Lovely
The following story is a glance into a day in the life of a child domestic slave in Haiti, locally referred to as a Restavek. There is an estimated 300 000 children forced to perform domestic chores in Haitian homes. These children are taken from poor families in the rural areas of Haiti and sold to poor families in the city. They are systematically abused, often beaten and abused both sexually and verbally.÷”ewq. Many run away to end up on the streets where a dangerous life of theft, hunger and homelessness await them.
The child shifts in the space between the ground she lays on and the base of the bed above her. Her limp body stirs and she scrapes herself along the floor, and lifts herself out, into the small room. It is not yet light outside, but the dense darkness of the night has waned, and the ether is still, lingering like the pause between two breaths. Soon the sun will climb the sky, it will glister through the day, beating, bleaching, warming and spawning. It will beam through the cracks of huts made of corrugated iron and awaken. It will warm the rugged skin of pigs muzzling through waste-adorned desiccated riverbeds. It will animate legions of bacteria in the pools, the sewers, the mires in the streets, endangering the lives of those who have no other alternative but to drink and wash in the only source of water obtainable. It will bring lustre to tribulation, to the untold tragedies of survivors and of fighters, to an earth shaken by trauma, mourning and adversity.
In ceremonious silence, Lovely unfetters the lock on the door and steps out into the semi-darkness. The rich stillness is fragmented by a crowing cock, and the distant whisper of a helicopter, obscured by the gloom of aurora. She hoists a fractured pail into her arms and scurries through the narrow passages winding through the modest shacks of the Port-au-Prince slum. Crossing vendors on her path, she lowers her gaze, as they push past her and carry on their droning calls. The firm soil under her bare feet turns to fractured rocks, and she expertly steps through them, without demur, making her way down the dirt track to a tent encampment below. A large four by four rocks past her, slowly navigating the terrain, jerking across the ruts, and leaving her in a pall of dust. The dust bonds to her skin, and clings to her eyelashes and hair, as if the ground that has thus swallowed so many souls will not renounce ownership over those left living. The tent camp is flickering with life. Children with bare bottoms run around in circles on the grit, laughing through the apparent starvation that their distended stomachs starkly reveal. The first rays of sunshine are illuminating the camp and warming the wet mud on the road skirting the tents. Lovely strides straight through the quagmire and disregards the putrid smell emanating from below her feet.
There are already other children at the water pump. She waits. All these children dressed in rags, adorned with scars, with earnest miens spread across their faces, do not look at each other, but pump water into their buckets and hasten off into the morning light.
Lovely returns along the path with the pale of water resting on her head, steadying it with one hand. The smell of cooking oil floats in the warm gentle wind like a soft maternal breath. No one looks at the young girl as she strides past, her skinny legs mechanically following her fixed gaze on the track ahead. Her brow is dotted with sweat. The droplets run down her face, following the line of a scar stretching from her forehead to her cheek. She rests the bucket on the floor beside the entrance to the small shack. “Lave ti bebe a”, she hears a voice call from inside. She steps tentatively into the room. The darkness inside blinds her for an instant. Her eyes adjust and she sees a woman sitting on the edge of the bed, holding a naked baby. A teenage girl stands in one corner, pulling on a school uniform, and a young boy lays motionless on the bed. Lovely hunches her frame and, looking at the ground, lifts the baby from the woman’s arms and takes her outside to wash her, as she had been told to do.
The sun, aloft in the sky, is like a spotlight on the streets, slums and tent cities of Port-au-Prince. Groups of street children frantically run from car to car, armed with rags, washing windscreens, begging for a few gourdes. Two young boys, their skin and clothes grey from dust and dirt, dart towards a white pick-up truck, whose sides are boldly branded with the letters ‘UN’, as it slowly approaches a set of traffic-lights. The boys start polishing the dark tinted windows with scraps of cloth and hold out their palms, rubbing their bellies. The lights change to green and the car moves away. A stream of traffic follows, and the boys stay motionless in the middle of the road, avoiding the scrapes from brightly coloured tap-tap vehicles, and quickly sidestepping swerving motorbikes.
Lovely watches them from across the road, clutching tightly onto the money in her hand, the notes greasily melting into her palm. She has been recipient to the attention of these boys before on her way to the market, and has suffered the penalty for returning home empty handed. As she steals glances at their feet in battered rubber sandals, their legs bruised and scared, their heads of hair a sooty grey and their faces worn and pained, she envies them. Some of them had been like her once. They had been compelled by fear, terrorised into an unrelenting motivation to keep working, keep alert, to always remain silent. Now they possessed nothing. They slept on the roadsides, amid the piles of trash, attempting to remain hidden from the gangs, police and wild dogs that drift through the streets at night. They drank water from the sewers, stole, begged or scoured the rubbish heaps for food. But unlike Lovely they had freedom. For most, their lives would be curtailed prematurely, and though filled with hardship, their waking moments would be free from the daily turmoil of systematic abuse.
