A NEW HOME, BUT LOVELY'S FUTURE REMAINS IN DOUBT
(Toronto Star) - By Jennifer Wells, Feature Writer
FERMATHE -Eleven months to the day. Dec. 12. Approaching dusk.
Lovely Avelus, tiny impossibility, is standing on the top of the world, with that stern look of hers and that knotted brow of hers.
Two weeks ago Lovely and her mother, Rosemene, and her father, Enel, moved from their pinched shared accommodation in Fermathe to this spot high up the hillside, a site accessible by rocky goat path. The house rests right into the hillside, backed by what appears to be the concrete foundation for a second unbuilt house that can easily be stepped upon, a ready-made patio when the scorching heat of summer returns.
Behind, a brace of pine trees has caught the dance of the breeze. The air is fresh.
Below, the view stretches across the capital to the plain that shoulders Tabarre, to the mountains to the north, to the harbour to the west.
In this moment Lovely Avelus has the city of Port-au-Prince at her feet, as if she were a ruling child queen in an orange hoodie and jelly sandals. Had she the wisdom and the years she could perch in this eagle’s nest, focus a sharp eye and ponder: What an unholy mess.
Three weeks after the January earthquake unleashed its wrath upon Port-au-Prince and points west and south, I met a woman named Francesca André in Place St. Pierre.
The “tent” city was more accurately “bedsheet” city, as tents and tarps had not yet arrived in numbers in the park where a bust of Alexandre Pétion, Haiti’s president from 1807-1818, rises as one of its signature features. Pétionville, long ago a hill station for vacationers seeking relief from the hurly-burly of the capital, has been grotesquely subsumed by the poverty and squalor of the capital. Strips of cloth have been tied around Pétion’s bronzed mouth as if to gag his screams of outrage.
On the day we met in February, Francesca was feeding squash soup to her mother, Rosemie, who, at 78, lay on the ground on urine-soaked cardboard with an expression on her face that was both quizzical and pleading. “She can’t move,” was Francesca’s simple comment.
The one-year anniversary of the earthquake approaches and here I find Francesca where I left her. Change has come, oh yes it has. She now has a U.S. Aid tarp (it arrived in March, she reports). And she has hauled in a mattress. Her clothing is piled in one corner of the tiny dwelling she shares with her 9-year-old daughter, Christina. She has a burner for cooking, and a tiny table upon which rests one strip of wire that had fed stolen electricity to her tarped home until someone disconnected it, one bud of garlic, a box of matches and a tablespoon-sized pouch of what she identifies as tobacco powder, which she mixes with maskreti oil and spreads over her legs. The unguent helps relieve her rheumatism, she says. She rubs her legs and together we look out from under the tarp toward the Jalousie slum that over the years has saturated the hillside in the distance.
Rosemie died last May on the mattress upon which we are sitting, Francesca doesn’t know from what.
Other developments: on the day political protesters, supporters of presidential candidate Michel (Sweet Micky) Martelly, lit the city on fire, tear gas was lobbed into Place St. Pierre. Alexandré Joseph holds up a spent canister for me to see. He says a baby was overcome and taken to hospital. I neglect to ask if the baby was born here.
The morning I sought out Francesca, international observers were gathering to receive a progress report from the Interim Haiti Recovery Commission. “Progress” is a term so easy to knock down in Haiti. Oh, there were dollops of millions committed to the rehabilitation of Lovely’s country, but billions of recovery and reconstruction monies remain floating offshore, as if in a boat waiting for the weather to warm.
The commission conventionally meets in Port-au-Prince, but it has been judged an incendiary time here in the capital in the midst of a national election that — can anyone truly profess surprise? — has ushered in yet more chaos. So Bill Clinton et al met next door in Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic, reinforcing Haiti as cliché and thereby sending a warning signal to the investor community.
Make that the wide-eyed investor community. Martelly’s song archive has found new life, as local radio stations play the Sweet Micky Creole classic Bandi Legal or Legal Bandits, replete with the sound of police sirens and lyrics that go something like: “We are legal bandits roaming the streets.”
