It was a strange walk. I say “strange,”even though a few paragraphs will make “strange” seem like a flippant, an inappropriate, way to describe it. But I don’t know how else to start. It was Wednesday, so I was headed uphill late. By the time I got to Bwa Moket, it was already 6:00 and getting dark. I was ready for a slow, careful walk up the steep and rocky path. I’m not really able to see where I’m stepping in the dark, but if I pay attention,
and it’s not raining too hard. I’m generally okay.

I was halfway through Bwa Moket when I heard my name. It may have been dark, but my pale white skin stood out clearly enough. Frenel, Mèt Anténor’s youngest brother and my next door neighbor, had seen me. He was on his way up too. He commutes daily to a job in Pòtoprens. He’s a bookkeeper at a small factory. He leaves every morning by 5:30 and walks up in the evening. We were in luck today. The driver of a flatbed truck had to get up to Malik, and he was willing to wait a few minutes while people who were on their way up on foot piled into the back. We stood up, holding on to the truck’s sides as he
sped away. The ride would get us halfway home.

As we left Malik to walk the rest of the way, a small group formed. They began to talk. One thing about my Kreyol: I can generally follow a conversation well if I catch the beginning. If, however, I don’t know the context from the start, it’s much harder. At first, I wasn’t even paying attention. I spent several minutes reflecting on the class I had just led. It hadn’t gone well, and I was thinking about why and about what to do next
week.

Soon they were saying something about a machete. That didn’t really catch my attention. Almost every man on the mountain has one, and they use them all the time. Then I heard “wounded,” and I started to listen. I figured there had been an accident. I had never heard of one before, but they use the machetes so much that I assume it must happen now and again. But then I heard “struck,” and my mind started to race. Were they talking about a fight? A murder? An attempted one? I heard “angry” and “depressed.” I felt lost in words. I knew the meanings, but they all seemed too terrible. I was trying to figure things out, but something wouldn’t let me. I recognized moment by moment that something awful had happened, but it was hard to piece together just what. My imagination went wild.

Eventually, I put together the following story: A man from a neighboring lakou had attempted to take his own life. He had reached back and tried to cut off his own head with a machete. He cut himself in the back of the neck, but the motion was awkward, and he wasn’t nearly strong enough to cut through. He was wounded and bleeding badly, but he was alive.

Madanm Anténor was tending to him. As soon as it happened, his neighbors rushed off to find her. She’s no doctor, not even a nurse, but she has some first aide training, is the local midwife, and that’s much more than anyone else in the area can say. She hurried down. As she later told me, she saw right away that she couldn’t do enough. While she fought hard to stop the bleeding, she sent some young boys to find a car to take the man down the hill to the hospital. This itself isn’t easy. There aren’t many cars on the hill, none within 10 minutes’ run from where the wounded man was. And there was no guarantee that anyone with a car would be home. Beyond that, it would be a 10-15 minute drive down to a doctor who might or might not be in Malik, or another 15 minutes’ drive to the clinics in Petyonvil. Somehow, they found a way to get him to a doctor eventually. I’m not sure how. When Madanm Anténor got home, she was not any state to answer questions. It seemed inappropriate to ask.

I did later ask Frenel and Toto a little about the incident. As much as it seemed that the circumstances would allow. I tried to ask whether they knew why the man had done what he did. Sensibly enough, they said it was a mystery. Suicide is probably always a mystery. But it’s not one I ever expected to encounter here. I guess I thought that people with pressing material need would be immune from existential crises. I suppose, however, that there is no place without its share of despair.

Sunday at 5:00 am, when I got up, Kasann was sweeping the dirt yard outside my patio. No one else was up yet. No one told her to get to work. This was Sunday, and she would spend nearly the whole day doing homework: memorizing French passages in textbooks she barely understands and going uncomprehendingly through math problems. Again, in French. No one, as I say, had told her to get to work, but her first instinct upon arising was to take a broom in hand and sweep.

What I first think of when I think of Kasann, what I first see when I look at her, what I first imagine when she comes to mind, are her two enormous, sparkling eyes. Even as small as she is, they may be the largest I’ve ever seen. They seem to see and respond to everything. Everything. And they respond with such laughter as can reside in our eyes. She is a beautiful, beautiful little girl. She loves to laugh. To laugh at me in particular. She imitates my clumsy Kreyol, and then giggles herself into a fit. It’s hard not to laugh with her. I’ve mentioned Kasann before. She is the oldest of Madanm Anténor’s three children, the oldest child in my family here. She’s twelve.

I’ve known her since she was ten, a tiny little thing. But from the very first, she struck me as nothing of a child. She often seemed and seems old beyond her years, decades more mature than her brother, Ti Papouch, who is only two years younger. This situation is familiar to me. I have some experience with oldest sisters, with one in particular, and it seems very much worth talking about.

