I suppose I should always have suspected that life goes on even under what might appear to be dire circumstances. Some of my very dearest friends are Colombians, who have been raising their beautiful children and living their interesting and varied lives all these last years while a violent and complicated civil war is being fought around them.

Then, a few months ago, I myself had the experience of crossing what was then something like the front line in a war of attrition between the forces of the UN in Haiti and those of what was then being called the “former military”, irregular thugs who had put themselves in charge in a couple of parts of the country. They claimed to be former members of the Haitian military that President Aristide disbanded when he returned from exile in 1994. At the time, I was on the way to Hinch with Saül, my godson’s dad, and Saül’s younger brother Job. As we crossed that line, it was striking how little it affected us. The war – if it was a war – was being fought on a level that didn’t touch us; our little visit to the countryside went on as if there was nothing strange about our crossing a market town occupied by a half-organized band of heavily armed men. (See: ToEnch)
Lately as things seem to be spinning out of control in the Port au Prince area it is both striking and instructive to watch, to experience, how life simply continues in all of the good and bad ways in which it goes on all the time.

I have carefully avoided changing names and hiding identities in what I’ve written so far about Haiti. Partly it’s been out of a sense that I have not been writing about people who are guilty or innocent; I have not been writing about people whose true identity needs protecting. Partly too it’s been that I haven’t wanted to turn anyone’s life into something like fiction. What I’ll write right now is different, and I will hide the identities of all those involved. The reasons will be obvious enough.

Several months ago, on a Sunday afternoon, a front yard not too far from where I live erupted in the sound of angry people arguing. It was the unveiling of a great scandal. A man had entered the yard with his three oldest daughters – his wife is deceased – to announce that the third of the daughters, a lovely seventeen-year-old girl, was pregnant by his neighbor’s fifteen-year-old son. He had brought her to his neighbor’s yard with her married older sisters to put the case before the unsuspecting parents. He was demanding an immediate marriage.
The girl insisted that she had been together with a boy only once, and, so, that the question of paternity was clear. There was no suggestion of rape. The boy, for his part, corroborated his part of her story. They had been together. He would not deny it. He too said it had been just once. Though he and his parents strongly suspected that the girl had been with other boys as well, they did not feel that they could simply shut the girl’s claims out of their lives. They are very decent people.

At the same time, they would not consider marriage. The boy is a child. He’s a long way from finishing school, a long way from finishing growing up or even growing. Apart from all the practical issues marriage would Fce him with that he is in no position to address, there is the damage marriage would do to his prospects for the future. And marriage for someone his age isn’t even legal in Haiti.

So there was a scandal and, for awhile, an impasse. The boy’s parents agreed immediately that they would financially support the girl through the pregnancy and then support both the girl and her child for the first weeks or months of its life. They would then pay for a paternity test – an enormous expense for a Haitian family, costing more than twice the average Haitian annual income.

They were able to finance the test by borrowing money from a family friend, but they are far from believing that the test will resolve the problem. If the result is positive, the girl’s family is likely to return to its original demand, marriage. If it’s negative, they are likely to believe the test was a fraud that their relatively-to-them wealthy neighbors were able to buy. The boy’s parents nevertheless decided to have the test done for their own peace of mind. They feel they need to know.

A lovely little boy was born in May and the families now await the results of the test. DNA tests aren’t performed in Haiti. The samples are sent to the States. So they take some time. If the baby is indeed their boy’s child, they will take him in. If he is not, they will not. I don’t know the girl’s family, so I can’t report what they are thinking about.

I am close to another such case right now, though the second isn’t as far advanced as the first. It is, however, in some way much sadder. It involves two restavek children, a boy and a girl, both in their late teens. A restavek is a child who lives outside her or his parents’ home. The word comes from the French for “stay with,” and restavek children stay in homes as domestic servants. Generally they are from families that cannot afford to raise them. Jean Robert Cadet’s book Restavek is a moving account of a way of growing up that is probably hard for most Americans to even imagine. The children’s parents give them up hoping they will find better circumstances than they themselves can provide, but often enough they receive the worst treatment imaginable.

This is not quite the case for these two children. They are treated decently in the houses where they live. The boy lives with his aunt, her daughter, and his grandmother in a one-room shack in a small slum in Delmas, one of Port au Prince’s large suburbs. The girl was living with a woman, no relation to her, whom she calls her aunt and the woman’s two young girls when the woman lost her housing. She asked the boy’s aunt whether the girl and her two daughters could stay temporarily in the boy’s aunt’s house. So, for awhile, the house’s one small room was home to the boy and six girls and women, ages six to seventy.

Somehow, in those crowded conditions, the girl and the boy found a way to share an intimate moment. I have heard not the slightest suggestion that he forced her. But now she is very much pregnant, and it’s hard to imagine what she, the woman responsible for her, the boy, and his aunt will do. Their circumstances were already very difficult.

