A Girl Named Lovely Read online

  It was not a place with time or patience for brooding. Editors were always focused on how to fill the next paper and satiate the ravenous Internet. They wanted to know what I was going to file next.

  So, I got to it. My first column after returning was about stupid city bureaucracy. I met with the members of an active neighborhood group that had been banned from using a pizza oven they’d built themselves in their local park because of the city’s fearful lawyers. It was a good column—tight, energetic, pointed. But, in the wake of where I’d just been, it seemed trivial.

  The saving grace: many Canadians were also transfixed by Haiti. As a country, we had donated more to relief efforts after the earthquake than we’d donated to any emergency before: C$154 million over one month. Of that, C$128 million was matched by the government, adding up to C$282 million. That made Canadians the second biggest donors to aid agencies in Haiti, as a country, after the Americans. But when you took our small population into account, we gave the most per person.

  Even Canadians who had never heard of or thought about Haiti before were consumed by the horror of what had happened there. The fact that Canada’s beloved and dynamic head of state, Michaëlle Jean, had been a Haitian refugee made people feel a connection to the country.

  The park activists who led me to their pizza oven asked me about Haiti. So did the women breastfeeding in a clinic that faced closure that I wrote about in my next column. Even the women’s shelter residents, who were scared police raids might lead to their deportation, asked me about my trip to Haiti.

  They all wanted to know the same things: what I had seen, how people in Haiti were faring, and whether the money they’d sent was helping. I started to begin my interviews unusually—by talking more than listening. I would describe the scenes that played in a loop in my head: the buildings in heaps that were laced with intimate clues of the lives they once cradled; the parks crowded with tents made from bedsheets; and Michele Laporte sleeping curled around Jonatha’s trembling body at night. Help was arriving; the country just needed a lot more of it. Invariably, my voice would crack and I would start to cry. I could hardly make it two hours without leaking, which embarrassed me. Reporters are often typecast as hard-shelled and unflappable. I was failing terribly to maintain that image.

  A dear friend of mine is a psychiatrist. She explained that talking about what I’d seen, as uncomfortable as it felt, was therapy. If I wasn’t having nightmares or anxiety attacks, then I wasn’t suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder. I needed to use my own “natural support networks” and heal by talking, she instructed.

  So I did. I talked to everyone who asked me about it. Soon I expanded the discussions to groups in my neighborhood.

  My family and I were lucky to have a supportive community around us. Most summer nights, the kids on our street congregated on our tiny front lawn, which offered the only grassy playground. Their parents would sit on our steps and share glasses of wine. Soon after I returned from Haiti, one of those neighbors arrived on my doorstep with a plastic container of homemade cookies and a plan. She had rented out a local church for an evening. Would I do a public talk about Haiti?

  It was the first of a number of requests that came in from schools, universities, women’s groups. I said yes to all of them. Despite the discomfort I felt at becoming emotional in public, I was relieved. Talking about Haiti released some of the guilt I had carried back with me on that evacuation plane.

  When I recounted what I’d seen, I became more than a passive observer of horror. I was an active responder. It allowed me to make a financial difference by donating my honorariums to the charities I’d seen working in Port-au-Prince. But, just as important, I was able to show people that love, as much as money, was needed to save lives.

  During my trip, I visited amputees who were being fit for new prosthetic limbs. Inside one silver-domed tent on the grounds of a broken hospital, I found a burly, gray-haired American volunteer with a handlebar moustache playing his harmonica. He was another catastrophe missionary, like Alphonse Edouard. Professionally, this man was a silkscreener and photographer, but he’d come down to Haiti to sing to people.

  My first reaction was cynical, just as it had been to the jump-roping New Jersey boy. I dismissed him as well-meaning but naïve. I had assumed that he would do more harm than good—tripping up the real lifesavers, sucking up supplies and space, distracting attention.

  But I was learning that there is more than expertise involved in saving lives. I had no doubt that Michele Laporte’s cuddles had saved Jonatha. Similarly, in the tent that day, I watched the woman dance in her gurney to his music. Her leg was shattered. She was facing a long, difficult recovery. But, for this moment, she was happy. She raised her hands above her head to clap, and smiled widely.

  “When the Lord gets ready,” he sang, “you got to move.”

  I had started out thinking that Good Samaritans got in the way. But people like this man showed me I was wrong. They offered a kind of spiritual medicine.

  Near the end of February, I was invited to my local church to speak in place of the Sunday sermon. The minister interviewed me before the congregation. We sat in big, comfy chairs in a pool of crimson light cast by the church’s large stained glass window.

  The wooden pews below us were packed with people—not just any people, but wealthy, activist-minded people. The United Church has a social justice bent, and this one is located in the heart of Rosedale, Toronto’s leafy, old-money neighborhood. Some members of the congregation are so rich, they have heated driveways so that they don’t need to shovel after snowstorms. If anyone had the money to help Haiti rebuild, it was the members of his congregation.

  My voice remained calm and poised for most of the twenty-four-minute interview. Then, at the end, the minister asked me for advice.

  “What should the congregation do for Haiti?” he asked.

