Telling people that I’m not really a doctor normally feels like a joke. Of course I’m not a real doctor, and I couldn’t be one. I’m too squeamish.

But when I got to the school that Tuesday afternoon, I knew I had to act. A small boy was sitting on a stone wall, bleeding badly from the back of his head. The teachers had known how to clean and dress his wound, and they had done what was, as far as I could tell, a good job of it. But blood was still pouring down his face. I guess they didn’t know about applying direct pressure.

So I sat down with the boy, and took his head firmly in my hands. Meanwhile, one of the teachers borrowed a donkey on which to take the boy the half-hour or so to Masikren. That’s where they would find the nearest health clinic. When the donkey arrived, they grabbed an older boy to take over for me – either to protect me from having to mount the donkey or to protect the donkey from having to carry my weight, I don’t know which. From that point on, the matter was out of my hands.

I mention the incident because it reminded me how difficult the Matènwa Community Learning Center’s situation is. I rarely think of the problems the school faces, because it generally functions so beautifully, but the school’s staff struggles hard to make it what it is.

I don’t want to say that the school is remote, because that word would imply that those of us who live miles or hours from Matènwa are where one ought to be, that the residents of Matènwa are removed from the center and that the center is us. Pòtoprens and Chicago are just as remote from Matènwa as Matènwa is from them.

But there are things that Matènwa lacks. There are two primary schools – the Community Learning Center and another – but a couple of additional ones might be needed before it will be possible for all children to go to school. And the additional schools will need to be cheap. They would have be organized so that they do not make demands that exceed the financial resources of the families they are to serve.

Matènwa has a store, but many purchases require a trip, in the best case, to one of the markets in Masikren or Nankafe. These are only 30-45 minutes by foot. In cases enough, however, one needs to go to Ansagale, the island’s major city, which is an expensive and uncomfortable hour-and-a-half’s ride on the back of a pick-up truck, or even to Pòtoprens, across the bay.

Health care is a major problem. Even for basic first aid, the closest places are Masikren and Nankafe, and the clinics there aren’t open all the time. More serious issues, anything requiring a doctor, means a trip to Ansagale. That’s where the one or two doctors that serve the island’s 100,000 or so residents are to be found.

And yet the Learning Center is a wonderful place. I’m particularly excited about it this year. I have visited regularly over the years and have been there frequently since I moved to Haiti in January.

I entered the country with twenty copies of a short book by Swiss psychologist Jean Piaget. The Learning Center is already unique among the schools I visit in Haiti in the way it creates a non-violent, student-centered learning environment for the children who attend it. Reading Piaget, however, gave the teachers a deeper sense of some of the reasoning behind a child-centered approach. They began to understand why Piaget thinks that only a child-centered approach could make sense for schools.

When we finished the book in April, the teachers wanted to start a more general study of psychology. We found a Haitian psychology textbook, and we used the teachers’ summer vacation to organize two one-week sessions that enabled us to get most of the way through it. We’ll need two more meetings to get us the rest of the way. The same Haitian publisher is right now coming out with an educational psychology textbook that will be a fitting sequel. Meeting together every two or three weeks through the school year should be more than enough to study that book as well.

When we met during their first week of school they decided that they will take leadership of the group from me. I’ll meet with one of the teachers a couple of days before each of our meetings, and plan with that teacher how he or she will lead the group. I’ll then attend the meetings as one of their participants.

But the most remarkable thing about the school has nothing to do with me or my work. It is, instead, a direct consequence of the wonderful, welcoming learning environment that the Learning Center’s staff has created. Over the last four-five years many of us who visit the Center regularly have noticed a change in the student population. The kids are getting younger and younger. Back when the school opened, Matènwa was full of young people who wanted to be in school but hadn’t had the chance. It was not unusual to have kids eleven or twelve or older starting in the first grade. By the time classes made there way to the sixth grade, they were peopled with young adults. Over time, that stopped. Kids were starting school earlier – first grade at five or six – and so finishing as children of eleven or twelve. We were all very pleased.

