Twenty Four Hours Later

I didn’t know about the earthquake in Haiti until more than 24 hours after it happened.  Twenty-four hours in which I made dinner for my children and put them to bed myself because Chris was away on business; got up twice in the night to soothe said children back to sleep; made breakfast; dressed the girls in warm clothes; scraped the car windows; dropped June off at her babysitter; saw my therapist; picked Grace up from school; filled the entire trunk of my car with groceries packed in cloth bags; put said children to bed again; sat at my kitchen counter with a friend and drank a bottle of wine.

It was only after my friend went home that I sat down at the computer and called up the New York Times homepage and saw what had really happened in Haiti.

I looked at a photograph of a child with a bandaged and bloodied face holding a piece of bread in one hand and I could not keep my mind from turning that child into June.  But that child isn’t June.  I am not sure there is a child is this world that is further away from the earthquake in Port-au-Price than June is.  I do not have words for my gratitude for this fact, or for my shame.

I read Tracy Kidder’s book on Haiti a few years ago, and occasionally I check in with Partners in Health to see what new and amazing work they are doing there.  And today I will send them money.  But the truth is I don’t remember much about Kidder’s book, other than its guarded hopefulness and the bleak picture it painted of a country terrorized by war and destroyed by deforestation, corruption, and illness.  I read that book and for a few days, or maybe weeks, I though about Haiti.  And then I let it go.  I let it go the same way that I let the Lost Boys of the Sudan go a few weeks after I finished Dave Eggers’ What is the What, and the way I let the Hurricane Katrina refugees go once the waters had receded and the Super Dome had emptied.

I live a life in which terror and destruction, poverty and violence are all things that happen to other people in other places.  I do not respond as generously as I should to requests for aid.  I do not hold broken people in my heart and mind for as long as they deserve to be held, which is forever.  Instead I occupy that space with my children and my partner, with my work and with dinner plans and vacation plans, with music class registration and permission slips and the twice-yearly clearance sale at Hanna Andersson.

The child is the photograph is not June.  But this fact does not keep me from worrying about June and wanting even more for her than she already has.  What I realize now–on this very day when I woke to a gray sky and a warm bed and a five-year old who had climbed in next to me because she wanted to hear a chapter of a new book before breakfast–is that I only neglect that Haitian child more by conflating her with my own daughter.  That hurt and homeless child who lives an ocean away is not my daughter.  She belongs to someone else.  She belongs to another world.  Today I am going to try to hold her next to my own children, and not because I feel guilty that such a thing has not happened to my girls or scared because such a thing might someday.  I am going to try to hold her because she is a wounded child, and she deserves to be held.