The Foreign Service Journal, November 2003

48 F O R E I G N S E R V I C E J O U R N A L / N O V E M B E R 2 0 0 3 people make their way to the area. She was shaken only once, the day two of her daughters (8 and 10 years old) were held hostage by a street gang at their private school on Lalue, towards the road up the hill to Delmas. She had to guess that afternoon if it seemed a bet- ter risk to try to fetch the girls immediately, or maybe wait the couple of hours it usually took for the street gangs to dis- perse. She was lucky that day; waiting the couple of hours turned out to be the right answer. So Antoinette and Zazie survived that day, but on March 18, 2003, their father Jean-Jacques did not. The assassin, perhaps driven to his ultimately self-mutilating act by hunger, or cocaine, or anxiety, will certainly go to hell if there is a hell. Haiti will proceed — or not — to its ultimate ruin. For Marie-Jeanne Durand, however, the die is cast. It was not easy to reach her after she went into hiding after the calami- ty that devastated her life on March 18: most phone lines in Port-au-Prince do not work anyway, and electricity is inade- quate to charge up computers to dip into cyberspace. Well-wishers finally reached the proud Marie-Jeanne three weeks after her husband’s murder, to urge her to accept some form of help in dealing with the challenge of raising and educating five children in a lawless country. Her response came in an April 8 e-mail: “Thanks anyway, but that which we need is lost, and cannot be restored.” ■