A Girl Named Lovely Read online

  I had to go to the bathroom. Right then.

  This panicked moment will be familiar to many backpackers. It’s your body’s warning signal that you have eaten something your weak, antiseptic digestive system cannot process, and it’s about to open all the emergency latches, forcing you to spend hours or days in the bathroom until your system is completely flushed and clear again. I had minutes to reach a toilet. Otherwise I would shit my pants.

  Sweat pooled at my temples, along my hairline, at the back of my neck. The artist continued to talk, but it was like I was watching him from underwater. I had stopped listening. My rabid-dog mind raced around, sniffing out possibilities: Should I ask to use his toilet? It would likely just be a hole in the ground; could I bear to crouch over it for twenty minutes and then face him again? I thought about running back up the stream and trying to find a quiet pocket of the forest. No, I couldn’t do that, either. Was there a school nearby that would have real flushing toilets, and would they let me in?

  My eyes were casting about when two people from the Healing Hands guesthouse appeared directly across the stream from me. I felt like a shipwreck survivor who had just been tossed a lifeline. I excused myself, waded across the stream, and climbed up the bank and into the guesthouse’s forested grounds.

  I had traveled an hour by car and foot from my guesthouse only to arrive a few meters away. This was the universe’s way of teaching me how much I had to learn, not just about the workings of aid, but about Haiti.

  It was also an act of grace. I made it to my shared bathroom just in time.

  • • •

  The next day, I set out in search of Corail-Cesselesse, a new planned settlement about twenty kilometers north of Port-au-Prince. We took the two-lane Route Nationale 1 out of the city, cutting through the shacks of Cité Soleil until they were outnumbered by banana trees. As Jean and I drove into dusty scrubland of Haiti’s central plateau, dotted with long-fingered cacti reaching from the ground like claws, we passed two kids riding a donkey bareback. We had shed the congestion of the city for a bare, forlorn, windswept desert. There were hardly any houses here.

  We saw the new settlement from the distance: row after row of glaring white tents in the shape of half barrels set out on the flat ground without any trees or posts between them. It looked like a bomb-testing site in New Mexico.

  We found the camp manager writing on whiteboards under a large tarp. “You have good timing,” he said. “The president is on his way here now.”

  Sure enough, about a half hour later, I watched a line of beige armored vehicles snake their way up the dirt road, spilling clouds of dust and startling a group of donkeys. Behind them came a convoy of Land Rovers with tinted windows.

  Out of one, as promised, stepped René Préval, the Haitian president, in a dress shirt and suit pants. Out of another emerged Sean Penn. He looked like he’d been backpacking around India for a year, with a T-shirt, khakis, baseball hat, and aviator sunglasses. Finally, out came Edmond Mulet, the head of the United Nations in Haiti.

  Haitian reporters I had not noticed before appeared instantly with their television cameras and tape recorders, huddling around the men, who delivered impromptu speeches.

  The UN chief called the new neighborhood “an example for the rest of the world.” Pulling his hat off to expose a bad henna treatment that had turned his hair red, Sean Penn proclaimed, “We see very tangibly the beginning of something that could be real hope in Haiti.”

  President Préval was much less celebratory. He perhaps knew what locals were already saying about the camp: that it was a set on a baking desert in the middle of nowhere. “We are doing our best. You have to be patient,” he said into the raised microphones. It had been two years since Hurricane Katrina destroyed much of New Orleans, and rebuilding had yet to really begin there, he pointed out. “It’s not that easy to create good conditions right away. . . . If it’s difficult for countries that are richer than us, it’s going to be more difficult for us.”

  With that, the president set off for a tour, surrounded by dozens of fawning followers and television cameras. Sean Penn trailed behind, not one camera or microphone before him. He was anonymous here, just another blan come to help. I found myself walking beside a tall, thin, bespectacled man who turned out to be a fellow Canadian. He introduced himself as Nigel Fisher and told me he had recently been seconded from UNICEF Canada to come here and help conduct the post-disaster needs assessment. Our meeting was a stroke of luck: less than two weeks later, Nigel was named the country’s top humanitarian—Haiti’s deputy special representative for the United Nations, in charge of all their projects as well as coordinating the thousands of foreign nongovernment groups and the plans to strengthen the Haitian government.

