Last semester, I introduced a new practice into my classes at Shimer College. Every few weeks, we spent the beginning of class evaluating ourselves. I asked each student to say a few words about what they had liked most about their own contribution to class over the previous couple of weeks and to share some thoughts as to what they would like to accomplish in the weeks to come. I participated in the evaluations just as everyone else did, speaking of my own goals and the ways in which I was working towards them. I think the evaluations were valuable as a way to keep us all thinking about what we were doing well and where we wanted to improve.

Self-evaluation plays a central role in the kind of education I believe in. Members of a group can only take responsibility for the progress they make together if they are clear about where they are and where they want to be. This is true whether the group is a class or another kind of gathering. Comments and grades from a group’s teacher or a leader cannot substitute for its members’ own thoughtfulness. And that thoughtfulness emerges most clearly when we try to put what we think into words.

The public self-evaluation I requested of my Shimer students was hard for them. Initially, they were inclined towards familiar, easy, and not very helpful analyses. They would say they needed to talk more in class or less, that they needed to read more carefully. Only over the course of the semester did their thoughts about themselves start to take clearer and more specific shape.

We are all, perhaps, more accustomed to responding to others’ views of us than to struggling to express our own. For the students with whom my colleagues and I are working in Haiti, evaluation is that much more unfamiliar. They are told what classes they will take, what those classes will teach, and they are evaluated in the most straightforward way by regular examinations. They are not generally asked how a class is going or whether their teachers are working with them well. So it was surely a surprise to our 9th and 10th graders at the Institut Abélard when Johny and I started class by telling them that we’d like to talk about how we and they thought class was going.

Johny and I shared the sense that it wasn’t going very well. The project that we brought to the students was translation. We chose Andromache, a classic French play by Racine that is a regular part of high school French literature classes in Haiti. Johny and I had felt that translating with the students could accomplish several things. It would push them to understand the French they read more exactly than they are accustomed to doing and to express themselves in written Creole with more than their usual care. In addition, it would be a chance to read a play that they might otherwise only read about and do so in a manner that would leave it up to them to decide what they think about it. Finally, it would give them a chance to work together in a class where they would share the responsibility to teach themselves and one another. The schools’ leadership was excited enough about the experiment that it agreed to add the activity to the students’ official program for the rest of the year.

But the clearest sign that something was missing was that few of the students were preparing for class. We had been assigning them to translate a number of lines at home each week, and most were just not bothering. A few would. In fact they were doing a pretty good job of it. And they would put their translations on the blackboard for the group to study. But most were, at best, participating only by criticizing details that they found lacking in their classmates’ work, the kind of details that suggest themselves to someone who hasn’t bothered to give a reading much thought. We had a long discussion, for example, about how to spell the play’s French names. At worst, the students would simply disengage for the hour that we spent together.

So Johny and I decided to talk with the students about our impressions and to ask them for theirs. What we discovered was saddening, but also encouraging.

After much hemming and hawing, a number of the students reported that they found our discussions frustrating because Johny and I were not telling them who among them was right and who wrong. Without decisive feedback of that kind from us, they felt that their work wasn’t leading them anywhere. Pushed farther, some also complained that our style wasn’t forceful or pushy enough. We were told that we were insufficiently move, which means mean or nasty, that we were too dou, or soft.

Needless to say, the comments made us sad because they expressed just the views that we want to change. We are committed to pushing the students to look more to themselves for answers, especially when answers are matters of individual judgment, and to inviting a collaboration based on something other than the authority we have as their teachers. At the same time, the students’ willingness to criticize us was encouraging. It made it important that we respond in a way that shows them that their views matter; we could not simply respond by arguing insistently for our own views. We could not tell them that we wanted them to take more control and then fail to incorporate their opinions into our plans.

We felt trapped. So I playfully slapped the young man who asked us to be more move on the back of the head. That brought out some laughter. More importantly, Johny and I agreed that we would collect written homework each week and return it with corrections and suggestions. All this could push the classes back towards more conventional teaching, and it will be our job to see that that doesn’t happen.

It will be hard. Johny and I are not able to spend a lot of time together, and it could take a lot of time to find ways to respond to the students’ written work that both gives them the comfortable sense that they are being judged and helps them see the questions their work raises that are beyond simple answers we can be expected to provide.

I hope that the more the students see that their work raises real and difficult questions, the less satisfied they’ll be with answers from Johny and me. That might be what they need to start looking towards themselves, but we do not know that it is.

We ourselves are in a situation of great uncertainty, but that’s just as things should be. After all, the problems our classes confront us with are closely bound to our reasons for leading them.

I asked Byton the following question: If we were talking to someone, and I mentioned that you had had a younger brother named Oli who got sick and died when he was about five, would you correct me?

