A Girl Named Lovely

by Catherine Porter

  “Nous sommes ensemble. We are together.”

  Over the next few months Eduardo would teach me a lot about how Senegal worked, both directly and inadvertently. He taught me how to bargain and offered advice on how to bribe police officers, which I could never bring myself to do. But his biggest lesson came after the morning he knocked on my door and asked if he could borrow money.

  He had a cousin who had been rushed to the hospital for an acute illness, and he needed to pay for his treatment. Eduardo’s request triggered a familiar reaction in me. This was why he had started to knock on my door, I thought. All those conversations were a means to an end. I wasn’t his friend; I was his big white ATM. This would be the first of many requests, I feared.

  I retreated to the war bunker in my brain and found my trusty, well-worn shield. Despite appearances, I told him, I didn’t have an endless supply of money. I couldn’t pay for his cousin’s operation.

  He looked surprised, but not for the reason I expected. He wasn’t asking me to pay for all of it, he said. He was calling all his friends and asking for contributions that, together, would cover the medical bills. Twenty dollars would be great. That’s how it worked in Senegal, where there was little state-sponsored safety net. Instead, families and friends worked together always to stitch it.

  A light switched on in my head. In Canada, I had grown up with the unspoken cultural rule of thumb that friendship should never be polluted by money. Sure, I might pay for a friend’s lunch, but never had anyone asked me for money to go to university or cover the mortgage. That’s what bank loans were for. Our system was built on the idea of independence.

  As North Americans, we don’t send remittances overseas to people. Instead, we remain removed by donating to NGOs. Introducing money into a relationship, to us, makes it feel impure and unequal. But in countries where the social safety net was thin, like Senegal or Haiti, people depended on one another more frequently, which meant money and friendship often went hand in hand.

  I had been thinking about my relationship with money and Lovely’s family—a book I’d bought about Senegalese culture called African Friends and Money Matters by David E. Maranz was illuminating—but it wasn’t until my conversation with Eduardo that I truly recognized how culturally based my understanding of the rules governing friendship and finances was. I’d been wrong to carry bitterness about the repeated requests for help from Lovely’s family. “Nous sommes ensemble” was a variation of how it worked in Haiti, too.

  I invited Eduardo and his cousin to Christmas dinner in our apartment, along with a mélange of friends who we’d met over the past few months. A few days later my family headed north to Morocco to meet Graeme’s parents for a vacation. I had a different destination, though. I had pulled together a number of story ideas and sent them to my editors, along with a budget. Despite the hefty airfare, they had consented. I was following the fat arrow on the map at the Maison des Esclaves and heading back to Haiti.

  • • •

  My first night back in Port-au-Prince, I phoned Elistin. He was the one I could best understand on the phone: he spoke slowly, unlike Rosemene, who chirped away like a morning lark no matter how many times I asked her to slow down.

  “Madame Katrin!” he shouted gleefully into the phone. “I didn’t know you were coming.”

  We traded updates about our families.

  “I am a new father,” he said. “Rosita had the baby last week. A little girl.”

  “What is her name?” I asked.

  “Lala,” he said.

  I paused. Was I hearing right? What was her name?

  “Lala,” he repeated.

  “Like my daughter, Lyla?” I asked.

  “Yes,” he said.

  The next morning, on the drive up to Elistin’s place, I wondered if I had misunderstood something. My Kreyòl had come along over the years, but it was still pretty basic. Would they really have named their daughter after Lyla?

  I arrived at Elistin and Rosita’s little house with the tin shed and rabbit cage, only to find that they no longer lived there. Three months earlier they had moved down the hill into their new home, which, I was amazed to find, was almost finished.

  It turned out that Paul Haslip had sent Elistin about US$900 after he got back home. I wasn’t surprised. Even before his visit, Paul had sent a lot of money to help Lovely’s family. Now, he had a personal relationship with them. I had asked, at the beginning of our trip together, that Paul not give tips or handouts to anyone I was interviewing, particularly Lovely’s family. So he had simply waited and sent the money down later through Western Union.

