What are you going to do in Haiti?

From Nancy Young

Jaffelin stares at me every day. What are you going to do?

She’s four, maybe she’s five now, but she looks tough here in the way of really smart people who see right through you.

In this picture in December her serious expression might have something to do with that in about 20 minutes she’d be sleeping in my arms, sniffling with what may have been the start of a cold.

She needed a nap.

I met Jaffelin on the beach, what I like to think of as “my” beach, just up the road from Caberet. She is the daughter of Franso, who speaks five languages and makes his living from the rowboat we’re in here, and his wife, who my feminist side of me is ashamed to say I know only as Madame Franso. Madame Franso has a beautiful smile and bright eyes, like her daughter. She runs the little stand on the public beach where I bought my Coke – and sometimes a little rum – to go along with the fresh fish her mother, who also worked on the beach, got for us.

I still don’t actually know if any of them are OK after the earthquake, but I’ve heard that the area around the beach was far enough from Port-au-Prince to largely escape serious damage.

And so I have good reason to hope that the little girl staring back at me is alive, though also I suspect that both her dad’s and mom’s businesses were hit hard by the earthquake. That all of their lives got even harder.

What are you going to do? That’s what Jaffelin’s picture is challenging me.

And I look back and say, I don’t really know. I’m sorry.

The other day I read a story in The New York Times about how business is booming in the pricey restaurants of Port-au-Prince, where diners feast on lamb chops from New Zealand while within eyeshot the residents of tent cities – more likely bedsheet cities – struggle to get enough to eat, to keep clean and to stay dry in the rainy season.

How did those no-doubt delicious and tender lamb chops successfully make their way from New Zealand when actual tents for most of the earthquake’s homeless nearby still haven’t?

I closed the story and Jaffelin’s picture popped up on the screen. What are you going to do?

One of the popular restaurants for the so-called “elites” and frequented by the workers of the United Nations and foreign NGOs is called La Plantation.

Haiti was the first country to abolish slavery, the first truly free and independent republic in the Western Hemisphere (not us, because we had slaves). Its founding fathers were former slaves.

And now, 200 and some years later, someone thought La Plantation would be a swell name for a restaurant.

The difficulty with Haiti is that it is living evidence that we have not overcome our history, that we are still a let-them-eat-cake world. I’ll be thinking of that as I follow what happens at a donor conference to help Haiti at the U.N. on Wednesday. There will be a lot of rhetoric and promises, but time will only tell what else.

And when I click off the internet, there will be this smart little girl sizing me up from her father’s rowboat about just what I’m going to do to make sure that she has all the opportunities in the world she deserves.

Time will only tell that too.

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