Monthly Archives: January 2006

The Class on the Mountain

Last spring I visited the Matenwa Community Learning Center with Toma, an activist, educator, and veterinary worker from the mountains outside of Léogane. Since spending those days with him, I have wanted to visit the discussion group that he leads in the yard in front of his home. I was able to do so last week.

Getting to Toma’s house involves a two-hour hike from the riverbed in Fayette, close to where he and his fellow literacy teachers meet on Saturday mornings. As you walk up, one of the first things you notice is the way the houses are built. Rocks, cement, and sand are hard to transport. Without a road that motorized vehicles can climb, one would have to depend on mules. So houses are built with wood or other more available materials.

Here’s a house woven from strips of coconut wood.

Here’s a school building made out of metal roofing material.

This woven palm leaf building serves as both a church and a school.

And here’s a typical house. It belongs to Toma’s father-in-law. Palm wood is the most common material in the area.

The view from Toma’s back yard is stunning. You can see all the way to the bay in the distance.

But Haitians say “//Dèyè mòn gen mòn//.” That means “Beyond mountains there are mountains,” and in Toma’s area this is literally true. This view is taken from his father-in-law’s house, a short, steep hike uphill from his own. The small cluster of houses you can barely see on the peak in the foreground is Toma’s yard.

Here’s Toma himself.

The group is working with the Wonn Refleksyon book that was created for non-readers. Rather than offering texts for discussion, it offers images and Haitin proverbs. The participants start by individually studying the image or the proverb for the day. Toma’s group has grown because of the activity’s popularity, so they are short of books, but participants don’t seem to mind sharing.

Participants then organize themselves into small groups to begin talking about their thoughts. The day I visited Toma’s class was talking about a Haitian proverb, “It’s when the snake is dead that you see its length.” In their small groups, participants shared experiences they’d had that related to the proverb.

After the small group work, they return to the circle. The small groups provide reports about their conversations, and a general discussion ensues.

I spent the night at Toma’s place so I gotto meet his daughters too. Nana’s on the left, and Zanda’s on the right.

The Literacy Game

I recently travelled to Hinche, where I was able to visit one of Fonkoze’s Basic Literacy classes meeting in a back room of the Fonkoze branch. The women were playing Jwèt Korelit la. It’s a game that teaches recognition of letters and words, and then the solution to simple business math problems, by challenging players to find a letter, word, or solution in a pile of cards spread out on a table.

This group in Hinche was without a table, but they were cheerfully making due with a chair and a piece of cardboard.

Here, one of the participants has found the letter that her teacher called out.

Fonkoze teachers emphasize the positive. One of the institution’s educational mantras is that adult learners are fragile. The first and perhaps, most important job for a teacher is to create a positive, encouraging environment. This literacy teacher could hardly be more enthusiastic.

After the game was over I asked participants whether they would be willing to write something on the blackboard for me. They all jumped at the chance, and almost all of them wrote their own names. This might not seem like much, but after a life without school of any kind and then only three months of weekly meetings its an accomplishment thewomen are extremely proud of.


When the last woman went to the board, I expected another name. I was stunned when she carefully wrote “M kontan wè vizitè yo.” That means, “I’m glad to see the visitors.” Here’s a short film of her writing.

The games name means “the game that supports the struggle”, and it’s exciting to watch the players use it as they struggle to improve their lives.

The pictures and the video were taken by Erik Badger.

Intervention

I’m worried about Jhony.

Before I go on, I should add that, though my proofreading skills have fallen on hard times, “Jhony” is not an error. That very American name is common in Haiti, but to Haitians the “h” appears to make little sense. They know that it’s there, but they don’t know where to put it. It precedes the “o” as often as it follows it, I think. I don’t suppose it matters.

And “Jhony” isn’t even Jhony’s name. His name is actually Makenson. Like many Haitians, the name he really uses is a nickname. Though he says that he’s called Makenson in school, I’ve never heard him addressed that way. In Ka Glo, he’s Jhony Bebette. “Bebette”, his mother’s nickname, is used to identify him when his own nickname is not enough. There are, in fact, other Jhonies and Johnies in the area.

I’ve known Jhony Bebette since I began coming to Ka Glo in 1997. He was seven or eight at the time, but already working hard for his mother in all the spare time he had. She sells bread, homemade coconut candy, and ground coffee from a basket she sets up along the road as it turns uphill towards Mabanbou, the cluster of homes just down the hill from where I live.

