A Girl Named Lovely

by Catherine Porter

  In light of the country’s brokenness, mounting cholera deaths, and poverty, the money spent on the election seemed grotesque. Dimitri and I drove to Carrefour, a sprawling suburb of Port-au-Prince, down a highway lined with tents and shacks, to see a campaign concert for President Préval’s chosen successor, Jude Célestin. A stage had been built right on the road, and as the crowds arrived, a plane circled overhead, dropping campaign flyers that scattered around us like confetti. Candidates were darting across the country in rented helicopters. When Préval’s party couldn’t find SUVs for their campaign team because aid groups had sapped the country’s rental agencies dry, they purchased the vehicles outright.

  Each candidate needed to spend US$10 million to US$20 million to run a serious campaign, experts said—and the teledjòl whispered that much of that was for graft.

  I dug up some evidence of that myself. Down by the broken palace, I met a man hawking paintings to aid workers or the rare tourist who came by. He had a membership card for Préval’s Inite Party and told me he’d received about US$150 over the past few months from them. He smiled when he told me who he planned on voting for: Sweet Micky. He took me through a throng of shacks to his own home but admitted he was not a true earthquake victim: his house in Cité Soleil was still standing, but he hoped to get a second one from some unsuspecting aid group. He was a make-believe refugee and a make-believe Célestin supporter.

  As Election Day approached, more and more candidates were loudly complaining the vote was rigged by Préval’s ruling Inite Party. By noon of voting day, as I sat drawing robots with Lovely, the complaints reached a fever pitch. Twelve of the nineteen presidential candidates assembled on a stage to denounce the election as a “massive fraud.” They demanded the election be canceled and called for Haitians to take to the streets in peaceful protest.

  The traditional form of protest in Haiti is to shut down roads with rocks and blazing car tires. By early evening, intersections around Port-au-Prince were smoking. One exception was Route Delmas, which linked downtown Port-au-Prince to Pétionville. There, tens of thousands of people thronged, singing and dancing around a SUV that held the bald candidate Sweet Micky on its roof, alongside Haitian American hip-hop artist Wyclef Jean and beloved Vodou musician Richard Morse.

  The crowd was boisterous and happy, chanting “Jude gave us money, but we voted for Micky.”

  Dimitri and I descended the mountain at the same alarming speed we’d traveled at the night before. But this time it wasn’t fear fueling us. It was a hunger to dive into Election Day action. Again the road was eerily empty. Not only was there no traffic, there were none of the traffic stops we expected. Later, when stuck in another interminable blokis, I would often think back to that day with longing.

  As we roared toward the city, I punched the radio on the dashboard to listen to Kreyòl reports, which Dimitri translated into English. There had been a handful of arrests for fraud. There were charges of ballot stuffing, and in Cité Soleil polling stations had been disrupted by gangs. Mostly, though, voters were just frustrated they couldn’t find their names on lists.

  That was inevitable. The country was not ready for an election: almost half of the country’s voting places had been destroyed in the earthquake; hundreds of thousands of ID cards had been lost in the rubble, and many hadn’t been reissued. On top of that, voters were scattered in large camps throughout the city, some far from their original neighborhood where they were forced to vote.

  Despite the setbacks, the members of the election commission—widely seen as Préval supporters—held a press conference of their own that afternoon and announced that the elections had been fair.

  That was the consensus of most of the international community, too. A team of observers with the Organization of American States and the Caribbean regional bloc said the vote could stand.

  I called Nigel on the phone, and he agreed that the elections were considered viable. The noon press conference of those twelve candidates denouncing the process had not been a spontaneous response to cases of fraud they’d seen that day, he said. It was seen as a premeditated move.

  Later, things got even more incredible when Préval claimed the United Nations had told him they were taking him out of the country because of “political problems.” The head of the UN said this wasn’t true.