It may be merely a difference between what we expect of little girls and little boys. Biology, and the different rates at which girls and boys grow up, may also play a role. There may also be a special burden on any oldest child. Whatever the reason, there is something very special about an oldest girl.

Even at ten, Kasann was working constantly, helping her mother with the housework. Though Ti Papouch might be told to do a specific chore on a given day, Kasann does many chores all the time. Ti Papouch mostly plays. He’s the kind of child who seems unable to walk: He either runs or skips. He can’t see a branch overhead without taking hold and doing a pull-up. He can’t cross our yard without doing a couple of flips or walking on his hands. He can’t carry something for his parents without tossing it in the air, twirling it on his fist, or dribbling it with his feet. He’s part of a small, elite group: one of only two boys in the neighborhood able to climb a coconut palm. The other, Petrus, is 22. Papouch can climb, but he doesn’t. If he’s caught climbing a palm tree, he gets a thorough whipping. His parents are worried he could fall. He’s a giggling, laughing, shouting, whining, jumping little fireball.

Kasann, on the other hand, rarely plays, even though when she does get into a game – of tag or hide-and-seek or whatever – she plays with real gusto. She squeals her delight. But on the whole, she’s much too busy: washing dishes, helping with cooking, sweeping the house and the dirt yard. And that’s during vacation. During the school year, she may do a little less work around the house, but she spends every free moment studying: copying or
chanting her lessons or going to her father or to the local teens for help.

What I see in Kasann is the unenviable position an oldest sister is in. Madanm Anténor, her mother, sees her as something of an extension of herself. She expects Kasann both to be extremely responsible and to take a lot of responsibility for her younger siblings. Her brother and sister, however, see her more as one of them. They resent the authority Kasann is expected to exercise. They don’t listen to her most of the time. This is true even though they expect her to do things for them that they feel unable to do: Getting
them snacks out of the locked pantry or making them fresh juice are examples.

Mèt Anténor and Madanm have both spoken to me about this. They think it extremely important to teach Kasann everything she needs to know to run a house. I suppose they are thinking prudently about her future, but they may also be thinking about their own. Life expectancies are short in Haiti, and Madanm Anténor works herself weary. She seems to worry a lot about her own health, though I can’t judge whether she has reason to. I wonder whether they are hedging against a need they could have, God forbid, to have someone else capable of running the house. I don’t know.

I think about Kasann’s future whenever I see her eyes. Because her eyes always remind me of her namesake. “Kasann” is a nickname; her full name’s Cassandra. Cassandra was the daughter of Priam, the last king of Troy. Cassandra’s eyes could see the future, though this was, for her, nothing but a curse. She was doomed to see all, but to be incapable of convincing anyone else of her vision. We watch her in Aeschylus’s great play //Agamemnon// walking knowingly to her own miserable death.

I think about Kasann’s future. She comes from a family that is, by Haitian standards, far from poor. But they’re also far from rich. They can hardly assure her what we like to call “a better life.” She is a good, hardworking student, but by no means an outstanding one. Competition for advancement in Haitian schools is fierce. She seems unlikely to get very far via that route. In all probability, she will marry someday and spend her life working from before dawn until after nightfall to feed and cloth her family, and to keep a household running well to make a house a home. Like her mother.

Of course, it is impossible to be sure. Cassandra’s curse is not our gift. But I wonder about the future that little Kasann sees. I don’t know what she imagines for herself. I can’t guess what her future holds. It is, however, hard to imagine one that’s very bright without real change in this land.

The other day I found myself walking home up the mountain at an hour much later than I usually would. It was raining and too dark for me to see, but I am getting to know the path well. I wasn’t really worried. The dark, lonely walk came after a couple of hours of hard riding around, so I spent some time thinking about transportation here and in the States. I’ve written tangentially about transportation before: how crowded public transportation is, how badly one ride bloodied me. I mentioned a motorcycle taxi. But it’s
worth speaking about transportation more generally, and I can do so by talking of an afternoon’s traveling.

It was a Wednesday, so I had a class to lead at the offices of an organization called Pwofod, off Rue Christ Roi. It’s down the hill towards Pòtoprens from our own office, on the other side of Rue Delmas. John, Erik and I left at 1:00 for a 2:00 meeting, and found a tap-tap to head down the hill.

A tap-tap is usually a pick-up truck. The back is covered, and there are benches along its sides. I suppose that they get their name because people knock at the window of the truck’s cab to tell the driver to stop to let them out. The ride down the hill to Kafou Ayewopò can’t be more than a couple of miles, but the midday traffic is rotten, and it can take 30-40 minutes if your luck is bad. Ours was. We were on the verge of getting out to walk – a miserable prospect in the heat of the day on dirty, crowded, polluted Delmas – when we arrived. We paid the driver seven and a half gouds, about 40 cents, for the three of us, and looked for our next ride.