  I cracked and began to leak again. Because, in truth, I didn’t know.

  I had done the first part of my job: witnessing death and despair in a disaster zone. But I hadn’t done the second part. I knew almost nothing about Haiti’s history or politics. I knew little about disaster relief. Sure, I had seen some charities working on the ground, but I hadn’t studied them. I didn’t feel knowledgeable enough to formally endorse them. I couldn’t direct people to Haitian civil society, either: in my time in Haiti, I met only one Haitian NGO, working on women’s rights. I had no formal call to action prepared; I had only my own version of a bedsheet spray-painted with SOS.

  My crying saved me from having to answer directly.

  “I’m not here with answers. This is the way I feel I can help, by talking about Haiti,” I told the people packed in pews before me. “This congregation has the brains, the financial means, and the spirit to help, too.”

  Any journalist would have called my response a dodge. If I was going to speak about Haiti, I would have to learn more about the country.

  • • •

  Haitians themselves were only just starting to take stock of the damage and figure out an answer to the question of what they needed. More than two hundred Haitian bureaucrats, businesspeople, and politicians, along with an army of international experts, were holed up with borrowed laptops in a hotel in Pétionville, the upper-class suburb of Port-au-Prince where I’d stayed with Brett and Lucas. In mid-March they produced a document with the official title “Post-Disaster Needs Assessment.” Everyone working on it called it simply “the plan.”

  It was a clear rush job in desperate need of a good editor—massive, scattered, in places contradictory and flat-out wrong. There were 114 pages of charts, bullet points, and figures mixed in with snippets of history, philosophy, and aspirational plans. It was an early indication that there were too many cooks in the kitchen of Haiti’s reconstruction.

  But it did give the first vague overview of what damage had ensued after the earthquake. The worst was the human destruction: Around 1.3 million people were living in temporary shelt
ers. Many were in camps in one of the four affected regions, but some 600,000 people had fled to the countryside.

  The damage to infrastructure was equally alarming, since much of the country’s population and investment had been crowded in the capital, close to the earthquake’s epicenter. Eighty percent of the country’s university buildings were destroyed, along with one-fifth of the country’s schools. More than half of the country’s hospitals were in the devastated area near or in Port-au-Prince, and most were badly damaged, including Haiti’s largest and only teaching hospital. Haiti’s only international airport and port were badly hit. The presidential palace, parliament, law courts, and most of the government ministry buildings were reduced to rubble. Some 105,000 homes were destroyed and double that damaged.

  In total, “the plan” estimated 40 million cubic meters of rubble needed to be removed—enough to fill 16,000 Olympic-sized swimming pools.

  Then there was the economic damage. Before the earthquake, 80 percent of the country’s industry, commerce, and banking were located in the capital. Much of that was now in ruins. “The plan” estimated 8.5 percent of the country’s existing jobs would be lost because of the earthquake—and this in a country where one-third of people were officially unemployed.

  All of this put together added up to US$7.9 billion lost—“equivalent to 120 percent of the country’s GDP in 2009,” according to the report.

  While the international community seemed to accept all this, a clear sticking point became the death toll. What had started around 40,000 a couple of days after the earthquake was pegged at 170,000 by the Haitian government by the time my evacuation plane took off in February. Not long after my return to Toronto, the official number given by a Haitian minister had climbed to 230,000. By March, the Haitian government was estimating that 300,000 people had died.

  A team of researchers financed by the US Agency for International Development (USAID) later concluded the death count was much lower, at most 85,000. But their report was quashed by the agency itself because of “inconsistencies.” The United Nations used the figure 220,000 and the Haitian government eventually settled on the curiously exact 316,000.

  The truth was, no one really knew because no one had been counting, nor could they. Dump trucks carried the bloated bodies from the overflowing morgue at the city’s main broken hospital and trundled them north of the city to a desolate place that had long served as the country’s paupers’ fields, as well as a dumping ground for political victims of past rulers. It was called Titanyen—a word that made many Haitians shudder. There, the bodies were thrown into giant pits and buried quickly, often before they could even be identified. Community leaders in many neighborhoods also dug mass graves for their own residents, but no one from the central government was overseeing those.

  The issue quickly became political: the greater the number of deaths, the greater the call for assistance in rebuilding would be.

  What everyone could agree on was that the earthquake’s damage was unprecedented. The Inter-American Development Bank called it “the most destructive natural disaster in modern times . . . vastly more destructive than the Indonesian Tsunami of 2004 and the cyclone that hit Myanmar in 2008.”

  Naturally, such an unprecedented disaster called for an unprecedented international response.

  But the plan included only a few concrete recommendations, like constructing six hundred new kilometers of roads. Mostly, it was frothy with first-world dreams: universal health care, universal access to primary school, organic farming, and a decongested capital.

  The Haitian government’s sister document, called Action Plan for National Recovery and Development of Haiti: Immediate Key Initiatives for the Future, was supposed to lay out more specifics. But it was equally detail-anemic.

  The earthquake, the document said, would give the country a “fresh start.” The country needed to be decentralized, with national airports, ports, hospitals, and industrial parks built outside the capital. It called for a national malnutrition prevention plan and school canteens that would offer students free lunches.