  In journalistic parlance, he was a killer source.

  I managed to jot down his phone number and email address before my third lucky break of the afternoon arrived in the form of a distant figure. I peered at him, wondering if my eyes were mistaken. No, it really was him! Jony St. Louis! I ran toward him, shouting his name, and wrapped him in an unexpected hug.

  I wouldn’t say he was unhappy to see me. But he was surprised. I’d been carrying his haunting story with me every day for two months like worry beads, remembering his wife trapped on her bed and the heroics of his neighborhood soccer team. At the same time he’d been focusing his energy on survival. He hadn’t given our conversation that day a second thought.

  Still, it felt wonderful to close this one loop. His two children were living with a relative in the countryside. He was involved with a circle of local medical interns who met regularly to talk about the earthquake, and that was helping. And he’d landed a new job with World Vision, the largest NGO in the world. He was in Corail-Cesselesse researching what programs the organization might run there.

  The plans for Corail-Cesselesse were fantastic on paper. They included elementary schools, community gardens and kitchens, and three health centers. In a few months the tents would be replaced by T-shelters, the buzzword among aid workers for transitional homes. Made of cement fiberboard and corrugated metal, they were intended to last about a decade, until more permanent housing could be built. There was even the promise of factory jobs from a new industrial park slated to open nearby.

  An hour or so later, after the president’s SUV doors had slammed shut and his entourage had pulled away in a cloud of dust, I was quietly interviewing a family at the entrance to their sweltering tent, when Sean Penn appeared before me.

  “Can I get your help?” he asked.

  My help? Really? I had asked the Hollywood actor for an interview earlier and he’d sloughed me off. Now he was back, but not for me. He wanted Jean to translate something for him into Kreyòl.

  Penn stayed behind to inspect the new camp, without any security guards or hangers-on. Most of the people moving to Corail-Cesselesse were coming from the Pétionville golf course camp, which he was managing, and he wanted to make sure that this camp was all that he was promising them. He led Jean and me to another tent and pointed to a tarp attaching it to the next. “This is not safe,” he said. “If a fire starts in one tent, it could spread to the other.” Jean dutifully translated this to the tent’s new occupant, a young man sitting on a set of stereo speakers who looked up at us quizzically.

  So I got the chance to interview Sean Penn after all. Haiti, for him, was not just a cry of the heart. It offered him liberty. I typed my story for the next day’s newspaper on the drive back to the city.

  • • •

  Later that week, I got a call from the child services agent working on Jonatha’s case. What he told me was so incredible and confusing, I asked him to repeat it a couple of times. I hadn’t misheard: the little girl had been reunited with her parents. She was living with them up in the mountains southeast of the city.

  I was dumbfounded. Everyone at that clinic a couple of months ago had been so sure Jonatha was orphaned, and I’d believed it, too. Plus, the girl I’d met was name
d Jonatha, but the agent kept referring to her as “Lovely.” I suspected we had our little girls mixed up.

  The agent agreed to take me to her. She was living in Fermathe, a town up in the mountains famous for a fort built by revolutionary Alexandre Pétion soon after Haiti’s independence two hundred years ago. As Jean drove me up the twisting two-lane highway, each turn seemed to confirm my suspicion that we were heading toward somebody else’s happy ending. It felt like we had crossed the border into a whole new country. The air was cool and fresh, not humid and tinged with exhaust and burning garbage, and the road was shaded by trees. The houses grew more and more enormous, each of them decorated with satellite dishes. Jean pointed out President Préval’s walled mansion on the side of the road. As we climbed higher, the flashes of countryside were strikingly beautiful—vibrant green in patches, descending steeply down the mountainsides. How was it possible that Jonatha, a little girl who was malnourished, came from this kind of wealth?

