Many of you may know that Catherine Porter, our Toronto bureau chief, was in Haiti immediately after the 2010 earthquake and returned there several times afterward.
She has gone back to produce a moving, richly reported look at the people who bring dignity to the dead in a country where even death offers no escape from poverty.
It’s part of The End, a series of articles looking at what our deaths tell us about how we live. Those stories include Ms. Porter’s similarly in-depth reporting on assisted death in Canada that appeared earlier this year.
Ms. Porter shared some thoughts about her latest visit to Haiti:
A few weeks before I started this job as The New York Times’s Toronto bureau chief in February, I went to my second home — Haiti.
I was finishing research for a memoir I’m writing about my relationship with a Haitian girl named Lovely and her family, and I was saying goodbye.
I didn’t think I’d be back for a while. I was heavy-hearted.
My first trip to Haiti was on an aid flight, 11 days after the devastating 2010 earthquake. The first story I wrote was about a 2-year-old miracle girl who survived six days beneath the rubble. That was Lovely.
I returned to Haiti a second time, three months later, to find that Lovely wasn’t orphaned, as all the medical workers had assumed. Her parents and younger brother had survived. But they were living in a tin shed that leaked every time it rained. Her story captured readers and drew me back to Haiti repeatedly.
By the time I joined The Times, I’d been to Haiti 18 times. On one of those trips, I brought my then 6-year-old daughter Lyla with me to meet Lovely and her family. Then, in 2015, I came for the baptism of Lovely’s cousin, Lala — named after my daughter. I am her godmother.
Clearly, Haiti was no longer just a story for me.
In some ways, I feel very comfortable there. I speak enough Kreyòl to hold a conversation on the street, know my way around the capital despite few street signs, and have a fat stack of contacts and some very close friends.
In other ways, Haiti is a very uncomfortable place for me. The thing that upsets me the most is the poverty — kids who are so malnourished their hair has turned orange, people dying from simple illnesses because they can’t afford treatment, the lack of basic education because parents can’t afford the school fees.
So when my editors asked me to find a story on death from Haiti, I was thrilled for two reasons. I’d get to see Lovely and Lyla again this year — not just once, but three more times.
And I could shine a huge spotlight onto the gruesome face of Haiti’s poverty — which, ironically, makes the dead faceless — and share my heartache with Times readers.
Ms. Porter’s book about Haiti, “A Girl Named Lovely,” will be published in early 2019 by Simon & Schuster.
Read: The Heroes of Burial Road
Northern Route to New York
The Citadel Theatre in downtown Edmonton, Alberta, is giving another chance to something it last attempted more than 30 years ago: developing plays for Broadway. Our theater reporter Michael Paulson went to see its production of “Hadestown,” a musical he described as a “folk-and-politics-infused riff on an enduring Greek myth.”
So far everyone seems happy. Actors at the Citadel get to work with Broadway talent and the audience gets to see a production it otherwise couldn’t. For the producers, the value of the Canadian dollar and Edmonton’s comparative isolation from New York have both been attractions.
Continue reading the main storyIf you caught “Hadestown” during its run in Edmonton, I’d like to hear what you thought about the collaboration: nytcanada@nytimes.com.
Read: An Unexpected New Stop on the Road to Broadway: Edmonton
The Limits of Tomorrow
Montreal and Toronto have emerged as centers for artificial intelligence, the field that Cade Metz covers as The Times’s emerging technologies reporter.
In a Q. and A., Mr. Metz offered some caution about the hype surrounding A.I. and acknowledged that he’s a “techno-skeptic.” Like me, he’s also pining for voice recognition software that can transcribe recordings of interviews.
Read: Busting the Myths About A.I. Invading Our Lives
Lessons From You
Through email, comments and social media, readers of The Times constantly tell us things we didn’t know. We’ve compiled a brief list of some of this year’s highlights. One of the most touching comes from Neil Mavin, a truck driver from Kitchener, Ontario:
Life on the road gets lonely. A wave or a child pulling the imaginary air horn warms our tough hearts. Not a man or woman driver can resist the horn at that request.
Read: 11 Things We Learned From Our Readers This Year
The Commonwealth Challenge
After a roaring start, the effort to get more new subscribers for the Canada Letter than the Australia Letter by the end of the year stalled over the past week.
So I’m pleading with you again to foist the idea of subscribing (it’s free) on friends, family, neighbors and passing acquaintances. Our national reputation, at least among the editors, depends on it.
Carol Fahey of Oakville, Ontario, an early and loyal subscriber whom I met on a Times Journeys voyage last year, wrote in to say that she was looking for something quick and easy about our campaign to post on social media.
One option is to use this link to the newsletter where I first made my plea.
Alternately, here’ some text you can cut and paste into Facebook:
Canadians: Canada Letter, The New York Times’s weekly newsletter about Canada and for Canadians, has been challenged by the editors to sign up more new subscribers by the end of the year than the Australia Letter. The prize? Um, mainly national pride. Do your part by signing up here (it’s free): https://www.nytimes.com/newsletters/canada-letter.
Remember, there’s also an individual prize for the best account of efforts to enlist new subscribers. Send those to nytcanada@nytimes.com. The begging ends soon, I promise.
Centre Ice
—Montreal will be in Ottawa on Saturday for an outdoor game at TD Place, just a few blocks from my home, which doubles as The Times’s Ottawa bureau. While the game comes just days before the centennial of the first National Hockey League match, a 1917 rule that banned goalies from dropping to the ice won’t be revived for the occasion.
Trans Canada
—The shoreline of Vancouver Island has produced another grisly find.
—Parents now searching in vain for Fingerlings, a robotic monkey that passes wind, can blame a Montreal company for their holiday frustration.
—British Columbia’s Securities Commission has found that Paul Se Hui Oei bilked investors of about $4 million. But it’s unclear if anyone will recover their money.
Continue reading the main story