By Michael R. Geisterfer
(This article first appeared in the November 2001 issue of Reader’s Digest Canada, and subsequently in dozens of RD issues around the world.)
Sixteen-month old Elijah is standing in front of me, a bewildered, terrified look in his drooping eyes. He knows something is up. An hour earlier he was singled out from all of the other orphans in La Creche de la Maison d’Espoir in one of Port-Au-Prince’s many dusty bidonvilles, dressed up in a fine set of clothes and taken out onto the street by his caregiver, Guerta, whom he calls, Mama.
It didn’t bode well. Elijah had seen the same thing happen to some of the other orphans. They get all decked out in their finest gear, are taken out into the street and they never come back.
Now it was his turn. They walked a few blocks through the crumbling ruins of Delmas 40B to the main road where tap-taps spewing noxious diesel fumes roared by. One of them stopped and the two of them climbed on board, squeezing into the interior of a mini-van that was already overcrowded with sweaty passengers.
Things happened quickly after that. They got out of the tap-tap, walked up a narrow side-street and into the courtyard of a low-slung brick hut. Guerta put him down in front of this strange, white guy and then walked away.
This wasn’t the first time that someone he had called Mama had done that to him, put him in front of a stranger and walked away. I wonder to myself what that must feel like, and then I think, I don’t want to know. I take Elijah into my arms and he is like a lifeless rag doll, limp, his face devoid of all expression. A few minutes later he watches Guerta disappear out onto the street and a large tear rolls from his eye and down his cheek.
About a year and a half ago I went out searching for my own child, the little boy I had placed up for adoption nearly twenty years ago. I made phone calls to the agency that had handled the adoption and the hospital where he had been born. I even tracked down the birth mother who had left the country even before the birth and whom I hadn’t seen in the interim. She didn’t know where he was. Didn’t want to know either and I never did find that child.
I found Elijah instead.
He was a child that had been abandoned by his parents for reasons similar to the ones that forced me to abandon my own. They were so poor they couldn’t provide him with the barest necessities to keep him alive. At the age of nineteen I was a struggling student and so emotionally impoverished I could barely meet my own needs, much less those of a child.
Things change. Now in my forties I decided I had the emotional stability and love necessary to take an abandoned child into our home. My wife agreed. We even had a professional social worker come in to do a home-study to prove it. Even though we already had three children, there was room for at least one more.
In February of 2000 we began the process, notifying the Quebec-based adoption agency, Soleil des Nations, of our desire to adopt a child from Haiti. Neither my wife nor I had ever been to that tiny Caribbean country, considered one of the poorest in the Western Hemisphere, but we did have a personal link with it. My brother is a missionary there and has been living in the region for nearly twenty years.
When Soleil des Nations informed us early in June that we had been matched with Elijah, my brother immediately rushed out to meet him. In the shade of a terraced patio at the lawyer’s office, he took the first photographs we would see of our new son. By the time those first images of Elijah arrived in the mail two weeks later, we were nearly delirious with expectation, the lines of his shy, sad face blurred by our tears of joy.
Now in mid-August, back in that lawyer’s shaded courtyard, those two emotions come together: it is clear that in order to claim Elijah as my child, I have to tear him from the arms of Guerta.
Looking back on that decision from afar, it seems naïve and altruistic, an act of charity. Now holding the terrified form of Elijah in my arms, I realize that adoption is, in the first instance, an act of violence. While the initial encounter may be euphoric for the parents, it is often traumatic for the child, another abandonment.
I am aware of this as I hold Elijah in my arms, and though I know I can’t fathom the pain and terror he must be going through, I know it must be so. He must pass through this one more time. I promise him that this is it. It will never happen again. We will never forsake him. Never.
I pray that this scared child will have the inner resilience to trust me on that score, to give it one more try. And he does. He doesn’t show it right away, of course, but a lot faster than I thought he would. That night he is sitting on my lap when he looks into my eyes for the first time. I am singing Itsy-bitsy Spider and when I get to the part about the rain coming out, I pretend they are tears flowing down my cheek.
He likes that. First it’s just the eyes, watching me with interest. Then there is the faintest flicker of a smile which he tries to hold back but can’t. Like he’s tired of being so abysmally sad. It is not in is nature to draw out the mourning process. And then it’s there, a full-fledged grin. I hug him in delight and he giggles and I feel even more relieved. “Thank God, thank God,” I cry. “Someone get my camera.” All day I had been holding back this feeling of dread, thinking he might be autistic.