  We left the main paved road for a treacherous rocky path, where a whole other Haiti came into view—one that seemed frozen in time from the 1930s. Little kids without shoes pushed bike tires down the edge of the road, and farmers looked up from thin patches of corn they were digging at with scythes. There were cows tethered to trees and chickens racing along the edges of the road.

  We pulled up to a small stone house with a veranda bordered by a neat trim of purple flowers. But instead of taking us inside, the agent led us down a little gravel path that skirted around the house. There, we came to a tin shed wrapped in a USAID tarp, just like the ones that had been erected around the golf course. I stepped into the muddy yard and there she was: the little girl from Sonapi, the girl I knew as Jonatha, her hard, suspicious eyes peeking at me from behind the legs of a small woman. It was really her!

  Her mother, Rosemene, kissed both of my cheeks. On her hip she was carrying a large toddler. She introduced him as Jonathan. Jonatha.

  The realization hit me: aid workers assumed this little girl was saying her own name. In fact, she had been calling for her little brother. Her name was Lovely.

  Some plastic chairs were pulled out and we sat in the dirt yard in the shade of a banana tree. I took Rosemene in: she was thin but strong, with a beautiful broad face and wide apple cheekbones. Her voice was high and she spoke rapidly, words spilling out of her joyously like a burbling brook. The love she had for her children was palpable. She bounced Jonathan on her knee and Lovely leaned into her lap as Rosemene told me the story I was desperate to hear.

  The family came from Fort National—a downtown bidonvil close to the National Palace. The afternoon of the earthquake, Rosemene was nursing a stomachache at home with her kids while her husband, Enel, was out working, selling sugarcane from a wheelbarrow. Rosemene dropped Lovely off next door to watch cartoons with her best friend, Gaëlle, and then she lay down with Jonathan. They were roused by the sound of a large truck passing by. It was the goudougoudou—the new onomatopoeic word Haitians had created for the earthquake. The ground below Rosemene bucked and she was pitched to her knees. Dust clouded her eyes. She managed to get up, grab Jonathan, and rush outside just before the building collapsed.

  Her neighbor’s two-story home, where Lovely had been watching television, had crumbled.

  Hysterical, Rosemene joined the throngs of people coursing through the streets, frantically searching for loved ones, all to the soundtrack of wailing, calls to Jesus, and screams for help. With Jonathan on her hip, Rosemene added her voice, shouting for her husband, Enel. She found him on a road before the sunken National Palace. It was dark by then and they settled among the thousands who crowded into Champs de Mars for the night. The next day they came here, to Fermathe, where Rosemene’s sister, Rosita, lived with her husband, a lanky farmer named Delius Elistin—like many Haitians, he went by his last name—and their two children, an adopted daughter, Sophonie, and a son, Lypse.

  For days Enel stayed down in the city, walking around the rubble of their old home, straining futilely for any sound or sign of Lovely. They thought she had died, and Rosemene spent her time weeping and praying. Then, six days after the earthquake, a neighbor called to say Lovely had been dug out. She was alive! The word was she’d been taken to a hospital, but no one knew which, so over the next couple of weeks Enel and Elistin descended into the city daily, checking at hospitals, embassies, and radio stations for word or sign of her. But there were hundreds of little medical clinics opened around the broken city at the time. The chances of finding their girl were slim.

  It was thanks to Haiti’s incredibly effective system of spreading news that Lovely was located. Almost everyone in the city had a cell phone, which it seemed they never turned off, answering calls in the middle of the night because that was how they got crucial alerts, be it about an approaching riot or the chance at a job. Sure enough, a neighbor called Rosemene to say he’d been to a clinic at Sonapi near the Trois Mains, where he’d seen Lovely.

  Early the next morning Rosemene boarded a crowded tap-tap, nervously descending the mountain, wondering if her neighbor was wrong and her heart would be broken again.

  When she finally pushed through the blue metal gates of the industrial zone and found the makeshift medical clinic out on the cobblestones, there was her daughter, surrounded by a group of blans. Lovely looked up at her, pointed, and told the woman who was carrying her, “Look, there’s my manman.”

  Rosemene was overcome with relief and joy. She waved her arms in the air, calling, “Glory to God.”

