A Girl Named Lovely

by Catherine Porter

  By 4:00 a.m. the contractions were so intense, Enel went to fetch Elistin and Rosita.

  “I was so hot. I had to get outside,” Rosemene said. “I gave birth right in the front door. Three pushes and she was out.”

  Rosita caught the baby. Enel cut the cord with a new razor blade. By then, all the kids were awake and Jonathan was screaming in fear: “Papa tou’em Mami!”—“Daddy’s killing Mommy!”

  We all laughed at that. I knew how lucky Rosemene had been that the birth had gone smoothly. If things had gone badly, she could have bled to death right there on the stoop of their home.

  In the time Rosemene had told her story, Ananstania had peed and pooed through her clothing. The family had no diapers, which meant she needed to be fully changed and bathed regularly. Rosemene pulled out a tub of cold water—she had no charcoal to light a fire to heat it up—and I watched as she dipped the baby’s small, excited body into it. Ananstania flailed her arms. Her facial expressions were wonderful—surprise, joy, consternation. Rosemene giggled and kissed her cheeks.

  “Don’t go pee,” she said. “Ooooh. You peed. Oh, cheri.”

  She rubbed Ananstania’s face with cream and laughed at her reaction. “Don’t open your mouth. I’m not going to feed you.”

  I asked her what she dreamed of for Ananstania’s future.

  “I hope her life is easier than mine,” she said. “I want her to learn a profession so she doesn’t grow up like I did. I’d like her to wake up and not worry about how to feed her kids.”

  In my own life, I’d always thought of birth control as a feminist issue—a woman’s right to control her own body. Here, I learned it was a development issue, too. The fewer babies Rosemene had, the more each one would get—not just attention but food, schooling, clothing.

  The Kreyòl word for birth control, planin, was from the English word, since foreign aid groups had delivered most of the supplies. Compared to most development programs in the country, it had proved moderately successful. Twenty-five years before, the country’s average family had 6.8 children. Since then, it had dropped to 3.4. One in three Haitian women had access to birth control—including Rosemene, who had gotten free shots of the hormone medication Depo-Provera every three months. But the drug had had severe side effects for her. She tried birth control pills next and found they caused the same problems, so she’d dropped them, too. A month later she was pregnant with Ananstania.

  “I wanted two. God gave me three,” she said. “Some people want children and can’t have children. Lavi pi chè. (Life is more expensive.) I have people helping me and I still find it difficult.”

  One thing Rosemene was certain about: “I’m not having any more kids.”

  Enel returned to the house in time to greet the kids returning from school. Lovely was dressed immaculately in her school uniform, a little Dora the Explorer suitcase in hand, plastic and purple. She charged toward me and leapt into my arms. I was so happy to see her and I wanted to hear all about her school and friends and life.

  Sitting on my lap and drawing in my journal, Lovely told me she could now count to five in English and that she’d written exams the week before.

  “I had a rabbit exam,” she said. “A leaf exam.”

  I burst into laughter. She was such a cool kid. And she clearly loved her new sister. I watched as Lovely held Ananstania and kissed her little mouth repeatedly. Still, I hoped Rosemene would not have any more. It seemed critical for Lovely’s success.

  I asked Rosemene what kind of planning she was using since giving birth to Ananstania. She had sent Enel out to collect the burr-like seeds of the Palm of Christ plant—the same grenn maskriti the family used for massages and taming Lovely’s curls. Rosemene was now swallowing the seeds like pills.

  “I heard about it in the countryside,” she said. “It’s called natural planning. If you drink ten pills, it lasts ten years. Take twenty, you are good for twenty years.”

  Perhaps there were some natural birth control properties to the seeds. But it seemed like a folktale to me.

  “Listen,” I told Rosemene, “that won’t work. That isn’t planin. You will definitely get pregnant again unless Enel uses condoms or you go back on the pill. You need to go back to the doctor and ask about it.”

  She told me she would. I hoped she was being sincere.

