A Girl Named Lovely

by Catherine Porter

  Elistin smiled, revealing a mouth that had lost even more teeth. He rubbed his head again.

  “I am the bòs,” he said. “But you are very important to us.”

  • • •

  Just over a month later, at the end of February 2015, I was back on a plane from Toronto to Haiti, staring down at the soft green mountains covered in what looked like white scales: Port-au-Prince. It was Saturday, around 2:00 p.m. Lala’s baptism was the next day.

  For the first time in five years, I had no performance anxiety in my belly. Every other time I’d traveled to Haiti, I found myself searching for a story at some point. Even when Lyla had traveled with me, I knew I would have to write about it, as well as report on another subject. This time, though, I wasn’t worried about missing a story. The only story I had ahead of me on this trip was a personal one. Richard greeted me outside the airport doors, his eyes shielded by mirrored sunglasses and his bulldog frown transforming into a smile when he caught sight of me. He hugged me and took the bag off my shoulder.

  As soon as we were inside the rental car, I yanked off my running shoes and socks and pulled out my flip-flops. I rolled down the window and delighted in the familiar sights flashing by, whooping out loud with joy. I was happy to be home.

  We rushed right up to Fermathe, not bothering to stop at the guesthouse. I had less than two days in Haiti and I wanted to make the most of every minute.

  When we arrived, Elistin’s new home was bursting with people. There was Lovely and Jonathan, Lypse, Sophonie, Elistin, Ananstania, Rosemene, and Rosita, holding Lala. And on one of the beds, no bigger than a water bottle, lay Zachary, swaddled in bonnets and blankets. His face was thin, making his eyes look large and round. His mouth was like Lovely’s, twisted in a little bow.

  Richard pulled my bag, stuffed with presents for everyone, out of the car. Lovely crawled up on my lap for the distribution ritual. Rosita picked up Lala and plopped her on my lap, too.

  I had decided to accept the offer to become Lala’s marenn. It seemed I was unofficially all the children’s marenn, anyway. I was paying for all of their school costs and, for the past few months, had hired one of Sophonie’s former teachers to tutor and feed them lunch each day after class let out.

  But Zachary’s birth and nearly losing Rosemene had crystallized something for me. My life was entwined with theirs now, far beyond what any story could ever have done. It was time I stopped struggling with that and simply embraced it. I wanted to be in their lives, not because of some bargain with my conscience or a duty to my readers, but because I cared for them. They had become my Haitian family. I wouldn’t write another story about Lovely for the newspaper, but her story would continue to grow and change, and I would document it as part of my own life.

  I reflected on what had happened over the past five years and all of the choices I’d made in Haiti. In the end, my foray into foreign aid had been limited to two projects. One had been a success. Muspan was up and running and more than three hundred kids were learning for free. After just over two years of funding the school, my commitment had ended cleanly. I had worked myself out of a job there, which I believed was the true role of an aid worker.

  The other project had been a failure from a development perspective. Rosemene’s family had eaten all her merchandise. Enel had started his new business and destroyed it. Elistin had built his house and lost not just his home but also the three fields he had farmed. They had no steady income and even more children to feed.

  I hadn’t worked myself out of a job there. In fact, I was more and more embroiled in supporting the family. There was nothing sustainable about it, except for the connections. I had thought our relationship would be clean and easy and distant, with me sending money from afar and getting reports from teachers. But it was the opposite: close and messy, a pile of children around me on the bed, all arms and legs.

  If I were given the chance to twist back time, there were some things I would change. I would have talked to Rosemene first about her business plans. I would have been clearer about my expectations and asked what her expectations of me were. I would have insisted Enel take more motorcycle lessons and been firm when I didn’t think he was ready. But I was not in control, and in Haiti neither were they. The country had not afforded them any safety net. How could they rise up without one? Like many who had funded projects big and small across the country, I had expected too much. In the end, I should have looked at my donations the same way the catastrophe missionaries had—as acts of kindness and solidarity.

