Since Gilberte’s property was so small, her school building would have to be three stories—a floor taller than most Digicel schools. That had added an extra US$120,000 to the cost. So Sophia had set out to look for a partner to carry some of the cost, she explained.
“We found the Stiller Foundation,” she said.
The Stiller Foundation, as in Ben Stiller, the Hollywood actor? The guy whose Zoolander character made my husband, Graeme, and me howl whenever we thought about the gasoline fight in the movie?
Yes, that Ben Stiller.
Sophia was not kidding. Stiller was one of the many celebrities who had descended on Haiti after the earthquake, along with Matt Damon, Shakira, and Sean Penn. His aim was also to rebuild schools, and last winter he’d signed a partnership with Digicel to do just that.
“He met Madame Salomon, too,” Sophia said. Supermodel Petra Nemcova’s foundation, called Happy Hearts Fund, had also contributed to the construction costs.
The work had already started. Crews had removed the rubble of the old, damaged building and were well on their way to finishing the new one. The completion date was less than two months away—August 1—so Gilberte and her staff would have plenty of time to prepare for the new term.
I left the office in a daze. What were the chances that, of 1,300 broken schools and universities in Haiti, Ben Stiller and I had chosen the same one to help?
The next morning I went straight to Gilberte’s. I found her in the courtyard of her temporary college.
The tarps were still up, but the separations between the classrooms were gone. It was now just one giant space filled with benches. And every single bench was crowded with Muspan students in their green tartan uniforms and plastic hair barrettes. In the midst of all of them, like a mother goose, sat Gilberte. She was being interviewed by a film crew working for the Stiller Foundation, and everyone was listening quietly like perfect students.
I snuck behind all the kids and had begun snapping photos of the scene when I heard her pronounce: “I prayed to God after the earthquake, to let me continue his mission. And he sent me a Canadian journalist who, by chance, just arrived.”
The gazes of more than two hundred students turned and fell heavily upon me, together with that of the interviewer who craned around and waved hello. I blushed, then waited until the filming was done, watching the crowd of kids mob Gilberte and slowly recede back to their classes.
“When you said you were rebuilding, I didn’t realize you were serious!” I exclaimed to her when we were finally alone.
“I am a very dynamic person. I would have built the school anyway, but maybe it would have taken years,” she responded. “Why don’t you head over and see for yourself?”
By then I’d seen enough construction in Haiti to know the difference between a professional job, with engineers and architects, and the regular homemade ones that dotted the bidonvils. Here, the workers were wearing not only hard hats but boots, too. The walls they had already erected were thick and even, with fat pieces of metal rebar poking up from them, crisscrossed with many intersecting metal stirrups—the key, I’d learned, to holding the bars together so the building would sway as a unit during an earthquake and not fall apart.
This clearly wasn’t going to be a typical private school in Haiti. It was going to be an institution, with wide halls and big windows, just like most schools in Canada. The only difference was that the playground would be up on the roof, since there was no room for it outside.
Gilberte rolled up in a truck, which she parked beside the construction site, offering her a clear view. She beamed.
She had more good news for me: she was rebuilding Institut Louis Pasteur, her nursing college, on the old site. She had raised the money herself by selling two pieces of land she’d inherited in Les Cayes, a town in the southwest panhandle of the country. The school wouldn’t be as big as it had been before, and it would be made partly of wood so that, if another earthquake hit, the students and staff would be in less danger. But she was almost back to where she’d been before the earthquake.
“What did you think of Ben Stiller?” I asked.
“He gave a good first impression,” she said. She had never seen any of his films, but, no, he didn’t seem funny. He was serious. She’d told him that she hoped to open a Muspan in every province and wanted his help.
“He laughed,” she said. But she held out some hope.
All of this was astounding and wonderful. It perfectly captured why I loved coming to Haiti: I never knew what remarkable thing the day had in store for me. I’d stumbled onto dead bodies, women giving birth, and now this—the remarkable rebirth of not just one but two schools.
