I’ve never much liked the story of the Lion and the Mouse. It’s about a mouse that falls into the clutches of a lion. The Great King of Beasts then releases the mouse because he’s amused by the mouse’s claim that he’ll return the favor some day. That day comes when the lion is caught in a hunter’s net and the mouse chews through the rope to set him free. I suppose they all live happily ever after.

What I haven’t liked about it is that I don’t really have questions about it, at least none that seem worth asking a Wonn Refleksyon group. I don’t want to feign interest. I’ve never been good at feigning anything. So the challenge for me every time I use the text is to find a way to engage myself in the possibilities for conversation that it offers.

I had to smile to myself when Frémy met before I left for my trip to the States to figure which of us would be responsible for which text in our work with the women of Kofaviv. He would be going to Guadeloupe to see his wife and son, and our trips would be slightly out of sync, so each of us would have meetings to manage with the group alone. The text that fell to me was the story of the Lion and the Mouse. It seemed all the funnier since in the sequence we use it falls right between two texts I like very much.

Kofaviv is the Komisyon Fanm Viktim pou Viktim which is to say the Commission of Women Victims for Victims. It was established by women who suffered rape and other forms of violence during the coup d’état years of the early 90s. They offer health and counseling services to women in the poorest neighborhoods of Pòtoprens, particularly women who are victims of violence. They also work towards organizing those women. Their leaders asked Frémy and me to prepare about twenty of the women to run Wonn Refleksyon groups in the various neighborhoods, and we’ve been working together for about a month and a half. Each week we do two things: First, we lead a discussion using the guidebook for leading discussions that a group of us created a couple of years ago; then we read the day’s lesson plan together and reflect on how Frémy and I used it to lead the discussion. Our goal is for the women to feel ready to use the guidebook to lead discussions on their own.

I hadn’t seen the women for a couple of weeks, so I was excited on my way to see them. I got to their inconspicuous Pòtoprens office and was pleased to see that they had acquired chairs. Our first meetings had been held sitting in a circle on the floor. There was nothing wrong with meeting that way and, in fact, it established an ease among us that might have otherwise been hard to achieve, but the fact that they had been able to find the money to buy chairs was a good sign. When they started our session by distributing nametags, including one marked “Steeve” for me, this seemed like an even better sign. Neither Frémy nor I had suggested nametags. Frémy’s great at picking up names, and I never think of it. So this was entirely their own idea, and showed they feel ownership of the work we’re doing together.

And the meeting went really well. Their sense of ownership extended to ownership of the objectives we share. Things took a more serious turn than they had in our previous meetings. When it came time to discuss they ways I had used the day’s guide to lead our class, they had lots of questions and comments. They noticed places where I had followed the guide exactly and places where I hadn’t. They asked for detailed explanations, and suggested reasonings of their own. Questions started to emerge that showed they are starting to image themselves as discussion leaders, questions that begin “What should a discussion leader do if . . .?”

My answers led to further questions. They asked about the importance of keeping track of time, about the role that small group work plays, and about the role of a leader during small group work. They are particularly concerned with learning how they can work with participants who are generally silent: though they are dynamic and articulate, the women they work with can tend to be shy. That they are already imagining the problem is a very good sign.

But this was not the only serious turn that our conversation took.

The main question the group wanted to discuss as we spoke of the story was whether people who are small really can help people who are bigger than they are. In a sense it is a silly, uninteresting question. Any sensible person would immediately answer “yes.” We’ve surely all experienced the question from both sides. Since one of the principles that we teach when we talk about developing good questions is that we should only ask questions when we don’t know what they right answer is, the question about small people helping larger stronger ones seems as though it could not be good.

It turns out, however, that our principle doesn’t quite apply in this instance, because the question is less direct than it seems. Though it appears to be a straightforward yes-or-no question, what it in fact does is invite participants to share examples that occur to them. Many of those examples will be distant – how political leaders could learn if they would listen to citizens, how parents could learn if they listen to their kids – but some participants share particular stories either of times when they’ve been useful to someone older or more important than they were or of times when a child has helped them. Most of these stories are charming.