This fall, however, the average age has shifted again, in a surprising way. The are ten adult women, most of them mothers of students attending the school, who have decided to return to school themselves. They sit in the classes with their own children, or with kids who could easily be theirs, and learn to read and to write and to do simple math.

Of course none of us knows how this new development will turn out. It could easily become hard for the women to find themselves, day after day, sitting and learning with little kids. For the teachers and the school, the presence of students who are adults could create dynamics that are hard to predict.

At the same time, right now one can not help but be very pleased. The women’s decision demonstrates both an inspiring enthusiasm for education and an encouraging confidence in the school and the teachers they’ve chosen to make their own.

Earlier that day, I had made a mental note to have a talk with Toto. He had made a silly mistake, and I had suffered its consequences.

It started in the morning. My neighbors and I were scheduled to spend much of the day – a Sunday – working on the church they are building. It is long, slow project. They’ve been at it for several years, and are very far from finishing. They do a little bit of work any time they collect enough money to buy building materials. We were very glad to be able to spend even just a day taking a small step forward. We would be pouring a concrete cover over the large rainwater cistern that had been built into the foundation under what will be the entrance to the church. A local mason had spent two days the previous week assembling and connecting the wire supports for the concrete.

My neighbors clearly like it when I pitch in with this sort of work. My willingness to help with the church in particular may take some of the sting out of the hurt I believe that I inflict by avoiding their church services. I also think it helps them see me as a real member of the community rather than as a mere visitor. Almost as soon as the day began, I started carrying water, bucket by five-gallon bucket. It was a short walk from our water source to the spot where the teenagers would be mixing concrete. The young people like it especially when I carry things on my head. I must make quite a spectacle. So as I filled the drums they had put at the construction site, I drew a small but animated crowd of onlookers. We were having a grand time.

Toto asked a couple of the larger teenage boys to go get the sacks of cement, and that’s when he did something foolish. When I started to follow them to help with the job, he stopped me and told me not to. He said that I would not be able.

Big mistake. I insisted that I certainly could and would carry a sack or two, that I had carried cement for them in the past. I took a sack from the group’s storage shed, which is the house in which Mèt Anténor’s parents once lived, and lugged it to the construction site. I was very sore for the several days that followed. All the more so because I had seen how very easily the young boys whom I was helping did the same job.

As I scolded Toto that evening, telling him that he should never tell me that I can’t do something, especially when he’s right, we all had a good laugh. I explained that he needed to be more diplomatic, and he gravely pretended to recognize his error. Though Byton’s sisters made an appropriate show of apparent sympathy, they were evidently as amused as everyone else. It was all a a part of the evening ambiance.

One of the unfortunate aspects of the way that my work is developing is that I am rarely at home. I spend little more than one day at home each week. This, despite how comfortable I am in the house Byton built me, and despite how at ease I feel among my neighbors there. The house has a large and comfortable living room, and when I’m in Ka Glo on a Sunday evening it’s common for a crowd to gather. Though I rarely cook in Haiti – the food my neighbors still send in quantities makes it unnecessary – I do make popcorn. Byton makes limeade, and these snacks are more than enough to satisfy a gathering.

On the Sunday in question, we had a muskmelon and a couple of avocados as well, so the atmosphere was festive. Toto was there, as were Byton’s sisters: Yanick, Andrelita and Myrtane.

Their cousin and neighbor, Eli, was there as usual. For Eli it was a nervous moment. He had taken the first part of the high school graduation exam in July. Passing that first part qualifies a student for the final year of high school. It is a road block that keeps many Haitian young people from ever finishing. The previous year, Eli had narrowly failed, but he took courage and returned to try again. This year his result had been better. Though he hadn’t passed outright, he did qualify for the make-up exam in August. He had taken that make-up, and was expecting the results any day. We would learn later that week that he passed decisively, but as we sat that evening, he could not be sure of his result.

