Route Delmas, the street that runs from Petionville down to Port au Prince, is hideous. Trucks, busses, cars, motorcycles, and motorized vehicles of all descriptions screech, roll, and zip up and down it, pouring black smoke and other less visible toxins out of their exhaust pipes. They fill the street with all manner of rattles and roars. All drivers insistantly beep their horns. It seems almost constant, as if the horn-and not leaded gasoline-was what made their engines run.

And yet thousands and thousands and thousands of people walk along this street most of every day showered by its terrible racket. It is the most important route to and from work for Haitians that live in Petionville and the villages above and around it. Hundreds of street venders line its narrow sidewalks selling produce and batteries and motor oil and shoes and choking in its noxious fumes. And yet here I am sitting in a booth on the sidewalk with Erik and Michelet sipping Haitian coffee, strong and sweet, out of old,
enamel-covered tin cups.

The booth is four bent wooden posts, holding up a simple frame, covered by a torn cloth that its owner and we implicitly agree to pretend will protect from the street’s infinite dust. She ladels the coffee out of a large kettle that we has been cooking all morning. It’s already after eight, more than an hour after her busiest time. Erik is Erik Badger, Shimer class of 1997. He is here in Haiti to work with me. I don’t know Michelet’s last name. I met him last year when I was here, and I liked him. He tells great stories, and he
smiles a lot.

Michelet came early this morning to the office/guest house that Erik and I have been staying in because he is sick and he does not know where to go for help. The house is about a block from Rue Delmas. He asks me to look closely at his eyes, and they are a pale, sickly yellow. He tells me that it’s his liver. Strangely enough, I understand him because the Creole word for liver is the “fois” of “paté de fois gras.” Last time he came by he found someone willing to give him the little money he would need to see a doctor. Today he has a prescription-at least that’s what he says it is-but no money to buy the
medicine.

I give him a couple of bucks-he says it’s more than he needs-without wondering very much whether the gift is the right thing for him or for me. It’s an easy gesture, and I feel good about it. I just don’t think about it very hard. I could describe the range of reservations I might have about it if I were to reflect, but I’ll save that for another time.

Tomorrow, I’ll move to my home in a village on the mountain above Petionville. I’ll be a long way from Delmas. In Ka Glo, it’s cool and quiet. There are trees everywhere. The house I live in is nestled in a mango grove.
Of course, when I go to work, I’ll be walking down Rue Delmas. Like everyone else.

Think of the anatomy of a pig, a big, fat one in this case. The legs are short and stumpy. The body is huge: both in girth and in length. It’s not a body made for sit-ups. Or “crunches.” Just think of the physics of it. Now hang the live, angry, frightened pig up by its hind legs.

I’m going to have to ask you to hold that thought for just a minute.

I am feeling more and more at home in Ka Glo, the mountain village where I live. My sense of being at home includes a desire to participate in, to share, as much of the life of the community as I can. A lot of their life is their work.

It was the end of the corn harvest when I arrived. There’s a good deal of corn grown on the steep slopes of our mountain. Almost everyone seems to have at least a small patch. When the ears have been collected and husked, the next job is to rub the kernels off the cobs and throw the cobs away. It’s laborious work. People were at it pretty constantly when I first arrived. They sit in front of their houses and rub the hard kernels off with their thumbs. Anyone who comes by will sit for a while at least and pitch in. When I first joined in, I was the source of much laughter. Not surprisingly, I was slow and awkward. Soon there were warnings, too: The corn would tear up my unaccustomed hands. (It did.) Nevertheless, I took my time, kept at it, and I am glad I did.

Most of the corn eaten in Ka Glo is eaten as cornmeal, so any day that we want it, it must be ground. We use a clumsy, two-handled hand mill, a real test of upper body strength and cardio-vascular endurance. I have pitched in several times so far, taking one handle while one of the young men takes the other. It wears me out thoroughly, and leaves blisters across the palms of my hands. My friends seem surprised at my interest, but happy for the help.

I wonder if they feel like Tom Sawyer, selling hard work as play with the right sort of marketing. They do not charge me to join them the way Tom charged boys to let them whitewash a fence, but I wonder what they think. What kind of rich man’s caprice do they see in my desire to share with them work that is not mine?