  The next morning, I arrived early in my Sunday best to find Lala dressed up like a 1980s bride in a puffy white dress and white fishnet stockings beneath lacy socks and white shoes. On her head she wore a white tiara that pointed down her brow. Rosita and Elistin plopped her in a chair and stood beside her in stiff frontier-era postures, demanding I take their photos. Then every single person in the family squeezed into the rental car to make the short trip to church.

  I spent most of the service nervously sitting in a pew, worrying that I’d be called to the pulpit and asked to say some words. But it never happened. Instead, after what felt like an eternity of impassioned singing and stern sermon giving, the pastor called Elistin up to the front with his family and announced that, as everyone in the congregation knew, “introductions to God” were always done on the last Sunday of the month. But since Lala’s marenn had come all the way from across the ocean for this, he was making an exception. I realized I had mixed up the dates and arrived a week late, but Elistin had been too polite to say anything. I smiled in my pew.

  Later that afternoon, five women arrived at the family home to squat over charcoal fires and cook the feast. They made rice and grilled chicken and shredded salad and macaroni. Elistin’s landlady had converted her parlor into a party room for the occasion, laying a nice tablecloth across the table and clearing out furniture. When the meal was ready, people I had never seen before surfaced as if by magic to carry out plates heavy with food. Richard popped a bottle of champagne.

  Afterward we dragged our chairs into the sun-speckled front yard. Lypse pulled out the soccer ball I had brought for him and we played monkey in the middle with Lovely. She squealed and gasped, racing around me and shouting “Madame Katrin, mwen mwen”—“Me me.” I loved moments with Lovely like this, when she transformed from a tough, wizened little woman into a carefree child.

  The afternoon passed like a summer dream, with kids climbing on and off my lap and Rosemene parading the clothing I’d brought for her and Rosita up and down the yard. Just a month ago Rosemene had been so close to death. Now here she was, vibrant and happy. I was in awe; it seemed another miracle.

  Near the end of the day, we all curled up on the two beds like a pack of kittens, with Lala in the middle sitting upright, her hair an Afro halo around her face. Lovely lay beside me, writing a letter to Lyla on my notepad in her flowery French penmanship.

  “Chère amie Lala,” she wrote. “C’est ton amie Lovely.”

  I smiled, remembering the first time Lovely had taken my notepad, just three months after the earthquake. That was the afternoon that started it all: the day I’d seen her potential and decided to cross the line.

  I still wondered if it had been the right choice. As a foreign correspondent, many of my stories would inspire readers to help the people I was writing about. I saw the wisdom of most journalists who directed their readers to NGO workers who functioned as intermediaries. The professional line of impartiality was there for a reason, protecting journalists in big ways and small ones. But I also understood that that wouldn’t prevent moral dilemmas from surfacing in more acute ways throughout my career, as they had the first afternoon I met Lovely, or a month ago when Rosemene’s life was in danger. And in those cases I would always cross it. The mantra I’d devised five years ago hadn’t changed: I was a human first, a journalist second.

  If I hadn’t decided to help Lovely, what would her life be like now? I wondered. She’d probably be back
in Fort National, living in a tin shed. She wouldn’t be in school; that was for sure. She would never have learned to read or write. Her only prospect would be the life of a timachann selling bouillon cubes or mangoes in the market. She would be poor and hungry. By those standards, my development project hadn’t been a failure. It was just ongoing. I’d have to wait another ten years to see what Lovely would make of her life. Maybe she’d be a cook, like she said she wanted to be, or a writer like me. Her mother pointed out how much she loved to read and write stories, sure that it was my influence.

  She had so many things going for her: her loving family, her grit, her determination. She was smart and hardworking. She was tough. And she had me. As long as she kept studying, I would continue to pay for her schooling.