  It was hard to know who to believe. Corruption was rampant in Haiti, but the government wasn’t the only culprit. Since kidnapped Africans had cast off Napoleon’s troops and declared Haiti the world’s first black republic in 1804, the country had been a victim of every type of foreign meddling imaginable: blockades, occupations, embargoes, foreign-funded coups. When France agreed to recognize Haiti as an independent country, the French insisted on being paid for their losses. In 1825, Haiti’s president signed a restitution agreement for 150 million francs, even borrowing from French banks to pay the first installment. Ninety years later, some 80 percent of Haiti’s national budget was still going toward paying back France and French banks.

  It was no wonder the country was so poor.

  • • •

  The official results from the presidential election were released by the election commission in early December, a week after the voting. They gave the lead to former first lady Mirlande Manigat with 31 percent of the vote, which, under Haitian law, was not enough to secure her the presidency. It put Préval’s pick Célestin in second with 22.48 percent. And not even a full percentage point behind him was Sweet Micky Martelly.

  That meant that Manigat and Célestin would advance to a second round of voting in January, but Sweet Micky would not.

  The announcement lit up the streets. Protesters blocked roads—including the one that led up to Lovely’s home—by pulling the burning carcasses of cars and garbage containers across them. They lit Jude Célestin’s campaign office on fire. The bullets Elistin worried about were fired. The city was shut down: international flights were canceled, embassies closed, and supermarkets shuttered.

  The response from the international community was mixed. Canada’s foreign affairs minister urged “all political actors to address irregularities in accordance with Haitian electoral law.” The American embassy in Port-au-Prince was more pointed, issuing a statement that questioned the results. And a Republican senator voiced a clear threat: the United States and other countries would withhold US$11 billion in promised aid if the country didn’t come through with a clean winner.

  Just who that winner might be wasn’t clear. Some countries backed the original vote results, while others didn’t find the “irregularities” serious enough to void the vote.

  What was made very clear, however, was that, whoever was in charge, it was not the Haitian government. After extreme pressure from international donors and a visit from Hillary Clinton, the Haitian election council finally announced the March runoff would be between Manigat and Sweet Micky, not Célestin. In the meantime, an Air France plane arrived in the country, carrying on it an important piece of Haiti’s past.

  • • •

  While all of this was going on, I was back home in Toronto, in bed. At first I thought I had vertigo from all the traveling I had done over the past year: seven trips in ten months. But then I visited the doctor, who told me that while I might have felt I was dizzy from the continual culture shock, there was in fact a medical explanation: an inner-ear infection. My immune system was shot from adrenaline and overwork.

  The city outside my little house was blanketed in a fresh layer of snow and wrapped in twinkly lights. But I was not in a Christmas state of mind.

  I had no gifts hidden around my house and, after walking through the city’s biggest mall once and emerging empty-handed, I couldn’t bear to return. Every item was translated into guilt: those boots were a year’s tuition to school; that lipstick was Lovely’s snacks for a week. I couldn’t figure out how to write a Christmas letter without sounding maudlin, so I didn’t bother. I couldn’t even send just a family photo: after digging through my pi
ctures from the year, I realized we had never taken one.

  In the days right before Christmas, three unexpected gifts arrived on my desk in the newsroom. They were powerful pick-me-ups.

  The first was an email from a Spanish catastrophe missionary who had flown into Haiti after the earthquake to volunteer his logistics expertise with the Red Cross. The Western Union beside the makeshift medical clinic in the Sonapi industrial district was the only place he could connect to the Internet, so he had often sat there with his laptop. Lovely had visited him regularly. He had left in February without saying good-bye and been heartbroken ever since. He had found my articles online and been overjoyed to learn Lovely was doing well.

  “Something of my life has been left with that child,” he wrote.

  The second gift came in an envelope. Inside it I found a typed letter on yellow paper from a couple of readers I did not know. They lived in a small French-speaking town about four hours from Toronto, and they had decided, in lieu of Christmas gifts, they wanted their family and friends to send me money for Haiti. They signed off with “Joyeux Noël, Catherine” and included a check for C$2,000.