  Finally, it requested US$11.5 billion in international donations—part for the eighteen-month emergency phase, and the bulk for the next ten years of reconstruction. Both the redevelopment and the donor money would be overseen by a board made up of Haitians and foreigners representing the donor countries. This was meant to sidestep concerns of corruption and replicate the successful commission that had rebuilt Aceh, Indonesia, after the 2004 tsunami.

  “The plan” was released with much fanfare at the end of March during the International Donors’ Conference Towards a New Future for Haiti, a one-day conference hosted by the United Nations in New York City. The theme of the conference was a line, coined by former American president Bill Clinton, who would become the co-chair of the Reconstruction Commission: “Build Back Better.”

  The world’s leaders and representatives gathered that day did not disappoint. More than fifty nations and organizations pledged a total of US$5.3 billion in immediate aid and US$9.9 billion over ten years. Canada was the third biggest national donor that day, after Venezuela and the United States, promising US$400 million over two years. That made Haiti, the Canadian government liked to repeat in its press releases, “Canada’s largest aid beneficiary in the Americas.”

  Sitting beside United Nations leader Ban Ki-moon in the United Nations unofficial uniform of a dark suit, Haitian president Préval thanked the little countries for their little contributions and the big countries for their big ones alike.

  “It’s a movement of heart. It’s a witness that Haiti is not alone,” he said in French. “And I say, in the name of Haitian people, ‘Thank you.’ ”

  • • •

  The night before Lyla’s fourth birthday party, she was banging her pink winter boots mindlessly against a metal shopping cart as we inspected the aisles of a bulk store for pink jelly beans and purple Skittles.

  The scene was equal parts devotion, overwork, and poor planning. It was already past her bedtime, but she wanted a castle cake, complete with turrets and standards and pink and purple candied walls, and I was determined to make it.

  As a working mom, I often beat myself up over the time I was not spending with my kids. However proud I was of my mom’s career as a book publisher, I remembered resenting all the volleyball games and swim meets she had missed because she was at work. I was determined to avoid doing the same thing, which meant I was often haggard, bitching at a subway delay or arriving sweaty and panting at a dance recital. It was why I was making a birthday cake from scratch, instead of just buying one.

  My trip to Haiti had intensified my guilt. I now missed Lyla and Noah even when we were together. I jumped into the bath with them at night, where we played crabs with our hands until the bubbles had long dissolved and the water had grown cool, and I crept into their bedrooms at night to breathe in their smell while they were sleeping. Had Jonatha’s parents kissed her in the hour before the earthquake? Every moment suddenly felt painfully important. I started to work from home a couple of times a week—typing on my bed, since my office doubled as their playroom in the basement—so I could sit with my kids at lunch and hear them playing around the house.

  We took a vacation to Florida with much of our extended family. I had brought novels with me but I hardly opened one that trip, spending the time instead laughing at things my kids did. At one point Lyla walked right into a wedding ceremony on the beach, stationing herself a few feet behind the bride and groom so she could hear every word. The couple was too polite to shoo her away, and finally I composed myself enough to casually pull her aside. I figured that enough of the couple’s wedding photos would include my daughter in her big yellow floppy sun hat and bathing suit.

  But even as I fell deeper in love with my precious family, my longing to return to Haiti grew stronger. I craved the adrenaline of a day’s work there: the unpredictability of what would happen, the detours, the surprising discoveries, the rawness, t
he extreme emotions.

  My conscience pulled me back, too. I felt a responsibility to the people I had met in those tumultuous weeks after the earthquake—people who had trusted me as a messenger to the world with their bruising stories. To them, I was likely just another blan—foreigner—who appeared briefly in the fog of their sorrow. But I relived their stories in my mind every day.

  What had happened to Paulette Paul, the woman I had met in the food line? What about Jony St. Louis, the physiotherapist who had rescued his wife, only to watch her die three days later? And what of Jonatha? Who—if anybody—was taking care of her now? Was she still living under a tarp in a field with fifty other orphaned children?

  As impotent as I felt, an outsider looking in, I was compelled to bear witness again. So, on April 13, three months and one day after the earthquake, I found myself heading down to Port-au-Prince on another Air Canada plane—this one a regular commercial flight.

  I felt calmer this time. I’d done my homework, grooming the Web for news on Haiti’s reconstruction and digging into the library and bookshops. I was better equipped and understood more about what I was getting myself into. At least, that was what I told myself.

  Chapter 3

  Building Back Better

  Pure joy greeted me through the metal gates of Fleurs de Chou primary school. Hundreds of little girls dressed in beige tartan tunics were bouncing in their black Mary Janes like squash balls, singing at the top of their voices. “Regardez! Regardez!”—“Look! Look!” they sang, louder and louder and louder, until the noise filled up all the space in my lungs and rattled my rib cage. They were dressed immaculately, as though they were heading to the theater for the afternoon—hair oiled, braided, and neatly pulled into pigtails, which were tied up like presents with floppy white ribbons that matched their lacy socks.