprised me. I had never thought about how the job was affecting him personally, and his struggle seemed illuminating. Dimitri was finding it just as hard being my voice as I was not being able to speak for myself. But while I resented the separation, he struggled with the closeness. He came from the country’s barricaded, educated class. This was the first time he’d been intimate with his own country’s poverty. I found the need for a translator frustrating for the opposite reason: it meant there was always a distancing echo between me and whoever I was speaking to, even Lovely and her family. I had purchased a Kreyòl primer and had been studying it, hoping that one day I could have direct conversations with Haitians. But I understood why Dimitri would rather have the distance. Coming face-to-face with poverty is painful.
We continued on to the quaintly named Ministry of the Feminine Condition and Women’s Rights, where I had an interview set up with the minister, Marjory Michel. She wasn’t there yet, but her attendant ushered us into a salmon-colored room where an air conditioner worked furiously, spraying out luxuriously frigid air. I had come to expect people to be late for interviews—in part because the streets outside seemed to be in a constant state of blokis, but also because of the Caribbean sense of time. “Now,” Dimitri had taught me, meant in ten minutes and “toute à l’heure” meant twenty.
After a while I stepped outside for a smoke, and the attendant followed me. She was dressed like a busboy, with a black suit jacket and checkered pants. She brought me a chair to sit on and in Kreyòl told me she was living in a tent in the Champs de Mars camp with her son. Her two daughters slept in the car. When I asked why, she held up a finger and slowly sliced the air before her. You can’t cut through a car door with a razor blade. It didn’t take her long to get to the point: she asked me if I could help her get to Canada. When I said no, she asked for my card anyway, so we could kenbe kontak—keep in touch.
I clenched my teeth and refrained from telling her that, really, I didn’t even know her name, so why would we stay in touch? She was just being smart—looking for a blan to give her some èd. But the demands for help, which had made me feel guilty after the earthquake, were now getting on my nerves. They were relentless; not an hour went by, it seemed, without a stranger appearing and asking for money. Even some of the people I was helping were asking for more. I had decided to enroll ten children in the Baptist mission school around the corner from where Lovely was living, in the hopes of spreading the wealth in her family’s neighborhood and defraying some of the jealousy directed against them. While filling out the receipts, the principal told me all about his stomach ulcer and medical bills: Maybe I could help him pay for them? I felt like a walking ATM.
When the minister finally arrived, she launched into a stump speech about the rebuilding of a better Haiti.
“It’s not just about infrastructure but reconstructing the mentality—a Haiti without prejudice, a Haiti where everyone has the same opportunity, for women and men. A Haiti where girls have access to school and education, where adolescents have hope for a profession. A Haiti where women are autonomous. The autonomy of women—if we want to combat violence against women, they have to be autonomous with power to negotiate their own security,” she said passionately.
Perhaps she believed it. But already I was becoming cynical. Her vision was wonderful, just like the education plan. But in practice, the lives of women were not better than before the earthquake. They were undoubtedly worse.
I had enrolled Lovely in school to secure her future. But an education wouldn’t protect her from rape, violence, lack of opportunity, and structural misogyny. Without a plan to “build back better” for women, what would her future hold?
• • •
Rosemene and Enel agreed to return to the site of their old home in Fort National. Lucas, my Star colleague, wanted to take some profile photos of Lovely there, and I wanted to see where Lovely had been buried in rubble.
Fort National was set on a hill in downtown Port-au-Prince overlooking both the broken cathedral and the shack-filled Champs de Mars. When the city was originally constructed, the neighborhood was full of stately homes with stunning views. Those had been replaced with slapdash concrete boxes, most of which fell during the earthquake. The area was among the worst hit in the capital, and it was now known for two things: poverty and gangs.
Rosemene described how the main road cutting through the neighborhood had once been lined with boutiks—little shops selling booze and water and phone cards. Now there was nothing but what looked like dusty football fields flashing through the windshield.
Rosemene and Enel both stared wide-eyed out the back windows.
“This is so weird,” Rosemene muttered. “I don’t recognize anything.”
Where was the spot where she used to sell her spaghetti and bouillon cubes? Where was the little medical clinic where she took her kids? Where were the local schools?
All of them were gone—felled into jumbled messes during the earthquake, then scooped up by the yellow diggers we saw parked around us.
There was a single building left on the road, surrounded by lounging men. We pulled up to it, and Rosemene leaned out the window, asking for directions. One said he would take us there, motioning with his hand. We all scrambled out of the car and began to pick our way down between tin shacks, jumbled piles of broken cinder blocks, drying laundry, and tents.
