Reader’s Digest Canada – September 2019

Some of my dispatches from Haiti

had made the front page of the news-

paper. I’d dug up good stories and

delivered them on time; I had proven

to myself and my bosses that I could be

a foreign correspondent. But that’s

not what I thought about, sitting on

the cold floor of a military plane, sur-

rounded by refugees and survivors.

The flight home only took three

hours, but I was travelling back to

another world: one where 50-storey

buildings stood impervious to danger

and radio DJs listed their favourite

breakfast cereals, not the names of the

missing and the dead.

I returned to my job as a social jus-

tice columnist at the Star. But I was

haunted—not just by the horrors I had

witnessed but by the fragility and help-

lessness of life they had exposed. For

the first time, I’d seen how indiscrim-

inate and unfair death could be.

Soon enough, my conscience pulled

me back to Haiti. I felt a responsibility

to the people who had trusted me as

a messenger to the world by sharing

their stories with me. And what had

happened to Jonatha? Who, if anybody,

was taking care of her now?

So, on April 13, three months and one

day after the earthquake, I found myself

heading back down to Port-au-Prince.

AS SOON AS I had a spare moment, I

searched for Jonatha. I returned to the

SONAPI compound, but the clinic was

gone. The security guard posted there

didn’t know where it had moved or

who might know.

I set off for the United Nations com-

pound, hoping the UNICEF office

would have a record of the girl. There,

I was told that out of the more than

750 children the agency had registered

as “unaccompanied,” only 75 were

reunited with their families. She didn’t

know if Jonatha was among them.

Later that week, the child-services

agent on Jonatha’s case called. What

he told me was so incredible and con-

fusing, I asked him to repeat it. The

little girl had been reunited with her

parents. She was living with them in

the mountains southeast of the city.

I was dumbfounded. Everyone had

been so sure Jonatha was orphaned.

The agent agreed to take me to her.

THEY WERE LUCKY; THEY’D SURVIVED HELL.

BUT NOW THEY WERE LIVING IN MISERY:

TWO COTS AND A MATTRESS ON A DIRT FLOOR.

reader’s digest

100 september 2019