A Girl Named Lovely Chapter 1 The End of the World It felt like the plane was landing in the middle of the ocean. Peering out a window, I could see nothing but vast blackness. There were no white lights dotting the edges of the runway, no brightly lit terminal buildings in the distance, and, beyond that, no twinkling city lights. Just blackness, then bump: we were on the ground. But the voice over the plane''s loudspeaker confirmed that we had in fact arrived at our destination: the devastated city of Port-au-Prince. It was 10:00 p.m. on January 23, 2010, eleven days after the earthquake.

Somewhere out there in the darkness were hundreds of thousands of bloated corpses, severely injured people, and armed thugs who were using the chaos to loot, rape, and exact hideous revenge by burning their enemies alive in the streets. I''d seen pictures of the latter, taken by my colleague, photographer Lucas Oleniuk, and splayed across the front page of our newspaper, the Toronto Star. They had kept me awake for the past couple of nights, ever since my editor had phoned me during lunch and asked if I wanted to go to Haiti. "Of course," I''d said without pause. I was a columnist at the newspaper, but my dream was to become a foreign correspondent. This was my big break. But I''d been quietly freaking out since that moment. What if I was kidnapped by one of those thugs? What if I witnessed a public lynching? Would I be able to handle the Civil War-era amputations to remove gangrenous limbs that my colleagues had reported were taking place in tents around the city? I packed in our basement the night before my planned departure as my two little kids looked on from the couch.

This would be my longest separation from them. Was I being an irresponsible parent, leaving them to travel into danger? Would I return injured or broken? But if I didn''t go, how could I ever forgive myself? Most days, I felt emotionally stretched between two worlds as a working mom; now that tug-of-war between ambition and duty felt as though it would snap me in half. When I couldn''t find my freshly purchased Lonely Planet guide to the Dominican Republic and Haiti, I started frantically tearing apart my bag and sobbing uncontrollably. I was having a full-fledged panic attack. My kids cuddled me on the couch and recited the soothing words I always told them: "Everything will be okay, Mommy." Adding to the sticky fear that clenched my stomach and muffled my lungs was performance anxiety. Every journalist is crippled by self-doubt most of the time. We all think we''ve somehow managed to patch things together thus far, but that it''s only a matter of time before everyone else figures out that we are winging it.

Would this be the trip that revealed all my failings? Would I crack under the pressure and be forced to call my editor blubbering and begging to be brought home? Would I get scooped by all the competing journalists and miss the big stories? A cheer went up in the plane around me. I was at the back of an Air Canada relief flight, surrounded by mostly female airline staff who had been trained as caregivers to soothe survivors after airplane "incidents"--scares or, worse, crashes. For them, this trip was about delivering aid to their colleagues in Haiti and bringing Haitian orphans, whose international adoptions had been expedited by the Canadian government, back to their new homes in Canada. The volunteers wore matching beige T-shirts with the word "Hope" printed in English, French, and Kreyòl ayisyen --Haitian Creole, one of the country''s two official languages--on the back. They had spent most of the ride bouncing excitedly between seats, snapping photos of one another and passing out chocolates and home-baked muffins. "What we are doing is greater than all of us," their upbeat leader, Duncan Dee, had announced over the plane''s loudspeaker before takeoff. Duncan was the chief operating officer for Air Canada, which had become Canada''s official emergency aid transporter after the Southeast Asian tsunami four years earlier. He was short, with cropped black hair and glasses that amplified his round face.

This was his third aid mission, after Indonesia and Hurricane Katrina, and already it had a special significance. A few nights before, Duncan had watched a Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC) newscast from Port-au-Prince featuring a child getting sutures without anesthetic at a bare-bones medical clinic. The child''s screams moved Duncan to tears and haunted him. He was a devout Catholic with two children of his own. "I couldn''t not do anything, knowing I would be in Port-au-Prince forty-eight hours after that child was screaming," he said. He''d picked up his phone and emailed Peter Mansbridge, the anchor of the flagship CBC newscast The National, who directed him to a reporter in Port-au-Prince. Within an hour Duncan had connected with a volunteer at the makeshift clinic who provided a long list of needed supplies. Over the past two days Duncan and his volunteer crew had crisscrossed Ottawa, personally collecting wheelchairs, generators, and diapers.