She roasts and grinds the coffee herself and makes the candy at home. She buys the bread down the hill in Petyonvil, so she’s got a roundtrip to make on foot each day. That trip, the time it takes to make the other things she sells, and the work around her house take up a fair amount of time, time she can’t spend sitting at her basket, making sales. So her children sit there for her. From a fairly young age, they learn to sell the stuff she offers, to keep track of money, and to make accurate change.

She’s even created a way to do business that works with little children in charge. Everything she sells goes for the same price: a Haitian dollar, which is the usual way to refer to five gourdes. Whenever prices have risen, she’s adjusted the quantities she provides at that price, but she doesn’t adjust the price. That way, making change is, very literally, child’s play.

And so I got used to seeing Jhony sitting by the basket, selling his mother’s wares. Or coming to the mapou tree to fetch water. Or, as he grew, walking down the mountain to Malik, where he would meet her as she headed home from Petyonvil, to help her carry her load. He was a cheerful but serious boy and, in his mid-teens, he’s become a serious but cheerful young man.

The year before last, he finished sixth grade at Mèt Anténor’s school, the nearby public primary school, and he passed the national primary school graduation exam. He was fortunate enough to secure a place at the public high school in Petyonvil. A good thing, too, because his mother could certainly not afford to send him to a private school. Even a cheap one. The public high school is almost free. He was nervous his first year in secondary school. Things were so different. Different teachers for different courses instead of a single teacher all day long. Much larger classes, filled with kids he didn’t know. But he worked hard, passed comfortably, and started his second year with more hope than fear.

In November, he became ill. I don’t have all the details, but it went something like this: He developed a rash and, at roughly the same time, began experiencing moments of dizzy weakness. The last time he went down to school, in November, he was so dizzy by the end of the day that he had to lie down, and he passed out. By the time he awoke, it was dark. He tried to start the hard uphill hike back home but he couldn’t. He just didn’t have the strength. Fortunately, he saw our neighbor Toto, driving by in his boss’s 4-by-4. Toto put Jhony in the back seat, finished some errands he had to do, and drove him home.

It was a week or so later that I heard about it all. I was away almost all of November, working in the provinces. I immediately asked what the doctor had said, but was sorry to learn that Jhony hadn’t been to a doctor. His mother didn’t have the money to take him, and, even if she did, it’s not certain she would have done so. She and her children belong to a charismatic group of Christians who meet in a home near where her business is, and they had determined that Jhony’s problem was not medical. They believed it to have been caused by the devils who live uphill from them.

These “devils” are the vodoun practitioners who live in Mabanbou. Conservative Protestants tend to be extremely hostile to vodoun, inclined to accuse vodoun practitioners of all sorts of wickedness. Jhony explained to me that he had been told that his soul had been taken to offer as a sacrifice.

Or something like that. I still have a hard time following such stories. I want to be very clear, though: This is nothing more than my very rough rendering of what Jhony told me his church’s leaders explained to him. So instead of taking Jhony to a doctor, they had him move into the church building. There, he could be prayed for constantly and intensively.

And this is where I got involved. At the time Jhony looked awful: thin, downcast, a little lifeless. And the rash was driving him nuts. I spoke to him, and then to his mother, respectfully about the prayer that they were using to heal him, but I also suggested that a doctor might have some good advice. I gave Bebette money to pay for the appointment and for tests and medicines if such were required, and left Ka Glo for another week.

I came back to discover Jhony still living in the church and not going to school. They had indeed been to a doctor, but when the doctor asked for lab tests, Bebette decided to return to the church with Jhony and follow prayer instead. I have no idea how they spent the money, but Bebette is raising five children, so I’m sure there’s no lack of need.

By that point, Jhony was feeling a little better. He had gotten the rash under control with some calamine lotion that I brought him. He was anxious to get back to school because he had already missed out on a lot and the second-quarter exam period was approaching, but he was afraid that he didn’t have the strength to go down to Petyonvil and then return each day on foot. So I gave him the money he would need to take a truck between Petyonvil and Malik, and I left for another few days.

When I returned this time, I was discouraged to learn that Jhony still was not going to school. His mother and their pastor didn’t think he was ready to leave the church. He was starting to look a lot better, but he seemed to be feeling increasingly discouraged. Exams were starting, and he would not be in school for them. If he were to lose a whole set of exams, he would have a hard time passing for the year, and this would have serious consequences.

Generally speaking, it’s not that unusual for a Haitian kid to fail a year of school and to have to repeat it. But slots at the public high school are so desirable that its administration does not let kids repeat grades there. Fail and you’re out. For Jhony, failing school this year could easily mean that his education is over, after a very promising start. And he is very clear about this. As his health and strength have returned to him, his frustration has grown. He thought he was ready to go down the mountain to take his end-of-term exams, but his mother was unable or unwilling to give him either the twenty gouds that roundtrip transportation would cost each day or the fifty gouds to pay the examination fee. With the Haitian goud at about 43 to the dollar, the sums are equivalent to roughly 47 cents and $ 1.16. Though her income is small, and she has a lot of things to manage with it, it doesn’t seem like a lot of money. But this is an extremely difficult claim to judge.

