My daughter had fallen in love with Haiti at first sight, which I didn’t think was possible. It’s a country that has to grow on you. It’s like a puzzle you can’t put down. But Lyla had responded with her heart, not her head, just as I had done almost three years ago, before the silty layers of cynicism had begun to fossilize those feelings.
I also gathered that Lyla felt so comfortable here because I was so comfortable. Over the past two and a half years, Haiti had become my second home. Lyla had listened to my stories at the dinner table, looked through my photos, and discussed Haiti while curled in her bed at night. She and Lovely might have just met, but Lovely had been part of Lyla’s life for a long time.
Once the sun turned honey gold, I announced it was time to go, and Lyla said her good-byes to all the kids with hugs. We made our way gingerly down the rocky path and around the cows, with both girls holding my hands.
Lyla and I waved good-bye as we climbed into the back seat of the car. We bumped past the lonely cemetery where Lina’s baby was buried, past the Baptist mission school, and onto the main road. Port-au-Prince came into view down below us, blanketed in a haze of dust and humidity. Suddenly, Lyla burst into tears beside me.
“I don’t want to go,” she said. “Lovely is my best friend.”
• • •
The next morning we set out to visit Muspan Montessori. The construction that Digicel had funded was finished, and the result was astounding. The school was enormous—broad and tall like a government building, its towering walls painted peach.
Gilberte appeared at the door wearing her trademark straw hat and carrying a metal cane with four tennis balls attached to its square base. She kissed us both on our cheeks and started our tour immediately, gingerly leading us up the staircase.
Strings of paper hearts hung from the ceiling and handwritten Bienvenue signs dotted the pale yellow walls. The school had just had its grand opening a few weeks before.
Classes were in session. The sound of teachers giving lessons echoed through the open doors. Otherwise, the school was quiet. There was no shouting, no hurling of backpacks, no small children walking the wide halls.
Gilberte led us into the first classroom. It was enormous compared to Lovely’s. Kids sat at long wooden desks with plenty of room for each to move and roomy aisles between them. The electricity hadn’t been connected yet, so the overhead lights weren’t working, but the room’s large window let in both light and a breeze. After Lovely’s class’s chaos, every detail seemed marvelous.
When we entered the kindergarten room, the kids all stood up at their desks. They launched into a song in French, their arms swinging cutely by their sides. Many had their names embroidered on the pockets of their green-and-white checkered uniforms. “Nous sommes heureux, de vous voir parmi nous”—“We are happy to have you here with us.”
It felt like a parade, but reversed. We marched from room to room and were serenaded in each. Most songs were followed by a flowery message, written neatly on the chalkboard at the front of each class and read by thirty voices.
“Bienvenue, Madame Catreen. And thank you for your support,” the little kids said. “Keep thinking of us. Thank you. Good work,” recited the upper-year students.
There were nine classrooms, so the tour was long, which made me feel proud and awkward at the same time. Lyla felt the same way. She held my hand and cast shy glances around each room.
Finally, we entered the grade-one class, where Gilberte gave an impromptu lecture.
“Do you know what Madame Catreen did for us? You don’t know?” she said from the front of the class. A little boy in the second row put up his hand and asked if I was a new professor come to teach.
“If it wasn’t for her, we wouldn’t have been able to continue the school,” Gilberte continued. “We have to pray for her every day, because for two years she helped pay for professors. Would you be able to come to school without professors? No. It’s thanks to her and her friends in Canada. There, they made donations for you to go to school. So that’s why we say thank you to Madame Catreen.”
I didn’t need the sales pitch; I had just committed to raising another US$26,000 for this coming school year. I wasn’t alone now—a group of girlfriends had offered to help me do it—and this trip confirmed it was the right thing to do. Compared to all the failures I had documented in Haiti, Muspan was one undisputed, unanticipated success. Here, in this one place, Haiti had indeed built back better. I had warned Gilberte, however, it was my final year of providing èd. Next year she would be on her own.
