LITTLE ROCK — She sits under a makeshift tent, holding a 3-month-old baby and trying to placate a frightened 3-year-old.
Rubble and the stench of death surround her.
She hasn’t seen her husband since the earthquake. Maybe he was trapped beneath the debris. Maybe he’s among the injured. Or maybe he’s searching for his wife and children. Surely she would know it, feel it, if he were dead.
So many remain missing.
That first day, in the hours after the quake, she raced about - holding her baby and dragging her crying toddler by the arm - asking if anyone could help her search for her husband, her mother, her sister.
But everyone was looking for their own lost family members. Some offered a quick hug. Others, numbed by shock and grief, simply shrugged and returned to digging.
Her children are thirsty. She is still nursing, so the baby has milk. When the toddler cries for water, she offers a breast instead. But the toddler won’t nurse, declaring that only babies get their milk from mothers. She’s a big girl. She wants a cup.
The mother is thirsty too. Her milk supply is dwindling, probably because of dehydration. She wonders how she will feed her baby once the milk is gone.
The woman in the tent next to hers brought over a few canned goods, explaining that her daughter had found them in a half-standing grocery store.
She has no can opener.
The trucks roll by with water. But with two children in tow, she’s afraid to enter the fray and fight for those precious water bottles.
So she stands at the back of the crowd, pleading for someone to claim a bottle for her children. No one listens. Their own children are thirsty.
Her infant son remains naked much of the time. She has nothing with which to clothe or diaper him. It’s easier to keep the baby loosely wrapped in the grubby Tshirt she found.
The toddler doesn’t understand.
“Why can’t we go home?” she asks.
“Where is Daddy?”
And again, and again - “I’m thirsty. I’m hungry. I have to go potty.”
The mother assures her daughter that they’ll get more water soon. Then she leads the toddler behind a pile of debris.
“You can go potty here,” she says.
As her daughter squats, the mother listens for sounds of danger.
With each passing day, the looters become more blatant, waving machetes and yelling at onlookers. She understands the desperation. What she doesn’t understand is how a man could attack a woman and steal food from her children.
At night, she lies awake, terrified.
She listens to the moans of the dying, the shouts of the looters, the fights breaking out between young men angry at their plight.
Her daughter also cannot sleep.
“My eyes burn, Mama,” she says. “The smoke hurts.”
The woman pulls her close and breathes in the familiar smell of the little girl’s hair, which, despite a coating of soot and dust, still carries the scent of home.
She listens to the sobs coming from the neighboring tent, where the kind-hearted woman who brought her the canned goods tends to a feverish 7-year-old.
And then she cries too - for herself, for her neighbor, for all of Haiti’s mothers.
Cathy Frye, a news reporter for the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, has two step teens and two children, ages 4 and 6. Also a husband. And a geriatric, deaf dog. She and Cindy Murphy are co-editors of LittleRock Mamas.com E-mail her at
Family, Pages 31 on 01/27/2010