I would have given him the money myself. It wouldn’t be much money for me, either. But I couldn’t convince myself that it would have the effect I was looking for. I have already given his mother money for him. She didn’t use the money I gave her for medical care to pay for medical care, and she didn’t use the money I gave her to pay for his transportation to school and back to get him to school. I do not believe that I should be making decisions for her and her son, but I can’t see myself simply giving them money for I-don’t-know-what either. It’s complicated.

And it gets more complicated in surprising ways. I visit Jhony in the church every chance I get. It’s nice to talk. But if the pastor’s there, he is certain to remind me none too discretely that I said I would buy several sacks of cement towards the construction of the church. This is false. I said no such thing. The truth is that he asked me to buy cement, and I didn’t say “absolutely not”. I said that I would consider the idea. I didn’t want to say “no” outright because so much of Jhony’s immediate future seems to depend on him.

I don’t want to paint Pastor Narcisse in a bad light. He’s taken responsibility for Jhony and for a small church where a growing congregation meets under a woven palm-leave roof that sits on a shaky frame. It would mean a lot to him to get a real structure built, so he would be crazy to let my visits pass without trying to convince me to help him out. At the same time, I’m just not that interested in financing church construction. I have, as they say, other fish to fry.

Soon, enough though, I’ll have to decide whether and what I want to do about Jhony. It seems to me possible, though not certain, that his family is now hoping that I will simply take over his school expenses for them. The interest I’ve shown in him over the course of a couple of years, but especially since he became sick, could very easily have created such a hope. Not deciding anything is not an option, because it would be exactly the same as deciding to leave well enough – or unwell enough – alone.

Elijen’s Garden in Bwa Nwa

Elijen has been the gardening assistant at the Matènwa Community Learning Center for over a year. Last year, he completed 9th grade at the Center’s junior high school, which is the last grade school goes to right now. Rather than continuing his formal education, he’s chosen to go to work as a gardener/teacher in Matènwa and as an agricultural advisor in his own neighborhood of Bwa Nwa, about a 50-minute walk from Matènwa.

His garden sits on a slope of Bwa Nwa, protected by mango trees. Here he is in the middle of his garden with Erik Badger, my long-time colleague in my work in Haiti and at Shimer College.

Elijen had to work hard just to create the space on his land that he farms. It’s extremely rocky soil. His first step was to remove the rocks. He’s used them to build a series of walls that hold the soil in place when it rains.

He cut channels that run down the slope to keep excess water from washing away his soil.

He chose some crops, like these sweet potatoes, that provide good ground cover.

And he uses plantain trees as supports for vines that can then be used to cover the soil.

He grows some vegetables that an American would immediately recognize, like these peppers. The first photo is a hot pepper plant, the second is sweet peppers.

He grows parsley.

And Pumpkin.

And spinach.

Nothing is wasted. He just finished harvesting his coffee, and he is now letting the outer shells of the coffee beans rot. They make great compost.

He grows grasses, like this elephant grass. The various grasses help retain soil and they can be used as animal feed.

And the straw that they leave can be used as cover for the beds in which seedlings are planted. Here they cover a bed of tomato plants.

The soil is hard, so Elijen has been experimenting with different ways to soften it. He’s covered this bed of cabbage with local clay.

He plants a lot of trees, just as they do in Matènwa. Here’s a small avocado plant.

He also does a lot of grafting. Here he has grafted lemon branches onto an orange tree.

This old mago tree has been prepared for grafting. It’s a “mango fil” meaning “stringy mango”. Its fruit isn’t very much liked. So the big branches have been cut off so that thin new growth can emerge.

“Mango fransik” branches will then be grafted onto the old mango fil tree. Fransik is a great eating mango.

As seen at the Matènwa Community Learning Center, he’s even created a great outer meeting space where he gets together with the other young gardeners that he works with.

Rocks, Paper, No Scissors

We sat in the meeting room at the top of the school in Matenwa with ten little stones, a pen, and a pile of scrap paper. I was trying to determine whether he knew his numbers, one-four.

He could write them on paper. “2” gave him some problems, but he was even able to write a perfectly good “6” at one point. It soon became apparent, however, that the fact that he could write the various digits did not mean that he knew what they meant. He did not seem to connect a “1” with one thing or a “2” with two things or a “3” with three.

