A Girl Named Lovely

by Catherine Porter

  My second decision was to enroll Venessaint in school.

  Rosemene loved the idea when I talked about it with her later. “Venessaint is like our child,” she said. “We are like his parents.”

  I left Dimitri with enough money to pay Venessaint’s tuition and buy some furniture for the family’s new place.

  After I’d returned to Canada, Dimitri called me with his report. Venessaint was taking grade one classes with a private tutor. And Dimitri had bought a small plastic table and four plastic chairs for the family. Rosemene was ecstatic with the gift.

  “I’m so sad you couldn’t see how happy she was to have those chairs,” Dimitri said over the phone. “I thought she was going to cry.”

  The image filled me with joy. It was the best Christmas gift I had ever given.

  Chapter 9

  Catastrophic Aid

  The newspaper’s “Lovely Project” officially ended with the anniversary of the earthquake. The end of the year is a natural time for newspapers to finish series, and this one had run its course. We had published dozens of stories; paid for around 180 Haitians, young and old, to go to school; and helped Lovely’s family in a myriad of ways. It was time for the newsroom to turn its energy to the next big idea.

  I was disappointed. But, given the amount of money the paper had spent sending correspondents to Haiti over the months, I couldn’t blame my bosses.

  It meant I wouldn’t see Lovely every other month, as a matter of course. But it didn’t mean I wouldn’t see her at all. Instead, I’d have to convince my editors each time that a trip to Haiti was worthwhile—by pitching story ideas and drafting out budgets, as I had done for foreign trips before. I was sure I could do that, between writing columns and large features.

  I framed one of Lucas’s photos of Lovely and put it on my bedside table so that she was the last thing I saw each night and the first thing I saw each morning. It was like she was waiting for me.

  I also quietly worked on my plan to raise the US$26,000 for Muspan Montessori, Gilberte’s school. One of the biggest difficulties, as far as I could see, was that I wasn’t running a registered nonprofit charity, so friends and family I leaned on couldn’t get a tax receipt for any donations they might make. I poked around on the Internet a bit and talked to some people with charities of their own, but what I learned sent me into a quick retreat. The last thing I wanted to do was create a heavy bureaucracy that would suck up my time and energy, particularly since I’d committed just for one year.

  Ryan Sawatzky came to the rescue. The bon bagay Rea Dol had told me about drove down to Toronto to meet me one frigid day in early 2011. Ryan was still designing theme parks with his father for a living, but he admitted that running the Sawatzky Family Foundation took up most of his time. Since the earthquake, he had broadened the foundation’s mandate to cover not just the costs of running Rea’s school but also the tuition for one hundred kids at another little school near Rea’s house. He figured stretching his umbrella over Muspan wouldn’t be much more work, since I would be the one raising the money. Once Rea met with Gilberte in Port-au-Prince, and they both agreed to the idea, it would be a go.

  This was incredible news. It meant not only that donors would get tax receipts but that their money would go straight to the foundation. No more personal checks to me, which was a relief. I still felt uncomfortable handling strangers’ money. It also meant that I didn’t have to deliver the cash personally: Ryan would include it in his regular transfers to Rea each month. This added a layer of impersonal administrative padding, which I was grateful for, as well as an element of oversight. All Gilberte had to do was arrive monthly at Rea’s office to collect the money and sign a receipt for it, leaving a clear paper trail.

  By the time I was packing my duffel bag with presents and rad kenedi for Lovely’s family in September 2011, I had managed to raise US$28,000—US$2,000 more than I needed. I should have felt triumphant, embarking on that ninth trip to Haiti. But, as always, I was uneasy.

  Lyla was a quivering mess in her little bed, sniffling and sobbing. The night before I left, she hid my shoes behind the couch in an attempt to keep me home. It was her new trick, her logic being that if someone she loved didn’t have shoes, they clearly couldn’t walk out the door. It felt like a good allegory for all of us.