Before I left, Gilberte grabbed my arm.
“Catreen, I carry you in my heart,” she said, looking me in the eye. “If you live for another sixty years, it will be because of what you have done for Muspan.”
• • •
The recent resettlement programs were slowly changing parts of Port-au-Prince. Many of the enormous tent camps that had spanned parks were gone. For the first time since I’d come to Haiti, I watched kids swing on the monkey bars in Pétionville’s Place Saint-Pierre and not live below them. What a glorious sight. It seemed like the moment a hangover lifts and you remember how wonderful regular, everyday life is. The park seemed so much more than an ordinary park now.
Back in January, on the second anniversary of the earthquake, the Canadian government had announced that it would donate just under C$20 million to empty and refurbish the most visible camp in the whole city—the Champs de Mars—where 25,000 people lived.
The Canadian government wanted the park back in decent shape by late July to host the upcoming Carnival of Flowers. Embassy staff admitted that the help wouldn’t solve the problem, but it would give them some money to start over with, similar to what I’d originally hoped for Rosemene.
I wanted to see exactly what kind of housing Canadian taxpayers were moving Haitians into.
Just a couple of months before, the Champs de Mars had been crowded with 5,000 shacks. When I arrived, I found only one left. I asked the last resident where his neighbors had gone, and he directed me to Fort National, Lovely’s family’s old neighborhood.
I knew from previous visits that I needed a bodyguard to go there. After Dimitri left, all my fixers had either burned out, found other jobs, or driven cars that kept breaking down. Out of desperation, I had called the Associated Press bureau chief in Port-au-Prince and asked for any leads. He’d connected me to a man named Richard Miguel, with one warning: “He’s a character,” he said.
I discovered almost immediately what that meant. Richard was bald and short, with dark bulldog circles under his eyes and a permanent scowl on his face. He spoke English with a New York accent and swore like a New Yorker, too. Driving through Port-au-Prince with him was like taking a gangster’s tour of the city. He pointed out street corners where he’d been arrested for robbery and crack houses where he’d passed years in a dazed stupor.
People who recognized Richard on the street usually knew him from time in jail together; he’d cycled in and out of prison in New York for years on convictions of robbery before the system discovered he wasn’t an American citizen. Finally he was deported to Haiti, a country he hadn’t known since he was four. Soon after arriving, he landed back in jail for the same thing. He’d been clean for seven years now and had settled down with a girlfriend, their young daughter, and honest work. His lingering weakness was gambling. He’d blow a whole week’s pay in thirty minutes at the casino, so he was always hustling for more money.
“I have a compulsive, addictive personality,” he said. “I like taking risks.”
We quickly developed a love-hate relationship. I loved his sharp sense of humor and the way he exploded into laughter at his own inanities. But his not-so-subtle attempts to weasel cash out of me set my teeth on edge. Richard exacerbated my irritation at feeling like an ATM in Haiti.
But the permanent sco
wl on his face made Richard the perfect companion to take me back into Fort National. The bidonvil had not changed much since I’d visited with Lovely and her family two years before. Other than a handful of tin shacks cluttering the edges of the main road, very little rebuilding had taken place.
Most of the homes we passed were dismal cells. On the main street was a little boutik selling water and building supplies. Richard knew its owner, a tall, lean man with the serene eyes and defined cheekbones of a Siamese cat. His name was Gueteau Lalanne, but everyone just called him Lalanne.
Trailed by a couple of dogs, he brought us down to his house, a bungalow in the middle of the slum, with three rooms, each covered in ceramic tile—a sign of his success. There was a pigeon coop on the roof, and goats and turkeys in a fenced-in backyard. After we arranged ourselves on the couches in his living room, a small white rabbit hopped by our feet.
I quickly learned that Lalanne wasn’t just a shop owner and animal enthusiast. He was also an entrepreneur. On top of the boutik, he was the director of security for the Ministry of Social Affairs and Labor and he worked on the side as a mason, building local homes. Oh, and he had built two reservoirs on this property to collect potable water from tankers, which he sold by the bucket to locals.