But at one quiet moment of the conversation, one of the women spoke of one of the women in her group. She said that the other woman had been beaten by her husband. At the time, that woman’s oldest child, whom she had had with another man, was five. Her husband must have been beating her horribly, because she said she was lying helplessly on the ground as he was approaching to continue his attack. The five year old boy picked up a knife, stood in front of his stepfather, and told him that if he struck his mother again he would stab him. It’s difficult to imagine what went through the husband’s mind, whether he feared the armed little boy or was shocked to his senses by the sight, but for whatever reason he broke off the attack.

For a moment, we sat in stunned silence. But then floodgates opened, and story after story came of children somehow helping their mothers at difficult times. None of them matched the story of the boy with the knife, but each was able to involve one or more of the participants in the now-very-serious exchange.

I had always known that my fondest or lack of fondness for a text is unimportant. What matters is how a text works for a group. It’s hard, though, to really bear that in mind. It’s easy for me to slip into thinking that my own curiosity is the engine that will drive a group. In my classes at Shimer, where students are required to read hard books that they sometimes approach thinking that they won’t be interested, my curiosity has had an important role to play. It can tend to infect the other in a class.

But working with the Kofaviv women has been an important reminder that, at least right here and right now, my own engagement in a question is not at all the main thing. It certainly can help, but it’s less important for me to lead an inquiry than it is for me to help open a space in which serious conversation can begin. They’ll be plenty of time for inquiry once the habit of conversation is in place.

I have to admit that I was a little disappointed to see American peanut butter on the table for breakfast in the priest’s guesthouse in Cerca Carvajal.

Disappointed and a little surprised. It must be a nuisance to keep a supply. I didn’t see anything in Cerca that could be called a store, much less anything that sells standard American groceries. Even in Ench, which is a hard ninety minutes away by truck, such an item might be difficult to come by. It’s likely enough that the large plastic jars of Jif are bought in Okap or Pòtoprens, hours away in one direction or the other.

And it’s strange that anyone would make that effort, because Haitians produce such wonderful peanut butter. It’s made, as far as I can tell, all over the country. And since Cerca is an area where lots of peanuts are grown, I figured that acquiring a delicious, locally-produced supply would be easy.

The church group I was in Cerca with had been there many times, so I asked them whether they had tasted Haitian peanut butter, or manba. When they said that hadn’t, I thought I would get to work.

The next morning, I went to the market early to have coffee, and asked the coffee merchant whether I would find someone selling jars of manba in the market later that day. She said that I would not, but the merchant next to her immediately chimed in: If I wanted to buy manba, she’d be happy to make it for me. I could come back to pick it up later in the day. And as we continued talking, I learned something.

I love manba. I really do. I think I could pretty much live on the stuff. I especially like it when it’s made with the very hot peppers that many Haitians grind right into it. It’s a surprising taste for someone who grew up with Skippy and the like, but I think it’s wonderful.

So I asked the woman to be sure to add peppers, and she answered, “We don’t make it that way in Cerca.” She went on to explain that, in Cerca Carvajal, manba is typically made with a little sugar, some cinnamon, and ginger. I had never heard of such a thing, but I was very happy to give it a try. It turns out, it’s great.

The experience reminded me that even within Haiti, a small enough country, there are cultural differences. When I tell my friends in Ka Glo, for example, that the folks around Twoudinò snack on fried horse meat they stare in gaping-mouthed wonder. When they hear that, in parts of the central plateau, people saddle and ride bulls instead of horses, donkeys, and mules, they are just as surprised.

The cultural differences between a group of Americans who come to visit a community in rural Haiti and the Haitians they’re visiting can, of course, be much greater. Those differences were what brought Frémy and me to Cerca Carvajal.

We were invited there by parishioners of a Catholic church in the Richmond, Virginia, area that has had a partnership with the parish in Cerca for a number of years. Groups from the Richmond church visit annually. They come with medical workers to run a two-day clinic. They also provide financial support to help run the parochial school and the church itself. Over the years, they’ve found their ties to the Haitian community that they visit abundantly rewarding, but frustrating as well. Father Ketnet, the priest who hosts them speaks English well, but other members of the Cerca community do not. All communication has had to be through Father Ketnet. The folks from Richmond have had little chance to actually speak with other people from Cerca Carvajal.

It’s not that they distrust Father Ketnet. Far from it. They seem to have a very good relationship with him. But they want something broader and richer, something that would allow them to learn from and respond to the whole community that they feel so attached to and that would allow the people in Cerca, whose lives so touch theirs, to feel a little more connected to them, too.