Women were leaning over tubs of water and little kids flew paper kites from the open spots where homes had once stood. Enel led the way with Lovely on his hip, followed by Rosemene carrying Jonathan. They stopped regularly to glance around in search of something—anything—familiar.
We stepped over piles of garbage and past the concrete walls of small homes that either had been rebuilt or hadn�
�t collapsed in the quake.
The alley spit us out onto a dirt yard dotted with mounds of sand mixed with small chunks of concrete. We now had a clear view of the sunken domes of the presidential palace below and the sparkling ocean behind it. The tin roofs of distant shacks baked in the blazing noon sun. They had turned brown, as though they were rotting.
Enel stopped before a small platform surrounded by three walls. It was no larger than eighteen square meters.
“That’s where it happened,” he said. He pointed to one side of the platform. “There was the room where the girls used to watch television.”
Rosemene agreed. This was it. She picked up a metal ring from the footpath. It was the remains of her recho, a type of metal colander Haitians stuff charcoal into and cook over like a barbecue.
“This is the only thing I remember,” she said.
Enel put Lovely down to walk around. She was dressed in a white dress and lime-green running shoes. Her hair was done up in twists, each one furnished with a little white plastic ball. She showed no signs of recognizing the place or remembering the ordeal she had suffered here.
Wait a minute, I thought. Wasn’t the television in Gaëlle’s house next door?
Then it dawned on me: Rosemene had told me they’d lived in a four-room house with their extended family. I assumed they had lived in all four rooms. I believed they were in better shape before the earthquake than they were now. Standing there, I saw the truth: they had rented one room of a four-bedroom house; only half of this platform had been theirs, and the whole extended family—nine people—had lived in that one room.
I finally understood how poor the family had been. I thought the tin shed they shared with Rosita and Elistin had been terrible, but it was no different from the home they’d lived in before.
We all stood there stunned: Rosemene remembering what had happened the night of the earthquake, Enel agog at how much had changed, and me realizing the truth.
On the way back up to their home, I picked up lunch for everyone. Rosemene and Enel raced into a market to spend the last monthly installment of my promised US$600 on supplies to restock Rosemene’s business.
They spent 550 gourdes (US$13.75) on a box of 240 bouillon cubes and a bag of rice for 850 gourdes (US$21.25). Rosemene explained her market plan to me. She would sell the bouillon cubes, two for 5 gourdes (12.5 cents US). The rice, she’d sell one scoop at a time, earning her another 930 gourdes in total (US$23.25).
Making that amount would likely take two weeks.
I quickly did the math on the back of my notepad: For fifteen days of work, she’d make 130 gourdes of profit—just over US$3 total.
I hadn’t been naïve thinking US$600 would fix Rosemene’s business. Where I had been naïve, though, was thinking her business would support Lovely.
Rosemene had been saving money for Lovely to go to school; I didn’t doubt that. But now I knew it would never be enough. Without help, Lovely would be destined to live at the very bottom of Haiti’s social ladder—a poor, illiterate woman living in a slum.
A daunting feeling filled me. Unless the government lived up to its promise of free education, there was no way that Lovely would be able to continue going to school after the two years I promised to fund her were up. Rosemene and Enel couldn’t afford to pay even the low tuition of the local Baptist mission school, let alone the middle-class school we’d enrolled Lovely in, without aid. My initial plan of helping the family find their financial independence seemed delusionally ignorant. Having seen how they lived before the earthquake, I realized that they were never on their feet in the first place, so how could I think US$600 would get them there?
I’d set a two-year deadline to my help, in the hope of extricating myself cleanly. But how could I follow through in good conscience now that I understood that bargain was cruelly unrealistic? Would I really stop funding Lovely’s education if it meant she would stop going to school?
I was beginning to learn the true danger of becoming personally involved in a story as a journalist. You start to care.
Part 2
Chapter 7
Lovely in the Time of Cholera
Dimitri picked me up at the airport in his green Patrol. We had hardly made it out of the airport parking lot before I pointed out a bundle of faded red umbrellas by the side of the dusty road and asked him to pull over.
I hadn’t been in Haiti for half an hour and I was desperate for a cigarette. It didn’t matter that I was no longer bombarded by scenes of death and anguish out the car window; my pattern was now set: when in Haiti, I smoked. I’d packed my running shoes and started jogging around the verdant grounds of the guesthouse early every morning, doing loops up and down the rocky stairs like a cooped-up hamster. But it was to no avail. I couldn’t rewrite my Haiti habits.
