Monthly Archives: July 2005

Micro Economies

Fito must be in his mid-teens. He was sitting next to me at my desk at home, very nearly crying. I had my laptop in Ka Glo, and we were writing an e-mail to an American colleague of mine who had lived in Haiti for several years. That colleague was in contact with another American who had lived here, and this other American had, for a long time, paid the rent that Fito’s mother annually owes for the small room where she lives with her children in Bois Moquette.

This year, something in the communication had broken down. Either their American friend had decided not to pay the rent, or had forgotten about it, or had been stymied by the various difficulties one can encounter sending money here. Fito and his family didn’t know. In any case, the rent was two months late, and the landlord had begun moving the family’s things into the street. It was Thursday, and he had told them to make no mistake: “Saturday will not find you in the room,” he had said, “unless the rent is paid.”

Among the basic aspects of life as a foreigner living in Haiti are the webs of financial dependencies that grow up around one. We create little micro-economies, peopled with those whom we hire to do various kinds of work and those we simply support for one reason or another. I’ll offer several examples.

I don’t do my own laundry here. I certainly could learn to wash everything by hand as Haitians do, and I could decide to build the time to do it into my schedule. I’ve never really wanted to, however. It would take a lot of time, and I’d rather use that time to read and write and do the various kinds of work I do. Or just to relax at home.

That choice is available to me. My neighbor, Rosemarie, does my laundry instead. She earns a little less than four dollars every time she does a load. This is a significant amount of money for her. Her husband, Awol, is a day laborer who has little land of his own. He farms other people’s land, raises a cow, and appears with a shovel or a trowel or a machete or an ax when there’s heavy manual labor to be done. He might get a little over two dollars a day for his efforts. They have three children. The oldest lives in Pòtoprens, with Awol’s sister. The two little ones live at home. Because of the two small children, Rosemarie can’t do much to earn money herself. She has to stay at home. The money she gets from me two or three times a month is probably making a big difference.

But, perhaps more importantly, it has connected her to me in a way that has nurtured a certain hope. Her second daughter, Sofonie is old enough to start preschool, and there is a private preschool just down the hill from the local public elementary school in Mariaman. Rosemarie would like to send Sofonie to school this fall, but she can’t afford to – not even with the laundry money that she earns. So she has already asked whether I would simply pay for the school. This would include various expenses – like shoes, a uniform, and a little backpack as well. The connection we have because of the work she does for me creates an expectation that I’ll accept a certain degree of responsibility in her life. I become the person she decides to depend on. In Creole, I become the patwon.

A patwon is someone who has wealth or power or connections that enable him to do favors for others. They include employers, whom employees depend upon for extra considerations when unexpected expenses arise, and relatives or neighbors with either wealth or connections that enable them to confer favors. They get young people places in schools, they pay for needed medicines, they help in other moments of need. They generally have a social position much highly than the person who comes to depend of them.

Another example: This afternoon, I’ll be visited by a young man from down in Mariaman, close to the school. I like him and respect him. Though he can’t be much more than twenty years old, he’s been living by his own wits and work for awhile. His parents can’t support him. He’s been earning the money that he needs to get through school by raising a couple of goats and by carrying water and doing errands for a couple of my American friends who live just down the hill. As is very common, they went beyond a mere work-for-money relationship. They became patwon. When he needed serious dental work done, they undertook to pay for it.

But the current situation in Haiti, together with changes in their lives, made them decide to leave, and that decision left gaps in the lives of people who had grown to depend on them. The young man who told me he’d be coming to see me is one of those people. Not only does he have a relatively small portion of the dental bill left to pay – something his American friends couldn’t have known about – but he is now trying to figure out how to afford school next year without the little bit of income that working for them earned him. He will speak to me today about those two matters: the last dental expense and school in the coming year. He hopes, I think, that I will be willing and able to take over the role of patwon from the American friends who left.

It’s awkward to be treated as a patwon. I sometimes think of the comment Lloyd Bentsen once made as chair of the U.S. Senate Finance Committee: “A billion here, a billion there, and pretty soon you’re talking about real money.” The money that the people around me ask me for is not a lot. The portion of the dental bill I am being asking to help with is less than ten dollars, but that’s money the young man doesn’t have. Sending Sofonie to school might cost forty or fifty dollars – I don’t know – but Rosemarie has no way of earning such a sum. Fito and his mother needed about $175 for their annual rent, but their current family income is, approximately, zero.