  The day before my family’s Christmas celebration started, the last present arrived. It was an email from a young political science student, one of the catastrophe missionaries I had met briefly during my first trip to Haiti. He was troubled by the four months he’d spent in Haiti, wondering if he had done any good at all. He was haunted by a severely handicapped boy whom he’d cared for at the clinic, feeding him, bathing him, singing him to sleep. When the clinic was forced to close, the boy and his family had no place to go, so the student had left them in a field near their shattered home.

  Lovely was one of two rare success stories that buoyed him. The other was an orphaned boy named Carlos for whom the student helped find a sponsor and settle into a new home. He wondered if he had gravitated to Lovely’s story because he himself was an orphan, adopted from South Korea by an American couple.

  “When I think about that I’m reminded, if only for a moment, that we might all be connected, that we’re in this together, and that we need to help each other whenever we can,” he wrote.

  Halfway through reading his email, the hair on the back of my neck rose: the sponsor whom this student had found for Carlos was Duncan Dee, the chief operating officer of Air Canada, who had flown me down to Haiti that first trip and inadvertently connected me with Lovely.

  He was right: we are all interconnected, and we all are in this together. By the end of the email, tears were rolling down my chin and splashing onto my neck. A sense of awe and gratitude filled me. The universe seemed to be sending me a not-so-subtle message: it wasn’t an accident I landed in Haiti and that Lovely was my first story.

  • • •

  I returned to Haiti a couple of weeks later for the earthquake’s anniversary.

  It was early in the morning—just 7:00 a.m., before the Caribbean sun had enough time to rub some warmth into the shoulders of the mountaintops.

  Lovely was dressed in one of Noah’s old red Gap shirts, with a baby-blue kerchief tied over her head. She sat in a strip of sunlight beside a fire pit, where a large pot of water was coming to a boil for the family’s morning coffee. She was playing with the Dora doll Lyla had sent down and singing a hymn absentmindedly.

  “What a God, marvelous. What has he done, marvelous. Look at God, marvelous. Alelouya. Alelouya.”

  Shivering, I looked around the family’s new rental home. It was perched like an eagle’s nest under towering pine trees at the top of a craggy hill. It seemed like a perfect vacation retreat from the heat of the city, and I could see the idea behind the house was grand, with Grecian arches and an actual indoor kitchen and bathroom. But whoever had built it had either run out of money or hired a lousy construction crew. It was so poorly put together, it seemed like it was made of cards, with walls literally leaning in place and holes gapping through the tin ceiling, which was held down with rocks. There was no electricity or water; the sink and toilet didn’t work, so the family was begging for water from neighbors and doing their business behind a nearby wall.

  Inside, there was not a single piece of furniture. The family had laid out a tarp on the bedroom floor to sleep on, and in the corner they had fashioned a small table from a broken stereo speaker for their comb and toothbrushes.

  It hardly seemed an improvement to me, but Rosemene was very happy with it. It was safer than a house in the city. And they were glad to be in their own place and not burdening her sister anymore. She also liked their neighbor, an old woman who came over in the mornings to chat with her.

  When the coffee was ready, she sent a young boy with a metal cup for the woman.

  The boy was her nine-year-old cousin from the countryside named Venessaint. I had first met him in November, but I hadn’t realized he was there to stay. Rosemene told me he had come to help with the children so she and Enel could leave for work each day.

  Venessaint was small, with a closely shorn head. The clothes he was wearing were filthy and at least four sizes too small: his pants fit like culottes, and the sleeves of the smudged rugby shirt reached just past his elbows. He was wearing red adult-sized sandals that overwhelmed his feet.

  I watched as he tended to the fire, feeding it more wood to warm Lovely’s bathwater. Suddenly it dawned on me: Venessaint was a restavèk.