In the short span of a few days he emerges from his protective shell to reveal himself to me. What he reveals is magnificent, a child of such warmth and laughter, I feel privileged and awed to be his father. He even recognizes me as such, waddling after me wherever I go and screaming in alarm when he loses sight of me.
I let him sleep with me at night and when he screams in nocturnal terror I hold him close, letting him feel my skin against his. I am the only thing connecting him to this world, the only thing separating him from the chaos out of which he is just emerging.
A week passes and he has become so bonded to me that I begin to entertain a bizarre notion. What if he had a choice? What if he could choose to return to the orphanage or stay with me? Which way would he go? I’m not sure I really want to know the answer, but on the other hand I can’t ignore the question. Having made an appointment to go to the orphanage anyhow, I decide to take him with me.
Guerta meets us at the door and a delighted smile breaks across her face. “Elijah,” she says, speaking Creole. “How have you been?” She takes him into her arms and starts marching him through the interior of the orphanage. “Look everyone,” she says, “Elijah’s come to pay us a visit.”
I race after her, suddenly fearful that he might in fact be overjoyed to see Guerta and not want to come back with me. I need not worry. His face is tormented. As soon as he sees me he holds out his arms imploring me to take him back. He clings to me in terror, certain that I am going to leave him there. When I abandon him to one of the other caregivers for a few minutes, so I can fill in some papers, he screams uncontrollably, flailing his arms and arching his back such that they can barely hold him. His sobs don’t cease until long after I have left the orphanage with him in my arms.
He holds his tear-stained face close to mine and I whisper, “Don’t worry. I would never leave you there.” He’s not sure about that. I can feel it in the way he clings to me. He holds onto me with every fibre in his body, and he doesn’t let go until he is absolutely sure that I won’t walk away from him and leave him with strangers.
On the day before I am to return to Canada with Elijah I finally receive the package containing all of his papers. Among them I find the names of his birth parents and the address of their house, the house he was born in. They live in a place called Waff Jeremie, down on the waterfront. I ask the social worker at the adoption agency if she will take me there and she says no. It is too dangerous.
There are certain places a white person just doesn’t go in Port-au-Prince. Cité Soleil is one of them. Waff Jeremie is another. Both places are squatter slums built on the garbage heaps on the waterfront. They are the first ports-of-call of peasants coming in from the countryside, the lowest rung in the hierarchy of poverty that characterizes Port-au Prince in general.
There is no question in my mind that I need to at least try to find Elijah’s birth parents. One day, when he is old enough, there will be questions and the only thing separating me from the answers is a taxi ride down into the harbour.
At nine o’clock that morning I meet with a black Haitian pastor who I had met previously at a conference in Ottawa. He wants me to come and visit his church. “Won’t you come with me to Waff Jeremie instead?” I plead. “I need somebody to translate for me.” He can’t come, he says, but he might know somebody who can. He makes a phone call and an hour later I meet Jonathan, a middle-aged Haitian man who speaks impeccable French.
He does not seem at all perturbed about going into Waff Jeremie, nor the fact that I want to videotape our encounter with Elijah’s parents so that at the very least he will have a visual record of his roots. “We may not find them,” Jonathan explains. “Waff Jeremie is forty square acres of squatter’s huts and thousands of people. There are no street signs and no numbers on the houses. It would be a miracle if we actually found them.”
It would be a miracle. I would be happy just to get some footage of the streets that Elijah toddled on as a child, and perhaps a shot of the house he was born in.
We climb into a taxi on Rue Delmas and negotiate a price to the wharf. It’s steeper than normal for two reasons: cabs don’t usually go into that neighbourhood, and my skin is white. There’s a premium for that sort of thing.
Winding our way through the crush of buses and tap-taps, we descend lower and lower into Port-au-Prince until suddenly we are expelled into what seems like a war-zone. Row upon row of crumbling shanties line muddy, pot-holed streets. The sharp stench of human waste from the open sewers greets us as we emerge from the cab, a crowd of children and curious adults gathering around us.
“Anybody here know Moise Louis?” Jonathan calls out to them.
The question goes shooting back through the gathering crowd until finally a short woman in a purple dress says, “Yes, I know him.” She suddenly becomes the star of the show and we all follow her down through the open marketplace to the wharf itself where a rusting ship is being loaded with all manner of merchandise. There are hundreds of workers heaving boxes into the hold, their dark bodies glistening in the blistering sun.