For him, the Canadian-funded move from the Champs de Mars was a great thing. His businesses were booming and the neighborhood was regaining its old life.
Even two years later, conversations always had a way of veering back to that terrible afternoon, and, sure enough, Lalanne recounted how he’d just returned home from work at the ministry and was up on his roof, feeding cornmeal to his pigeons, when the ground around him heaved. He watched the dust and heard the screams to Jesus rise in waves, and he scrambled downstairs to find his wife and children unharmed.
He’d immediately started to pull his neighbors out of the rubble. That first evening he manically broke concrete with his sledgehammer and sawed through metal rebar to free people. He described himself as a motor running on adrenaline and raw strength.
“I took so many people out. By midnight I couldn’t do it anymore. I went back to my house and cried and cried and cried,” he said. “But I kept hearing the screams. So I got up and went back out to dig some more.”
Soon he was joined by a handful of other men and they worked as an ekip—a team. Over the next few weeks they saved twenty-six people. They buried even more, delivering the bodies to the top of the road, where a giant hole was dug for a mass grave.
In the middle of Lalanne’s description, I began to wonder about Lovely. I had never searched for her saviors; frankly, I figured if Rosemene and Enel hadn’t found them, I wouldn’t be able to. But here was a guy who’d saved many people in their neighborhood. Maybe he’d know something.
Had he heard of the little two-year-old girl who had survived six days under rubble somewhere in Fort National? I asked.
“Of course I know Lovely. Everyone knows about her,” he responded. “But no one knows what happened to her after she was sent to the hospital.”
I was astounded.
Did he know who saved her?
“It was me,” he said.
• • •
The next morning I drove up to Fermathe to tell Rosemene and Enel the news. I brought photos of Lalanne on my laptop in case they recognized him.
When I arrived, Rosemene was sitting on the floor, combing Lovely’s hair into braids. Her hands froze in place as I told her about my conversation with Lalanne. She stood up, walked over to the small bed in the corner, and sat down on its bony edge.
“Did you confirm it? Are you sure it is him?” she asked. I had always thought it was a foreign search-and-rescue team that saved Lovely, but Rosemene told me she had heard through the teledjòl it was a local drunk with a thin beard named Chocholi.
“If it was him, I’d like to thank him for saving Lovely,” she said.
I decided to do a little more digging. I returned to Fort National a couple of days later and Lalanne took me to his shed, where he kept a cache of masonry tools. They were the same tools the ekip would have needed to smash through concrete and cut metal: sledgehammers, crowbars, metal pikes, and metal saws.
I managed to track down many of the people who Lalanne’s team had saved. I met the father of one on the main street one morning, looking as bright and promising as a new penny in his crisp uniform, canvas suitcase in hand. He was going to work. But two minutes into our conversation his eyes brimmed with tears. Lalanne had saved his youngest child. “Around 11:00 p.m. he brought her out. I hugged her,” the man recalled, his voice cracking. She had died a few hours later.
It became clear Lalanne was telling the truth: he was truly a hero who had saved many people in the area. I grew even more certain when I met the other members of his ekip and one of them turned out to be a man named Chocholi who loved his kleren. Together, the members of his team recounted how they’d worked three days to locate the little voice that was calling for her brother under levels of concrete. Finally they found her at the back of the third spot they smashed down into.
“The reason the cement roof didn’t splatter her was there was a table and the roof fell on the table, leaving her a very small, secluded space,” Lalanne said. “She kept asking for water. I threw down some crackers to give her hope.” He cut a lot of rebar so Chocholi could get down to Lovely. As soon as they pulled her out, they carried her dust-coated body up to a Red Cross vehicle.
All of that added up. But there were parts of the story that didn’t. The biggest one was Lalanne’s description of Lovely when she emerged from the rubble in Chocholi’s arms. Lalanne said Lovely had looked up at him and said, “Thank you.” That did not sound like Lovely when she was well-fed and happy, let alone dehydrated and distraught. The people at the Sonapi clinic had told me it was days before she stopped crying and spoke her first words. Maybe he was confusing her with someone else?