The market is always busy. The sun is beating down on the sweating bodies surrounding Lovely as she rushes through the crowd, stepping on the flattened empty wrappers, packets, boxes the earth is carpeted with. Clothes hang from open stalls, school books are displayed neatly along the ground, aubergines adorn buckets next to bananas, dusty sweet potatoes and plantains. Music blares from a loudspeaker that sits surrounded by more speakers and shabby looking radios piled on a table. Women sit next to their small collection of live chickens and buckets full of medicinal pills. Lovely glances from seller to seller as she marches through the market, and suddenly the blasting colours of each stall turn to grey and black. Lovely stops and steps towards the charcoal sellers and it is as if she is stepping into a black and white photograph. She hands the grey woman two coins in exchange for a bag of coal.
Back at her master’s house, Lovely prepares food. She serves up the tchen tchen*, to the three kids and woman in her household and waits patiently sitting by the entrance to the house as they eat, hoping there will be enough leftovers for her.
The light over Port-au-Prince is turning to a subdued haze, as if the sun is jaded from a long day of burning so forcefully. The dust and the twilight mantle the city and the luscious green hills in the south, and the arid dry hills of the north. Music is still pumping through the bumpy, cracked streets, merging with the blaring of the motorbike horns, the shouts of the street vendors, the distant shrill chimes of water trucks. The water glistening in the bay glints stars of pink, orange, purple and gold. The narrow, winding streets of the slums nestled on the southern hill, Carrefour Feuilles**, will be the first to be plunged into night as the sun disappears behind the mount, and drops into the sea. Food carts will begin to emerge from in darkness. Trays of fried bannan and pate*** will borrow the light of a glowing bulb on a breadfruit-juice stall, a loud generator perched on the side of the stand powering a single blender. In the darkness, candle-light will flicker, shadows and silhouettes will move across the glowing embers from the vendors’ fires as they grill chicken and corn. Fires will spread through the piles of trash and glow through the billowing smoke. The dark streets will swallow up the people, the dogs, the houses. Whole neighbourhoods will sit unlit, waiting for a chance flick of a switch that will illuminate a section at a time, for an hour, maybe two. The dark streets of Petionville**** will be lined with candles like a church aisle, as women sit on the road with a single burning flame each, shining a warm glow on their wares. The headlights of cars and motorbikes will reveal, for an instant, what the dark depth conceals, people walking on the footpath, stationary moto-taxi drivers gathered on a street corner laughing, couples sitting on a wall beside a broken set of swings. The edges of tent camps will be lit by the flickering flames burning fires on the streets and the dim glow from cooking stoves heating cooking oil and barbecues.
Then, little by little the candles will be blown out, and the fires will die. By nine o’clock the streets will be almost empty. The traffic jams will have dissipated. The taptaps***** will soon stop running. Doors and gates will be locked. Only some cars will be left on the dark roads, slowly edging through police checks as armed guards will stop passing vehicles, clutching tightly on to their rifles. Intimidation and fear will replace the flickering glow of the candles. The only people remaining in the streets will be the intrepid, the feared, the street-kids.
Lovely will finally lay her body down to rest, in her place under the bed. She will go to sleep long after everyone else, kept up, still working, into the night. As she lies on her sheet of cardboard, she will close her eyes and try to forget.
She wills to forget the disregard in the eyes of her peers, the hand that fed her, as if she is a wretched dog, the strike of the leather belt as it swept and broke her skin. She banishes the fear and grief from her tired thoughts. Pushes away the memory of the time spent with her neighbour that day, the man who strips her from what little feeling of beauty she feels she holds, like a rough hand tearing away the fragile petals of a wilting wildflower. She quells the faint memory of her mother, her home by the sea, her brothers and sisters and how they would play in the dusty street, then let the waves on the pebbled beach swirl around their ankles. She is haunted by the memory of the sound of her own laughter, of her mother’s voice, of her own voice, as they sounded so golden, spoken in childhood and love, and now only in solitary dreams.
Years of being a Restavek have taught Lovely never to cry, never to voice her needs, her pain. Her hunger withers and her dreams of escape wilt in the darkness of every passing night. The sun rises each day and with it, she listlessly follows the hopeless path to the water pump, to the market.. Her sole resolve, as she marches through the hostile streets of the crumbling city, her young eyes falling on disease, hunger, injury, death... to not let her life get any worse.
- Dish of maize and beans, locally known as tchen tchen, a Creole name which comes from the french ‘Tiens, tiens’, which means ‘Take, take’.. In the past, this was ordered at the slaves by the French when giving them their daily rations, the dish thus adopted the name.
** Carrefour Feuilles is a very large slum in Port-au-Prince, located on the side of the mount of Kenscoff.
*** Bannan is plantain and Pate is a Haitian pastry delicacy often filled with meat or fish.
**** Suburb of Port-au-Prince
***** The only form of ‘bus’ in Haiti. Basically a pick-up truck with a roof mounted on the back, and painted a multitude of bright colours, often stating thanks to God in Creole, or something like ‘Jusqu’ici l’Eternel nous a Secouru’... ‘Thus far, the Eternal has kept us alive’..
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