We crossed the intersection to looked for a taxi. We had been using taxis to get to these weekly meetings. But someone called us over to another tap-tap, and he convinced us that his driver would stop at our street. The man was not a driver, nor had he any connection to the driver. He is, for lack of a better word, a tap-tap packer. Men and boys – a lot of seeming street children – hang around various tap-tap stations waiting for a truck or bus to arrive. They jump on before it stops, and begin to yell out its destination: “Lavil, lavil, lavil. Ann ale” (Downtown, downtown, downtown, downtown. Let’s go.) If the driver is satisfied that his truck is filled quickly enough, he might give the packer a couple of gouds. There seems to be no guarantee.

We decided to give the new ride a try. It worked fine. It brought us to within a quarter mile of our destination, though we needed directions to find it. We were so unsure whether we were headed in the right direction that we got out of the truck early, and the driver’s assistant had to tell us to get back on. When he decided we should get off, he stopped the truck himself, and pointed us the way. Our meeting went well from two to four.

The way back was harder. Four is rush hour. When we walked back to find a tap-tap headed the other way, we saw one after another pass us by already packed with people. As over-full as they are willing to get, there are limits, and a driver will not stop if he believes he has no space. There were four of us now. Tito, the Haitian high school student who is Erik’s Creole teacher, was with us. He is part of the Wednesday group. After some minutes waiting, we decide our chances of finding a truck with room for four were very slight, and turn to looking for a cab.

Now, there isn’t much here that sets a cab apart, except that they generally have a red ribbon hanging from their rear-view mirror. They are mostly small, four-door sedans that will take up to six passengers. They are generally about double the cost of a tap-tap, but tap-tap prices are quite fixed, whereas a taxi driver might try to get double or triple his usual fare out of a white person – of course, that’s still less than a dollar. When a
driver stops, you tell him where you want to go, and he quickly decides whether the destination suits him. If he’s willing to pick you up, you get on and are off. But if the cab is less than full, he will continue to stop for more passengers. Each time a potential rider names a destination, he will quickly calculate whether there is a sensible way to add it to his route and either let him or her in or drive off.

We took this cab back to Kafou Ayewopò, and looked for a tap-tap up the hill. It was futile. Everything was packed. We were a little pressed, because John and I wanted to get all the way up the mountain out of the city before dark, so we found another cab. The driver agreed to 75 gouds for the four of us. It was a ridiculously high price, but we felt we had little choice. Of course, it still amounted to very little dough.

Unfortunately, the fares are so low that drivers have little money for maintenance. Many of the taxis are in bad shape. Such was ours. It gasped along up the hill in bumber-to-bumper, stop-and-go traffic until the driver turned to enter a gas station. He was out of gas. He bought a couple of dollars worth, and we were ready to go.

Fortunately, the station was on a steep hill, because the taxi itself was not so ready. The driver had to let it roll out of the station and about fifty feet down a side street to get it started. Then he turned it around and headed back up to Delmas. And we sat there. At this point, the traffic was more “stop” than “go.” We crawled forward for awhile, but then we stalled. The driver didn’t quite know what to do. He was headed straight uphill, with
cars and trucks of all sorts packed in behind him. Angry horns and shouts told him nothing but that he had to get moving fast. The four of us piled out of the car and started pushing.

It is not easy for me to convey what a spectacle this made: three white men and a Haitian schoolboy pushing a beat-up taxi through rush hour traffic. Heads turned on every side. We were lucky: The car quickly started again, and we were off. Soon the driver was able to turn off Delmas to head up the hill via a back way. This went well for awhile, but – almost inevitably – we eventually found a spot in the road were the street was narrowed to one lane by a parked car. The series of full-size dump trucks headed straight toward
us convinced our driver that, all rules of the road aside, they had the right of way. We stopped and waited. The driver kept revving the engine in neutral to keep it from stalling again.

By now we were sitting in three-four inches of grimy, oily, putrid muck. Erik turned and said he didn’t want to have to push again. Not just here, anyway. The laugh helped, I think. After 45 minutes, we made it to the office. It was a long ride.

At this point, John and I wanted to head up the hill, but it was getting dark and beginning to rain. We caught a tap-tap to Petyonvil – not hard to get from the area near our office – and there we looked for a motorcycle.

The most convenient way to get around here is on the back of a motorcycle. Drivers wait at certain central locations to pick up fares. They are more expensive than tap-taps or ordinary taxis, but they have no set routes, and they do a lot of weaving, so they’re not much affected by traffic. Whether they are safe is a hard question. But I don’t feel
especially safer getting around in any of the other ways available to me here. Traffic here is dangerous. Period. But we can’t decide not to get around.

In any case, the cycle took us both, and got us almost as far as John’s place. He lives about a 20-minute walk down the mountain from me. At that point, the road is so steep that the driver couldn’t get his cycle up in the rain. He started to slide back. So we got off, and walked.