I decided I’d let Rosemene and Enel be the final judges. My plane ticket back home was already booked, but I talked to my editor and she agreed I should fly back a couple of weeks later for a reunion of Lalanne’s ekip and Lovely.
• • •
It was a hot July morning, and Lovely sat in the crowded back seat of the car on her father’s lap. Rosemene was there, as were Elistin and Rosita. They all wanted to be part of the moment, in case these turned out to truly be Lovely’s saviors.
I led them down to Lalanne’s house, where he and his crew were waiting. It was barely 8:30 a.m., and Chocholi already looked glassy-eyed from kleren.
We sat down together on couches in the small front room. The tin door to the roof had been moved aside to allow sunlight to spill onto the floor. Lovely climbed onto Rosemene’s lap. She was dressed again for church, in a pink floral summer dress, white socks, and her Mary Janes, which were so clean, they gleamed.
An awkward silence followed the introductions. No one knew what to say.
Finally, Chocholi spoke: “It took a great deal of effort to get her out.”
Then Lalanne, dressed entirely in army fatigues, piped up: “She’s grown a lot. She was shorter. She had dust all over her face. She kept saying ‘I’m thirsty, I’m thirsty.’ ”
Rosemene’s voice was husky and soft when she asked Chocholi which hospital he had taken Lovely to. She was testing him.
“I took her to the Champs de Mars,” he said, adding that he’d put her into a mobile clinic. He couldn’t remember the name.
Lalanne bent his long frame down and nuzzled Lovely’s little face.
“Lovely, ça va?” he asked. “Do you remember me? My, you’ve grown. Speak to us, Lovely. Do you remember Chocholi?”
Lovely smiled coyly and pressed her head into her mother’s chest.
Lalanne began to hold court. “I spent three days looking for a position to get that girl,” he said, standing up and addressing the room. “She was screaming under the cement. I said, ‘That’s not the voice of an adult. That’s a child’s voice.’ Ev
ery place we broke, it wasn’t where she was.”
From his seat on the couch, Enel quietly asked Chocholi if he stayed with Lovely at the clinic. It seemed like another test.
Chocholi said he returned to Lalanne to work and drink more kleren, which Lalanne had on hand for him. “It mostly gives me force,” he said. “When I drink kleren, heavy stuff becomes light.”
I could tell Rosemene and Enel were still not convinced; nor was I. So I asked Lalanne and Chocholi to take us to the site where they had rescued Lovely.
Lalanne led us out his back door, through his crowded pen of turkeys and goats, and out the corrugated metal fence into the heart of the slum. The thin alleys were clogged with garbage: Styrofoam containers, rum bottles, discarded limes—all in blackened mounds. In places, the smell of urine was thick and heavy. We passed a half-naked girl bathing from a bucket and some young boys kicking a tennis ball around the floor of what had once been a house. We climbed a hill, slipped down another thin alley, made a sharp left, and stopped abruptly before a little two-door shed roughly hammered together with scraps of plywood and corrugated tin.
“This is where you lived,” Lalanne said, turning. “Do you remember this place?”
Rosemene was holding Lovely in her arms. Her eyes narrowed. She scanned the surrounding homes, now mostly quilts of metal and plywood, searching for something familiar. It seemed we’d been here before, on our previous trip to Fort National to see Lovely’s original home, but everything had changed again.
Then a man stepped out of the shack wearing nothing but a red towel around his waist.
“Bonjou, friend,” he said to Rosemene. “Where are you living now?”
It was her former landlord, who had moved back from the Champs de Mars a few months ago and built this small two-room house.
Curious neighbors poked their heads out their doors to see what the commotion was about. Suddenly, Rosemene was flooded with familiar faces. A smile stretched across her face.
A Girl Named Lovely Page 18