  “Have you ever gone to school?” I asked him.

  “Non,” he answered in a husky voice. He had a stutter.

  How could this be? Restavèks were renowned in Haiti as child slaves. If Lovely’s family was considered well-off enough to afford a domestic helper, how poor must their cousins in the countryside be? Was it possible that Rosemene and Enel were mistreating this kid? I just couldn’t believe that.

  Venessaint brought me a sugary cup of coffee, which I gratefully cupped in my cold hands and sipped while Rosemene oiled and braided Lovely’s hair, adding red flower clips at the end of each one. Like the entire country, Rosemene was thinking about the earthquake. But instead of mourning, she was full of gratitude.

  “I always think to say thanks to God. If Lovely had died, it would be one year today,” she said. “God gave me a gift, while so many other people died.”

  Lovely was bathed with warm water in the bathroom, then poured into a white dress. Rosemene wore white from head to toe, too, as did Enel. The plan for the day was to go to a jèn—a prayer session.

  “Make some food for yourself but wash the dishes,” Rosemene called to Venessaint as we gingerly made our way down the path to the car.

  The jèn was not in a church as I expected. It was under a blue tarp, held up with crude wooden posts and stretched like a roof across the dirt yard of a house in the center of Fermathe. A couple of wooden benches extended like pews on both sides, and we took a seat in the back. There were only a handful of women there when we arrived, most of them dressed in white and holding babies, but soon the tent filled to capacity.

  The congregants sang hymns together and then each took a turn to pray loudly as the man directing the service clanged two cymbals together in his hands. The prayers rushed out of people, so fervent and unabashed they seemed to be speaking in tongues. They raised their hands in the air and waved as they spoke. When it was Rosemene’s turn, she thanked Seyè—the Lord—for giving her another twelve months with Lovely.

  I sat back, suddenly hyperaware of my awkward foreignness. My blotchy white skin felt glaring, my purple T-shirt and green skirt garish. My silence and stillness was deafening. I felt so out of place not only because of my culture but also because of my tenuous connection to faith. Even though I had started showing up at church from time to time, I still wasn’t sure I believed in God. If I granted there was a higher power, it was not one that controlled such choices of life or death. It wasn’t God’s fault, for instance, that Lina’s baby had died. And if it was God’s decision to spare Lovely, why did he kill so many other children? I believed it was up to us to make the m
ost out of our lives.

  As if she could sense my conflict, Rosemene suddenly stood up and handed Lovely over to me. The tent had heated up, and Lovely was sweaty. She lay her head lightly on my chest, and I rocked her from side to side as I had done with my own children when they were babies. She soon fell asleep.

  Looking down at Lovely, I thought about how the whole world had come crashing in over her head and how, despite it all, she had survived. I thought about how many people were trying to piece their world back together again, but still, after a year, Haiti seemed in a more precarious situation than before. I thought about my own naïve and presumptuous expectations of Rosemene.

  Among the babbling and singing and rocking, a realization came to me: I might not believe in an all-powerful God, but I was not in control. I could help Lovely’s family, but I couldn’t fix all their problems. Even with the support of readers and the Star, I was just one small person. I had to reset my expectations, of them and myself. I needed to look at the help we were offering as just that: help, and not development funding. I shouldn’t expect a return on my investment in terms of their self-reliance. Just like Michele, the Montreal nurse I had met my first day in Haiti, this was my “cry of the heart.”

  I made two decisions that day.

  The first was that I would fund Gilberte Salomon’s school for one year starting that September. I would have to raise US$26,000—enough to cover all fourteen staff salaries and a little extra as a cushion—for all 350 students to go there for free. This time, though, I would do it privately in my spare time. I would not write about it in the newspaper. I felt that, with my friends and connections, as well as some speaking engagements I was doing, I could raise the money myself. It was probably what I should have done from the very beginning: funded an institution instead of a family.