I’m not sure that rush hour here is worse than it is in Chicago or Washington or New York. It’s certainly more eventful.

On a recent Sunday, I was in the Catholic church on our mountain. The occasion was a happy one. Frenel, my next door neighbor and Mèt Anténor’s youngest brother, asked me to take some pictures at the baptism of his infant son. I was delighted. I like Frenel, and I had never been to a baptism nor – at the time when Frenel asked – to a Haitian religious service at all. The chance to do someone a favor and see something new had quite a draw.

My preparations were a little complicated. I had a shirt, a tie, and some slacks, but no shoes. Haitians really dress up for church – they dress up for almost everything – so neither sandals nor dirty sneakers seemed quite right. I eventually borrowed snappy dress loafers from Richard, a fast-growing teen who lives down the road. They were a size too large for me, and two for him, but he can’t buy dress shoes every year. He seemed pleased to be doing me the favor, and by early Sunday morning he had shined the shoes to stunning brightness and had delivered them to my room. My clothes looked decent enough, I thought, but the trip up the mountain in my book bag left them looking less than freshly pressed. Not so unusual for me. But as soon as I had them on, the whole neighborhood affirmed that I would have to iron them.

Those who know me well would surely doubt it, but I actually can iron. I learned how in Junior High School. We all took “Home Economics ” in 8th grade. When I was in 7th grade, H.E. was for girls and Shop was for boys, but my 8th grade year was when Massachusetts decided that separating classrooms by gender in public schools was not ok. We all took both. So when the neighborhood said that I must iron, I asked for the coal-filled iron, spread a sheet on the kitchen table, and got ready to start. Neighbors gathered in stunned silence to watch. As soon as I started on the shirt, Casnel decided I
wasn’t doing it right. He shooed me away, and did it himself. When he finished, he assigned Toto to do the pants. I got dressed then, but Madanm Anténor wasn’t quite satisfied. She thought I needed a belt, so she called Toto over and sent him to get his. I put it on, she looked me over, nodded and said I would do.

I walked down the road to the church together with Frenel himself. It’s a pretty little building, with a high-peaked roof and a small steeple. Its pale yellow walls and concrete floor are kept as clean as the sometimes-dusty, sometimes-muddy mountain will allow. It sits up on a slope overlooking the road, with a spectacular view of the plain below. On a clear day, you can see the Caribbean and the island of Lagonav to the west, and the Dominican Republic to the east.

The service was chaotic. The priest only visits once a month or so, and the baptism had to be planned well in advance. About ten children were registered to take part. That itself would have meant ten children, ten pairs of parents, and ten pairs of godparents gathered around the priest on the small platform in front of the congregation. But the population on the mountain is growing quickly. Maybe too quickly. More than twenty infants showed up. There was paperwork to been done. The qualifications of more than ten extra sets of godparents had to be checked. The president of the congregation and his teenage assistant worked furiously – the former almost ferociously – to get forms filled out. They themselves had lots of writing to do, and they had to help the many illiterate parents as well.

Despite their frenzy, we were well more than an hour late. The congregation and the choir chanted prayers responsively while we were waiting. It was terribly hot, there were young children crying and older ones fidgeting all over the place, and time seemed to pass slowly.

In the end, though, it was a beautiful afternoon – an afternoon of lovely prayers and happy people. Our whole neighborhood returned as one to our lakou for a great feast that Madanm Anténor and Toto’s mother, Madanm Boby, had been preparing at Frenel’s house.

Unfortunately, Sunday’s mass was my second in two days. The first trip was not a happy one. The Saturday before the baptism, I went to the cathedral in downtown Prtoprens for a funeral. The brother of a close friend here had died after a long illness. He was a young man, slightly younger than I am. All the usual things you would say about a funeral were true. The man’s family was miserable. Friends converged on them with attempts at consolation. My friend stood in the middle of it all, taking it courageously upon himself
to offer his mother such support as he could. Such support as is possible under the circumstances.

But what struck me most of all was that it was not one funeral, but four. I know nothing of the other three deaths. The four stories were entirely unrelated. But just as too many infants are born here, too many people die here, too. The cathedral cannot handle each funeral separately. Four coffins were before us; four unrelated families had to grieve together.

That’s not all. My friend John and I were at the funeral together. We got there by motorcycle taxi. After the funeral, as the driver drove us up the hill out of Pòtoprens, he told us the following story: While we were in the cathedral, a six-year-old girl had been found dead nearby. It seems she had been sent by her family to fetch water from the local cistern. She lost her balance, fell in, and drowned. Nobody was around to see her fall, no one to hear her cry. I don’t know how many families will be grieving together with hers.

