SAVING LOVELY, SAVING HAITI

Catherine Porter
Star Columnist



FRI OCT 15 2010
PORT-AU-PRINCE, HAITIHer name is Lovely.
PORT-AU-PRINCE, HAITIa rocky hilltop.
Lovely Avelus looks down on her Haitian neighbourhood from She is 3-1/2 years old. Petite in stature, she’s big in personality - moody, stubborn, loud, demanding. She has the dark, brooding eyes of a world-weary grandmother, and they size you up suspiciously. She likes to draw and scribble and, when she’s happy, dance and sing. She’s often sick from sleeping in a muddy tin hut crowded with people, and she has four rotten teeth, which hurt like hell. She loves salami. She adores her little brother, Jonathan, who looks just like her, only fatter. She has a little bird voice and she loves, loves, loves going to school. The first time I met her, she was chasing away chickens that approached her rice. She’s always hungry.

For me, Lovely Avelus is Haiti.I met her on my first day in the country, 12 days after the magnitude 7.0 earthquake ripped apart Port-au-Prince.Since then, I’ve been back to the country six times and interviewed hundreds of people — in throbbing refugee camps, broken hospitals, squalid streets, crumpled schools and in soccer fields turned into tent settlements. But I have always returned to Lovely.She is around the same age as my two kids. I worry about her like a mother.Al Ingersoll, Haiti’s leading prosthetic expert, explained the pull of someone like Lovely: “I can’t fix all the problems of Haiti. I try not to focus on them,” he told me while moving between amputees clogging the grounds of a city hospital. “I try to focus on one person — how can I get that one child back to school?”In a sea of rubble and heartache, my sightlines fixed on little Lovely.“
I can’t fix all the problems of Haiti. I try not to focus on them, I try to focus on one person — how can I get that one child back to school?”She had a miraculous story. On Jan. 12, Lovely was buried beneath two storeys of concrete. Everyone assumed she was dead. Six days later, a search-and-rescue team dug her out and rushed her to a makeshift health clinic, where I met her. Somehow she survived, without so much as a scratch.Lovely, like Haiti, was given a second chance at life. But second chances are not enough. There are still thousands of hurdles facing Lovely, starting with finding breakfast each day.There are still thousands of hurdles facing Haiti, starting with the rubble choking its streets nine months after the quake.And there are hundreds of thousands of Lovelys in Haiti — children who are homeless, penniless and, in many cases, hopeless.If Lovely can flourish after the earthquake, I thought, maybe her country can, too. Maybe all the Lovelys can. I didn’t know it then, but my interest in her would change her life. And mine, too.It was the deadliest 35 seconds in modern natural history. The earthquake that struck 17 kilometres southwest of Port-au-Prince killed up to 300,000 people, injured just as many, maimed thousands more, and shattered the homes of 1.5 million.What made it worse than the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami was its location in the country’s capital. In that half-minute, every national ministry building collapsed, killing roughly one-sixth of Haiti’s bureaucrats, and destroyed 80 per cent of the country’s university buildings and one-fifth of its schools. More than half of the country’s hospitals were in the devastated area; most were badly damaged, including Haiti’s largest and only teaching hospital. The international airport and port were hit, the national courthouse was reduced to rubble and the country’s Catholic cathedral and most of its administrative buildings were destroyed. Before the earthquake, 80 per cent of the country’s businesses were in or near the capital. Many of the garment factories, banks and company headquarters were ruined.Walking down the crowded market road during that first trip to Port-au-Prince, I felt like I’d stepped into a World War II photo of Dresden. Every other building was a heap of rubble and twisted rebar being combed through by bare-footed men. People hustled through the squalid gutter, pushing wheelbarrows of broken wooden doorframes, carrying metal siding on their heads and yanking carts stacked with mattresses. White UN trucks roamed the streets with helmeted soldiers gripping machine guns. The world, it felt, was ending.But no one I spoke to over the ensuing months believed Haiti’s devastation began on Jan. 12; its roots stretch back centuries.A lush, productive colony of France, Haiti became the world’s first independent black republic in 1804, when former slaves overthrew their masters after a bloody 13-year revolution. The sugar-producing island’s major trading partners — the U.S., France and Britain — then boycotted Haiti, the Americans fearing their own slaves would be inspired to revolt, until Haiti agreed to pay France a retribution fee for its “lost property” in 1825 of 90 million gold francs. The debt strangled the country for more than a century, and still haunts the country. On Haiti’s 200th anniversary, then president Jean-Bertrande Aristide launched a popular radio and bumper sticker campaign demanding France repay the sum. Needless to say, the cheque didn’t arrive.

 Continue Reading…

Posted by Thavam