It is a strange and wonderful privilege for me to be part of these gatherings. Almost everyone sitting in the room grew up within fifty feet of my house. Only Eli arrived more recently: He moved to his Uncle’s house in Ka Glo in 1998, when his mother died. But even he grew up in Metivier, only about a half-hur’s walk away. These are people who have been together, living the same shared realities, for all of their 25 or 30 years. They know each other very, very well. I am the single stranger, the one person who does not seem to belong.

And yet I do belong. Younger than I am by a decade or more, and separated from me by a whole set of experiences that we do not share, my friends have nevertheless made me part of their crowd. They engage themselves in the goings on of my work and my life, and they accept my engagement in theirs. They know about my friends and family in the States, and about my friends and colleagues in Haiti. They tease me as they tease one another, and they casually accept the little hospitality I can offer as their due. This last point is especially important, because it gives me a comforting sense of the comfort that they feel.

In a very real sense, I’m still an outsider in our small village, set permanently apart from my friends by everything from my cultural background, to my work and my interests, to the color of my skin. And yet it’s not that simple. Perhaps it would be best to say that I am a outsider who belongs very much to the village as an outsider, as its outsider.

One of the pleasures of my life in Haiti has been to live there more and more as a foreigner who is not quite foreign. The foreign-ness that I carry around with me everywhere in Haiti gives me a sense of freedom that cultural expectations might otherwise diminish, but the comfort I have found as I’ve grown to be part of the world I live in there enables me to enjoy that freedom in ways that someone who felt more alien could not.

Penya giggled when I asked him whether he knew his right hand from his left. He’s my six-year-old neighbor. He graduated in the spring from a three-year pre-school program, and is ready to start first grade in the fall. Madanm Mèt, who is his aunt, laughed and said that the question was beneath him.

In a sense she was right. When I asked him to show me his right hand, he had no trouble doing so. But he was standing directly opposite me, and when I asked him to point to my right hand, he immediately indicated my left.

It was just what Swiss psychologist Jean Piaget said he would do. In the book I had been studying with a group in Dabòn, Piaget claims that young children are egocentric. He means it literally. They view themselves, he says, as the center of everything, and are unable to see things from a perspective other than their own. By asking Penya to identify my right hand, I was reproducing one of the examples that Piaget cites to make his case.

The discussion group was organized by a group called “Rasin Lespwa.” The name means “Roots of Hope.” Rasin Lespwa is a cultural organization that has been advancing education and cultural life in Dabòn for almost fifteen years. They run a small library – the only one anywhere near Dabòn – and arrange various kinds of seminars, lectures, concerts, contests, cultural exchanges, and other events.

This was the third consecutive year they have invited me to lead a two-week short course during the summer vacation. The first year, we read Descartes’ Discourse on the Method. Last year, we read Paulo Freire’s Education as the Practice of Freedom. This year, we chose a collection of essays by Piaget called On Pedagogy. We spent two weeks talking about various aspects of his approach to the psychology of learning. The largest number of participants were primary school teachers. The most active, however, were a high school teacher, a librarian, and a couple of recent high school grads.

For most of the first week, and into the beginning of the second, we were working hard to understand, at least in outline, Piaget’s view of how a child’s intellect grows. He is very much convinced of at least two things: First, that knowledge is something each of us creates in ourselves. It’s not, in other words, something that a teacher can simply transmit to a passive student, but must be constructed by an active learner. Second, that clarity, sophistication, and rigor of thought only develop as we interact within a group. In other words, our intellectual development and our social development go hand-in-hand, so that it is, in his view, tremendously important that schools be built around collaboration rather than individual achievement.

It was towards that middle of the second week that this second point really hit home. The group came to the realization that Piaget was not just saying that group collaboration was an interesting classroom technique that a teacher might employ to help students learn more effectively, but that he was really insisting that students could only grow as thinkers to the degree that they worked together with one another. In effect, they began to see that, if Piaget is right, they are not really teaching their students anything at all.

