PORT-AU-PRINCE–This is what we know about the little girl with the white tank top, fuzzy braided hair and too-big pink corduroy skirt that keeps slipping down her backside, revealing some Pampers: her name is Jonatha, she is about 2, and it is a miracle she is alive.
Six days after the Jan. 12 earthquake shattered Haiti, she roared up in the back of a search-and-rescue vehicle to this makeshift medical clinic hastily set up on pavement out front of a slumping trauma centre near the airport. Dogs had sniffed her out of her crumbled home and she was plucked from the rubble.
Six days of no water, no food, no one to sing comforting songs to her. And she was not only alive, but apart from long-term malnutrition, she was physically unharmed.
Now, it will take a miracle to find her family – if they survived.
In the chaos following the earthquake, there were few doctors, no anesthetic and definitely no intake nurses scribbling files. All hands were on deck tending to crushed limbs and bashed skulls. No one knows where she was found. No one knows who brought her in – the Chinese, the Americans, the French ...
"We don't even know how many patients we've had this week," says Michele Laporte, pulling Jonatha onto her lap to feed her spoonfuls of rice, beef and beans from a Styrofoam container. "I don't think her parents survived".
Laporte is a retired Montreal nurse. Like most of the foreigners staffing this clinic, she flew down to the Dominican Republic and hastily crossed the border two days after the earthquake to help however she could. She came with her 23-year-old daughter. They found this clinic and Jonatha found her.
"She was very distressed. She was always in the fetal position, otherwise she'd cry. The only thing she would say was 'Mother mother,'" Laporte says. So, she cuddled her to sleep at night in her tent set up in the sad patch of grass across the street and held her during the day.
"Just yesterday, she started to talk," Laporte says. A Mexican psychologist dropped in to look at her Sunday morning. "Today, she smiled for the first time. It is a breakthrough," Laporte says as Jonatha scrambles over to examine hens pecking the pavement nearby.
The rub? Laporte is leaving Monday, returning home to Montreal. Who will take care of Jonatha? How will she cope?
"We don't want to take her to an orphanage. They are all broken rubble. She needs stability," Laporte says. "But what can we do?"
Now that most of the corpses have been removed from the streets, it's the kids that get you here in Port-au-Prince. They rush from their lean-tos made of sheets and plastic tarps to grab your hand and sing "bonswa".
They surround you in the refugee camps, stopping a game of soccer to giggle at your fumbled words of Creole. They sleep in their grandmother's arms on the side of the street. They stand naked, pot-bellied and twig-armed in the shade of spindly trees, as their mothers lather them with soap and bathe them from buckets.
They are the most vulnerable. They are the most innocent.
Before the earthquake, Haiti was teeming with orphans. Since the quake, authorities estimate the number has risen above 600,000. The difficulty is separating those who are orphaned permanently – their parents crushed by concrete – from those who still have parents, but who knows where they are? Perhaps they are in hospital. Maybe they are in one of the city's 500-plus camps, thinking their little Jonatha is dead. Maybe their bodies have been hauled out to one of the mass graves and buried, never to be identified. As Laporte puts it: "Will we ever know?"
UNICEF has issued an alert. It is worried children are being snatched and sold – to foreign adoption programs, prostitution, indentured labour. Spokesperson Kent Page told us UNICEF has opened three clandestine safe houses around the city for children who have lost their families. Already, 300 children have arrived.
"Do you think the care there will be good?" Laporte asks when we write the email to Page. Page responds within minutes with a pledge to check on Jonatha.
"There are 1,000 families in Canada who would want her," says Laporte, leading Jonatha by the hand towards the clinic's bathroom for a pee-pee. "I hope she ends up with a good family and can take painting classes and ballet and do all the things our kids get to do".
Me too. But, spending the day touring this city's endless refugee camps, I'm not hopeful.
The Toronto Star