Frémy was asked to facilitate a large gathering at which members of the two groups would speak to one another without priestly intervention. I would be his lead translator. He would be introducing a method called Open Space. It’s a way to run a meeting without fixing its agenda in advance. Participants are invited to propose a series of topics at the start of the meeting. Each topic becomes the theme for a small group discussion. Multiple such discussions are then held as the same time. Participants choose the one whose topic interests them.

Or they don’t. A good deal of what makes Open Space work is the freedom it offers to participants. They come and go as they please. They’re not even encouraged to stay put once they enter a group. Someone might wander into one small group discussion ten minutes late, get up after five minutes of listening, and that walk off to join another. Or even just hang around without entering into any of the small groups at all. In the language of Open Space, it’s called the Law of Two Feet: If you’re not gaining from or contributing to a conversation, use your two feet to take you someplace else. It creates an ambiance that’s as unfamiliar to many of us as peanut butter with hot pepper mixed in. No one is in charge. Folks wander around. It can look and feel chaotic.

But the seeming-disorderliness of the ambiance is just the point. Because it is the loosening of the framework that a fixed agenda, clear leadership, and regimented procedures normally provide that opens up a free space where people can organize themselves to pursue the questions and tasks that really interest them. Open Space works because it invites people who are together because they are interested in something to exploit their own interest, their own passion, so that they can take responsibility for addressing the issues and solving the problems that they see as facing them.

The folks from Richmond were hoping that a meeting that broke up into separate little working groups would create an opportunity for more direct dialogue with their counterparts from Cerca Carvajal because Father Ketnet would be able to be in one small group at most. Also, paying attention to the topics that folks from Cerca propose might help them understand better what their Haitians friends were hoping for. The only things limiting what people could talk about would be their interest and their imagination.

But there would be problems. First of all, I could not do all the translating. We would have to hire a group of translators, and English speakers don’t grow on trees out in the Haitian countryside. We addressed this by inviting strong English speakers from Ench to join me as translators. I would translate Frémy’s facilitation from Creole to English, and help with other parts of the translating as well, but when participants divided into small groups, the translation team would divide with them, assuring that there would be one of us in as many different places as could be.

Using translators in the small groups, however, is tricky. Spontaneity and free flow are important parts of the atmosphere that makes Open Space work, and a translator, even a pretty good one, is almost bound to interfere with both. It is too easy for a translator to become the center of attention, making decisions about who speaks when. When translators are inexperienced and participants are also unused to speaking through translators, things are much harder. People can tend say more in each speech than the translator can remember, so things need to be repeated if they are not to be lost and that can further clog things up.

We had what appeared to be a bigger problem, however. When we got to Cerca on Wednesday afternoon, we learned that no one had yet been invited to the meeting scheduled for Friday morning. So when Father Ketnet asked at dinner that night what the maximum number of participants was, and explained that he thought 80-100 would come – if that was ok with us – I thought he was nuts.

But it turns out he can mobilize his people. There might well have been almost a hundred people – including Frémy, thirteen Virginians, and me – packed into the parish meeting house by the time things got going. Just going through introductions took a lot of time.

There’s not much to be said about what might seem like the important question: Namely, How did it go? Open Space always goes well in a way, almost by definition. As long as the person or group convening it has the ability to put things in the participants’ hands, the process can’t fail.

I don’t say this lightly. It’s certainly possible that an Open Space meeting could fail to lead to the specific consequences that those organizing it envision. But bringing about a predetermined effect is not what the process is designed for. It’s designed, rather, to free those who participate to pursue what they want.

And what these people wanted was, mostly, just to talk. The participants from Cerca wanted to share their problems and their hopes with their visitors and to feel heard by them. They also had specific questions about some of the activities that the Virginian parish sponsors. The visitors, for their part, wanted to express their interest and their appreciation to a community that has been sharing its life with them for a number of years, and to take some first steps towards understanding that community better. The small group conversation I translated was certainly lively and seemed pretty frank.

It’s hard to tell where things will go next. The Virginian group appears committed to Cerca Carvajal for the long term. Ideally, that would mean that they’ll have lots of opportunities for many more conversations.

Also ideally, it will mean that they’ll get to eat years of Cerca’s wonderful manba as well.