A Girl Named Lovely

by Catherine Porter

“I am angry!” I exploded. “What happened to the US$25 I gave him two days ago? What does he take me for? I’m not made of money.”

  I walked away to clear my head, and Richard sent Enel off on his own. I hoped he could manage to arrive home without getting in an accident.

  • • •

  Back in Canada, my family’s plans cemented. We were moving to Dakar, the capital of Senegal, for a year. I couldn’t have placed the country on a map before Graeme texted me to say his business partners would be keen for him to move there, since their company did so much work in West Africa. Once I started researching it, though, I got very excited. Senegal was among the most stable countries in Africa. Since its independence in 1960, it had not suffered a coup d’état or civil war. There was no history of ethnic strife between its many tribes. By big-city standards anywhere, Dakar was considered safe. It was the capital of international business and the aid industry in western Africa, so there were good schools, and it had a thriving cultural scene. And the city was spread across a peninsula, with beaches on three sides, which would entice the kids. They could learn how to surf!

  Most exciting for me, however, was how different the country was from Canada. It was hot, Muslim, and French-speaking. I was amazed to read that it had been a major departure point for slave ships in the seventeenth century, loading kidnapped West Africans into their holds and sending them off to what was then known as Saint Domingue: Haiti. Dakar, it seemed, would offer both the adventure I craved and a connection to what had become my second home.

  Even the preparations were exciting. The first step was to take the kids back to our travel doctor. Noah was so nervous about the yellow fever shots, we spent a week carefully assembling a plan to calm him: I’d go first, then Lyla, and then, once Noah saw how little pain the needles caused, he would take his turn.

  But the doctor clearly wasn’t used to kids. He insisted Noah should go first and ordered me to hold him in my arms. Noah instantly transformed into a snotty, squealing, bucking farm animal. The doctor unloaded the first needle and then, without warning, jabbed a second one into his other arm.

  Noah went from a pig to a bronco. He burst from my arms and charged out of the examination room. I raced back into the doctor’s office to find him ransacking the place: his little arms swept all the papers and pens off the doctor’s desk, and he tipped over two chairs. I managed to lasso him in my arms before he got to the computer.

  Lyla, in the meantime, had left the doctor’s office altogether. I found her in the hall, waiting for the elevator. “I don’t want to go to Senegal anymore,” she said.

  When we were back in our car, on our way home, each of the kids sucking on a huge lollipop consolation prize, Lyla and I laughed about what had happened. It would take Noah weeks to stop brooding about it, though.

  “He said he was going to give me just one needle,” he said, “but he gave me two.” He felt the doctor had pulled a dirty trick on him.

  As my excitement mounted about the year of adventure ahead, I had one lingering regret: Lovely. I doubted I would get to visit her from Senegal. I checked plane fares from Dakar to Port-au-Prince online and they seemed prohibitive. Not much chance the Star would foot the bill, I thought.

  So, in June, I went for one last visit before the move. This time I wouldn’t be alone. I brought with me one of the regular contributors to the Star’s Lovely project, a man named Paul Haslip. Of all the people who had donated to Lovely and her family, Paul had contacted me the most over the years. He was the one who had sent me the surprise C$2,000 Christmas check, and also the one who had proposed funding a new career for Enel. I figured he should come to see where all of his money had gone. He’d be a representative of all the Star readers who had donated over the years. For Lovely and her family, they would finally meet one of the strangers from across the world who had been moved to help them.

  Paul was a sixty-year-old investment broker from a sleepy French-Canadian village in southwest Ontario. His favorite hobbies were working on his century-old home and cleaning his and his wife’s matching Jaguars by hand. He had never been face-to-face with poverty in the developing world before. But he projected a serene calm, dressed in a purple paisley shirt at the airport check-in counter where I met him for the first time. I figured he’d be okay.

  When we arrived to Lovely’s place, we found out she had moved again. We were climbing out of the car, when we heard Rosemene’s voice call out across a small field of towering corn plants, their husks glowing magenta in the afternoon light, “Misye Richard, nou la”—“Mr. Richard, we are here.”

