Lovely’s sister is a child of hope
FERMATHE, HAITI— She’s got her father’s face and Lovely’s appetite. Her name is Anastania. She is Lovely’s little sister. She was born on the stoop of their one-room concrete house 13 days ago.
I know what you’re thinking. I thought it too: how can a family this poor, earning the equivalent of only $5 a day in rural Haiti, with three children to raise already, afford yet another child?
Another mouth to feed when the family is already hungry, when they are barely scraping by.
But then I drove up the pot-holed road into the mountains southeast of Port-au-Prince, where tenant farmers plough their meagre fields of cabbage and corn by hand, and pulled up to Lovely’s family’s cement-block house, shaded by banana trees.
Inside, I found Lovely’s mother, Rosemene, lying under a mosquito net on the bed, cuddling the little bundle — a baby wrapped and rewrapped in clothing in Haitian tradition, three little hats pulled over her little head.
Rosemene handed me her tiny body, just 6.5 pounds. And then I thought: what cruel world do we live in that a perfect baby is anything but a blessing?
Lovely, you might recall, is a miracle child. She survived six days under the rubble of her home after the 7.0 earthquake brought this limping country to its knees in 2010. She was only 2 years old then and very poor, living with her family in a slum near the national palace, in a single room packed with eight people. Her illiterate parents had been scraping together $5 a day, selling sugar cane and small packets of rice on the streets. She didn’t eat much. Her teeth were covered in black spots, caused by in-utero malnutrition.
Her life has greatly improved since, due mostly to the kindness of strangers — Star readers who have funded her schooling, her family’s rent and soon a new business for her father, Enel. (I will tell you about that in another story.) They all moved from the crowded slum to the countryside, where her uncle is a tenant farmer. It’s safer here, cleaner, beautiful even.
She, her 3-year-old brother, Jonathan, and their 12-year-old cousin, Venessaint, who lives with them, all attend classes with middle-class kids at a nearby private school. Most days, she eats three meals, cooked over a charcoal fire pit outside their front door. She even gets tutored by a neigbourhood high school student most days.
It is progress, measured in inches: Lovely’s family is no longer desper- ately poor. They are terribly poor, living off father Enel’s scant income from casual labour. They have no electricity, no running water, only this one bed for six of them now. This child was not in their plans. “I wanted two children,” Rosemene says with a sigh. “God gave me three.”
Unlike most development efforts here, Haiti’s family-planning program has been a moderate success.
Twenty-five years ago, the country’s average family had 6.8 children, Dr. Ramiz Urkhan Alakbarov tells me. He heads the United Nations Population Fund (UNFP) in Haiti. Today, that number has dropped to 3.4.
“No country in Latin America has made a more dramatic transition,” Alakbarov says. Ten years ago, only 20 per cent of Haitian women in relationships had access to birth control. Today, 33 per cent do — a far cry from the 57 per cent in most developing countries, but an improvement nonetheless.
Every hospital and registered health-care clinic in the country can access free birth control methods, funded by the UNPF and the American aid program USAID, Alakbarov says.
The problem that remains: reaching the other 57 per cent of fertile women in relationships who say they’d like to have only two children. That means building many more clinics in the countryside.
We in Canada think of contraception as a feminist issue. It’s also a development issue: the more spaced out and the fewer children a woman has, the greater her children’s chances of exiting poverty. They eat more, see the doctor more, and are more likely to go to school since the family can save money.
Also, every childbirth that a woman avoids is one less brush with death.
Haiti retains the ignoble status of having the highest maternal mortality rate in the Western hemisphere. For every 100,000 live births, 350 Haitian mothers perish — almost double the number of mothers in Bolivia, which has the next worst chance of survival. In Canada, it’s 12. Rosemene did use family planning in the past, she tells me. For two years, she got free shots of Depo-Provera every three months. But her period came on like a hurricane, lasting up to 15 days. She felt weak, lost weight and became anemic. She went to the nearby hospital and was advised to change methods. They provided her with the birth control pill. But after a few months they caused the same problems, she says. So she stopped taking them. A month later, she was pregnant with Anastania. She had planned to deliver the baby at the hospital, where she’d gone for prenatal check-ups, but her labour progressed so quickly, she worried she’d give birth on the 30-minute walk there in the middle of the night. In the end, she delivered like most Haitian women do — at home. “I was so hot, I had to get outside,” she tells me. “I gave birth right in the front door. Three pushes and she was out.” Her sister caught the baby and Enel cut the umbilical cord with a new razor blade. They used the flash of their cellphones for light.
Anastania, thank goodness, is healthy. She has already had her first vaccination for polio. And she is feeding like a competitive eater.
No disposable diapers for her — it’s a cost the family simply can’t afford.
The family is out of charcoal, so Rosemene can’t warm up some water. Instead, she pulls out a tub of cold water she lugged from a neighbour’s cistern and begins the process of bathing Anastania.
“I hope her life is easier than mine,” says Rosemene. “I want her to learn a profession so she doesn’t grow up like I did. I’d like her to wake up and not worry about how to feed her kids.”
She bathes Anastania delicately, giggling at her baby girl’s wonderment and flailing arms, kissing her cheeks, sprinkling her with talcum powder.
When Lovely returns from school, she quickly pulls off her uniform and demands to hold her little sister.
The family is in love with their newest, and Rosemene hopes, last member.
Rosemene plans to go back to the family-planning clinic as soon as she has fully recovered from labour. “Some women want babies and can’t have them, so we are lucky,” she says. “But I am finished. Pa gen plis timoun.”
No more children.