  I doubted she could be the president. I now knew enough about Haiti to understand she’d been born in the wrong class for that. But I did see that she could lead a full, meaningful life. And I was so glad that I would be there to watch it unfold.

  Epilogue

  The path down to Lovely’s new home was so steep, I had taken my shoes off to navigate it barefoot, my toes curling around the shards of damp rock to prevent me from slipping and falling.

  It was early October 2017. The rainy season was tapering to its end, which meant the red earth beneath my feet was still moist. The sun was high, cooking the heavy air like a sauna. Banana trees in the valley just below us gleamed an emerald green, and the voices of Lovely’s neighbors echoed around us.

  I’d left the Toronto Star earlier that year for my dream job—a foreign correspondent for the New York Times. I was the Canada bureau chief, based in my home in Toronto, so I got to see my kids more. But I also covered the entire country, flying to places so different that, although they were within my country’s borders, they gave me the sense I always craved—of being a visitor in a strange land.

  Before I started the new job, I’d traveled to Haiti to visit Lovely and her family, thinking it would be the last I would see them for some time. But Haiti had me mare—tied. No matter how far away I was, the country worked some magic to bring me back. In this case, my new editor at the Times had launched a series about death around the world and asked me to tell a story from Haiti, since I knew it so well. So, I’d traveled back three more times throughout the year, to the point that, on my last trip, Elistin exclaimed, “You are here again! I thought they were joking when they called to say you were at my house.”

  I discovered that Lovely’s family had moved again. They’d rented a small piece of land on the edge of a steep, rocky valley in Fermathe and built a house on it. The house was made entirely of scraps of tin, nailed together like a quilt. From the outside, it looked almost as terrible as the hovel I’d seen at the bottom of Bobin, albeit without the surrounding trash. But inside, the home was cool and roomy. There was one single bed and the frame for a second, a little shelf filled with all their kitchen supplies, and a television, which miraculously turned on for a couple of hours a day when the electricity was working. At night, they rolled out bits of carpet on the floor, which was rocky dirt, for the kids to sleep on.

  The fact that the family owned the home, on rented land they aimed to buy at some point, gave them a sense of security they’d never had. Rosemene saw it as progress. She and Enel had bought a cow with the proceeds from the motorcycle he’d sold, and the cow was now pregnant. They planned to sell the calf and buy a concrete floor for their home.

  “The city wasn’t built in one day,” Rosemene said, as a parable for patience. “It’s been seven years and look at it. It still hasn’t been built.”

  She was right. Seven years after the earthquake, the country’s reconstruction had paused indefinitely for lack of funds. The world had moved on. Haiti had not been “built back better.” Aside from a few good projects, it had returned to what it had been before the earthquake.

  I still considered Muspan as one of those few good projects, particularly because it had withstood a huge tragedy. Gilberte Salomon had died. She’d been visiting her family home in Les Cayes when she suffered what seemed to be a stroke. Her son Anthony told me she’d had diabetes for a long time and had not been managing it well. He lived not far from me, in the suburbs of Toronto, but was now running his mother’s school remotely, flying down to Haiti regularly to check on it and the nursing college. Even though he told me he didn’t share his mother’s thirst for social justice, he still carried on her legacy, charging just US$30 tuition so that poorer children wouldn’t be priced out of an education.

  Lovely’s family had suffered its own tragedy of sorts: Sophonie was pregnant. The news had stunned and infuriated Rosita in particular. Sophonie, just sixteen, had more education than she and Elistin put together, and now she seemed destined for their lot—piecemeal labor. She would not be helping the family out of poverty, as they’d hoped. The local high school wouldn’t accept her pregnant, so she was lounging about at home, casting back her parents’ anger.

  I was disappointed, too. This was a barrier to progress I had considered when it came to Rosemene, but foolishly had not contemplated for her children or nieces. I hoped Sophonie would return to school once the baby was born, but it seemed depressingly unlikely. Please, Lovely, I thought, learn from this lesson.