I had already decide to write this week about my work here-in fact, I had already done the writing-when I had an adventure that I thought I’d add. It’s not really a story about life in Haiti so much as one about Steven’s life, but it seems worth sharing. Things did, eventually, turn out fine-well enough, anyway-even though it didn’t seem as though they would. For example: the torrential downpour that caught me as I went up the mountain washed most of the blood out of my hair. Things do, generally, work out.

My parents, grandmother, and aunt will see this sketch, so I should add right away that, though the blood was, indeed, mine, I am fine and was fine at every point in this story. It only seemed otherwise.

My trip home usually starts at the corner of Rue Delmas and Delmas 75. There I wait for public transportation to take me to the top of Rue Delmas in Petyonvil. From there I either take another public ride to Bwa Moket, or I walk the rest of the way. “Public transportation” is a misnomer here. The vehicles are privately owned, and they are of all sorts. One typical kind is a pick-up truck. Twelve to fifteen people climb onto two opposing benches in the back. Another one or two people might stand on the rear bumper and hang on tight. At best, it’s pretty uncomfortable.

Wednesday, I saw one approaching that was almost empty. I had to hurry to catch it, but it seemed worth the rush for a more spacious ride. It was already clear that rain would come, so I was in a hurry to get home, too. The driver must not have seen me rushing across the street toward him, because he started to pull away. I jumped onto the back without trouble, though. Except that I bumped my head.

Now, few whites ride regular public transportation here, so I am used to being stared at and talked about. I try not to notice. I start little conversations or I join the ones they start. As if nothing strange were happening at all. The two sitting with me Wednesday were indeed staring. And I could understand it. I hit my head pretty hard, noticeably so. I start out here as a public spectacle, just by being white, but my little hop into the back of their ride certainly didn’t help.

But soon they were pointing, and when I wiped what I thought was sweat out of my face, I knew why. Blood was pouring into my eyes.

Remember, Mom, I really was in no danger at any time during this story.

I am reading Deutoronomy these days, so I immediately remembered that Moses emphasizes that we are not to eat the blood, “because the blood is the life.” I got back off the truck, headed back towards my office, and watched descending sheets of my life turn my eyeglasses opaque.

As I walked back to the office, not a head failed to turn. People pointed. They told those who were with them to turn and look.. They asked me what had happened, whether I was ok, where I was going. When Sayil, the housemaster at our office, saw me walk up he yelled and asked whether some indeterminate “they” had shot me. “No,” I said, “I bumped my head.”

Within a few minutes, the bleeding had stopped. I was able to wash up, change clothes, and try again to head home. Now I really was in a hurry both because the rain was clear about to start and because the family I stay with does not yet approve of the notion of my arriving at night. They are worried that the unlit walk up the mountain would be dangerous for me. And indeed it might be.

My rushing, though, was futile. The rain poured down on me most of the last 45 minutes of my walk. But, as I said, it washed a lot of the blood away.

People here are telling me to be more careful. I really do try.

They love soccer on the mountain. I should say, the boys love soccer. The Mia Hamm phenomenon hasn’t reached here yet. Little girls play with the littlest boys, but by the time they’re teens, it’s an all-boy sport.

They especially love Brazilian soccer. They feel some connection to the Brazilians. Haitians have their own nicknames for many of the Brazilian stars, and each Haitian boy has one whom he tries to emulate: Ronaldo, Rivaldo, Bebeto, Roberto Carlos. They tell me I play like Dunga, but what they’re really looking at is his short, graying hair. Brazil’s loss to France in the finals of the last World Cup was a double tragedy: French victory
combined with Brazilian defeat.

Space to play in is hard to come by on our steep, rocky, densely populated mountain, but any small clearing is likely enough to host a game of whatever size it will bear. On some of the smallest spots-short, relatively flat stretches of our narrow, unpaved road, for example-you’ll find games of two-on-two. Anything relatively round will serve as a ball. Very often, little boys will use unripe grapefruit. As the zest scrapes against their rock-strewn field, the smell of the citrus wafts teasingly through the air.

Since I arrived in August, the older boys in Ka Glo have had a first-rate leather ball, courtesy of Leo Pickens, the Director of Athletics at St. John’s College. There are regular games of 4-on-4 in the 30 by 50 foot clearing that opens beneath the giant mapou tree outside my gate. The games consist of a lot of shooting and a tremendous amount of shouting. The whole neighborhood gathers to watch. There’s singing and encouragement and ridicule of all sorts.

The field they play on is about as bad for the ball as one can imagine. It’s thickly strewn with jagged rocks ranging from marble-size to baseball-size and larger. The first few weeks I was constantly filling the ball up for the boys with the small pump that Leo sent with their ball. One day, they weren’t playing, and I asked why. It turns out that the ball was already torn and wouldn’t hold air at all. I figured it was back to grapefruit.