  • • •

  If I thought things were bad at Lovely’s home, they were far worse at Muspan. The building was the same. It was what was happening inside that was in shambles.

  Gilberte took me on our ritual tour, and it didn’t take me long to sense that something was wrong. The teachers, who normally smiled and instructed their classrooms to stand and welcome me, were stone-faced. They shifted their gazes around to avoid looking me in the eye.

  Gilberte launched into the speech I’d become uncomfortably accustomed to: about how I was the Canadian journalist who had paid for the teachers’ salaries so the students could all go to school for free. Then she went off script.

  “But since she didn’t pay enough, I had to pay the rest out of my pocket,” she announced.

  What was she talking about? I was getting regular emails from Ryan Sawatzky’s foundation showing the money had been sent every month. My group of friends and I had just finished raising the US$26,000 to cover the school’s costs for a final year. I knew Rea Dol had had a hard time reaching Gilberte and delivering the latest installment. But she’d gotten through and paid her as usual, so what was Gilberte talking about?

  As the tour progressed, with more sniping from Gilberte and masked looks from professors, it became clear I’d stepped in the middle of a political war.

  We shuffled into the dark administration office and sat down to talk. Gilberte planned to fire all the staff, she said. They were incompetent. They weren’t delivering their lesson plans, so she had cut their paychecks. In response, they’d gone on strike the week before.

  The root of the problem, she explained, was the government’s free education program. The teachers thought the grant money should go to them directly in the form of a raise. But Gilberte pointed out that most made about US$120 a month, which was good for a teacher.

  “The money should go elsewhere to create other schools like Muspan,” she said. “It should be used to help pay tuition for other children.”

  This was the first I heard that Gilberte had received money from the government program. She handed me a package of letters that outlined how much they’d given her last year—around US$3,800, to cover the tuition of all the school’s grade-one students.

  That wasn’t the only surprise. The same letter laid out Muspan’s annual budget, listing it as US$20,000—US$6,000 less than what I was sending her. Adding the two together, Gilberte seemed to have made an extra US$10,000 last year. What was going on?

  I felt sick as I went through the documents in the guesthouse that night. I phoned one of the teachers who spoke English.

  “Liar! She’s a liar. We were at school all of last week,” he sputtered over the phone. “The professors were there; the students were there.”

  I asked him how many months he’d been paid last year. His response: nine. I had sent money for twelve. It was all fishy. I carefully crafted an email to Gilberte, being direct but polite. Could she please explain? Two days later I received a response. She said she’d only received “maybe 10 months” of transfers. Once the school is over in June, she said, “I don’t receive transfers from Rea.” I imagined her squinting at the computer screen and pecking out the next paragraph with the fingers on her left hand. The email was all in lowercase letters.

  “I must assure you the funds I receive go strictly to Muspan,” she wrote. For her the school was “une oeuvre sociale”—a charitable work. She’d paid for the teachers’ salaries for eight years out of her own pocket, she reminded me.

  “I could never profit from the school,” she wrote. “It is true that Haitians have a bad reputation. I believe I am an exception.”

  I ca
lled Rea and arranged to drop in a few mornings later to go through the paperwork. Maybe they would show that Gilberte was being honest—that she hadn’t been paid for the summer months when school wasn’t in session. But when we met, Rea pulled out a folder of receipts, each written out carefully by hand on white paper. They showed that, month after month, Rea had received US$2,000 for Madame Salomon from me, Catherine Porter, and that the money had been given to the undersigned. At the bottom of each line was a shaky signature: “G Salomon.”

  So Gilberte had received the money for the summer, contrary to what she said. The sick feeling in my stomach spread up to my lungs. I wondered: Is that why Rea had found it so difficult to connect with Gilberte? US$10,000 was enough for a couple of very nice vacations.

  Corruption was an emerging theme of the country. The teledjòl was still buzzing about rumored graft by the president himself. Frustration among international donors was mounting.