At the same time, these sums add up. Though by any reasonable standard I am paid quite well to do the work I do, I have a lot of the same concerns about covering my various expenses that anyone might have. Some of these concerns are real, and some are probably imagined, but both sorts feel like concerns nonetheless. The truth is that my resources are limited and that they feel even more limited than they are.

But what’s worse is that the people who come to me are generally asking for help with things that they have fundamental rights to. Why am I deciding whether someone can get dental care or an education or a roof over his or her head? I feel both as though my right to refuse them is limited and as though what seem to them as gifts from me are not the answer at all.

It would be easy to be theoretical about this – in one sense of that word. On one hand, if my willingness to share a little of what I have makes those who ask me find it easier to accept my privileged social and economic position, then I am doing them a disservice. Their acceptance of the privileges that people like me have is surely part of the larger problem. On the other hand, if my giving nurtures dependence, then the disservice is even more clear.

Even so, in the immediacy of the moment and of the need that’s presented to me, such thoughts of what would really be best can seem pretty distant, pretty abstract. If a toothache keeps an acquaintance from sleeping, should I be asking myself whether paying for dental treatment will undermine his or her larger progress? When asked by someone whether I will help them with some money, I rarely feel as though I know what I should do.

I would be finished with these reflections, but I sense that something’s missing. I need to add at least three notes.

First, the picture is too one-sided. I’ve emphasized fiscal – I won’t even say “economic” – dependence over dependence of other kinds. It is important for me to be continuously aware of my very great dependence on many of those who ask me for monetary help. Cases like Rosemarie’s, who does my laundry, are only the most straightforward ones. The people who feel they need money that I can give them have a lot that they can and do teach me about how to live in Haiti. I depend on them for advice and more. A friend to whom I just gave roughly sixty dollars was effusively grateful, but I think he’s come to know perfectly well how difficult it would be for me to get by without his regular help. And I’m grateful for his awareness.

Second, it would be a mistake to think that only foreigners create such webs of dependencies as the one I’m part of. Steady income is a rare thing in Haiti, and anyone who has one is certain to find plenty of people that need her or his help. The fact that “patwon” is so common a word here testifies to that.

Third, a note about Fito: The people I contacted on his family’s behalf decided not to help out this year. As I prepared to give Fito the news, I tried to think whether the was something I was willing to do. I didn’t want to take on responsibility for a whole household, but I didn’t like the thought of their being cast out into the street. So I imagined a compromise, one that I thought would be both helpful to them and easy for me. I gave Fito a substantial portion of the coming year’s rent but told him that I would not give more. I thought that would be the end of it.

Of course it wasn’t. He is in no position to simply accept me word that I won’t give them more money. Within a couple of days he was back at my house with a long story explaining his need for an addition sum. It’s pretty clear that he’ll be coming regularly now.

Hard Questions

In the spring of 1989, I led a classroom discussion that nearly erupted into a fist fight. The members of the class were students with what were described as “learning disabilities.” They were seventh, eighth, and ninth graders at Riverside Junior High School, in Northport, Alabama. I had been working for the University of Alabama for almost two years, and had come across the opportunity to work with these students once-a-week. We were experimenting with materials prepared by the Touchstones Discussion Project (www.touchstones.org), the group that provided much of the advice and support we needed as we were starting our work here.

The near-fight had a perhaps-surprising source. The students were reading a passage taken from Isaac Newton’s laws of motion. In the passage, Newton is explaining what it means to say that an action has an equal and opposite reaction when he says that if a horse is pulling a rock, the rock is pulling the horse just as much. Several of the students thought this was simply dumb: Rocks are not living things; they cannot pull. Others agreed with Newton.

I was surprised at the time at how important this seemingly-remote question was for the students. Not only did they nearly fight over it the first time it came up, but for weeks afterwards, anytime there was a lull in our dialogue – no matter what I might have thought we were talking about – the students would start arguing angrily about the rock and the horse all over again.

Groups sometimes come across issues that they find they cannot talk about. The example from Riverside Junior High School was extreme and, at the time, perplexing. But it’s nonetheless an example of something that comes up often enough. Something about a question touches a group’s members so closely that they are unable to listen to one another. They can’t speak with the openness to letting their opinions be affected that real conversation requires. They are defensive. They argue. Or they are unwilling to speak at all.