  Together with Elistin’s savings, Paul’s donation was enough to buy the necessary supplies and hire a three-person crew. The house now had stone walls, a metal roof, and two rooms. Elistin had even hired someone to string up a live wire and tap it covertly into the electrical network, so he had intermittent stolen electricity, which powered a single overhead lightbulb. Elistin’s dream had finally come true.

  So had Rosita’s. For years she’d told me she’d longed for another baby, but pregnancy had eluded her. Now she’d given birth to a healthy little girl in their new house.

  I expected a joyful air, but the mood in their new house was funereal. I arrived in the late afternoon, when the sun was hanging over the far horizon, offering little light. The hanging bulb was dead. I sat with them on wooden chairs in their dim salon, trying to get to the bottom of the baby’s name.

  Rosita was dressed to go to the gym in an oversized gray sweatshirt and sweatpants, with a white shawl wrapped around her head. Her daughter lay on her lap, similarly bundled. Lala had fat cheeks and thick patches of black hair that stuck out from under her knit cap.

  Elistin was listless. He was drained of energy. He rummaged through a wooden drawer in search of the baby’s birth certificate, since he couldn’t remember her official name.

  “We call her Lala,” he said. Lypse had been the one to propose it: he’d so loved his time with my daughter, he wanted to name his sister after her. I was moved almost to tears. But why weren’t they rejoicing?

  And then the story of what they called the Zafè Ti Bòs—the Little Boss Episode—began to emerge. A few weeks before they finished the new house, the property owner had called Elistin. She was angry. “Who authorized this house construction?” she had bellowed over the phone. She gave him a month to get out.

  “I thought she’d respect her word,” he said forlornly.

  Rosita hadn’t slept or eaten since last week, when the owner had called again threatening to use force if they didn’t leave this month. She would arrive with a justice of the peace, the police, and likely a gang of thugs to attack him and destroy the place.

  “I’m scared Elistin will be shot. People here kill each other for land all the time,” she said. “If he gets killed, I’ll be dropped in hot water.”

  They were resigned to moving, but how and where?

  They had poured all their savings into building this house; they had no money left to pay a year’s rent, which had to be paid in full in advance. Plus, they were losing Elistin’s three farm fields, which provided part of his income.

  They’d been trying to get ahead, but the Zafè Ti Bòs would leave them worse off than they’d been before.

  Elistin tried to be philosophical about it. “It’s part of life,” he said wearily. He cited a Kreyòl expression: “You think you are going to sleep well, but the house is hot.”

  But I thought another was more suiting: “Lave men, siye atè”—“Wash your hands and wipe them in the dirt.”

  • • •

  I had been mulling over the idea of buying land for Lovely’s family. But land ownership was a controversial issue in Haiti. Corruption and shoddy records meant that most pieces of land had more than one owner with legal papers. It was one of the reasons international development workers with organizations like Oxfam and Habitat for Humanity had been unable to build much new housing for earthquake victims: no o
ne was sure who owned the land. There was a joke among locals that if you put all the legally owned land on paper, Haiti would be the size of Canada.

  I had heard that a columnist from Montreal named Agnès Gruda had managed to buy some land for a Haitian family, and I phoned her for some advice.

  Her story proved a cautionary tale. Leading up to the earthquake’s first anniversary, Agnès had been assigned to find a young boy who had been pictured on the front page of her newspaper the year before. She’d had nothing to go on but the photo, showing the boy’s dusty head and shirt, red with blood. No name, no address, no number.

  Agnès had phoned a Haitian-Canadian documentary filmmaker in Port-au-Prince and asked her if she could find a fixer to track down the boy. The filmmaker had delivered a counterproposal: she would find a fixer, but if he found the child, the newspaper had to do more than just write a story. They had to help the boy and his family.