He and I were talking about some of the differences in the ways that we look at things, and I wanted to ask him about lougawou, the mystical beasts that are said to feed on Haitian children. He had long ago told me that Oli had been eaten by a lougawou, and I had never been very clear about what he meant by that. It was a problem of communication that none of my efforts seemed able to solve. Byton would say that he doesn’t believe in lougawou, but that they are a reality, and I couldn’t make any sense of it. We were sitting with Ronald, a friend who’s a fourth-year med student, and he only made things harder. He would not, he said, base his treatment of a sick child on the thought that the child’s spirit had been eaten because he doesn’t believe in such things. At the same time, he added, he could not, as a doctor, ignore such a possibility, because it is something real.

Communication is often a problem for me here. Some of it has to do with my Creole. Though I am always improving, and though my colleagues and I manage pretty well, there’s still stuff that I miss or that I have trouble saying.

But there are other issues, too. Issues that emerge especially in my work, when I am trying to say something too strange to fit comfortably with the habits or expectations of those I’m speaking with.
It was only a couple of weeks ago that I was saying how little I have to do these days with Wonn Refleksyon, the Haitian adaptation of the Touchstones Discussion Project (www.touchstones.org) that brought me to Haiti in 1997. That has changed, and I couldn’t be happier about it. Two pieces of work have developed since then. One is a large collaboration with Fonkoze (www.fonkoze.org), the bank that serves thousands of Haiti’s poor. The other is a long-term workshop organized by GTAPF, a grassroots organization based in a rural area outside of Darbonne.

There’s a lot to be said about the Fonkoze project, partly because the organization itself is so compelling and partly because what Frémy and I have been asked to help them create is such an exciting new direction for us. They want us to guide them as they develop a basic literacy curriculum based on combining an adaptation of Wonn Refleksyon with the literacy game they have used for years, and – what’s most exciting to me – they want us to figure out a way to effectively present the curriculum to literacy teachers who are not teachers but are, instead, market women willing to teach other market women to read.

Nevertheless, I want right now to write about GTAPF. The work that Frémy and I are doing with them is exposing a very basic problem in our practice, and it’s doing it in a helpful way and at a helpful time. The problem expresses itself when we regularly discover that there are things we would have thought to be obvious that the folks we’re working with do not understand. Here the communication problem is not my Creole. Frémy is struggling as much as I am.

GTAPF is based in Fayette. It’s a farming area near the spring that supplies much of the region, including the city of Léogane. It sits at the base of the hills that rise just outside the Léogane plain and that lead to mountains that bar the way to Jacmel in the south. It’s lush with trees and gardens. There’s no town to speak of. The small houses seem pretty evenly scattered in small clusters of two or three or four.

GTAPF is the local peasant organization, and it’s working on a couple of different projects. One is latrines, a collaboration with outside funding sources to build latrines for its members. Having good latrines is an important public health issue. A second is adult literacy. For a couple of years, different attempts were made to offer literacy classes in the region but they didn’t really take. They didn’t hold the interest of participants. Last year, with support from Shimer College, GTAPF was able to introduce a new literacy program emphasizing an approach which encourages students to tell, and then write down, their own stories. They turn the stories into small books, which they also illustrate. The approach has been a big success. A large number of students were able to graduate from the first year of the program in early January.

A second grant from Shimer College has made a second year of literacy possible. The centers that were active last year are offering an advanced literacy class to their students, and several new centers that are opening. GTAPF wants to integrate Wonn Refleksyon into the work of all the centers. Once each week, the teachers will lead discussions. The second-year centers can use the book of basic texts in Creole, which was the first one we developed for use here. The first-year centers will need to use our newest book, which uses images and Haitian proverbs instead of texts.

GTAPF needed to prepare its literacy teachers to use Wonn Refleksyon, and Frémy and I were happy to sign up for that work ourselves. It offered us a couple of advantages. First, though Frémy and I consult one another very closely regarding all our work, we do not right now have a regular group that we work with together. The work with Fonkoze is irregular, and the other groups we’re participating in right now involve only one or the other of us. Taking on a project we would carry out jointly seemed like a good idea. Second, I have not participated in serious Wonn Refleksyon training in a long time, and it would be useful to me in particular to relearn how such training can work.

When it became clear that we were all interested in a longer, fuller workshop, GTAPF decided to add some additional participants. The organization works together with other peasant organizations in the mountains outside of Fayette, and its leadership felt that if representatives from those groups participated in a Wonn Refleksyon training the groups themselves might be able to function more effectively and more democratically.
So Frémy and I scheduled a weekly, two-hour meeting with the group of twelve. In addition, we planned a one-time, two-day workshop. We started three weeks ago, and held the two-day session last week. Initially, we wanted to introduce the group to the Wonn Refleksyon process by letting them experience what it feels like to be part of a discussion of a text, an image, or a proverb. At the same time, we also felt a little pressed to help them arrive quickly at the point from which they would feel comfortable leading discussions because they are in fact scheduled to start doing so soon.