When Roseline shouted “anmwe!” at the mention of the word “eredite,” I was reminded of the Riverside group. In Haiti, yelling “anmwe” is a little like shouting for help. And she was yelling for some sort of help because the question of heredity – in Creole, “eredite” – had come up once again.

Roseline is a teacher at the Matenwa Community Learning Center, in Matenwa, Lagonav (http://matenwa.tripod.com). We were in the first week of a two-week seminar on psychology. Through the spring, I had been meeting with the teachers a couple of times each month, discussing a book by Swiss psychologist Jean Piaget. At the end of the semester, we met to evaluate the time we had spent together and to decide how we wanted to continue. The teachers had become interested in psychology and asked whether we could spend some time studying it together. We found a textbook that had been published by a Haitian press. It’s partly in French, partly in Creole. We figured that reading it all would take a little over two weeks of meetings. We scheduled a first week for early July and a second for early August.

These teachers have been working together for sometime, working together more closely than any other teaching staff I know of. Though the school has a principal, Abner Sauveur, he is the farthest thing from a tyrant. His opinions carry a lot of weight in staff decision making, but for that very reason he’s slow to express them, preferring to listen closely to his colleagues first. And even after he expresses them, they feel free to disagree and to express their disagreements strongly. And in the end, the group decides together.

It would be an exaggeration for any outsider to take credit for the way they talk with one another, but they themselves point to the difference that Wonn Refleksyon made. In the States, Touchstones Discussions have been most often and most importantly used in classes of school children. But the example of Matenwa has shown that, in Haiti, Wonn Refleksyon might be even more important among groups of teachers. When Erik was here as part of our team in 1999-2001, he invested a lot of time leading and participating in discussions for and with the Matenwa teachers, and they are quick to say that those exercises helped them learn to collaborate the way they do.

But when they come across the question of heredity, their ability to converse productively reaches its limit. They argue, several speaking loudly and angrily at the same time. They stop listening.

The issue is a hard one indeed. The question they see before them is whether intelligence is inherited, and there is a tremendous amount at stake. For example: they regularly have students whom they have trouble teaching. Some of the teachers have noticed, or believe they have noticed, that many of these children come from families in which other children have difficulties as well. Many of the children’s parents have no education. Many of the parents raise their children in ways the teachers disapprove of. It can be tempting for teachers to say that this or that student is troublesome or troubled because of the family he or she comes from. From there it can seem like a short step to conclude that the problem is hereditary. The apparent advantage to this conclusion is that it seems to let the teachers off the hook. They tried, they can say, but there was nothing they could have done. A student’s limits can simply be too great, and those limits are with him or her from birth.

Various members of the Matenwa faculty present arguments against almost every step in this reasoning, as they very well might. There are plenty of wholes in the argument. For one thing, families can share traits without those traits being hereditary in the biological sense of the word. The traits might thus be very much susceptible to influence. For another, suppose for the sake of argument that a child has severe limitations to his or her potential development that he or she inherits from parents at birth. Even then, we cannot conclude that we cannot work to help such a child succeed. We can’t know in advance exactly what a child’s limits are, so there’s no point to arguing about where the limits derive. We must in any case treat each child as though they can succeed, so we might as well assume that they can.

That has more or less been Abner’s argument: That the discussion of hereditary is pointless because we must behave as though we believe that a student’s development can be influenced nonetheless. But he has had a hard time expressing it. And even if he could express it well, it might not help. The issue of their students’ limits has pushed the teachers up against a limit of their own, though a limit of a different kind.

I hope the question keep arising. I know that, at some point, someone will say something that breaks through their colleagues’ inability to hear or to learn.

In the conversation in which we evaluated our discussions of Piaget, Abner said something both striking and encouraging. He said that our conversations were helping him appreciate how much more we can learn when we work together. I think that the opinion he was expressing was general. I myself certainly felt the same way. And a group whose members are devoted to the idea that they learn best, that they work best, together can only continue to move ahead.

Life Goes On: Part Two

Life goes on in the midst of the current difficulties in Haiti, for better and for worse. Last weekend, I got a heavy dose of the better and it seems worth sharing.

I spent most of the weekend at the Villa Ormiso. It’s a guesthouse run by conservative Protestant missionaries, here in Haiti to convert the masses. They would not normally be my cup of tea, but the guesthouse they run is valuable to us as a pleasant and accessible place where we can organize inexpensive meetings that last several days. Last weekend, more than forty of us gathered there for the fourth annual meeting of the Haitian Open Space Institute. I missed last year’s meeting, but had attended the others, so I was anxious to attend this year’s as well.