Upon arriving, the first stop I made was always at those umbrellas to buy cigarettes and add minutes on my cheap Haitian phone. The umbrellas were from Digicel, the nation’s largest cell phone company, and invariably there would be a guy nearby wearing a red Digicel pinny, who would lean into the car window, take my money, and text me minutes from his phone.
After our pit stop, we made our way to a local gas station, where I changed my American cash for gourdes. Since coming to Haiti, I had never been inside a bank. Dimitri had showed me how to exchange money on the street, finding one of the money changers he knew by sight only. They didn’t wear pinnies—they just looked like cool layabouts, wearing flashy sunglasses and leaning against the wall of some gas station as if they were waiting for a friend.
“How would you ever know who they were?” I asked Dimitri once.
“In Haiti, you have to know, to know” was Dimitri’s perennial answer.
We then nudged our way through afternoon traffic to the guesthouse, where I dumped my bags and climbed back in. We were heading straight up the mountain to see Lovely and, more importantly, her cousin Lina, Elistin’s daughter from a previous relationship who had recently moved up to Fermathe from the city below. Lina was tall, like her dad, and had his apple cheeks and almond eyes.
When I’d left the family in October 2010, Lina had been eight months pregnant. She wouldn’t disclose much about the father, other than he wasn’t in the picture. But she’d been happy. I’d promised Dimitri a half day’s pay if he went up and took some photos of the baby for me.
Instead, he’d phoned me the week before, sounding very somber.
“The child died,” he said. It was a boy. He’d been only fifteen days old. “They never took him to the hospital.”
Now, as we roared past the mansions of Haiti’s elite and skirted the edges of cliffs that looked down over an emerald quilt of impossibly steep farmers’ fields, Dimitri repeated the story and added the parts he hadn’t already related. When he’d spoken to Lina alone, she’d told him that neighbors were saying she was cursed to always bear children who died.
When we arrived, we found Lina curled in a wooden chair in the dirt yard, swaddled in layers of dirt-smudged clothing and sorrow. She had another black shirt tied around her head like a turban. She lifted her eyes to greet me and then returned her gaze to the ground.
“I just stopped crying this week,” she said softly, playing with the thread of her dark sweatshirt.
As I sat with her, the family surrounded us, their voices barreling over one another to fill in the depressing details of the baby’s short life.
Lina had hoped to deliver the baby at the Baptist mission hospital, but it was deemed too expensive. Instead, Elistin had hired a hospital nurse to come to the house and help deliver the baby there. The nurse had come and gone quickly, determining that Lina was in early labor and still had many hours to go.
In the end, Lina pushed the baby out on Elistin’s bed with guidance from her stepmom and a neighbor. Rosita cut the umbilical cord with one of Elistin’s tailoring razors.
He was fèt ak kwaf. Born with the caul still over his head. In Haitian folklore, this meant he was destined for a luc
ky life. The irony was too much.
“He was white, had lots of hair,” Lina said, when I asked her to describe him. “He wasn’t so fat.”
She hadn’t even named him.
“I was going to open the Bible and choose a name when we got his birth certificate,” she said. “I didn’t want to pick a name that was bad luck.”
The family agreed that he was healthy that first week. But during his second week he had stopped feeding, turning his face away from Lina’s breast. Then he started to wheeze.
Rosita and Rosemene took turns comforting him, feeding him wet crackers and massaging his naked body with the same maskriti seed oil they used on Lovely’s hair.
The day he died, Lina was sleeping in bed beside him. One of the children who crept in noticed he was no longer breathing.
“I shook him,” Lina said. “I called, ‘Baby, baby.’ There was no response.”
Everyone was clearly still in shock. The family sat glumly, except for Lovely, who danced in the yard, oblivious to the family’s sorrow.
They all seemed defensive. They were blaming one another for the tragedy.
Rosita said she thought the baby had fallen and that Lina had held him too tightly.
“He did not fall,” countered Lina. She believed that someone had cursed her. The day the baby died, she heard a noise on the roof. She thought it was a lougawou—a werewolf—sent to kill him. Lougawous were demonic shape-shifters, believed to devour people, children particularly. Apart from armed thugs, they were what people in the camps told me they feared most at night.
“Since the first time, they killed my baby. They killed the second one, too. I know people don’t like me and my family. I don’t know why. They just hate us,” Lina said.
A Girl Named Lovely Page 12