This brings me to the pig. Sunday morning, I saw a group of them leading a large hog by a thick rope to a big tree. They wound the rope around its hind legs, threw the rope over a strong branch, and lifted the pig until it was hanging in the air. It took about six of them to lift it. It turns out that a pig that has been hung up like that is pretty much immobile. They are too heavy to move themselves.

By this point I had disappeared into the house, chased away by the pig’s wild squealing. They quickly neutered the pig, let it down, and led it back to its sty.

Later that day, I spoke with Casnell about the chore. He’s my next-door neighbor, a thirty-five year old man who still lives with his parents and four younger siblings because he can’t yet afford to get married. He noticed that I had not wanted to share in the work. I told him that I like being a part of community work, but that cutting up the pig was more than I could do. He said that he doesn’t like it either, but since other pig farmers do it he
feels he must. It’s hard to sell the meat if the operation is not performed.

He well understood my own aversion to the chore. He and I have talked a lot about the fact that I do not eat meat. But the meaning of such aversion is what interests me here: It seems to me to mark strongly one aspect of my rich man’s privilege: the freedom to indulge such an inclination, to choose the work I am willing to do.

“Words matter”. That’s how a hero of mine once began a lecture on Bach. I think she was right, but I also think that context matters a lot, too.

I have a very particular example in mind. It’s a Creole phrase, “Vin m pale w.” It means, roughly, “Come here. I want to talk to you.” But it can mean much more. I’m thinking of Madanm Anténor.

Madanm Anténor is married to Mèt Anténor. She is master of the house I live in. She and her husband divide their responsibilities pretty clearly for the most part, and at home she is the boss. Her name is Bernadette, but I have never, ever heard a Haitian use it. They call her Madanm Anténor or Madanm Mèt. Her husband has real status here on the mountain. Some call her “Makomè,” a way to address a woman which indicates something like a collegiality among adult members of a community.

She has her own job outside the home. She works as a health extension worker,
hiking with our neighbor, Casnell, all over the mountain, vaccinating children and talking to mothers about care of their infants. It’s exhausting work, and the pay is bad, but the little bit of extra cash is helpful with three children in school and land that does not produce all the food the family needs-even if the work she does requires her to hire help to do some of the work around the house.

When Madanm Anténor says “Vin m pale w” one of several different things can happen. If she says it to one of her own children-Cassandra, Cyprien, and Valerie-he or she will quickly try to find a place to hide or a plausible explanation for not having heard her. Because when she speaks to them the phrase can have two meanings, neither of which appeals to them very much. It could mean, “Come here, I have a chore for you to do” It could mean, “You’ve done something you shouldn’t have done. I’m angry, and you’re going to know it.”

On the other hand, she often says it to local teens, usually teenage boys. Then they run like the wind to her. When she says it to them it can have only one meaning, “I have food for you.” There is, uncharacteristically for Haiti, no real food shortage here in Ka Glo, but Madanm is a great cook. Acknowledged by all here as the best. And teenagers everywhere love to eat. When she calls, they come, and they think nothing of doing chores for her when she asks. And she does ask, because her kids are still too small for
heavy work.

I like and respect her enormously. But there is one last thing I should say about her. When I say that she’s telling her kids “You’re going to know that I’m angry,” that is a euphemism. What it means is that she’s stripped a fresh branch from the ornamental bush near her door, and she’s preparing to whip her child. It’s a lovely shrub, with thin green leaves on its younger branches and stunning reddish orange ones on some of its older ones. It’s flowers are a delicate pink. When I look closely at the bush, I can see the
various places where young twigs have been torn away from it, and I know what each of those places means. How do I reconcile the horror I feel when I see and, even worse, hear the whipping with my fondness for her? I don’t. I know she loves her children, and that the world is full of contradictions.

I’ve written precious little so far about the work that I came to Haiti to do. Really, nothing at all. One reason for this is that it has seemed important to provide some context, to locate my work, by sharing something of the place where I find myself. But beyond that, it’s simply seemed premature: Not very much work has happened so far. We are still in the preparatory stages of our work, and it hardly seems that interesting.

At the same time, it might be a good time to say something of the plan we have for these first months, and a few words about the issues that are emerging as we try to set
our plan into action.

For the last two summers, our team here in Haiti-principally: David Diggs, John Engle, Guerda Lexima, Eddy Sterlin, and I-have led various seminars in which we introduce a range of Haitian teachers to the practice of leading discussions in their classrooms. The approach to discussions we use, called “the Touchstones Project,” was developed by several of my own teachers at St. John’s College. It uses a range of activities-individual, small group, and large group-that focus on short, well-chosen texts. These activities
have as their over-arching goal to help students take over primary responsibility for their own education.