This was easy for the recent graduates to accept. They even liked it. They were excited by the chance it offered them to bemoan the education they had been subjected to, to criticize the teachers they had had and the schools they had attended. It was an easy pill for the high school teacher to swallow as well. For a number of years he had been carefully choosing the schools he worked in, selecting only those in which the classes would be small so that he could run them in the ways he wanted to run them. He was already emphasizing teamwork among his students.

But when the enthusiasm for Piaget’s argument had gathered real momentum, something surprising happened: Two of the primary school teachers, who were sitting next to each other, started laughing. At first they made efforts to cover up their laughter. But they couldn’t, and soon enough their laughter was perfectly clear.

We asked them what they were laughing about, and though they didn’t want to say so clearly, it became evident that they were laughing at the rest of us. We just didn’t get it. How in the world were they supposed to use student-centered education or teamwork in the classes they actually were teaching. They both worked, they explained, for a school supported by a Christain mission, where the cost of the education is very much subsidized. Parents pay almost nothing to send their children, and the kids get free school uniforms and free hot lunches to boot. As a consequence, there is an enormous and insistent demand from parents for the school to accept their kids. Maximum class size is supposed to be 35, but that maximum is largely ignored, and classes can have 40 or 50 or more. Try to imagine working with a class of 60-70 first-graders. We need not even get into the inadequacies of the classroom spaces they are assigned.

Our group had failed to consider the perspective of someone actually working in a Haitian schoolroom, so our insistence that education in Haiti take a new shape, though we believed it to be based on compelling arguments, failed to account for the reality that these teachers face every day. And it wasn’t just that I, as a foreigner, was guilty of this. The high school grads had been much worse than I had been, beginning many of their comments with phrases like “I hope the teachers who are here will . . .”

The teachers themselves would be willing to try new approaches, but not until someone can help them imagine just how to move forward. The two weeks we had spent reading together had been useful. Reading a book together, and talking about what its author said, helped all of us develop an initial picture of the kind of classroom we would like to see. At the same time, such a conversation can at best serve as a beginning for change. Actually changing the way classrooms work will take more time and energy. We’ll need to talk through specific strategies that enable teachers to imagine how they are to implement the classroom that we all hope for. And implementation is certain to be hard: Continued dialague through the whole process will be necessary if real changes are to take root. The follow-up of our seminar is in the group’s hands. We have scheduled a meeting for the end of September to discuss our plans.

In the meantime, I want to say one more thing about Piaget. The question I asked Penya is only one of the simple questions that Piaget suggests to make his point. I had already asked Penya the other one. I asked him whether he has brothers. He told me he has two, Christopher and Breny. I then asked him how many brothers Christopher has, and he said one. Then he thought for a minute and corrected himself. Christopher has two, he said, Breny and himself. At six years old, Penya was doing what Piaget says is first done at eight or nine. He was looking at the question of brotherhood from his brother’s perspective.

Now, Penya is a very bright child, and the ages Piaget gives are only averages, so I wasn’t really surprised. But I decided to try another experiment. I asked Givens, my godson, whether he has a brother. He told me that he does, Cedrick. I then asked him whether Cedrick has a brother. Givens smiled, hid his face in my lap, and said “Givens.”

Givens is not yet three, so I had to wonder whether there was something wrong with Piaget’s view. Is the perspective that he speaks from limited by the time and place of his experiments and by the population of children he interviewed?

It’s a little hard to imagine that he’s entirely mistaken. So much of what he describes seems right on. But he himself strongly emphasizes the role that our social life plays in developing our intellectual capacities. Maybe the great difference between Givens’ life and the lives of the children of Geneva lead them to develop in very different ways as well. Just how different would be hard to say, but it would be a very appropriate matter for further investigation.