As the room around him buzzes with the voices of doting families bathing and comforting maimed relatives, Jean Jeantilis sits silently on a sheet-covered cot labelled "Bed 9." He has no one to talk to, although he, too, could use some comforting – a bandage on his left hand conceals a skin graft and the loss of three fingers. On his handwritten chart, "no family" and "no one bringing food or water" are underlined.
Across the compound in another of the tents that make up the largely open-air hospital west of Jacmel, 68-year-old Charlotte Saint-Jean is also alone. In her darker moments, she confesses, she has asked the doctors to "give me an injection [so] I go out" – so bleak does her life sometimes seem.
As the injuries they sustained begin to heal, many elderly survivors of Haiti's earthquake are facing the most daunting uncertainties of their lives. Not only have they lost homes and families, they have suffered lost limbs, broken bones and emotional wounds that have rendered them newly and wholly fragile. Their futures are equally so. International aid groups working in Haiti are focused on what are generally regarded as the most vulnerable victims – most often women and children – and senior citizens are not high on the list.
This is something Ms. Saint-Jean, a former designer of French hand-sewn lingerie, is acutely aware of. She is among the thousands of elderly Haitians who were severely injured in the earthquake. Without family members to care for them, many have lingered in small hospitals like the one in Cayes Jacmel because doctors have nowhere to send them but overwhelmed convents.
"Everybody wants to help the kids, but they forget the old people," said Ms. Saint-Jean, who was born in Haiti but retains the Parisian accent acquired during her formative years in France.
Ms. Saint-Jean said she was resigned to living "a solitary life" when, five years ago, one of the workers in her factory gave birth to a boy on the doorstep of her mountainside home.
"When this kid is born, she just left him at my house and I take care of him," she said in heavily accented English. She named the child Christian. "It was really with joy I keep this kid," she said. "We exist one for one. I feel the love of God in this kid."
It was that love that prompted Ms. Saint-Jean to throw herself on top of Christian as the ground began to shake on Jan. 12. The pair hit the floor beside a sofa bed just before the roof came down. Although the roof was propped up by the sofa bed, which spared them, a rock that was part of a wall crushed the lower half of Ms. Saint-Jean's right leg.
For half an hour she lay paralyzed, sandwiched between the floor and the collapsed roof.
"I don't feel nothing," she recounted, wearing a white cotton night gown and a cross around her neck on a chain of wooden beads. "But when I try to get up … I thinks all my blood is go out."
The next hours were long and dizzying. They ended with her arrival at a hospital in Jacmel, where she was diagnosed with a broken tibia and underwent surgery. With nowhere else to go and no family to call on, young Christian, who is not quite five years old, spent the next 36 days sleeping under her bed. Last week, he was placed with a temporary adoptive family, although his mattress is still tucked beneath Ms. Saint-Jean's wooden hospital bed.
"After this disaster, he's really traumatized," Ms. Saint-Jean said.
"Every day he'd say, 'We have to go home, we have to go home. I know it's [broken] but we have to go home.' But life decides," she said.
With Christian safe in his new home and another surgery on the horizon to remove a metal rod from her leg, Ms. Saint-Jean is hopeful she'll be allowed to stay in her hospital "room" – a communal tent outfitted with a mishmash of real and makeshift medical beds.
"I learn a lot about common humanity here," she said.
"I stay … because I have no family. Now I have to pay somebody to take care of me, especially on the toilet," she said, bowing her head in shame. "Oh, la la. When people are sick, they need somebody to help them, to feed them."
Luckily for Ms. Saint-Jean, a group of Canadian charity workers employed by the Windsor, Ont.-based Hearts Together for Haiti stumbled upon her case and is planning to sponsor her care for the next year, for about $50 a month.
"There is always a hierarchy of the poor," said Steve McDougall, the organization's chairman. "Who could be worse off than someone who's got a broken leg or missing limb or who may have a hard time providing for themselves if they don't have extended family?"
His charity's postquake aim, he said, is to identify Jacmel-area residents who do not have a support network and establish connections with Canada that will help them rebuild their lives.
For Ms. Saint-Jean, who is hoping for a new wooden house, the news was enough to bring her to tears.
Mr. Jeantilis, the man with no family, has not had such good fortune. He left the hospital in a free taxi on Monday. Nobody seemed to know where it was taking him.