  The filmmaker called my fixer Richard, who managed to find the boy. Agnès was determined to live up to her end of the bargain, and she raised money to buy the boy’s family a small piece of land. She hired Richard to help the family set up a bank account, only to later discover that he had taken a cut of the money she’d sent to the family.

  “Richard screwed me,” she said. She didn’t feel comfortable asking readers to fund corruption costs, so she replaced the lost funds with her own money and fired Richard.

  The whole process took more than a year, and she still didn’t think the family’s ownership papers were legitimate.

  “I gave up,” she said. “It was mission impossible. You have to be modest. You do what you can.”

  In the car, Richard and I fought like siblings about what he’d done. According to him, everyone in Haiti got a cut and there was nothing wrong with that. He gave me an example. Once, when working logistics for a North American company, Richard got three bids for their rental cars. A year after he lost his logistics job, he continued to receive a check every month from the winning rental company with his commission, and he wasn’t about to correct them.

  The way Richard saw it, he hadn’t forced the family to give him the money. He hadn’t held a gun to their head or threatened them. He had just made it clear he expected pa m—“mine.”

  “Without me, there would be no house, no land, nothing,” he said, his voice rising. He was getting passionate now. “Without me finding the boy, they would not have attained all these funds.”

  I shook my head. “But, Richard,” I said, “you grew up in North America. You know people there will see this as corruption. You were paid for your work, and then you took more.”

  “I’m living here,” he replied. “I have to survive things happening here. This is Haiti. This is how it works here.”

  His reasoning was clear: if everyone took a cut, then it couldn’t be corruption because it was a built-in part of the system. I might have been more indignant had I not discovered that petty corruption was similarly endemic in Senegal. When we first moved to Dakar, I traveled back and forth to the Affaires Étrangères police station for my permanent residency permit no fewer than seven times. Each time an officer told me that I hadn’t “bien compris” and that, yet again, there was something missing from my fattening file. When I vented my frustrations to taxi drivers, they repeatedly smacked their heads and asked how could I not see: the officers were expecting a “sacred handshake.” One went so far as to demonstrate how I should fold a bill in my right hand and then slap it into the officer’s palm upon greeting him. I wasn’t sure what was worse: bribing a police officer or returning again to sit among the dusty plants outside the permit office. I decided to hire someone to get it done for me and eventually received my bloody card. Corruption wasn’t a moral failing; it was simply how you played the game.

  The thing was, I could afford to bribe. Elistin’s family couldn’t. And neither could Lovely’s. I wondered if Richard had taken pa m from every transfer I had sent for Enel’s preparations to become a mototaksi driver. He promised me he hadn’t. But he also said the family insisted on giving him phone cards as acknowledgment of his work.

  Even before Elistin’s Zafè Ti Bòs, the prospect of buying land for Lovely’s family had become less and less appealing. Now it seemed an impossibility.

  • • •

  Enel held Baby Ananstania on his lap, sitting in the family’s rough, dark cell of a home. He spoke so softly that I had to lean toward him to hear his explanations for the two motorcycle accidents he’d had since I’d last seen him. The first one occurred when he’d dodged out of the way of a police car that had been hurtling at top speed down a country road. Enel had lost his balance and fallen into a ditch, banging up his hand, knee, and head. Another motorcycle driver rushed him to the Baptist mission hospital, where he was stitched up.

  Thank God I had set up an account there, I thought.

  Then, in November, another motorcycle driver slipped across the center of the road and crashed into Enel head-on. Enel got off lucky that time—he hurt only his ankle—but the bike console was smashed.

  Paul had sent Enel money for repairs, but the word on the street had been punishing. Enel got even fewer customers than before. Some days he returned home with less than a Canadian dollar after many hours of waiting in one of the local mototaksi stations.

  By December, things had gotten so desperate that Rosemene left baby Ananstania with Enel and descended all the way down into the city center to buy curtains. She spent the night down there with her brother and the next morning had taken two more tap-taps back up into the mountains to sell them in the Fermathe market. Her profit from those two long days of hustling was less than US$4.