  Nigel, who was now the top United Nations representative in the country, had voiced all this in a recent speech, stating that—despite all the grumbling about foreign interference and the United Nations in Haiti—the “political elite” had much to answer for.

  “What is sovereignty for the mother who is forced to send her child to the city as a restavèk?” he asked. “What is sovereignty if all Haitians are not equal before the law? What is sovereignty if opportunity is limited to the few?”

  I felt I owed it to all the school kids, friends, and family who had raised money for Muspan to get some answers. I called local contacts and friends for advice on how to approach Gilberte. One expat who had lived in Haiti off and on for a quarter century was frank: “Don’t do anything. Just drop it. She could take you to court.”

  “She could take you to court or worse,” advised a Haitian friend. “She could take you out.”

  Sophia Stransky of the Digicel Foundation said she’d noticed Gilberte was forgetting and confusing things of late, but she didn’t think she was corrupt. Instead, she thought she was showing signs of the early stages of dementia.

  Sophia suggested I take the oblique approach, gently asking for clarification, and I trusted her advice. I drafted another email to Gilberte, attaching the photos of the receipts from the summer.

  “I am really confused,” I wrote. “Could you please explain to me what happened to this money during the summer?”

  She asked for my mailing address so she could send me the payroll sheets for eleven months, signed by the teachers. “If I had received the transfers, I would not have suggested for you to go look for the receipts,” she wrote.

  She made a good point. It was of course possible someone else had forged her signature.

  As a show of goodwill, the morning I was departing for Canada, Gilberte sent a driver to my guesthouse to drop off letters from a dozen students. Each came with a photo attached and began sweetly with “Cher ami(e).” I promised to deliver them to a teacher in Toronto whose class was going to start a pen pal program with Muspan.

  A few weeks later the signed payrolls sheets arrived at my office. It appeared the staff had been paid for eleven months—not nine, as the teacher told me, nor twelve, as Gilberte had said when we set up the system. So that meant that only US$2,000 of the money I’d sent had gone missing. It was disappointing but not a catastrophe. Gilberte might have simply put that money into the school in a different way—for books or gas for a generator. I decided to simply swallow it. Compared to other projects I’d documented in Haiti, I had gotten off lightly. There was a Kreyòl expression for the predicament: fè byen se fwèt. The literal translation was “Doing good is to be whipped.” In English, we say “No good deed goes unpunished.”

  • • •

  While I was trying to sort out what had gone wrong with Muspan, I was starting another development project in Haiti. I had brought the US$1,500—sent by the Canadian reader—specifically earmarked to help Enel start a business. On paper, the plan was perfect, the essence of the “Teach a man to fish” proverb. This wasn’t a forced, foreigner-imposed project: after deliberation with Rosemene, Enel decided that running a motorcycle taxi business was the right choice. I insisted he do some homework so that he was prepared and would put some of his own sweat into the idea.

  There were some setbacks along the way: he lost his national ID card, and he had to restart his driver’s license application when he discovered the bureau had printed the wrong name on it. But he had spent the last month taking lessons from a local chofè mototaksi, or motorcycle taxi driver, named Roland. Considering Enel had never ridden a bicycle before nor driven a car, he had learned a lot. He performed some long loops on the freshly paved road near his home for me, demonstrating how he could balance Roland’s motorcycle over the speed bumps, switch gears, and come to a wobbly stop.

  That last part worried me. Motorcycle taxi drivers in Haiti were like independent hairdressers: they groomed their own clientele, who called them directly. There was no central dispatcher, just the driver and his cell phone. They seemed to be all men; after thirteen trips to Haiti, I had yet to see a woman motorcycle chofè. If a driver proved himself to be reliable, he could make US$12 a day from his regulars—twice what Enel made now working on building sites. But a couple of accidents could spell the end of their careers. The teledjòl was ruthless—word would get out and their clients would find other drivers they deemed safe.