Jonathan and I stop for a Coke and wait for the miracle to transpire. The woman in the purple dress cannot find Moise Louis and the onlookers have gotten bored. “Ask her to take us to his house,” I tell Jonathan. He complies and we are off again, back through the marketplace and into the barracks-style wasteland.
Waff Jeremie was built right at sea level and when it rains, the streets and walkways turn into a sea of mud and water. Children have died in the torrential runoffs that turn the open sewers into cascading rivers of filth.
Suddenly we are on the very street that Elijah was born. I stop to get a few tripod shots of the extant misery when suddenly a cry goes up from the crowd. “He’s here! Moise is here!”
I rush forward and see a young man covered from head to foot in thick soot, blinking in bewilderment at the crowd that has inexplicably surrounded him, and the white guy with the camera that is suddenly shouting questions at him in French.
“Are you Elijah Benson Wilson’s father?” I ask.
“Yes,” he says, smiling timidly “Yes, I am.”
“I’m a journalist from Canada. I know Elijah. Can I ask you some questions?”
Jonathan translates.
“Yes, but first I need to take a bath. I just got back from work.” He takes his leave. His ‘bath’ consists of pouring water over himself from a rain-barrel in full view of all of his neighbours. There is no privacy here in Waff Jeremie, no private property. Moise’s house is a one-room shack no bigger than a tiny single garage. It contains one single cot and nothing else. Yet it is home to at least seven people, not to mention the scores of visitors from the countryside who, needing a temporary place to stay, are invited into his home.
So many people live in his little house that they take turns sleeping. The children sleep on the floor and the adults who don’t make it onto the single cot sleep propped up against the walls, hoping it doesn’t rain in the night.
Moise returns from his bath, and now that he’s had time to think about it, he’s flustered by the camera. I curse its presence and yet I know that the images it captures will likely be the only ones Elijah will ever have of his birth father. They are a link to his fragile roots.
“When he was a baby, Elijah used to sleep on my chest,” Moise says.
“Did you love him?”
“Oh, yes.”
“Then why did you give him up.”
Moise is not embarrassed. “There was no food,” he says.
As we speak there is another commotion at the edge of the crowd, and with the camera still rolling a cry goes up. “Micheline is here.” Elijah’s mother.
I shift the camera fully onto the face of a young, flustered woman who tries instinctively to shrink back out of sight. “Are you really his mother,” I ask, my voice breaking. Tears have welled in my eyes, behind my dark sunglasses.
“Yes,” she says, puzzled.
I give her my spiel: I am a Canadian journalist. I know her son. I tell her that he is with a Canadian family, and she seems happy about that. Relieved. Then I ask her: “If you had the opportunity of saying something directly to Elijah’s adoptive father, what would it be?”
Without hesitating she says, “I would say thank-you.”
Unable to contain myself, I hand the camera to Jonathan. “There is something I must tell you,” I say to them. “I am the father. I have adopted Elijah.”
A twitter of awe ripples through the crowd and both Micheline and Moise stare at me, stunned. I have to repeat it a few times before it finally registers. I am taking their son home with me. Then they are all over me. Micheline hugs me and does not let me go. From that point on her arm is around me, holding onto me, as if letting go of me means letting go of her son for good.
“Do you want me to send photographs?”
“Oh yes, please,” she cries. “Please.” There is such a pleading in her eyes that I stop everything and look her directly in the face.
“I not only promise that I will send photographs regularly, but each time I am in Haiti I will come and visit you. Elijah will always be your child. You and I will be co-parents. We will help raise him for you.”
This is not a hard promise for me to keep. If God or anyone could grant me one single wish, it would be to know that the child I had put up for adoption twenty years ago had fared well in his life. I would trade that little tidbit of knowledge for any amount of money or professional success. It is something I will likely never have, and I am determined not to deprive either Moise or Micheline of it.
Micheline squeezes my hand tightly in hers and I can feel her love seeping through me to Elijah. The two of them –Moise and Micheline- and the crowd of onlookers, walk Jonathan and I back to the main road to where the taxis are parked. She is still holding onto me.
“In six years, when Elijah is eight years old, I will take him back to visit you. I promise you.”
They nod their heads and Micheline reluctantly lets me go.
“We will see each other again,” I say. I can tell they believe me, and so do I. It’s a promise I intend to keep, not just for them, and not just for Elijah but for myself as well.
-30-