So, one of the ordinary parts of life that just goes on during a political crisis is, unfortunately, unprotected sex among minors who are unprepared for its possible consequences.

The current “crisis” – whatever we really mean by that word – may make things harder for them in various ways. Prices continue to rise. Jobs become scarcer. The visitors, both foreign and expatriate-Haitian, who would normally be bringing dollars and demands for services into the country, especially during the summer, are staying away.

But the real problem is not this particular difficult moment in Haiti’s history. It’s the fact that children grow up here, as they do in many places, unprepared to deal with the temptation that sexual maturity presents them with and unprepared to deal with the consequences of their poor preparation. It is the world’s oldest form of recreation, but surely the world’s oldest problem as well.

As far as I can remember, Saturday was the first time I’ve had to take off my pants in order to get to a class. I must have made quite a spectacle: a lone blan, crossing the river in his underwear, with his pants in one hand and his sandals in the other.

Since the demise of my chakos, I depend on sandals that are less resilient than my feet, so I took the sandals off in order to ford the river barefoot. I took off my pants because the water was high enough in places to muddy them, shorts though they were, and I didn’t want to sit through the class in shorts caked with the mud that the water was carrying with it.

Frémy and I normally drive to our Saturday morning workshops in Fayette in his small four-wheel-drive, but there’s been quite a bit of rain, so the river between Nan Mapou and Fayette was too high for the car. We thought about missing the class and sending our apologies. The group would understand. Rain is a common and acceptable excuse for all sorts of absences in Haiti. But Frémy had missed the previous week because of work elsewhere, leaving me to meet with the group alone, and it seemed important to keep up the group’s momentum. So we took off our clothes, and waded across.

The real difficulty I encountered as I crossed was not the feeling that I was making a spectacle of myself. Not only were all the Haitians, in whichever direction they were crossing, in the very same boat as I was, but I simply could not live here in Haiti as I do if I was too sensitive about the attention I draw to myself. I’m used to it. The real difficulty was that the water was so muddy that I could not see where I was putting my feet. I was stepping from underwater rock to underwater rock, and my unaccustomed feet were having a hard time of it. They are too soft, and many of the rocks simply hurt. Feeling my way little-by-little was slow and painful work.

The group in Fayette is the part of our collaboration that Frémy and I are sharing most closely these days, and so we value it for that. In addition, the work is interesting in itself. We were invited to collaborate with the group of adult literacy teachers and community organizers in February, and we began soon after that. This is the second year that the teachers are holding literacy classes in centers supported directly by Shimer College. Our collaboration with them is the most extensive Wonn Refleksyon training that we’ve ever undertaken. We have a longterm commitment to weekly two-hour meetings with bi-monthly day-long workshops as well. The size of the time commitment is especially welcome because we’ve had the sense that the shorter, more limited workshops we’ve generally undertaken have been shallower than we would like.

But there’s yet another reason we’re so interested in the collaboration: The group in Fayette is the one currently experimenting most seriously with the book that we created for non-readers. That book is called Annou Reflechi Ansanm. In English that means “Let’s Ponder Together.” The book uses pictures and Haitian proverbs as topics of conversation, rather than the texts that our other books have been based on. Each of the literacy teachers is committed to leading weekly meetings with his or her group, and so their work and the time we spend with them combine to offer us the chance to learn a lot about how the book functions in a classroom and about how to help teachers use it most effectively. Our core strategy has thus far been to lead the group through the creation of weekly lesson plans, to create a kind of teachers’ edition, or guidebook, in collaboration with them. A weekly lesson plan can give them a clear sense of how to lead their classes, and the process of creating it each week pushes them to think in specific, concrete terms about the challenges that their groups are facing, the particular objectives that those challenges imply, and the strategies they might employ towards attaining those objectives.

Our team in Haiti began working towards creating guidebooks in 2000. Erik Badger pushed us in that direction, the same direction that the Touchstones Project, our parent in the States, had begun taking more than ten years earlier (www.touchstones.org). Erik was working closely with inexperienced discussion leaders – some of them very inexperienced – who were leading lieracy classes on the island of Lagonav. He felt that the leaders’ understanding of Wonn Refleksyon was marginal at best and that they often seemed lost in fundamental ways as they tried to lead their groups. He suggested that we created a guidebook that would do two separate things. On one hand, it would break down the complicated array of goals that discussion leaders can have for their groups into distinct pieces so that over the course of eighteen to twenty weeks the leaders would have the chance to read about and better understand the various goals. At the same time, each lesson plan would set out a simple procedure that a leader could choose to follow closely. These procedures would give even very inexperienced discussion leaders a way to enter a classroom with a certain degree of confidence in their sense of what they were going to do.