  Lovely appeared along a thin path that skirted the corn, wearing one of Lyla’s old dresses and her purple sandals. She took my hand and led me to her new home. Except it wasn’t a house; it was a grotto. Like the family’s former place, this was just one room, but the floor was rough, unpaved concrete and the ceiling sagged down overhead, rusty rebar poking out here and there like bony ribs. It was a dark death trap.

  After greeting Paul and me with kisses on both cheeks, Rosemene handed Paul her bundled baby as if she’d known him for years and took a seat in a plastic chair.

  “I don’t like this house. It’s not finished. It’s not pretty. But our landlord raised the rent in the other place,” she said. “We couldn’t find another place.”

  The rainy season was well under way and everyone had snotty noses and fevers. The family was struggling. Enel’s mototaksi business had not taken off. He’d made only two regular clients—timachanns who called him to transport their tomatoes and cabbage to and from the market twice a week. That earned him just US$3 a day, once he subtracted gas costs, so he’d found another job working on a construction site.

  Paul wasn’t disappointed. He was impressed by Enel’s doggedness and flexibility. “It’s a start,” he said, holding the baby bundle on his lap. “It will take time for him to figure it out.”

  A couple of days later, Paul and I met Nigel for breakfast up at the Montana Hotel, which had been rebuilt to only a fraction of its former self. There were a few rooms, a pool, and a large patio restaurant and bar, which offered a stunning view of the city below. Small birds darted between nearby trees.

  Nigel arrived pressed and groomed for another day of high-powered meetings. He wore a blue suit, and when he took off his jacket to hang on the back of his chair, he revealed a pink dress shirt without a single wrinkle. A patch of dry skin had appeared beneath his left eye. He was only ever supposed to be in Haiti for two months, but he’d remained for three and a half years, and the experience had clearly taken a toll on him. He still had his twinkle, but his upbeat, Scout leader enthusiasm had dimmed.

  “Yes, there has been progress,” he said. “But it could have been much more and the cost has been too much.”

  He tried to untangle the many reasons for the lack of development. First, he didn’t think the government deeply cared about its people, and the public administration was too weak. The country’s elites needed to take a course in civics, and there were far too many donors and volunteer groups doing their own projects without coordination.

  “Haiti is littered with the carcasses of successful projects,” he said. “It has to stop being a charity case.”

  But the greatest problem, he said, was the pervasive culture of criticism and blame among Haitians themselves. He used the Kreyòl expression “Se pa fòt mwen”—“It’s not my fault.” It made getting basic things done difficult. Even Afghanistan had been easier to work in, he said.

  “Don’t tell me it’s only the foreigners to blame,” he said.

  This would be our last meeting, as Nigel’s term as the head of the United Nations mission here was ending in two weeks. He was planning to move back home to Canada—at least temporarily, until he got his next offer to move into another disaster zone. He was leaving the country feeling proud of the progress he’d been part of, but sorry, too.

  Back in the car, Paul was having none of Nigel’s pessimism. Paul didn’t see the disorder
and filth in the streets; he saw the neat piles of green bananas and mangoes laid out carefully in rows by timachanns on their blankets on the road. The mother of all blokis that absorbed our car didn’t faze him. Instead, he remarked on the patience and courtesy of Haitian drivers, making way for one another.

  He reminded me of myself on my second trip to Haiti—full of wonder and goodwill, unendingly optimistic, and buzzing from the adventure of it all. He was far out of his comfort zone, and he was loving it. I realized that I was the fixer in his midlife crisis.

  On our last day in Haiti, we rented a minivan from the guesthouse and picked up Lovely and her whole family early in the morning at our usual meeting spot in Pétionville. We were going to the same beach we’d been to with Lyla. It was quickly becoming our reunion tradition.

  The day was magical in all the same ways it had been the previous fall. The moment we got there, Lovely whipped off her clothes to display one of Lyla’s old bathing suits and grabbed my hand, jumping in the water and shouting, “Wi, wi!” The other kids raced down after her, swarming me in the warm water, touching my hands, shoulders, arms, legs, demanding that they be next for a turn out in the deep to feel what it’s like to swim.