A few days later, the ball made a new appearance. Eli and Jinyò had taken it to the market in Bwa Moket, a 45 minute walk down the mountain, where they found someone to repair it. Jinyò is one of the younger teens. At 15, he’s smaller and weaker than the older boys he plays with. On our small, restrictive field, it’s hard for him to compete. But Jinyò can play. Beautifully. Dribbling, faking, shooting from all angles. Like most of the
boys, he plays in flip-flops or barefoot. He’ll put a sneaker one of his feet if he can find one. I’ve rarely seen him with two. Everyone loves watching him. He thinks nothing of kicking the ball backwards over his head, even though falling on his back means landing painfully on the rocky ground.

When Eli and Jinyò returned from Bwa Moket, the ball was back in action, good as new. For a few weeks, anyway.

But this is where things get interesting. One day I saw Jinyò with the ball. It was obviously torn again. I looked it over, and noticed that in the course of trying to pump the torn ball up, the kids had displaced the valve that the needle enters. I figured the ball was finished. I asked Jinyò what he planned to do with it, and he said that he was leaving things to Eli.

Now, Eli is a very short, asthmatic 16-year-old boy. He is much smaller than the other boys, and he is convinced his asthma will prevent him from ever growing much. It amuses him that I call him “Big Eli” to distinguish him from the other Eli, a little boy of six or seven, in our village. He rarely plays because of his asthma, but he watches. He watches everything, and he really pays attention. I followed Jinyò to find him, and I sat down to do some watching myself.

It turns out that Eli didn’t go with Jinyò to Bwa Moket for nothing. He had carefully observed the man they took their ball to, and was now prepared to try to repair the ball himself. He had a knife, a needle, and some thick thread. He worked slowly, with extraordinary patience. He cut the ball open, repaired a couple of new leaks, re-attached the valve, and sewed the ball up again. A couple of hours later, the boys were playing again and Eli was watching.

The other day, when I got home, Eli was sitting on one of the benches in front of my porch. Once again, he had needle and thread in hand. But this time, instead of the ball that Leo gave us, he had a pile of small, carefully cut-out hexagons and pentagons in worn brown leather. Somewhere, his friends had found him a small, black rubber bladder and an old leather book bag that he had already cut up. Big Eli was making a ball from scratch. It took a lot of doing. He had to sew things together and tear them apart again several times through the afternoon. By early evening, he was finished. Once again, he had to sit and watch others enjoy his work. I didn’t hear anyone thank him, or even speak well of the work he had done. But they do talk to him and of him with genuine respect. And so do I.

Recently, I participated in my first soccer riot. My own role was mercifully small. Richard and Nikson, the boys who brought me to the game, whisked me away at the first sign of trouble. But it was an adventure nonetheless.

It turns out that there is something of a soccer field on our mountain, and an organized team that uses it as home. The field is a 30 minute, uphill hike from Ka Glo, where I live. The hike leads away from the main road, along a narrow, narrow path, that rises almost straight up. The field is something to behold. It’s about the size of an ice hockey rink. The men play 6-on-6, plus goalies. If the field had any straight lines, it would be an irregular
trapezoid, but it has none. It’s bordered on one length by the path which continues up the mountain towards Fò Jak; on the other, there’s a barbed-wire fence nominally protecting a bean field.

The play was exciting. Our home team, “Argentina,” fell behind early on a lovely goal – a chip from right midfield that reached a striker darting down the left sideline towards the goal, and the game stayed 1-0 for quite awhile.

Though both teams had guys that could really play, they didn’t have the space to make things happen. One player whom I know well – his name is Alen – can serve to explain. He is about 6’2″, and probably weighs almost 200 lbs. In other words, he’s a big man. He played defense, and was shooting threateningly on goal from well inside his own team’s proportionately small penalty area. He was easily able to cover enough space to make setting up a play cleanly almost impossible. Other players were smaller than Alen, but they were all so closely packed that it was hard for anything interesting to develop. There just was no room.

Space here always seems to me short. The pick-up trucks I ride to the top of Rue Delmas will hold 15 people or more stuffed into the back. The rides I sometimes get from there to Bwa Moket are very small, four door sedans – Honda Civics, Toyota Tercels, and the like. They regularly carry six passengers and a driver, plus assorted luggage, produce, and small children. My friend Jowel, his wife, and 9 kids live with occasional guests in a 15 by 25 foot house with two rooms. Each room has a small bed. There are too many people here in Haiti, and there’s too little habitable room.

The problem’s not just aesthetic. Some of the steepest hillsides on our mountain are heavily farmed, and the consequent soil erosion is everywhere to see. The eternally regenerating rockiness of the road up the hill is only the most obvious sign. In a rainstorm, it can be positively hazardous with all the soil and stone that the torrents of unabsorbed water wash across it. The hillsides are farmed, because that’s the land that the folks on the mountain have, but the long term problem that’s created is clear enough. I can’t guess whether there’s a solution.

