A smiling little girl, who survived the earthquake but lost an arm, is a good omen for Haiti, writes LARA MARLOWEin Port-au-Prince
THE LITTLE Haitian girl in pigtails and a lime green playsuit stood on the far side of Delmas Boulevard, clutching her aunt’s hand with her own right hand. I recognised the child immediately, from the stub that ended just below her left elbow.
Five-year-old Faimi Lamy had survived the three-part, salami-style amputation of her arm last January. She smiled radiantly. It was a good omen for Haiti.
The last time I saw Faimi, a Cuban nurse was suturing the raw meat of the child’s lower left arm, in an open-air clinic next to Port- au-Prince’s ruined cathedral.
There was no anaesthetic and the child raved deliriously about wanting to kill the devil.
“Godmother, make them stop, please,” she begged Sandra Oscar, who is raising Faimi. Sandra held Faimi on her lap throughout the operation, with tears streaming down her face.
“It’s a miracle. I thought she would die,” Sandra recounts joyously. Faimi’s arm was crushed when the upper story of the Oscar family’s cinderblock house in the Poste-Marchand neighbourhood collapsed on her. The wound from a first amputation was infected. The operation I witnessed was her second without anaesthesia. The wound became infected again, Sandra told me.
Despairing of saving the child, Sandra found volunteer American doctors working with anaesthesia, and the third operation succeeded.
Sandra took two weeks off her job assembling electronic parts in a Port-au-Prince factory to nurse Faimi back to health. From the one-room shack they have built with boards, corrugated steel and cinderblocks, the family can see their former home less than 10 metres away. It, too, was a poor dwelling, but with its three rooms up and three rooms down, it seems palatial now.
When I ask Faimi what happened, she whispers her self- censored child’s version of events to me: “I was asleep and I woke up because the house was shaking. It fell on top of me. My father got me out with a hammer. My father was crying and crying. He rolled on the ground. My aunt and mother took me to a hospital. Nothing happened after that. I didn’t hurt. I didn’t cry.”
An open sewer runs down the winding alley that leads to the shack where Faimi lives. The heat is sweltering, the stench almost unbearable. Faimi’s family must walk nearly half a kilometre through the labyrinth of houses in various states of collapse to reach the neighbourhood’s only water taps, then carry buckets back up the hill. Rubble that people have cleared from their homes mixes with rotting garbage in the main street.
Three adults and five children share the shack that Faimi’s family cobbled together after the earthquake. Two more adults – Faimi’s mother and father – sleep elsewhere.
Her mother Sajine and aunt Sandra are the only family members with salaried jobs. Her grandfather, Louis-Jacob, brings in a little money as a plumber. The entire family of 10 gets by on the equivalent of $250 a month.
Aside from the three operations which Sandra sought out, no one has offered Faimi’s family any kind of assistance. Sandra would like to obtain a prosthesis for Faimi but says she doesn’t know where to go.
Faimi returned to Le Bocage kindergarten on April 7th, but now her school is demanding back tuition for the three months she was absent because of the earthquake. All schools were closed from January 13th until April but many Haitian schools are trying to raise money in the same way. “We can’t leave Faimi there; we’ll have to send her to the Sisters of St Anne,” says Sandra.
Faimi seems blissfully unaware of her family’s travails. She has her best friends at school, Lid and Jildana. She has not yet reached an age where children are cruel enough to tease amputees, where men would shun a one-armed fiancée.
No one has told her that her ambition of becoming a nurse may not be realistic. “She tries to do everything, comb her hair, wash, as if she had two arms. She can’t manage but she never complains,” says another aunt.
Faimi plays the clown, wriggling the little nub of flesh with her elbow joint, to make the other children laugh. She dances in the dusty path in front of the shanty, waving her stunted arm as if in triumph.
Someone – Sandra thinks it was the Haitian government – surveyed all the houses in Poste-Marchand and marked them with paint. Red means the house is in danger of collapsing and must be torn down. Green equals safe for habitation.
Yellow – the colour daubed on the house where Faimi lost her arm – means it can be salvaged.
“It’s hard to start over from scratch,” Sandra sighs, “but we have a plan for next year. I told my father last week: ‘We’re going to rebuild the house’.”
Louis-Jacob Oscar (66) stands nearby, skinny and shirtless, nodding in approval. It was he who built the damaged house. “Every month we’ll save a little money to buy sand, cinderblocks and cement,” says Sandra.
Faimi was the only one injured, and no one in the family was killed. “We were very lucky,” Sandra says, “but three of my best friends died.”
Sandra Oscar is cheerful, despite circumstances that a European or American would find unbearable. She says she is happier now than before the earthquake, because “God gave Faimi back to me. She is so brave. She gave me hope for Haiti. I want her to be a lesson for the world, that Haiti is alive.”