  After lunch, I sat between Lovely and Sophonie, with little Jonathan’s legs straddling me from behind as if we were heading out for a toboggan ride, and we let the waves wash over us, squealing with delight.

  Lovely cooked up her favorite meal of cornmeal porridge, mayi moulen, from sand for me.

  “I am stirring in tomatoes,” she said, adding some pebbles.

  “What can I add?” I asked, grabbing my own pile of rocks.

  “Potatoes. Carrots. Cabbage and peppers,” she said as I dropped each stone into her sand meal.

  I felt like I was up at my family cottage with my own kids. None of the pesky questions about identity, my complicated role in the family, how my generosity was becoming a trap for both them and myself—none of that clouded my mind. I was fully, deliciously present.

  A few hours later, Rosemene called down from her beach chair under an umbrella that it was time to go. She wanted to beat the afternoon showers that arrived during the rainy season like clockwork.

  “Five more minutes,” I begged her, just like my kids always did. She nodded her head. Five more minutes.

  “Madame Katrin, when will we come back to the beach?” Sophonie asked.

  “M pa konnen”—“I don’t know,” I responded. My eyes, hidden behind my sunglasses, filled up with tears.

  I was sandbagging the shores of my heart. My own midlife-crisis adventure was looming, and it meant I wouldn’t see my second family for at least a year; likely quite a bit longer. It suddenly seemed a terrible tradeoff. I knew I would return to these last lingering moments during the months ahead, so I wanted to stretch them out as long as I could.

  We ran into the water one last time, all three of the kids squealing atop me—on my shoulders, my back, my arms. I was their raft as we floated, heads in the water, eyes tight, smiles enormous.

  When our five minutes were up, we all reluctantly pulled ourselves up from the water’s embrace and trudged up the stone stairs to the outdoor showers. It was only the second time any of them had experienced a shower; Rosemene, in particular, soaked it in. Imagine what her reaction would be to a hot shower, I thought. She wore just the bright yellow bathing suit bottoms I had brought with me and began to lather herself with soap.

  All right then, I thought. When in Haiti . . . I carefully undressed both Lovely and Jonathan, folding their clothing and tucking it up on a ledge, took a breath, and removed my own bikini. Then the three of us stepped under the water spout beside Rosemene.

  I felt her hands on my buttocks before I saw them. Rosemene was washing me.

  “You need to clean that,” she said, rubbing away the sand.

  Once we were finished, Lovely stood up on the ledge, my pink wrap draped over her head and around her body, a vision of beauty. As I changed into my underwear and shorts, I felt her little hands on my face. Gently, tenderly, she was rubbing krèm kawòt—skin-lightening cream popular with Haitian women—onto my face.

  Lovely and her mother were caring for me. They were feeling the same heavy tenderness I was.

  By the time we rolled back to my guesthouse, a few blocks from our regular meeting spot, the rain was coming down as if we were driving through a car wash. I couldn’t see out the windshield, even with the wipers manically darting back and forth.

  “When will we see you again?” Rosemene asked from the middle row of the minivan.

  “M pa konnen,” I said weakly.

  “I will miss you anpil,” she responded, kissing my cheeks.

  “We’ll talk on the phone,” I answered. “I will miss you all, too.”

  I kissed them all, one by one.

  With that, I hauled open the minivan door. Paul and I were immediately soaked by the pouring rain. By the time we scooted into the building, my tears were crashing down just as hard. I pressed my eyes, embarrassed to be crying so unabashedly in front of a man I had just met.

  Nothing was settled in Haiti, nor would it ever be for me. Over the years, my feelings for Lovely and her family had become complicated and messy and deep. My mental spreadsheet of aid, which had started so simply, was now decorated with curling lines and blackened-out sections and calculus equations that kept changing with each visit. My mind finally understood what my heart had been screaming at me: I loved them. There was no way I could be away from them for a whole year. I would have to figure out a way to visit from Senegal.