Open Space meetings are something special. They were designed around the notion that the most productive time that groups spend together is often the unscheduled time: the coffee breaks, the lunches, the unforeseen delays in otherwise tight agendas. Those are the times during which meeting participants talk with the people they want to talk with, and talk to them about the things that are important to them.

At an Open Space gathering, the participants create an agenda for the a meeting – ours was to be two-and-a-half days long – during its first few minutes. The agenda consists of a schedule of group discussions running parallel to one another on themes chosen by the participants who propose them. Each participant then chooses the small group discussions he or she wants to attend. The guiding principle is that you should not be part of anything you’re not interested in. The underlying assumption is that, given the freedom to do so, people will make good decisions about how to use their time.

For me, the most important thing about the structure of these meetings is that it allows me to find time to meet individually with various people I want to talk with. I find that I don’t often attend many of the scheduled conversations, but that I get a lot accomplished nonetheless, much more than I could accomplish if we were all following a carefully planned schedule.

I was especially grateful this year for the opportunity to meet with people on the edge of the meeting because I was actually able to attend rather little of it. Life goes on here in Haiti even as the political situation seems to spin into chaos, and that means work goes on as well. I had a busy schedule of meetings to attend in various places as the large Open Space meeting at the Villa Ormiso was going on.

We arrived at the Ormiso on Thursday afternoon. It’s located in Bizoton, a neighborhood on the road from Pòtoprens into Kafou, its overcrowded southern suburb. The opening ceremony was Thursday evening, and it was unforgettable. My partner Frémy used the meeting as the occasion to get married. He and Nadine exchanged rings in front of the group of friends and colleagues that he has come to think of as his family. The whole crowd of 45 of us sat around with them in a circle, and as we passed a small box with their wedding rings from hand to hand, we each had the opportunity to share with them whatever thoughts or wishes we might want to share. It was, perhaps, an unusual ceremony, but Frémy and Nadine are unusual people.

I had to leave the meeting just before breakfast on Friday morning. I needed to get back to downtown Pòtoprens by 8:30. As always I left much earlier than I should have had to. The trip could be more than a couple of miles, but I couldn’t tell how long it would take for me to get onto a pick-up truck heading downtown, I couldn’t be sure of the traffic, and I wasn’t certain how long I would need to make the long walk I’d chosen to make so that I could get to my meeting without passing through any of the parts of the city that are dangerous these days. I was supposed to be at Fonkoze (See: www.fonkoze.org.) by 8:30 so that Anne Hastings, the foundation’s director, and I could drive together to a meeting with colleagues at PLAN International. PLAN is funding the literacy work we are doing in the northeast, and we had some questions about the budget they had approved and about their reporting requirements.

I hadn’t initially been looking forward to the meeting. The work with Fonkoze was already pulling me more towards administration than I would normally want to be. I had needed, for example, to teach myself to use Excel both to translate the literacy program’s budget and to simplify it so that the field supervisors would be able to work with it easily. Though I don’t mind dealing with simple numbers, and understand well the importance of a willingness to do some math, such work is not what I normally choose to do. I’d much rather be in and around the classroom.

But the prospect of sitting around a table with NGO decision-makers intrigued me. It’s a class of people I’ve had little contact with – except for Anne herself – and I’m learning so much by watching her work that the chance to see her meet with her equals was too intriguing to miss.

The meeting was short, but pointed. We had a detailed agenda of specific questions that Fonkoze had for PLAN, and Anne stuck to it closely. I spoke when called on, but not really otherwise. The other assistant that Anne brought with her didn’t speak at all. It was the farthest thing from the kind of fluid and creative environment that Open Space nurtures, and that seemed just perfect. The meeting’s focus allowed us to achieve our very particular objectives in very little time.

When I got back to Ormiso early afternoon, I was just in time to meet as part of a group that has gotten together to discuss the guidebook that several of us had created for the first volume of Wonn Refleksyon texts. They were mainly primary school teachers, and they wanted to talk about what they could do to better adapt the guidebook for use with children. (See: GuideBooks.)

I enjoyed the session and I profited from it. I think that a couple of us gained a clearer sense of how we want to proceed to write a new guide. I also learned from the clear contrast between the style of this small meeting and the style of the one I had attended in the morning. In the talk about guidebooks, everyone spoke. We were all there because we had contributions to make, and since there was nothing that distinguished who among us had the power to make decisions, nothing that distinguished whose words would really count, we all had our say.