After Gilberte finished her speech and retreated into the staff office, Lyla and I stayed behind, taking a seat on a back bench to watch the grade-one class. The teacher was a tall, thin woman who patrolled the rows, her hands clasped behind her back, peppering the children with questions. What were their favorite animals and how did they spell them? After a few answers, she arrived at our desk and announced it was Lyla’s turn.
My daughter had been drawing in her journal and not paying attention. So I whispered an answer in her ear: “Chien.” The class around us broke into laughter. I had forgotten that dogs weren’t normal pets in Haiti; they were either wild in the streets or tied up to guard properties. They were not things you liked.
The laughter embarrassed Lyla, and she said she wanted to go. This school bored her anyway. It was too much like her class back home.
“I liked Lovely’s class more,” she whispered. “It was more fun.”
We said good-bye to the class and Gilberte walked us out the front door. “Next time you come, little lady,” she said to Lyla, “you will stay at my house.”
• • •
We decided to spend our last day in Haiti at the beach. I had traveled to many of Haiti’s neighboring countries just for the beach in winters past, but here the idea seemed revolutionary. Not only had I never been to one of Haiti’s beaches, I’d never even seen one. I’d glimpsed the Caribbean Sea, but only as the fetid border to Cité Soleil’s shacks or the flashing backdrop to Titanyen’s mass grave site. To me, the ocean seemed like an ironic theater set, pegged up with tacks for a play about despair.
Rosemene had told me that she had never been to the beach before, despite growing up near a beach town. For that matter, no one in her family had ever been, so they were all keen to come.
I hired a van and driver from the guesthouse. Our plan was to pick up Lovely and her family in the morning and then travel north of the city to Wahoo Bay, a private beach some Haitian friends had assured me was beautiful.
That morning Lyla and I climbed in with our swim bags packed. The young guesthouse driver clambered into the front seat and started up the engine. It promptly died and refused to come back to life, no matter how many times he turned the ignition. We wouldn’t be leaving the guesthouse driveway, it seemed. Thankfully, the guesthouse manager agreed to loan us the backup van, a clunky blue tank with ancient seats and, we discovered, just one working seat belt, which I dutifully wrapped around Lyla.
The engine groaned to life and we lurched up the steep driveway, dumping black smoke behind us. We made it up to Place Saint-Pierre, where the entire family piled in: Lovely, Jonathan, their parents and cousins, aunt and uncle, and Venessaint, who had brought his best friend, Lovinsky. Lovely immediately settled into the seat beside Lyla and they pressed their heads together, coloring in her notepad.
We cut through the heart of the city and reached the airport, rounding the Trois Mains statue and passing the sign and blue gates of the Sonapi industrial district, which Rosemene pointed out excitedly. That was where Lovely had been found, two times—first by blans, then by her family. To Rosemene, it was a billboard of love.
The mountains rose softly before us, their edges smoothed as though scuffed with green sandpaper, and the ocean glistened beside us, holding up fishermen in rustic wood sailboats.
Wahoo Bay, like all private property in Haiti, was barricaded behind a high wall.
On the other side, we w
ere met by a Caribbean airlines ad: pink bougainvillea dripping overhead from trellises, a pool surrounded by lounge chairs, and, down at the end of the stone steps, a sandy beach dotted with wooden umbrella stands.
Exquisite. Lyla ripped her clothes off and waded into the ocean immediately, without a care in the world. Lovely and her family were hesitant, standing awkwardly near the water, not quite sure what to do. This was completely foreign for them. Not one of them could swim.
Slowly, they each peeled off their clothes. Lovely was the only one who had a bathing suit, an orange one covered in yellow leaves that Lyla had outgrown last summer. Everyone else wore tank tops and their underwear.
They each sat down tentatively just inside the surf, but the water was so warm and inviting that, before long, Enel and Rosemene began to submerge their bodies and venture up and down the beach in the shallow water like cats, pawing at the sand with their hands.
I took Lovely in my arms and gave her a lesson in floating, the way I used to with my own kids—“Stomach down, kick, kick, one, two, one, two.” Jonathan stood on the shore screaming “Mwen, Madame Katrin, Mwen.” He wanted his turn.