  Chapter 13

  Lave Men, Siye Atè

  (Wash Your Hands and Wipe Them in the Dirt)

  Dakar was exactly what I’d been hankering for. Every day was an adventure.

  Most of the year, the landscape was a parched brown, but because we’d arrived in the middle of the rainy season, the hillsides were a brilliant emerald green. Large brown hawk-like birds of prey called kites circled in clouds overhead, crying and diving and striking each other with their yellow talons. The trees were scrubby except for the giant baobabs, whose thick gray trunks reminded me of elephants’ legs.

  We moved into an apartment on the city’s main promenade, with a long rectangular pool in the back garden. White egrets visited, standing on the fence to watch us swim, and iridescent blue swallows darted into the pool around my children. Each day, by late afternoon, the street transformed into a marathon of runners—in sneakers, soccer cleats, and my favorite, jelly sandals. Most were men, although women walked in bunches and did fitness classes on the sidewalks, too. Exercise was a national pastime. I kept asking fellow runners why they did it, and they invariably responded with a perplexed look and a variation on the answer “It makes me feel good.” Of course it did. Everyone in North American knew that. It’s just that very few people acted on it. Again my cultural windshield became more evident.

  I delighted in all the differences. Our first morning in the city, we headed off to the grocery store for supplies and had to pull over onto the side of the road to allow a herd of longhorn cattle to pass. Walking to school each morning, the kids and I skirted goats along the sidewalk. But some things felt eerily familiar. I could see Haiti everywhere. The local buses, called supers, resembled tap-taps; they were painted colorfully and so densely packed with people that many hung off the back doors and stood on the bumpers. The high walls barricading private property and the little boys darting between cars with bare feet and begging for money wouldn’t have been out of place on the streets of Port-au-Prince.

  The streets felt alive in the same way as Haiti, a carnival of commerce and traffic, including horses pulling loaded wooden wagons. Few roads had street signs, which I came to view less as a symptom of disorganization and more as a brilliant design intended to foster healthy human communication and interdependence. Even the local translators I hired had to stop strangers regularly to ask for directions. It reminded me of what Dimitri had once said: “In Haiti,
you have to know, to know.”

  Our first weekend excursion was to Île de Gorée, a small island three kilometers from downtown Dakar. From the ferry window, the island seemed like a village plucked out of Tuscany and plopped down into the Atlantic Ocean. Old ocher-colored buildings with wooden balconies and terra-cotta tile roofs crowded its cobblestone laneways. But the beauty masked a sinister reality: each of the Renaissance-style houses had served as a slave prison for more than four centuries.

  One home had been turned into a museum called the Maison des Esclaves. We hired a guide who led us around the small stone rooms on the ground floor, describing how the kidnapped children had been separated from their mothers and the women from their husbands. After months of fattening, they were shuttled through the “door of no return” and onto boats, where they were chained head to foot to the floors of the galleys, for the three-month voyage to the colonies. Display maps showed where most of the kidnapped people were sent. One giant arrow swept across the Atlantic Ocean and pointed to Brazil. Another led to Haiti.

  One morning in early October, I woke up with red, swollen eyes. The next morning Lyla’s and Noah’s eyes looked the same. We’d gotten the Apollo virus, the street name for acute hemorrhagic conjunctivitis—pink eye on steroids. Our eyes were itchy and pus-filled and heavy. Sunlight made them sting. We stayed indoors and took turns lying on the bathroom floor to administer the red antibacterial drops that transformed us into vampires, crying blood.

  The kids’ eyes cleared up before mine, and they returned to school. I stayed inside, miserable. Eduardo, a short, happy man who arrived on his Vespa each morning to clean the pool while singing songs from his native Benin, knocked at our door to ask why I wasn’t on the patio, typing on my laptop. I peered at him with my bloody eyes.

  He told me not to worry. It would pass. “This is scary for you because you’ve never had it before,” he said. For locals, it was like the flu. I thanked him for his wisdom and he repeated a refrain that was so common, it seemed the national saying.