  I was nervous about what would await me in Haiti, too. For one, Dimitri was no longer there. His green card had come through and he’d moved to New Jersey to join his pregnant wife. They were expecting a baby girl in a month’s time, and he had landed a job as a security guard.

  It was good news for him but terrible news for me and the country. I had lost a trusted friend and dependable fixer, and Haiti had lost another of its rare educated citizens, who now, more than ever, seemed essential for rebuilding the country. He had become part of the country’s enormous brain drain.

  Haiti remained stuck in an emergency. Around 600,000 people were still living in squalid camps that, a year and a half after the earthquake, had long lost most of their support from NGOs. It wasn’t hard to see that peoples’ living situation in the camps was desperate—no water or food, broken toilets, high crime rates—but they were increasingly being characterized as freeloaders and fakes looking to game the system. The threat of eviction was real and constant. Sympathy had turned to blame.

  It didn’t help that Haiti’s political ghosts had returned. Shortly after the election, Jean-Claude “Baby Doc” Duvalier—the country’s former dictator, who’d maintained a lavish lifestyle while the country suffered—stunned passport officials at the airport when he arrived on an Air France flight. He said he had no political ambitions, but still, his arrival brought with it a general nervousness that descended across the country. A couple of months later he was followed by Jean-Bertrand Aristide, the left-wing priest who had been the country’s first democratically elected president in decades and who had been deposed in not just one but two coups. Aristide also said he had no plans to enter politics, but his return further stoked the country’s fear.

  Sweet Micky, the bawdy musician, had handily won the runoff election in March and been sworn in as the country’s new president in May 2011. He quickly announced two big plans. The first was free schooling for more than 100,000 children, funded not by donors but with a new tax on international calls and money transfers. He was sick of the country being an aid case. His slogan was “Haiti is open for business.”

  His second plan seemed much less ambitious. He wanted to close six camps in the capital, moving 30,000 people from them and into sixteen restored urban neighborhoods. The majority of people in the camps were renters before the earthquake, and they would remain so; each household was offered a US$500 rent subsidy. That didn’t pay for much more than a one-room apartment before the earthquake, but since so many places had been destroyed, the ones left standing were twice as costly. The idea of building back better seemed to have been forgotten. Instead, it was returning people to where they were before: the slums.

  Among the families evicted was Lovely’s. One Sunday, while they were having coffee, the owner arrived—a different man from the one who had rented the place to them and who, they learned, was only a caretaker. The real owner kicked them out. The family found a new place, but I didn’t expect it to be any better. Desperation does not make for a good bargaining position.

  • • •

  I had thought that first flight down to Port-au-Prince after the earthquake was special—packed with donations and people wanting to help. But it turned out to be the norm. Every flight from Miami was packed with T-shirt brigades: Americans and Canadians in matching bright-red or lime-green T-shirts with slogans printed across them that invariably included the word “Hope.”

  The most volunteer groups I ever counted on one plane was seven. Imagine: seven crews of fifteen to twenty people each, all in matching T-shirts. If you stumbled onto the plane by accident, you’d think you’d entered a spring break trip to Daytona Beach, filled with university students. />
  They were all volunteers, usually going to Haiti for two-week trips to help out at an orphanage, teach English, or build a school.

  Many were deeply religious. Their T-shirts included snippets of scripture that I read off their backs while standing in line to board. “God loved the world so much that he gave his one and only son that whoever believes in him may not be lost but have eternal life,” read one.

  One group, dressed in red T-shirts with the words “Haiti Missions” on them, called their trip a “crusade” and prayed around the luggage carousel. Another was on a mission to travel to every country in the world—all 196—to pray. Haiti marked country number 16. I watched in bemusement as their leader fought with the airport porters over their luggage. When I told him the US$10 the porter was charging was the cost of a sandwich and a drink in the States, he snapped, “That money could go to the orphans.”

