Two Angels

Yanick seems like an angel. She just appears. Walking out of clinic today into the sun, I was thinking about giving my Coke bottle back to the street vendor who tries to rip me off each day. Yanick was standing in front of me when I looked up.

She was composed, compared to the last time and I saw her. I didn’t know who she was for just an instant. Then it all came back.

She lost her daughter in the hospital about a month ago. Her daughter’s name was Ferna.

Yanick was dressed nicely and carrying her well worn Haitian bible. She had come down the coast two hours today by public transportation from her home to see me.

We sat on the edge of a wall next to the clinic. She started crying saying that she cannot look at the hospital across the street because her baby daughter died there.

I asked her if she buried Ferna. She said “no” and she does not know where her daughter’s body is. I think it went from our little hospital’s morgue to the general hospital morgue in Port-au-Prince. When poor Haitian families have no money for transportation of the deceased or for their funeral, the bodies from the morgue are laid to rest in a common burial ground.

After talking about thirty minutes, Yanick, who lost her own little angel, got on another crowded bus and headed back up the coast.