Back to the game. Late in the second half, Argentina scored to tie the score. It was a corner kick, from a corner so far in front of the goal it should have been in line with that the ball didn’t have to hook even a bit to sneak in. At this point, players and fans grew tense. Even so, it all seemed friendly enough to me, and when Nikson walked casually over and said, “If there’s a fight, we’ll run right away.”

I was taken aback. I saw no sign of trouble. Within two or three minutes, though, a hard foul led to pushing on the field, which led in turn to pushing among opposing fans. The penultimate sound I heard was the crack of a homemade wooden goalpost, splitting as a fan was thrown through it. The last thing I heard was the sound of the friends of Nikson and Richard shouting that they were “//kapon//”, or cowards, for leaving the
game so quickly.

It was a good thing we left when we did. For me, at least. It was growing dark, and if we had been on the road any later, the boys would have had to physically guide me, slow step by slow step, down the steep and rocky unlit path. They weren’t happy about the name-calling they suffered, and which they continued to suffer for several days, but they were pretty sure that my presence left them no choice. People will look after you when you let them.

Last week, I began to write about a question that emerges in the very center of the work we are trying to do here. The question is: What does it mean to take responsibility for one’s education. This question does indeed reach the heart of what we’re trying to do, and I said last week that my letter would be about the theory behind it. Even so, I tried to raise that theoretical question in a concrete, and therefore dramatic, way. This week,
I’m going straight theory. There are no compelling characters or specific events in what I have to say, but I hope it will be worth reading nonetheless.

Though there are many ways in which we do or don’t take or accept responsibility, I defined taking responsibility as taking a share of control. We are responsible for our own education in a very special way when we are in a position to push our own questions and to encourage those of our peers, when we are in a position to search together with them for answers to our questions and theirs.

But the notion of helping people take control is a complex one. It can be well expressed as a logical problem, though it is also much more than that. In logical terms, the problem is this: If I, as a teacher, give my students control our class, haven’t I already kept control for myself? The act of giving is my act, my decision, my initiative. My students, in taking control, would be doing what I am telling them to do. I myself am no logician, but I smell a contradiction in there somewhere. How do we give up control without retaining it at another level?

The simplest answer might be that we don’t. There are aspects of the Touchstones process, the process we are working with here, that a discussion group leader is likely to manage for as long as his or her group works together. These aspects may shift as a group’s work progresses, but a teacher is never likely to give up all control permanently.

The trick is to understand responsibility, or control, as an issue richer than the logic of yes and no, black and white. Rather than viewing myself, as a discussion leader, as someone who gives control to my students, I try to think of myself as helping to open empty spaces in which student initiative, or student control, might emerge. This weird-sounding claim can be reduced to something more straight forward: I focus on nurturing the possibility of silence.

Even this – maybe this most of all – needs explaining, along at least two lines. First, how is silence a way to help students take control? Second, how do I nurture the possibility of silence?

The first question is relatively easy to talk about. Most of us are uncomfortable with prolonged silence in our conversations, let alone in a discussion class in a school. We fidget. We start to wonder what is happening and what should be happening. Often enough someone will break the silence with a joke, “Don’t everyone talk at once.”

I think what makes us uncomfortable is a sense that the orderliness of what we’re doing is dissipating. The pleasant feeling that we know what we’re doing and, very roughly at least, what will happen next starts to fade. What’s being lost is the directed-ness of the conversation. As that directed-ness dissolves, a couple of things could happen. Often, students will look to me, their discussion-leader, to get the conversation back “on track,” whether by refocusing us on whatever we have been discussing or by proposing a new
question. I often could get things going again, and sometimes I do, but that is not my first choice. Another possibility is that a student will get us back on track, or will offer a new track.

This is more what I am hoping for, but consider what’s happening in either case. A student, whether asking for my help or charting a new course without me, has decided that the conversation needs direction and is acting to remedy the situation. This is already the first step towards taking control. Even if he or she is only asking for my help, that is a step. If the student re-focuses our work without me, then his or her assumption of
responsibility is that much greater. In neither case am I handing control to anyone. In both cases, I am merely watching my own control die a slow death.

The more difficult question is how I can, as a discussion leader, nurture such silence. It’s rarely adequate, or even desirable, for me to simply watch a conversation die. Interest in our shared activity can easily die with it. My own sense is that I best nurture silence when I am working to make the comfortable flow of the conversation hard. I believe it is my job to challenge all the easy aspects of the conversations I lead.