  Lovely had just started grade six. She still had the toughness and grit that drew me to her when we’d met, but she was softening with age, adopting some of her mother’s lightness and delight in life. It made her all the more lovable.

  She was guiding me down the path, pointing out the best places for me to step. I held my shoes in one hand, and her hand in the other. I looked down at her with pride and wonder.

  How was it that she survived six days under the rubble? But more importantly, why had she survived? It was a question I’d mulled for years now. All the death I’d seen in Haiti, all the poverty and dejection, and yet here she was—not just surviving, but thriving. Lovely was only ten, but she had already been granted three lives.

  I wondered how she carried that. Was it a heavy burden?

  “Lovely,” I asked her, as she jumped down to the next step, “do you remember the earthquake?”

  “Yes,” she responded.

  “Do you remember being under the rubble?”

  “Yes,” she said. “A man helped break the building.”

  “What do you think about it?” I asked.

  She paused for a moment, and we stood quietly on the edge of the rocky valley.

  When she finally answered, she said, “I don’t know.”

  I squeezed her hand, she turned to face me, and we smiled at each other.

  I didn’t know, either. Some things, I figured, we would never know. But we’d also never tire of thinking about them.

  Kreyòl Glossary

  (Haitian Creole)

  anpil: a lot

  bayakou: latrine cleaner (often derogatory)

  bidonvil: slum

  blan: foreigner

  blokis: traffic jam

  bon bagay: good stuff

  Bondye: God

  boutik: small store

  bwat: box; in most cases a lunch box

  byen chè: very expensive

  chofè: chauffeur/driver

  dlo: water

  èd: aid

  ekip: team

  fèt: party

  gade: look (verb)

  goudougoudou: The onomatopoetic word created by Haitians after the earthquake to impart the sound the earthquake made. It is now synonymous with “earthquake.”

  goute: snack

  jèn: all-day prayer session

  kay: house

  kenbe kontak: keep in touch

  kleren: high-proof sugarcane liquor

  kraze: smashed, broken, collapsed, destroyed

  lekòl bòlèt: literally “lottery school,” but in a Haitian context it refers to low-quality private schools

  lougawou: a demonic shape-shifter

  machinn: car

  maji: magic, sorcery


  manman: mother

  mare: tied, bound

  marenn/parenn: godmother, godfather

  mototaksi: motorcycle taxi

  oblije: obligated or required

  oungan: Vodou priest

  pa gen kòb: there’s no money

  poto mitan: central pillar, generally a reference to the central pillar of a peristil (Vodou temple), but figuratively a cornerstone or foundation (e.g., “the poto mitan of the family”)

  rad kenedi: old-fashioned term for secondhand clothes sold on the street; named after former US president John F. Kennedy, because the first shipment of gently used clothing from the United States to Haiti occurred in 1961, around the same time he founded the government’s international development agency, USAID

  recho: small metal charcoal stove

  restavèk: a child domestic worker

  tap-tap: privately run buses, usually made from pickup trucks with benches thrown down the back, and metal awnings usually painted with bright colors and decorated with mottos like Jesus watch over us

  teledjòl: literally “mouth television”; refers to word-of-mouth information

  timachann: market woman/small-scale merchant

  timoun: child/children

  Acknowledgments

  I began to write this book as a conversation with myself—a way to unravel what happened in my personal and professional lives as a result of my many visits to the devastation of Haiti and to understand how it had changed my view of the world.

  Most of the unraveling and resewing took place before 6:00 a.m., while the demands of my work and daily life were still asleep. It continued for three years.

  It made me unbearable to many people I hold dear, for an awfully long time—particularly because I get emotional and short-tempered when I am tired.

  So, this note is equal parts thank-you and apology.

  My husband, Graeme, took care of our children during my more than twenty trips to Haiti, without complaint. He never let the fatigue and irritation creep into his voice when I called home. He never made me feel guilty, which, you will know by now, I have an aptitude for.