The first two weeks, we divided the sessions into two activities. Frémy and I each led a discussion. When time came for the two-day event, we decided to spent the first morning leading more discussions, but also inviting discussions of the discussions. We wanted to group to start questioning us about what we were doing. That afternoon, a pair of the groups’ participants would take responsibility for leading a discussion. We would spend the lunch break with them helping them plan what they wanted to accomplish and how. The last part of the day could then be spent, first, in a larger discussion of the various examples of leadership the group had seen. We’d then finish with a very short introduction to the guidebook for discussion leaders that the Wonn Refleksyon team produced a couple of years ago. We would invite three different participants volunteer to lead three discussions on the second day of the workshop. They would have their copies of the guidebook, which they could use to plan their discussions at home.

This last part of our plan failed in the most interesting way. When we returned on day two, it became clear that the folks who had volunteered to lead the group had not looked at the guidebook in advance. They held it in their hands as they directed the group, in the way that inexperienced cooks will work from a recipe that they’ve never read. The first participant-leader understood even less well. He started his session with every intention of leading a discussion on the pages from the guidebook instead of on the reading they were meant to accompany. Frémy and I had assumed, without even saying as much to one another, that assigning leadership of the groups in advance would mean that the leaders would prepare, but we were working with people who had never used anything like our guidebook. It’s relationship to the class they would lead was mysterious to them. Our preference – perhaps I should say “our prejudice” – for letting people discover what they think our work is about and how it functions had lined up our volunteers for failure. Fortunately, the ambience in the group is such that they could fail without really being hurt.

In any case, yesterday I met again with the group. Frémy was away. I decided to take the bull by the horns. Instead of jumping into the discussion I intended to lead, I spoke at some length at the start about my goal for the day – presenting the way the guidebook works – and my reasons for setting that goal. I then led a discussion which closely, but not exactly, followed the guidebook’s instructions.

The group spent some time reading the section of the guidebook I had followed and talking about how I had used it and where I had diverged. This was not a discussion. It was a question-and-answer session, and I think it helped. They noticed how much I had prepared in advance and saw the advantages. They saw the changes that I made relative to the guidebook’s instructions, and they asked me about them, so they got to see me thinking about what would succeed with our group.

They still have some hard work to do. For one thing, when it came time to judge the day’s events, they seemed to have forgotten our specific goals and instead judged only that they had had a good discussion in which everyone participated well. That’s nice enough, but a group’s progress depends on a leader’s attention to much more specific goals then that. The guidebook had set some out for us, but they hadn’t caught the group’s attention. Keeping specific goals in mind even as you try to make each discussion feel successful in the more general sense as well is a real challenge.

For me, the session was valuable in a very different and very important way. The group’s clear need finally succeeded in pushing me towards a level of communication that I had not previously achieved. In the last stage of the conversation, I spoke much more, and in a much more teacherly way than I normally would.
The more I work here with people inexperienced at leading discussions, the more I will learn about what I can expect them to discover for themselves and what I should simply say.

Jogging has been going well. I have a new route that I’m enjoying. I run up the hill past Blancha towards Divye. Just below the market in Grifen, I head down towards Franswa. I turn at the church in Franswa, and then descend past Kafou Mortel to Nan Konble. From there, it’s a short, hard uphill run back to Ka Glo. The whole thing takes a little less than an hour. Though I’m not in Ka Glo as much as I’d like to be – I sleep there two or thee nights most weeks – when I’m there, I’m jogging. And that feels good.

The other day, as I was working my way up the steep stretch of road that leads to lower Blancha, I passed Micanol. He was hiking up the hill with a five-gallon bucket of water on his head. He goes down each morning to Ba Osiya, a ten minute walk from his parents’ house, to get the water from the public faucet there. He makes three or four trips each day, starting early to avoid the crowd. Five gallons of water is about forty pounds, so the total amount of work he does each day to supply his family with water is considerable.

I often see him during my run, and it makes me wonder. I ask myself why my jogging doesn’t seem pretty silly to him. He has more than enough work to do every day to keep himself both busy and strong. The idea that someone would need to add something otherwise useless – like jogging – to their schedule in order to stay in shape must seem strange. But he has never shown any evidence that he finds my jogging strange.

