How Catherine Porter went beyond journalism covering the Haiti earthquake

Catherine Porter could not have prepared herself for the devastation she would see when she arrived in Haiti in January 2010.

After the worst earthquake in the country's history, the then-Toronto Star correspondent was driven through the ravaged streets of Port au Prince, where she witnessed the results of a 35-second disaster that would claim approximately 300,000 lives.

It was the following evening when she met Lovely, a two-year-old girl who had been found alive after six days buried beneath rubble. In A Girl Named Lovely, Porter traces her relationship with Lovely and her family after the disaster.

Tragedy after the earthquake

"I arrived at 10:00 p.m. and it was black. There were no lights. The electricity was completely cut out and I had to stumble underneath the plane to find the airport, make my way through this flooded airport and hope that there was a driver outside that would pick me up... We drove through the city and I saw little bits of it illuminated by the headlights of the car. There were people lining the streets, sleeping on the edge of the streets and just mounds of rubble storeys high. We spent an hour piecing our way through the wreckage of the city to get to this broken hotel, where I stayed for the first night.

"[Haiti] made it very personal how callous life can be. When you live in North America, particularly in Toronto or in other big cities, you have the sense that if you're a good person and you work hard good things can happen to you. Yet, in Haiti, it didn't matter whether you were a good person. Thirty-five seconds and random choices about whether to stay in bed or to step outside, meant that you died or you survived. All your children died. The callousness of life was one of the big lessons."

A young girl's courage

"[Lovely] had my daughter's coordination. She was in control of her body, but she was small like my son. There was something about her that was hard-boiled. She seemed like an old soul. Her eyes would just bore into you; look deep into you, assess you and judge you. When I first met her, I thought that this must be what kept her alive throughout all those days under the rubble. She was a survivor in a real sense. There was a toughness to this kid that I found impressive from the first moment I met her. She didn't play to the crowd.

"Lovely was having her third birthday. My daughter was three and Jonathan [Lovely's brother] was only a little bit younger than my son. I was looking at a mirror of my own family. It was a mixture of emotions because I'd been covering such tragic stories and here was a miracle story. Not only had this kid survived, but her whole family had survived. No one was killed from her family and they came from a destroyed slum in the downtown of Port au Prince called Fort National."

Going beyond journalism

"I realized this is breaking every rule that has been instilled in me as a journalist because I was shaping the story. I thought that this would be the last time I'd ever go to Haiti because it's expensive and the attention of the world lurches from one disaster to another. I thought that it would be my little secret, I would do this good thing and I wouldn't know how to change her life. I would just hopefully get their lives a little bit on track and that would be it. But when I got back to Toronto my editor said to me, 'You're a columnist you can write about these things, so write about it'. That's probably what changed my life, because I wrote the story."

Catherine Porter's comments have been edited for length and clarity.