  Even when the T-shirts were conspicuously absent, the flight was jammed with volunteers who had come to help the country in one way or another. On one trip, I was standing in a customs line in the temporary luggage hanger when I struck up a conversation with two young men from small town Ontario who were behind me. There was no air-conditioning in the airport arrivals hall, and all of our brows gleamed with sweat. They told me they had come with their church to rebuild a school, but they couldn’t tell me where it was, because they didn’t know. In front of me was a young nurse who had come to work in a Christian tent hospital. When I asked her where it was, she answered, “I can’t tell you where it is, because the mission really doesn’t want any credit for this work.” I figured she didn’t know where it was, either.

  On the surface, all of this compassion and care was wonderful. Extreme poverty anywhere in the world should inspire these kinds of responses among those of us who are well-off, as well as donations to charities working on the ground.

  But this was my ninth trip. I had started feeling like I was a part of Haiti, so the groups irked me, the same way Haitians got upset at white SUVs roaring by with aid workers. The earthquake had been eighteen months before.

  The audacity of it also galled me. After meeting a crew that had come to teach English at a school for two weeks, I tried to imagine my reaction if Lyla returned home from school to say some special Chinese people had dropped in and taught her Mandarin. I would assume they were professional teachers who had been thoroughly vetted by the school. Even parent volunteers required police background checks, and those took no fewer than two months to complete. If I had discovered that those volunteers had not been vetted, or that they weren’t professionally trained teachers and that they’d simply showed up at her school unannounced, I would have called the Children’s Aid Society. So why did people from North America think the standards should be so different in Haiti? Why did they think that Haitian kids should take whatever was offered for free? Dimitri had said it reinforced a slavery mentality—that any blan from the developed world with enough money to come to Haiti clearly had something to teach. More and more, I saw the truth in his words.

  Sure, the money they were spending on food and transportation and guesthouses was helping Haiti’s struggling economy. But wouldn’t it be better if all these volunteers just sent the US$600 it cost for a round-trip ticket down to Haiti to hire locals to do the job they were doing for free? When I asked people in the camps what they most wanted, they invariably answered, “A job.” US$600 could cover four months of a minimum-wage, full-time job in Haiti—which in itself was more than double what most people there made. That would offer real hope, in the form of self-reliance and the ability to buy the things they needed and rebuild their lives themselves, without the indignity of waiting for it to arrive on the back of a truck packed with blan volunteers.

  There were exceptions, of course. In the days following the earthquake, the medical teams and search-and-rescue crews that flocked to the country saved many Haitian lives. So did the untrained catastrophe missionaries who helped in those early hours, handing out water and scooping out food. But these T-shirt brigades were a different matter. As individuals, I couldn’t see how their help was harming anybody. The problem was, they weren’t coming as individuals. They had been filling planes and descending on Haiti even before the earthquake, to work on their little projects here and there. The emergency was long over now. When was the country going to start its development phase?

  • • •

  I pushed through the piece of corrugated metal into the yard of Lovely’s new home to find her crouching in the dirt by the kitchen fire pit, a giant plate of diri ak sos pwa on her lap. She set her plate down, sprang up, and ran at me. “Madame Katrin!” she yelled. I loved how sharp my name sounded coming out of Lovely’s mouth: “Katrin.” It was a pronunciation I heard only in Kreyòl. For any Haitians who spoke French—typically upper-class, educated citizens who I was talking to as a reporter—I was the gentler “Catreen.” Two names for two different roles.

  While we hugged, Jonathan, Venessaint, and Enel emerged from the house. Lovely tugged me into the new kay (house) for a tour. It was a simple box made of white cinder blocks topped with a tin roof. There wasn’t a single window, but from the inside it seemed bright and cheerful. Morning sun spilled through a pretty lace curtain that hung in the doorframe and speckled the smooth, polished floor. The four chairs Dimitri had bought sat around a small matching coffee table. There was a single bed in the corner, covered by a white ruffle-trimmed cover.

  Lovely danced around the room and then dove under the bed, her little bum sticking up behind her, to dig out her report card to proudly show me.