He works a lot. It’s not just a matter of carrying water. He’s in the final year of a course designed to teach something like general contracting. The course involves masonry and carpentry, but also home design, drawing, classes on building materials, and some other stuff. He started after deciding that he could no longer afford to attend a conventional high school that was not preparing him for a job. He made that decision despite the fact that he had always been a very fine student. We talked about the decision at the time, and it was clear that he partly regretted his sense that he had to make it. Before the start of last year, he decided to return to high school, not instead of the course but in addition to it. He would go to his academic school all morning and then to the professional course all afternoon. He would be in class for something like ten to twelve hours each day, then he’d need to figure out how to do homework and chores. Despite those obstacles, he passed the first part of the national high school exam last summer, qualifying therefore to start his last year of high school in September and to take the second part of the exam this July.

He and I spoke recently about hard work, and it was striking how little he thought about himself. He was much more focused on his parents. When I mentioned that I thought that many Haitians work very hard, he immediately offered his father then his mother as examples. His father is a farmer, and even in this season without rain and, therefore, without planting, he leaves the house before sunrise each day and isn’t back until late. His mother is a marketwoman, hiking the hour or so from Blancha to Petyonvil six days each week to sell various low-margin foodstuffs in a stall in the midst of the market.

It would be hard to spend a lot of time in Haiti without thinking about work. I often hear colleagues at Shimer and other folks back home complaining that they are busy. I sometimes engage in the practice myself. But the only time I’ve ever heard my Haitian friends and colleagues complain that they are busy is when they are explaining why they had no time to do something specific that they had expected or hoped to be able to do. What I recognize from the States – the talk of busy-ness as though it was an undesirable state that one could find oneself trapped in, a kind of disease – is something I just don’t hear here.

This is true, though many people I know are doing something or other almost all the time. If Madanm Anténor isn’t cleaning some part of her home, she’s in the kitchen preparing food or headed off to work or to do the marketing. From my back porch I can see the fire in her kitchen light up light up before dawn each day when I’m in Glo. The last few hours before bed, she sits in her pantry where her children do their schoolwork and prepares a supper and, then, the ingredients she will need for the meals she’ll prepare the next day. She’s never idle, yet I’ve never heard her say that she’s too busy.

When I’m in Matenwa, I live next door to Abner Sauveur, the principal of the school I work with there, and it almost never happens that I see him sitting around his pleasant front porch, relaxing. If he isn’t at the school leading a class, he’s in the school’s garden or his own, or he’s meeting with some or all of his faculty or headed to Ansagale on school business or to a literacy center or a meeting of the grassroots network he’s a part of.

One last example: In Darbonne I know a woman name Sipòtè. I doubt it’s her real name, but it’s what she goes by. It means “supporter.” She has business selling food at the side of the road that leads from the Darbonne tap-tap station to Frémy’s house, where I stay when I’m there. She serves big midday meals: rice with bean sauce or vegetable sauce or both. The servings are large enough that I had to make a special arrangement with her so that I could get a smaller portion. She’s never stopped to count how many people she feeds each day, but she thinks it’s in the neighborhood of two hundered.

In fact, she never really stops at all. She’s sitting at the side of the road by 5:00 AM and is there into the evening preparing the day’s food, serving it, or doing clean-up and prep work for the following day. Her children work with her, as do a couple of adult employees. I try to spend a few minutes sitting with them as I return from the station where I have coffee most mornings here, and they like to chat, but they don’t stop working while I’m there.

It’s not that everyone in Haiti is active all the time. There’s idleness her, lot’s of it, just as you’d expect in a place where unemployment figures are extraordinarily high. It’s just that being busy is not a problem I find my Haitian friends and colleagues presenting themselves as having.

I suspect it has something to do with what it really means to be busy. One thing I noticed when I was Dean at Shimer is that there was only a weak correlation between the degree to which colleagues and students described themselves as being busy and the amount of work that it seemed as though they were doing. The same is very much true when I consider only myself: There’s not much connection that I’ve noticed between how busy I feel and how much I’m accomplishing.

Being busy has, perhaps, as much to do with our imaginations as with any other part of us. It implies that we’re imagining ourselves doing things other than what we’re doing, that we feel blocked from doing, because what we’re actually doing takes up too much time. It implies that we imagine ourselves entitled to rest that we’re not getting or to quiet times that never come.

For thosed immersed in the lives they lead, too fully engaged to imagine other things they migh be doing, for those wrapped up in what they do, the feeling of busy-ness, busy-ness as a disease, what I’d call “maladi okipe a” just doesn’t exist. That was that point Frémy made as we headed to Fayette, a village on the outskirts of Darbonne, for the first day of a two-day workshop. He put things ironically: the busiest Haitians he knows are, he said, too busy to feel busy. Busy-ness is felt by those who have time on their hands.