That means first and foremost challenging to-my-mind easy understandings or assumptions about the subjects we’re discussing, most especially when those easy ways of talking involve too-easily dismissing a class’s most useful tool: the book or text it is reading. It is part of my job to help authors speak to us forcefully. Much of what I do in a class involves helping students to see how hard I find the most important questions, whether questions of interpetation or questions of much larger scope. But it can also involve challenging the comfortable ways the process sometimes moves: our comfortably reducing some participants to silence, whether by the force of our own personality or our lack of interest in their voice; our comfortably talking without listening – really listening – to what others have to say; our comfortably banishing difficult questions from discussion; our comfortably ignoring any of the difficult aspects of our shared task.

It would be a mistake for me to push to make working together impossible – we all need to feel as though we’re getting somewhere. But neither should conversations ever be too easy. Is it somewhere in Aeschylus that there’s mention of the beauty of difficult things?

I’ve said before that our work’s central mission is to teach a process that helps people take over responsibility for their own education. This is a complicated claim, requiring some explanation. I thought I would attempt the beginning of one.

The claim carries a harsh implication: that someone or other is, currently, not taking responsibility for his or her education. And when I think about the lengths many Haitians I know go to for an education, the charge seems terribly, patently unfair.

Let me give some examples. I met a boy – somewhere in his late teens – going down the mountain the other day. It turns out he already knew me. He lives about 200 yards farther than I do up the main road that leads from Bwa Moket past Ka Glo. The lakou, or cluster of houses, that he lives in is significantly poorer than my own, but somehow they had been sending him to school, and he appeared to be an excellent student. He spoke a few words of English with me, and they were fluid and correct. I wondered where the folks
where he lives could have gotten the money to send him to a decent school.

As we walked down the mountain, we talked, and he asked if we could make a little detour. I looked to Toto, who was walking with me, and we quickly agreed. It turned out that he had to make a stop at Malik, the first larger town down the mountain from me. It’s where good electricity and phone service end, so there are a number of wealthier Haitians who live there to get out of the Pòtoprens heat.

One of these wealthier Haitians, or boujwa, is a former minister in the national government, and he did very well for himself during his time in office. He was, as Toto told me quietly, a “gran manjè,” or “big eater.” That’s idiomatic Kreyol for a corrupt official. Toto began to explain. The gran manjè is related to them both. The boy that was going to see him, though, depends on his help. His own family somehow scrapes together a chunk of the money he needs for school, but the boy needs more. For reasons I don’t yet understand, he needs a “patwon,” too. The boy was humbly visiting a nasty man he does not like to beg for a favor – a letter of reference, I think. Though schools have been open for a week or two, and though the man had agreed to write for the boy, the boy was still waiting. As he told me later, his patwon is not “prese.” He’s in no hurry. For a few minutes as the three of us continued down the mountain, the boy tried to explain that the man isn’t so bad. In the end, he admitted to us that it was nasty business.

But what choice does he have? By the time we reached Petyonvil, he was explaining to me how I could arrange to teach at a Haitian university next year. That would connect me to the university system. And that, he didn’t quite say, would connect him. He only has one more year of high school. He’s thinking ahead.

Another example: Now that school has started, one sees young people studying almost everywhere one looks. At night, in Pòtoprens, where electricity in homes is spotty, you see them sitting or pacing under streetlights, chanting texts in French, in an exercise of usually uncomprehending memorization. Where I live, where there are no streetlights,
children get up with the sun to chant before they have to leave for school, usually by six in the morning. At night, they gather around kerosene lamps, squinting as they chant.

One more: Kasann – I’ll write more about her sometime – is the oldest child in the home I stay in. A beautiful little 12-year-old girl. She finished elementary school last year, and is now starting secondary school. A few weeks ago, I came home to find her bawling in our pantry. She had just learned that though she had graduated, and though she had been admitted into the school she now attends, she would not be receiving her diploma. She had missed passing the national exam by the slimmest of margins. She was
inconsolable.

The question is this: In a place where proud young people humble themselves, where they seek out any source of light than can permit them a few extra minutes of studying, where a young girl can be heartbroken because she hasn’t quite captured her diploma, in such a place, what does it mean to suggest that people are not taking responsibility for their own education?

People here could hardly care about and value their education any more than they do, it seems. Clearly they are taking responsibility, accepting responsibility, in a very deep way, in a way that reaches to their hearts. And I have not even begun to mention the sacrifices people make to put together the money they need.

Taking responsibility is a complex notion. Many of the young people I know here are indeed taking responsibility. They’re taking responsibility for entering into an educational process that they do not, however, own. They struggle to get themselves a place in a classroom where they do not pursue their own questions, a classroom in which all initiative is outside themselves, where they are passive respondents – copying, reciting, sitting in silence.

When I say that we are introducing people to a process that can help students take increasing responsibility for their own education, I mean that it is a process which invites students to take initiative. The Touchstones process, which we here call Wonn Refleksyon, encourages students to develop the habits of forming and pushing their own questions and of working together towards answers. They gradually assume not only responsibility for taking their places in their classroom, but for taking control of the classroom as well.

I’ll write more about this next week.