Lyla dove around the edges of the group, her dark goggles pulled down over her eyes. She asked me to play, but after I’d explained how we were the only ones who knew how to swim, she began to take her lifeguarding role seriously. I spent the rest of the afternoon as a swim coach, rotating between Lovely and Jonathan, and then Rosemene and Rosita. They each closed their eyes and smiled widely while I held their bodies supine in my arms and rocked them back and forth in the water.
Their delight was so huge, it was heartbreaking. This seemed truly the definition of poverty: to live beside a paradise and never experience it.
The rest of the day passed like a dream, everyone relaxing more and more. By the end, all the adults were laughing by the water in a carefree manner I’d never seen. Venessaint was a natural swimmer, plunging his head under the water and kicking around the shallow end. Lovely and Jonathan huddled under my arms and we chased after Lyla, with Lovely excitedly shrieking “La-La, La-La,” which had become Lyla’s Haitian name.
My pen lay on my notebook under the shade of a beach umbrella, untouched. I had not written a single word all day—a first for me in Haiti. This was my introduction to the country as Catherine, mother and friend, goofy woman who liked to laugh and play. It felt so good.
Perhaps Lovely and Rosemene had never seen me as a human tape recorder and bank machine. But I had. This was Lyla’s gift to me. She had shown me a different Haiti, yes. But, more importantly, she had shown Haiti a different me.
I would have stayed until nightfall, but Rosemene took note of the sun’s position in the sky and announced it was time to go. We reluctantly crowded into the van’s rickety seats and trundled back through Haiti’s countryside, happy and relaxed. Lyla fished out a bag of jelly beans from her knapsack and distributed them, one by one. “Wahoo Bay, Wahoo Bay,” Rosemene repeated, as if trying to imprint it on her memory.
Enel sang quietly to himself behind me in the back seat. I craned my neck to tell him about an offer I had recently received from a reader who wanted to help him begin a career, paying for his schooling and start-up costs for whatever he chose to do.
“You could become a mechanic,” I told him. “A security guard?”
“Mototaksi,” he said, smiling. He wanted to be a motorcycle taxi driver.
“You don’t need to decide right away,” I said. “You can think more about it.”
The late afternoon sun coated the banana trees outside our windows with honey, and when we reached Titanyen, a gasp went up from the front: a giant rainbow arched over the site of mass graves. Even the ugliest and saddest site in the country, a symbol of death, poverty, and injustice, was beautiful at that moment. A sense of hope filled my chest. Everything could be remade; anything seemed possible.
Sitting on her mother’s lap near the front, Lovely announced she wanted to sit on “Manman.” She crawled over the back of her seat toward me.
“What are you doing, Lovely?” I asked her. “Your mother is there.”
“She calls you Manman, too,” Rosemene said over her shoulder. “Manman Katrin.”
It was the second time Rosemene had said this to me, and my thoughts sprinted down the same reactive track. I was not Lovely’s mother; having Lyla here with me underlined that. I would never know Lovely’s internal world like I knew my daughter’s. But Lyla’s presence also revealed the depth of my affection for Lovely and the level of comfort I had with her. I felt like a mother to her. So while I had previously rejected the idea that I was, in any meaningful way, Lovely’s mother, I was now coming to see that there was an element of truth to it.
Jonathan followed behind her, squeezing between Lyla and me, while Lovely nuzzled her head under my chin. Lyla started singing “Down by the Bay,” a camp song we often sang in the car at home to pass time. I looked around me at the mosh pit of arms and legs and felt completely, totally at home.
Chapter 12
Fè Byen Se Fwèt
(No Good Deed Goes Unpunished)
It was destined to be a difficult trip to Haiti, because that was the kind of winter I was having in 2012.
I was in the dumps. Things were going right in my life, but I couldn’t focus on the happy aspects. I glommed onto the bad, the hard, and the cold. I was determined to be miserable, and my misery became a self-fulfilling prophecy.