Erik and I wrote an initial draft of the guidebook for our first volume of discussion texts with help from various colleagues over the course of a couple of months. As our network became more and more familiar with it – with its strengths and its weaknesses – we invested time in revising and rewriting it. A large group of us met over the course of several days a few years back to thoroughly rewrite it. Finally, this year Frémy oversaw the publication of a polished version of the revised work. Its roots are still traceable to the work Erik and I originally did, but it has passed through many other hands as well and is much the better for it.

The experience in Fayette is quite different and more interesting than that original one was because, though Frémy and I lead the weekly meetings where the lesson plans are created, the plans are being created nonetheless by the same emerging discussion leaders who’ll take them into the classroom as well. We’re three lesson plans into the process, and I’m impressed both with the plans themselves and the conversations about challenges and objectives that the plans are built upon.

The question of objectives is important. That should be obvious enough, but I’ve also begun to see how critical setting the right objective can be as I’ve observed a friend who tried to use the original guidebook this year with his own group. His name is Benaja Antoine, and he’s the fourth-grade teacher at the Matenwa Community Learning Center, the community school on Lagonav that has become one of my homes here in Haiti. He has been leading weekly discussions with his students over the course of the school year, and has discovered that the guidebook that should have been helping him is more-or-less useless.

And it’s no wonder. All through its early development, the people mainly, most seriously involved were using it to lead groups for adults. And even though we have considerable experience that shows that the same discussion texts can work well with both adults and kids, there’s little reason to suspect that they would work in the very same ways.

The objectives that the current guidebook sets out are a poor fit for Benaja’s students in two respects. On one hand, the guidebook very heavily emphasizes handing leadership of the group over to participants rather quickly. This makes a lot of sense for adults. It is reasonable to hope that they can, relatively quickly, get a sense of the activity and choose to take control of it. With children, things are more complicated. Though it is important for them to feel ownership of the activity, and though they need to be drawn into a share of the responsibility, they also need space to just be kids. Pushing them too hard too fast to lead themselves in conversations that are serious and sustained makes no sense.

On the other hand, the guidebook fails to sufficiently emphasize improving their reading or their ability to consider critically what they read. The kids in Benaja’s fourth-grade class are generally much better readers than are the participants in literacy centers that the guidebook was written for, and so the guidebook doesn’t help a teacher push them as readers nearly as far as it could.

So Benaja and I have decided to work on another guidebook, one especially for use with kids. I’m not yet sure what shape that will take. I don’t know what a new guidebook will look like nor exactly what the process or the timeline for creating it will be. But I have been very impressed with the way creating a guidebook in Fayette is working out, so I look forward to a similar experience in Matenwa.

There are projects that are best, or even necessarily, undertaken step-by-improvised-step. An example is fording a stony river bed barefoot. Each step is a new experiment. There’s not much thinking you can do two or three steps ahead. Leading discussions can be like that too, but it doesn’t need to be. Guidebooks can give discussion leaders a way to look forward to the route their groups might take. More importantly, the process of creating a guidebook can force us all to think through what we are trying to achieve and how we are going about our work. The understandings that emerge are not just deep, but detailed.

Okay. I admit it. Tarantulas scare the hell out of me. For awhile a few years ago I was thinking of buying one to keep in an aquarium in my office at school. At the time, I was preparing to teach a class in Observational Biology, and I wanted to make animal motion a focus. I imagined students profitably enjoying tracing the movements of a big, hairy spider. I never intended, however, for the tarantula and me to be on the same side of the aquarium. It would stay on the inside. I would stay on the outside.

Tuesday night in Matenwa, however, Anita told me to keep an eye out for the critters. Since the spring rains have started, they show up often enough. By early Wednesday evening, I had seen three of them, inside the house I was staying in. In other words, we were on the same side of the house. One of them was sitting comfortably on one of the beds. Though it had chosen the one that I was not using, I immediately deduced with certainty that it would surely choose to spend some time on the other one that night. I didn’t sleep well.

I should be more serious about the dangers in Haiti, though, so I’ll share another anecdote.

Thursday, Edouard and I were stopped at a blockade by heavily armed police. They were dressed in the all-black uniforms that are worn by what is called SIMO, the rough equivalent of an American SWAT team. They were not, in other words, traffic cops. Being in close proximity to automatic rifles and large handguns would give me the creeps under the best of circumstances – if there are good circumstances to see them in. But I recently read a report asserting that Haitian police have been entering certain parts of Pòtoprens and carrying out summary executions – I can neither confirm nor contradict the assertion – so running into a crowd of large uniformed men carrying big weapons made me nervous.

It turned out to be a very professionally-run operation. They were checking everyone’s ID, looking over the drivers’ various paperwork, and searching for weapons. They were forceful, but reasonably polite. They looked through my bag, but showed no interest in either the laptop or the cash it contained.