Jantoutou joined Vana’s third-grade class this year. He’d been friends for years with other kids in the class, but hadn’t been going to school. He is what Haitians call a “bèbè”, a deaf-mute, and such children generally miss out on the chance to go to school. There’s just no place for them in a traditional Haitian classroom, where the emphasis is on recitation of memorized texts. There is, for example, a deaf-mute who lives in Nankonble, just a little way down along the hill from where I live in Ka Glo. He’s a full-grown young man, big and muscular, and he makes a living working for the masons and carpenters who build houses in the area. He does the heavy work: mixing and carrying mortar, lugging rocks or cinder block or planks, digging holes. But he didn’t get to go to school. His ability to communicate is limited.

But the Matenwa Community Learning Center is different from almost all other Haitian schools. Teachers there focus on creating classrooms where children can work together to discover the world. The children work individually, in small groups, and in large groups to teach one another and themselves to read, to write, to appreciate and improve the environment that surrounds them, and to learn math and the other skills and information they’ll need as they grow.

And the freer, more participative approach the school takes leaves plenty of room for students who would not traditionally find their ways into Haitian primary schools. I’ve written before of the adult women who attend classes with the Matenwa kids. These women are only the most obvious example of students who would not be in primary school were they elsewhere in Haiti.

Jantoutou is an example of a very different kind. Vana is happy with his presence in her class. He is growing socially, integrating himself increasingly into the class’s activities. As long as he has something to do, he is hard to distinguish from the other kids. Only when he feels lost does he tend to misbehave. Naturally enough, I suppose. When the kids are writing or drawing, he works closely with another student, copying whatever she does. And so he is getting better at drawing, and he can write some words.

But Vana has been increasingly concerned at the difficulty of determining exactly how much Jantoutou is learning beyond how to behave in a group. It’s hard to be certain what the drawings he creates or the words he copies mean to him. The example Vana cited when I spoke to her was straightforward: He seemed to understand addition problems some of the time, but not always. She knew that he probably needed more individual attention, but with twenty-something other students to worry about, and without experience or training to help her know how to work with a deaf child, she was a little bit stumped.

I certainly don’t know any more about working with deaf children than Vana does. If anything, I know less. She is, at least, an experienced and successful teacher of kids. But I’d become fascinated during my monthly visits to the school as I got to see Jantoutou working in her class, and I was curious to see what doing some math with him would be like. So I asked her whether I could work with him for a few minutes, and she quickly agreed.

I started by making three piles of stones: one with a single stone, one with two, and one with three, and I wrote the appropriate digits under each. I used pointing in an effort to associate the digits with the piles. We then spent about twenty minutes alternating between two games. In one, I would put out one, two, or three stones, and he would have to write the correct digit. In the other, I would point to a “1”, a “2”, or a “3” on a sheet of paper in front of him, and he would have to choose the right number of rocks.

It soon became clear that he had not really been associating the digits with the quantities. He seemed to be choosing digits more-or-less at random. That is, in fact, why I know he can write a perfectly good “6.” He wrote at least two of them that I can remember, though he never had six rocks in front of him at once.

Slowly, his answers became more and more regular, more and more correct. It will take a lot more practice for me to be able to be certain that he’s getting it. I just don’t know what I’m doing. If nothing else he seemed to be having a great time.

I hope to make sitting with him a part of my daily schedule when I’m in Matenwa. Abner Sauveur, the school’s principal, spoke to me about the activity later that day, and he plans to start spending time with him as well.

My work here in Haiti is an apprenticeship. I think of myself as learning all the time. Working with Jantoutou will be a new challenge. I don’t know what he’ll get out of it, but I am very sure I’ll learn a lot.

The Classroom in the Garden

The Matenwa Community Learning Center has been making a schoolyard garden an important part of its work for years. The garden reflects the school’s philosophy in a number of ways. First, the school aims to educate children to appreciate the place where they are growing up and to be able to live well there. This is enormously important because the great tendancy in all of rural Haiti is for those children who get to go to school to move away to cities where their families think they will have more opportunities.

Second, the school aims at sustainable development for Matènwa and for the island of Lagonav, where Matènwa is located. Teaching organic vegetable gardening is a way to develop a food source for an area where food can be scarce. Teaching techniques that are good for the soil and for the environment in general is an important way to fight the environmental degradation that hurts the island — and all of Haiti — so badly.

Third, raising and distributing trees directly combats the deforestation that has pushed much of Lagonav to the environmental edge.

The school calls the garden its treasure, or its treasury.

Everyday, Abner Sauveur, the school’s principal, spends an hour in the garden with one of the classes. They start by sitting in a circle and going over the work they’ll need to do that day. Here he’s talking with the fourth grade class.