It had to do with turning forty, but I wouldn’t see that right away, even when it hit me in the face on Christmas Eve, two days before my birthday. I had pulled on winter jogging gear and headed out into the gray, frigid streets to de-stress from work before the holidays started. My intentions were right, but the execution was shoddy. I carried my cell phone to play music on my earphones, but ended up scrolling through email messages while running. I tripped on a bump in the sidewalk and flew headfirst onto the empty street. To save my face, I rolled as I landed and something in my right shoulder popped.
I lay there alone on the hard gray road, howling loudly in pain, so absorbed in the sensations of my animal body, my librarian spirit was incapable of marshaling discretion. A truck approached slowly; its driver rolled down his window and kindly offered to take me to the hospital. He had a huge dog in the back seat that looked at me with its big black eyes and licked my cheek.
It turned out I had torn the ligament in my shoulder. The good news was I wouldn’t need an operation. But all I heard was that my shoulder would never be round again: a clothes hanger–like bump would spell the end of my strapless dress days. And I was bound for a difficult recovery: four weeks of shooting pain up my arms and tingling in my fingers. Four weeks of no lifting, no T-shirt wearing, no writing—nothing but Advil-numbed afternoons in bed.
Things got much worse on my birthday, when the phone rang: a dear university friend who Graeme and I had worked with in India had drowned. We were despondent.
Little things were falling apart, too. Our favorite neighborhood bakery closed down. In the grand scheme of things, it wasn’t terrible, but it had been our family’s Saturday morning ritual to wander over to the bakery for cinnamon rolls and challah. “Who will take over the store?” Noah asked.
“Probably some crappy store will go in,” Lyla responded. “They are leaving, and I love them. Everyone I love leaves.”
“No more sticky buns,” lamented Noah. “No more yummy bread.”
I decided I needed a big change in my life. I wasn’t sure what it would mean yet, but I was pushing Graeme to move—not to another neighborhood but another country. But first I had some things I had to settle in Haiti.
• • •
Two weeks before I arrived back in Haiti in March 2013, Rosemene delivered a baby girl.
She’d known it was a girl because of the way her body filled in at the waist, and she’d intended to name her Mylove. In the end, she chose Ananstania, because a neighbor said it was from the Bible, a claim that turned out to b
e untrue.
I sat in the dim light of their one-room house and held Ananstania’s small body in my lap. She had Jonathan’s heavy brow and Lovely’s wiry body. She was swaddled in clothing. Rosemene had pulled no fewer than three hats over her little head; the top one was a pink one that I had brought with me in my regular gift bag of rad kenedi.
Ananstania looked up at me quizzically, swung her arms around, and opened her mouth and closed it like a hungry little bird.
A feeling of dread hung on my body like the cold mountain air. There was no doubt she was beautiful, and a healthy baby is always a blessing. But that mouth. Rosemene had struggled for so long to feed the three children under her care. Now there was one more. Lovely would likely go back to being hungry. Ananstania’s birth seemed like a huge step backward for the family as a whole. I tried to hide my disappointment.
Rosemene lay on the room’s single bed, similarly bundled in several layers of clothing, with a thick white towel wrapped over her head. It was a Haitian tradition, she told me. They both would remain like this for three months.
The day of Ananstania’s birth, Rosemene went to a jèn, an all-day prayer session. On her way home she’d felt cramping in her legs.
“I cooked. I cleaned the house. I made some coffee,” she said. “In the afternoon I felt a slight pain in my stomach. I felt ill at ease.” I remembered feeling achy and restless the afternoon before I went into labor with Noah. I had moved from the floor to a couch to the bath to bed, fruitlessly trying to calm my nervous body, which sensed the approaching storm.
Enel had offered to take Rosemene to the Baptist mission hospital, where she’d gone for prenatal visits and planned to give birth. But she thought it was too early. So she went to bed instead. The contractions woke her up in the middle of the night. Enel lit a fire to heat some water. He had added some soap so there was foam and rubbed her belly with it between contractions. It was the poor person’s version of a bubble bath.
A Girl Named Lovely Page 20