  “I’m so ashamed,” she said. “We haven’t put money in the bank.”

  Just when the family should have been more comfortable, they were poorer than before. It might have just been bad luck. But they had a grander explanation: maji. Sorcery.

  After the second crash, Enel had discovered a plastic bag stuffed in the compartment behind the bike’s pedals. In it were two matches, some corn kernels, and a handful of dirt they thought had come from the cemetery.

  “Someone had him mare—tied—to stop him from making money,” Rosemene explained. “They poisoned the bike. It was a malfèktè—an evildoer—to stop him from succeeding.”

  Enel and Rosemene believed someone had gone to an oungan, or Vodou priest, to buy the spell. They had no theories as to whom; it could have been any of their neighbors, who were jealous that Enel had a new motorcycle.

  “Haitians are like that,” Rosemene said. “They hate each other for any little thing.”

  Enel and Rosemene were strict Pentacostalists. They didn’t practice the Vodou religion, but their belief in evil eyes and evil tongues wasn’t about the religion. It was cultural. Before I moved to Senegal, this contradiction confused me. Now it seemed less strange. In Dakar, the population was devoutly Muslim, unfurling large carpets throughout the downtown streets on Friday afternoons to pray together. But my friends there also believed in the evil eye, the evil tongue, and evil spirits, called djinn. They hung gris gris—leather amulets fashioned by spiritual leaders—around their children’s necks to protect them against unseeable evil.

  On one of our first trips, to Dakar’s miserable zoo, I was offered a bottle of lion urine, which, the zookeeper assured me, would cure asthma if poured in a bath and ward off robbers if kept on a bedroom dresser.

  I now understood how syncretic religion could be, braiding together ancient African beliefs with Western or Middle Eastern ones.

  “Have you gone to get a counterspell?” I asked.

  Rosemene shook her head adamantly. “Real Christians don’t go to oungans,” she said. “Evil cannot cure evil.”

  Instead, Rosemene had bathed the motorcycle in a homemade cure for the magic poison, made with lemon, some local leaves, and oil blessed by a priest. But she wasn’t sure it would be effective. She thought the maji might be too powerful. She wanted Enel to ren
t out the bike or sell it and go back to working construction sites. The jobs there were irregular and held no chance of career advancement or raises, but they were safe. Enel was reluctant. Even though he was making no money, he liked the status the bike gave him and how passersby would say hello.

  “Why don’t we get you some more lessons?” I suggested. It seemed to me that he just needed more practice. My friends who rode motorcycles told me it was difficult to learn—and they had ridden bikes from childhood and driven cars. Enel had done neither. But he dug his heels in stubbornly.

  “I don’t need more lessons,” he said. “It’s the maji.”

  We were at an impasse. I couldn’t make them disbelieve in maji. And I worried again about the jealousy my mere presence in their neighborhood had clearly caused. But mostly I wondered about the larger cultural trap I had inadvertently stepped into. How could a country develop if every small individual advancement was cause for jealousy? It was the inverse of the development theory that a rising tide would raise all boats. Instead, it seemed, any boat that rose up would be dragged back down to the bottom of the ocean.

  • • •

  It took all my energy and determination to visit Muspan. I had stopped funding the school the summer before, as had been the plan all along. I had always meant for my help to be temporary, the intention being to get the school back up on its feet, not to hold it up forever. Gilberte needed to do that on her own.

  But I also knew she hoped I’d change my mind.

  After all our emails back and forth last spring, I knew I would never get to the bottom of what had happened to the missing US$2,000. Anyone could have taken it—the groundsman, the driver who had picked it up, a secretary at the school. I had dropped the issue and continued the payments until August 2013, the last month of the school year. Given what I’d learned about pa m and corruption, one month of missing funds seemed like a small loss compared to the larger gain: the school was up and running, and the kids were in class for free.