He assigned two of the children to take inventory of newly-planted beds of cabbage. As it turns out, they counted almost twice the number of plants that he had recorded in his journal. He himself had failed to count plants in one of the new beds. The kids enjoyed correcting him, and he was pleased to be corrected.


One boy was assigned to water plants. Though the school uses some drip irrigation, they are not yet equipped to use it throughout the garden. And they’re not sure they want to. They like the way a person carrying a watering can interacts with the garden closely.

The day’s major work was in the tree nursery. The school has distributed over 7000 trees to students, teachers, and neighbors this year. One group was assigned to fill the bags they plant seedings in with soil.


The fourth-grade teacher, Benaja, joined in.

Another group was removing saplings from bags that had become too small.


Not all the students are children. This year, several adult women decided to return to school. It’s a credit to them that they would have the courage to do so, but it also speaks well of the school, which creates an environment in which they feel comfortable joining in a class of children.

One group of children joined Elijen, the school’s gardening assistant, as he organized newly-filled bags of soil in the tree nursery.


It’s hard work on a hot day.

The kids get some help from an neighbor.

At the end of the class, the group returns to the circle to talk about what they’ve accomplished.

The school is very much committed to creating a positive, respectful, encouraging environment. As each group of children tells the class about the work it did, Abner has the class give them a round of applause.

The school in Matènwa depends in part on support from donors in the States and elsewhere. If you want to learn more about supporting the school, contact Chris Low, at [email protected].

Vana and her Garden

Vana is the third grade teacher ay the Matenwa Community Learning Center. She’s one of the longest-serving teachers at the school. She’s also a member of the executive committee and the schools treasurer. So she doesn’t have much time to farm. She believes in the school’s garden, however, and so has taken the time to establish a small garden of her own.

I don’t know anything about soil, but the soil on her land seems pretty unpromising. I’m not sure whether the photo really conveys how gray it is.

She tries to work with the soil by planting in beds that she covers with leaves and straw. It holds the soil down and captures moisture.


She is working on a couple of different crops. One is tomatoes.

Here’s a young eggplant.

Cabbage seems to grow pretty well in the Matenwa area.

And here’s a young sweet pepper.

And here’s a picture of Vana herself.

Soup Joumou

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The photo above was taken in Madanm Anténor’s dining room on January 1st, 2006. It’s room a know well because it’s what I called home in Haiti from 1998 to February 2005, when I moved into the house that Byton built. January 1st is Haitian Independence Day, the anniversary of the 1804 declaration of independence from France and Haitians everywhere celebrate it by feasting on soup joumou.

Soup joumou is pumpkin soup, and the story goes that when the French still controlled Haiti it was consumed only by slaveholders, never by slaves, so that when independence was declared former slaves decided to celebrate by consuming what had, until then, been forbidden goods. It came to be known as independence soup. When Jean-Bertrand Aristide was elected in 1991 after years of dictatorship and oppression, he called it democracy soup.

So it is a meal that means a lot to Haitians. And it also tastes great. I’ve grown fond of all sorts of Haitian foods, but love none as a love pumpkin soup.

The photo was taken midmorning, about 10:00, and so lots of soup had been consumed by the time it was taken. Andrelita and Myrtane, Byton’s sisters, had borrowed and alarm clock from Byton the night before so they could get up at 3:00 and start cooking. Their soup arrived in my house as I was finishing my coffee around 6:00.

So the fact that so much soup had already been consumed and the quantity still sitting on Madanm Anténor’s table requires some explanation. In fact, only one of the bowls on the table has any remnant of the soup Madanm Anténor herself had made that morning. Each of the other bowls contains a generous portion of soup, prepared in one of her neighbors’ kitchens: Madanm Clébert, Madanm Willy, Andrelita and Myrtane, Madanm Frénel, and Merline, Madanm Jean-Claude’s youngest daughter.

Because that’s what happens all through the morning of January 1st. Children weave through the neighborhood, carrying bowls of soup from one home to another, sent with good wishes for the year to come. Adults circulate around the neighborhood as well, wishing one another a good year and good health and that they will always continue to live together as neighbors just as they do now.

It’s a practice the merits careful attention and, perhaps, imitation: a whole neighborhood of friends and relatives that eat together once a year, celebrating their friendship, their sense of community, with the meal most meaningful to them all.100_0232w

And, as I said, the soup is great. I’m not the only one that thinks so. Madanm Anténor can’t get enough of it. The photo below is of Valouloun her youngest daughter, who loves it perhaps even more than Madanm Anténor and I combined.

Happy New Year.