It’s hard to imagine just how foreign here the notion of relatively open discussions in a classroom is. Here, most teaching involves providing students with long texts to memorize, texts in French, a language they rarely understand, a language many of the teachers themselves do not understand well. Beatings and other humiliations are the two main ways teachers aid students’ with memorization.

Our sense after two summers was that our short seminars were serving to generate enthusiasm for the idea of conversation, but that without ongoing support it would be too difficult for teachers to know what to do with the idea. We decided to try a slower, longer-term approach.

We decided to spend this Fall organizing two discussion groups. We will meet weekly with each, and lead each through a series of discussions. Our idea was that the process will make much more sense to those who have had the chance to experience learning within a discussion group themselves. At the same time, we can use the weekly meetings to discuss the problems and possibilities that naturally arise in such work.

That’s all we’re doing: organizing two discussion groups. Not very ambitious, really.

But nothing here seems easy. It has, for example, been hard to identify a place to meet. We need a classroom close enough to downtown Pòtoprens that it will be easily accessible. At the same time, there may be elections this Fall. Elections could easily mean violence, and it is downtown that such violence is most likely to occur. In other words: We need to be close to the action, but want to be out of harm’s way.

We have also begun recruiting participants. Recently, Guerda and I met with six interested college students at our office. We talked some about our project, then I led them through a discussion of a text excerpted from the //Iliad//, the moment when Hector returns from battle to see, for the last time, Andromache his wife. They were very good students, but that fact hardly interfered at all. It will nonetheless be a long road. They had a lot of questions about how little I, the Teacher, was saying. They found silence uncomfortable, and wondered why I did nothing to break it. In other words, it was a perfectly ordinary first class.

I learn a lot when I walk with Mèt Anténor. He is the principal of the elementary school nearest where I life. It’s in Mariaman, a half-hour’s walk down the mountain from Ka Glo, where we live. I say “we,” because I live with Mèt Anténor . I live with him, his wife, and three children in a small house a few feet from the house he grew up in. They have been my family here ever since I began visiting Haiti two summers ago.

” Mèt ” has nothing to do with his name. It’s his title as the local principal, and almost everybody on the mountain, short of his wife and children, uses it.

Every once in a while, he and I walk down the mountain together. He doesn’t go down often. He’s asthmatic, and walking back up is a real struggle for him. But as the October beginning of the school year approaches he goes to school more and more often and to the various offices in Pòtoprens itself where one gets through whatever red tape there is for a public school principal at the beginning of the school year.

Running a school in Mariaman is challenging. The school is about 30 feet by 50 or 60. He has three small rooms, 300 students, and six teachers. Six, that is, when they all can come. There’s an outhouse for teachers. The school is public, which means that the government pays the teachers’ meager salaries and for some copy books for the children-whenever Mèt Anténor can get the various bureaucrats he deals with to cough up the dough.

That leaves him to finesse issues like school maintenance and supplies. What he’s forced to do is charge the parents who send their children to his school a few dollars a month. That’s not much, but it’s already prohibitive for some. If it were only a matter of those few dollars, more students would be able to attend, but Haitian schoolchildren wear uniforms and decent-looking shoes. If their parents can’t buy shoes, the children stay home. There are plenty of children on the mountain who can’t go, even when Mèt Anténor discounts his fees for many who can not pay.

When we walk along the mountain road together, he has a word for everyone and everyone has a word for him. When he passes a local mason, he chats about how repair work might get done. When he passes teenage boys, he asks them to remove some rocks from the middle of the narrow path that is our road. And they do. When he passes a roadside stand, he chats about business and farming and other community issues. He himself does subsistence farming on the land his father left him.

All his conversations are filled with his broad, deep laughter. He laughs whether the news is good or bad, and people generally laugh with him. Everyone knows him, and, as far as I can tell, they love him too.

I am always learning from him. He has taught me much of the Creole I know, and what he hasn’t taught me himself, I know because he put me into the hands of my great teachers, the neighborhood teens. He’s taught me about the community he lives in, a community he knows very well indeed. And he’s also teaching me much larger things: about the importance of hope, the irrelevance of doubt. He’s a very good and devoted teacher, and a wonderful friend.