  The blans at the clinic wouldn’t let her take Lovely home, though. They wanted proof Rosemene was truly the child’s mother. So Enel went back to their childhood homes near Jacmel to look for baby photos of Lovely, while Rosemene traveled back and forth to the clinic each day, riding three separate tap-taps, to see her daughter and hold her. The child services agent planned to do a DNA test, but after a few visits watching the two of them together, it became clear they were mother and daughter. He signed the papers and considered the case his most unlikely success.

  “We were lucky because Rosemene found us herself,” he said.

  While we spoke, Lovely danced around the yard, returning time and time again to kiss Jonathan, who was a large, chubby baby. She chirped a song about a little baby drinking milk from his bottle and tickled her brother, who squirmed, smiling. It was the most playful I had ever seen her. Then she climbed onto my lap and took the pen I’d been writing notes with out of my hand. She began to scratch lines on my reporter’s notepad.

  “Gade!” she announced. “Look! I’m doing something. I’m drawing. Gade! Gade!” When Rosemene reached to pull her away, Lovely’s little brow furrowed and she swatted her mother, shouting, “Get out of here. I’m writing!”

  She wasn’t cute, but she was endearing, and there was something special about her. It was her iron core. Her friend Gaëlle had died, Rosemene said, along with Gaëlle’s grandmother. Lovely must have watched them perish or seen their unresponsive bodies nearby. I wonder how her two-year-old brain had processed it all.

  “Does Lovely talk about the earthquake?” I asked Rosemene.

  “Yes, anpil—a lot,” she said. “She says she was under the concrete for so long. And someone helped her, bringing her food and water.”

  Who was that?

  Rosemene leaned toward me from her perch and said, with her light chirpy voice, “It was her guardian spirit.” That’s how Lovely survived unscathed six days under the rubble while thousands of people died from blood loss, toxic shock, and dehydration.

  I do not believe in guardian spirits or divine intervention. But the explanation didn’t seem ridiculous. My logical mind could not explain the fact that this two-year-old survived many days longer than was medically possible. Something had kept her alive.

  Before I left, Rosemene scooped up Jonathan and placed him on my lap beside Lovely for a photo. While Jean snapped the picture, Rosemene snuck behind him and popped out on either side to wave and make her children
smile—just like I did with my kids. In fact, I could see my own family in them. I had two children, about the same ages as Lovely and Jonathan, and if something terrible happened to me and my husband, the first person we’d turn to was my sister.

  On my way down the mountain to the broken city below, I ruminated over Lovely’s story. Just that morning I had interviewed a midwife downtown. She’d arrived late and seemed scattered, unable to answer my questions, until she abruptly apologized and explained that she’d lost her husband and two children in the earthquake and had not been able to concentrate since then.

  Lovely and her family were so very lucky; they’d survived hell. But they were now living in misery. I poked my head into the dark, crudely built shed where they slept. It was a dismal scene: two cots and a mattress on the dirt floor. Eight of them slept there at night: not just Lovely’s nuclear family—Rosemene, Enel, and Jonathan—but her aunt, Rosita, her uncle, Elistin, and her cousins, Sophonie and Lypse, as well. When it rained—which it did often during the rainy season—a river coursed through the bottom of the shed, forcing them all to stand. I couldn’t imagine living like that. It wasn’t a life; it was survival.

  Before the earthquake, Rosemene worked as a timachann, selling small packets of spaghetti and bouillon cubes from baskets on the side of the road. She couldn’t read or write, nor could Enel. They had both left school after just a couple of years. But Rosemene had dreams for Lovely. Her daughter’s friend, Gaëlle, had been two years older than her, and she’d attended school regularly. She was the one who taught Lovely how to hold a pen and “write” her lessons. Rosemene had planned to send Lovely to school, and for two months before the earthquake she tucked money into a can each day to go toward that. The can was long gone, with all their other possessions and dreams.

  Rosemene told me one other thing. On April 27, Lovely would turn three. They weren’t planning a celebration, because, as she put it, “pa gen kòb.” It was a refrain I’d heard often: I don’t have money.