Edouard’s papers were not in order, not even close, and they held us for awhile. He himself knew perfectly well that they were in the right. They listened to his explanation, which was reasonable. It was mainly based on how hard it is to get official paperwork organized in Haiti. It was not the sort of explanation they were bound to accept, but though they made us wait awhile, and though they told him in no uncertain terms that his explanation was unacceptable, eventually they let him – and, so, us – go. The gave him nothing but a firm scolding. Frankly, they impressed me.

This is a strange time to be in Haiti. The news I read of Haiti on the internet is, without exception, bad. This would not be, in itself, so unusual. The world press, when it’s willing to show any interest in Haiti at all, generally seems quite fixated on misery.

But these days it’s different. The news is not about poverty and suffering. It’s about violence and crime. Some news sources will report that supporters of former president Aristide are fomenting violence to interfere with elections. Others will insist that Haiti’s in-their-view-illegal government, virtually imposed by the United States since the 2004 coup d’état, is carrying out an campaign of violence and terror against those same supporters of Aristide. I am not a journalist and I have a poor understanding of Haitian politics, so I won’t presume to say what the truth is. I suspect that there’s some truth in what both sides our saying, but that there’s plenty of old-fashioned crime-for-profit as well. Even a recent State Department comment admitted that things here are “more complicated” than its usual anti-Aristide proclamations would have one believe. And they admit this even though the American government simply loathes Jean-Bertrand Aristide.

What is clear is that there is, both here and in whatever corners there are abroad that care about Haiti, a rapidly escalating perception that the county is dominated by violence and crime. Not only are Americans I know — even ones who have years of experience in Haiti – choosing to postpone or cancel trips here, but Haitians I know in the countryside are thinking seriously of canceling trips to Pòtoprens.

And it’s not as though they have no reason to feel concerned. Kidnapping-for-profit rings seem to be increasingly active and effective. Heavy gunfire is a part of daily life in certain corners of Pòtoprens. The combination of Haitian police and UN peacekeepers who are nominally responsible for security here seem hard-pressed to help. If that’s what they are honestly trying to do. There are about seven thousand peacekeepers and about five thousand police, and Haiti is a nation of eight million people. Even if you only consider the population of Pòtoprens, the number is something like two million. The numerical odds seem very much against law and order.

So one might easily wonder why I choose to remain here at a moment like this, and my answer might come as a surprise. The truth is that I do not feel as though I am in danger. I could be wrong about this, of course, but I have not yet felt that I have something here to fear. I devoutly avoid those parts of Pòtoprens where the violence is occurring, just as I am careful about where I would go in Chicago, Waukegan, or New York. I likewise avoid the trappings of wealth that both draw kidnappers’ attention and make their work easy to do. I don’t travel in a fancy SUV and I don’t make regular trips to a fancy office. I use public transportation or Edouard’s motorcycle to get in and out of, and to get around in, Pòtoprens. I’ve yet to read stories of kidnappers pulling victims off the back of random pick-up trucks, and Edouard works with an attentiveness and a level of skill that avoids trouble. There has yet to be any sign of political or criminal violence in Darbonne or Matenwa, much less in Ka Glo, and these are the places I live. I might very well leave if I felt concerned for my own safety, but so far I see no reason to be afraid.

But fear is a funny thing. It has as much or more to do with impressions and semblances than with facts. Our imagination plays an important role as well. For example, when I think carefully about my fear of tarantulas I must admit that it has little or nothing to do with the tarantula’s painful and, perhaps, dangerous bite. What I fear is the feeling that one might crawl on me or touch me as I try to sleep at night. My fear is, in other words, of something that I have no reason to be concerned about. And my fear is perfectly real nonetheless.

Now the very last thing that I would want to suggest is that those who fear Haiti right now are as irrational as I am about tarantulas. There is violence here right now. There are dangers. Just as there are, by the way, in lots of places. But assessing danger is complicated, and different people can have very different reactions to similar things. I think of the way I imagine that my young American friend Alexa Dolinko would walk up to tarantulas ready to be fascinated by the lovely creatures that they are.

And other people who live and work here, or who come here to visit, may see something that looks very different from what I see. I recently told my parents to cancel a planned visited because I feel as though they would likely draw the kind of attention that I do not think I draw. Those here who work more regular schedules than I do, those who depend on attractive private transportation, and those whose life or work takes them to offices or homes in lower Delma or downtown Pòtoprens surely have something very real to fear.

But none of this is true of me. In fact, as the school year draws to a close, and my new laptop battery makes it easier for me to work without electric power, I am likely to circulate less and less. My life should only get even safer than it has been.

So for now I see no reason to leave, no reason to be too concerned. Friends and family might find too little comfort in my sense of safety, especially those who are used to watching the way their absentminded philosophy professor crosses the street. But I get a lot of advice from those around me here, and I listen to it. Other than that, I don’t know what I can reasonably do.