Except for one type of antibiotic, they had picked up every last thing on the list. They were high on compassion and buzzing from the endorphins of altruism. "It''s a privilege for us to do this. We are helping people who have nothing," Duncan said. Back in economy class, I and my colleague Brett Popplewell, a reporter with the Star, were the only ones who were getting off. We weren''t here to save lives or help in any tangible way. We were here to witness whatever horrors were unfurling in the darkness and report it to our readers back in Canada. I nervously checked my bag one more time to make sure I had everything: my pens and notebooks, camera and laptop.

I tapped my waist, where I was wearing a money belt filled with my passport and a thick wad of American dollars I''d packed to pay for drivers, translators, and a hotel room, if I could find one. I began to shuffle my way to the airplane exit, a sense of dread growing with each step. My breath was shallow, and nausea gripped my stomach. As I was leaving, the Air Canada agent who''d been the most buoyant and enthusiastic called out to me: "Good luck." * * * Outside, the air was thick and warm, like a damp wool blanket. The smell of burning rubber filled my nostrils. It was dark except for the headlights of a giant pickup truck that had rolled right up to the plane, and the white glow of a television camera. From atop the metal staircase, I could see Duncan''s round face illuminated in the camera''s glare below.

The same CBC reporter who had inspired him to help was now interviewing him. A knot of people moved in the shadows nearby. When I reached the ground, I quickly learned most had arrived to pick up the emergency supplies Air Canada staff had carefully collected. These weren''t professional aid workers, though. They seemed to be just a bunch of random people who, like Duncan, had watched the news and been inspired to help Haiti in person. I would come to call them catastrophe missionaries. "We''ve been setting up tents, holding babies, seeing a woman give birth," said a thirty-year-old man from New Jersey wearing a baseball cap and baggy shorts. "It''s been the craziest two days.

We rode in on the back of a dump truck to get here. We brought bags of lollipops to give to kids. We were jumping rope with them today." When I asked him his job, he said his fiance was in medical school. I raised my eyebrows. Seriously, what good did he think he was doing skipping with kids in an earthquake zone? I at least had a job to do here. He was just some yahoo who''d come for a strange thrill. I figured he would cause more harm than good.

But I scratched everything he told me down in my notebook, hoping my pen was working in the dark. The best cure for performance anxiety is action, and interviewing someone--anyone--was calming. The man pointed out his group''s leader, a tall, slim, and slow-talking information technology specialist from Manhattan named Alphonse Edouard. Alphonse had been vacationing in the Dominican Republic when the earthquake struck and had rushed over the border with two duffel bags of hastily purchased medical supplies. He''d met up with members of the Dominican Republic Civil Defense and some Greek doctors, and together they''d set up a medical clinic on the edge of an industrial complex near the airport. It was Alphonse who had sent Duncan the list of needed supplies. "I''m still pinching myself. I can''t believe the plane is actually here," Alphonse said.

"The people of Haiti really need the relief." At the clinic, doctors were seeing dozens of patients a day, treating fractures and delivering babies. As I scrawled down his words, I heard something that made me stop. His clinic was taking care of a "miracle baby," a little girl named Jonatha who had been dropped off six days after the earthquake. The girl had survived all six days under the rubble alone. He figured she was one and a half years old. "We''ll have to do something for her," he said. "Her parents died.

" Six days without water--that seemed a miracle indeed, particularly for such a small person. My kids, Lyla and Noah, were three and one, and they wouldn''t make it a single day without food or water. Even when we were stepping out for a quick errand, I packed.