  Enel seemed to think he was ready. “It was hard at first,” he said. “But now it’s easy.”

  Richard and I arranged to go motorcycle shopping with Enel the next morning in Pétionville. He brought along Roland for advice. The sunlight filtered through the palm trees onto the burnt-orange and Dijon mustard–colored buildings that lined the street. It seemed like it was finally going to be a good day in Haiti.

  The first place we rolled up to was still closed, despite a sign outside that announced it opened at 9:00 a.m. The second had no motorcycles in stock. The third place had two on display, but both had already been purchased, the salesman told us.

  We continued to a department store that had everything from beds to generators on display. There were motorcycles for sale there, the clerk told us. Fabulous! But there was just one small hitch. We’d need to get the bike’s registration papers from the customs office. And that could take a week at minimum. Likely more.

  “You see why this country drives me crazy?” Richard exclaimed loudly. He’d spent more of his life in Haiti than in New York, but he still maintained his American expectations. The country, to him, was purgatory. “It’s as if they don’t want to be in business.”

  We went off in search of the next shop, strolling through the market and past a corner with a bunch of guys sitting on their motorcycles. Richard called it the “motorcycle station.”

  “Where is the station?” I asked. To me, the word conjured a building where you could buy tickets and load your luggage, maybe get a snack between trips.

  “That’s the station,” Richard responded, bursting into laughter. “There is no building.”

  It seemed another classic make-believe situation. But, mulling it over, I saw I was imposing my own cultural expectations on Haiti, the same as Richard. Why did a station need a building? Why was my North American idea of a station more correct than this assembly of motorcycle taxis stationed together?

  As we walked, Roland and Enel fell farther and farther behind Richard and me. At first I thought they were just dawdling. But then it became clear: they didn’t want to be seen with the blan. Perhaps they were embarrassed, but more likely they were worried the perceived connection would get them robbed once we’d parted ways. I tried to understand, but I took their distance personally. I felt like a mother dragging her petulant children around to go shopping. Compounded with all the other failures of the week, my irritation bubbled over.

  We came to the shop that should have been our one and only stop. It was called Mototech, and all it sold was motorcycles and their accessories. More important, it had tons of machi
nes in stock, parked in neat rows along the sidewalk and deep into the open parking lot beside the store. The owner was an Israeli I found working on a four-wheel motorcycle buggy that sold for US$35,000—more than Enel would likely make in his entire lifetime.

  Enel and Roland conferred for a while and picked out a cherry-red Apollo that cost US$960, lock and helmet included. Enel stroked it like a little kid getting his first bicycle. “It’s beautiful,” he said.

  “Why this one?” I asked him.

  He giggled and said simply, “The design.”

  Roland had practical reasons for the choice. It would serve Enel well up in the chewed-up roads of Fermathe, he said. “It’s not afraid of mountains; it’s not afraid of rocks.”

  While I stepped inside the office to pay the bill, Roland and Enel remained by the bike, where Roland started chastising Enel, venting all the criticisms that had been brewing inside me. I eavesdropped through the screen door. “How can you lose your ID card and not report it? How could you not read your license and notice they’d put the wrong name down? This is why you are spending all this money,” he said. “You don’t act like an adult!”

  Rather than placating me, hearing the criticisms voiced stoked my growing anger. How many people get an offer to restart their lives? It was like Enel had won the big prize in a game show, and all he had to do now was invest his winnings wisely. If he was smart and cautious, this gift could mean he could feed his children three times a day, every day.

  Once I was finished paying, the vendor told Enel to return in two hours so his staff could fine-tune the bike. As we departed, I handed Enel around US$12 for gas to get him home. Then, quietly, he asked me for lunch money for him and his friend.

  Lunch money for his friend? Was he kidding? I started ranting in my pidgin Kreyòl but quickly shrugged it off for more comfortable English, spraying out words like bullets—rat-tat-tat-tat. Richard began to translate, then stopped. “Don’t get angry,” he said, raising his eyebrows.