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.