Who is this manufactured candidate?
And what would it mean if he were to end up running Lovely’s country?
Martelly’s lawyers huddle in the war veranda of Martelly’s home, dressed in very fine suits and led by top political adviser Daniel Supplice. A Duvalier supporter (Baby Doc) and failed senatorial candidate, Supplice keeps fraudulent ballots of his own race as mementoes. “Totally falsified,” he trills of the vote count in his own senate run as he verbally autopsies the current election disaster.
Had the international community not bowed to President René Préval’s will last summer, he says, had they not thrown their support behind the now widely discredited provisional electoral council, or CEP, Haiti would not be in this political mess. “It was a real plot between the government and the CEP,” says Martelly’s top lawyer, Gervais Charles, a round, Dickensian sort of character who rolls out the word “plot” with delicious enjoyment. Charles is busily crafting a challenge to the preliminary results that put their man narrowly behind government man Jude Célestin. “We are trying to buy time,” he says amiably.
No one bothers mentioning first-place finisher in the preliminaries, Mirlande Manigat, who, like Martelly, refuses to countenance a recount. Nevertheless, the final fraudulent results of the falsified election are expected to be released Monday, a thought that evokes the immortal words of Alice in Wonderland: “It would be so nice if something made sense for a change.”
The election, or electoral caper, has redirected the recovery and reconstruction focus to such a degree that the IHRC’s “target outcomes” revealed Tuesday, including a pledge to have 40 per cent of the earthquake debris removed by October, 2011 (you read that correctly), garnered few headlines. Nor the plan to have 400,000 Haitians relocated from camps by Halloween of next year, close to two years from the date of the earthquake.
It isn’t all bad news. The International Office of Migration released data last week that suggest the numbers of camp residents has declined from 1.3 million or so to roughly one million.
Francesca is not yet among those who have been able to move on. The day we met, the residents of Place St. Pierre protested outside of the home of Pétionville Mayor Claire Lydie Parent. The residents had been promised 15,000 gourdes ($375) to relocate. “The mayor asked us to destroy our tents without paying 15,000 gourdes,” one resident told the newspaper Le Nouvelliste. “She wanted to use us like toys.”
In Lovely’s life, there have been improvements. Rosemene has rented one room of a three-room house. The floor is concrete and the room is largely dry, though daylight does peek through the corrugated tin roof in one or two spots. On the afternoon of my visit, Lovely’s brother, Jonathan, was deeply asleep on a mattress in the corner. Father Enel had painted the room white, and it felt clean.
But the move has brought its challenges. There’s no electricity at all now, not even the stolen hours that Lovely’s family drew in their post-earthquake shanty. There are solid bars on the windows, bringing security, but Rosemene says she feels lonely living away from her extended family.
Enel left for town days ago with a plan to sell sugar cane on the street though he had no money to buy the cane upfront. He hoped he could find someone to spot him a few gourdes. Rosemene does not know if he has met with any success. She had given her cellphone to Elistin to take down the hill to charge. The political eruption in Port-au-Prince prevented Enel from returning home in a timely fashion.
Rosemene is bundled against the chill, and she has a pretty purple and green scarf tied about her head. When Jonathan stirs she draws him briefly to her bosom, the warming transition from sleep to wakefulness.
I ask Rosemene to recall the Christmas holidays of her childhood in Jacmel. She used to perform in pageants, she says, taking a tin bowl from a ledge, singing a song about gift giving, swaying her hips, dancing in her bare feet. She has a radiant smile. Now Lovely is learning seasonal songs in school, Rosemene informs.
She would like to connect with a local church soon. Church is the connection to the most important seasonal celebration, not Christmas but New Year’s Day, when everyone gathers for squash soup after the morning service. It’s the one day when everyone gets something to eat.
Even at this late hour, the sky throws off intermittent patches of blue as Lovely takes a photographer’s hand and walks across the green grounds. As she has so many times before, Lovely makes a serious study. Her gaze is commonly unwavering, as if to say, look upon me, do not dare think of looking away. Not yet.
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