  She had excelled in her second year of kindergarten. The check marks showed she was generous, orderly, and well-dressed “toujours” (always), obedient “souvent” (often), and aggressive “parfois” (sometimes). Attagirl, I thought. You better be aggressive sometimes. At the bottom her teacher had written, “Bon Travail, bonnes vacances (Good work, happy holidays).”

  Enel pulled out two of the plastic chairs into the small, stony yard in front of the door so we could sit and catch up. From our vantage point, I could see the house’s other bonus: a couple of rusty eaves that directed rainwater into a reservoir. For the first time, the family could access their own water—for bathing, at least.

  A banana tree hung its giant frond down over our heads and trumpet flowers opened their wide white mouths from the bushes around us. It felt like a secret garden.

  “We found peace here,” Enel said shyly. Lovely climbed up onto my lap as we talked, and I could feel by the heft of her body that she had gained weight.

  Things in their life had finally begun to improve. Yes, they’d been evicted, but they’d gotten their money back from the corrupt custodian and used it to rent this home.

  Lovely had not needed to go to the doctor in months. The family was eating twice a day, a big meal at 2:00 p.m. and soup at night. Both Enel and Rosemene were working. Right now, Rosemene was down in their old neighborhood, selling lemons and oranges in the market. Up until recently Enel had worked on a construction site, building a wall around a nearby house and making US$7 a day. The job had ended, but he thought it would start up again soon. And Rosemene was also doing a little business out of the house: she’d bought a metal hand mill to grind pistachios and corn kernels for neighbors.

  It didn’t add up to much, but it was more than they had before and enough even to save some money—not in a bank account, but in the form of a ewe. When they needed to pay next year’s rent, Enel said, they would sell it.

  I was thrilled. Clearly, my standards for success had dropped. I no longer used Canadian benchmarks when thinking about Lovely’s future. Instead, I thought of the pregnant girl in Cité Soleil and the single mother in the trash heap at the bottom of Bobin.

  Lovely snatched my pen and scribbled on my notepad.

  “I am writing a book here,” she told me. “Gade. Look what I made. It’s beautiful.”

  It had been seven months since I’d last seen Lovely. I knew f
rom personal experience how long that was in the short life of a child. But she nestled into my lap as though I had never left. In fact, she was more familiar with me than she’d ever been, tracing her little fingers along my arms and neck to gently poke my freckles, then reaching up to rub my cheeks.

  Soon her brother was at my side, wearing nothing but a red shirt and demanding to be pulled up onto my lap, too. I felt Jonathan’s little bare bum nestle into my thigh and laughed at how intimate and natural it all felt—like these were my own children.

  I wanted to go and check in on Elistin and Rosita to see how they were doing. The new house was a short walk down the dirt road and up a farm field away. Lovely led me there. She was wearing the tiniest blue jelly sandals and she shuffled them forward, pretending to be a machinn, or car.

  “Beep-beep!” she yelled, giggling. “Beep-beep!”

  Pride filled my heart, as it did when I’d watched Lyla perform recently in one of her Irish dancing concerts. Lovely was thriving.

  • • •

  The constant rush of volunteers and aid workers flooding Haiti was not a new phenomenon. The numbers were amplified because of the earthquake, but Haiti had long been known as the Republic of NGOs.

  No one knew how many of them were operating in the country. In a speech in 2009, Bill Clinton said that Haiti, with a total of 10,000 NGOs, took the silver medal for the most NGOs per capita after India.

  The government’s records were well out-of-date, and the bureaucrats had no capacity to monitor or coordinate them, so the NGOs operated on their own, unaccountable to anyone but their donors in far-flung countries. Many were tiny—little church groups that filled the planes from Miami. Others, like World Vision and Save the Children, were so big that they were like governments themselves. They received large parts of their funding from foreign governments, many of which, since the 1990s, had largely stopped channeling aid directly to the Haitian government for fear of corruption and incompetence. Ironically, aid had been a mainstay of Duvalier’s regime, which had openly terrorized the population and made few investments in the country, simply pocketing the money.