The contrast struck me at first as a trade off. We had given up something of the narrow, efficient focus on needed results that governed the Fonkoze/PLAN meeting and had traded it for a broad involvement that opened us up to the possibility that we might be pushed in any direction that persuaded us. But as I thought more about it, that analysis came to seem too shallow. The focus of the Fonkoze/PLAN meeting was not available to us because we were a group coming together without a designated leader to guide us. No one had the right or the power to stipulate a rigid agenda in advance. We could not trade off something that was not available to us in the first place. What was remarkable was the way that, even without that tight focus, we were able to talk ourselves towards a relatively clear plan of action. Our conversation took on a life of its own, in a very literal sense. It organized itself, which is to say that it became something organic.

Saturday morning, I left early together with Frémy and Abner Sauveur, the founder and principal of the Matenwa Community Learning Center. We had been invited to visit the Peasant Association in Fondwa, a small town between Léogane and Jacmel (See: http://haitiforever.com/fondwa/fondwa.htm.) The founder of the association, Father Joseph, asked us to come to talk to him about some concerns he has both with the association’s school and its university.

Father Joseph, who also founded Fonkoze, explained that both the school and the university had been created with a view towards preparing young people to live in the rural areas that they come from, but he also explained that, in just this respect, both institutions were falling short. The school is hampered in two ways. On one hand, the importance of the national exam system pushes teachers towards a traditional academic program that has little relationship with the lives the students actually lead. On the other, the teachers’ own experience in the classroom has offered them little in the way of alternative models to learn from and explore.
The issues at the university level are slightly different. Though the curriculum at that level does, he think, respond to the real needs of rural communities – it offers such majors as veterinary medicine and agronomy, areas of expertise that rural communities badly need to develop – there is something about the university’s culture that fails to integrate its faculty and students with the people that live around them.

As Father Joseph detailed the kind of training he wanted us to provide the faculties of both institutions, we could only sit and listen. He had a lot to say. He had already developed a very detailed notion as to how our work with them should go. He’s been a stunningly effective leader, at the heart of a movement that’s produced some of the most interesting, most compelling organizations I know of.

At the same time, we simply do not take the approach that he suggested we take. We call ourselves apprentices, and we mean it seriously. We cannot enter a relationship with even the outlines of a prefabricated solution in hand. We are delighted to sit together with colleagues that have a problem they want to address and to help them decided how they want to address it, but more we cannot do. We proposed to Father Joseph that we organize an Open Space meeting for both school and university leadership. The theme of the meeting could be the problem Father Joseph was trying to pose: namely, how can both institutions better succeed at preparing their students for life in rural communities?

Father Joseph seemed open to our idea, only adding that it was crucial that clear and concrete plans emerge from whatever we do. It was hard to tell, however, whether he was really open or simply unwilling to get too involved in the matter, preferring to leave it in other people’s hands. For now, the difference doesn’t matter to us very much. What we need is for his strong leadership to allow for space in which the people working under him can reflect, make plans, and act. We would be pleased if the space opened up because he was convinced of its importance. We can be satisfied initially if it opens up because he is too busy to keep it closed.
The ride to Fondwa and back took us through heavy Kafou traffic both on the way there and on our way back, so it was early evening by the time we returned. We had missed the day’s activities, and so were left to read about them in the notes that were taken.

We spent the evening, however, hearing about various conversations that had been held that day and watching a theatrical piece presented by a group of women who were attended the meeting from Lagonav. The group, //Fanm Kouraj//, or “Courageous Women,” creates and performs pieces presenting problems that rural Haitian women face. The women then lead their audience in discussions of the pieces. (See: http://www.womens-rights.org/pdf/PopularTheater.pdf.) They had performed a similar piece Friday night as well.

Sunday morning there were more small group discussions, and then we met at 11:00 for final reflections and goodbyes. There were several visitors from the States who had planned to attend the meeting but couldn’t because of the unstable situation here, but our Haitian colleagues accepted no such inconvenience. Though those from the countryside fear entering Pòtoprens, and though those from Pòtoprens might be reluctant to circulate, the meeting at Ormiso was their best chance to get together and further their own work. And the work of conversation and of the practices that nurture it could hardly be more important here in Haiti than they are right now.