Monthly Archives: May 2006

Being an Apprentice

I recently received a letter from one of my high school teachers, a man named Ray Karras, whom I very much liked and admired. He’s retired, and it might be almost 20 years since I had been in touch with him, but a couple of circumstances had brought him to mind, and the internet made it possible to find a mailing address. I sent him a note that included a description of some of my work here, and he responded shortly thereafter. He’s not electronic. His letter was typed on the kind of non-electric machine that I remember seeming antiquated when he typed notes to me in the 70’s.

He wrote two things that struck me. First, that he liked the sound of my work and was pleased by his sense that I really like being a teacher. (I do.) Second, that he suspected I had discovered that we teachers learn much more from our students than they ever learn from us.

His second comment not only seems right to me. It seems like something I should always have in mind. I think of myself, and believe I ought to think of myself, as a learner first, and as a teacher second. That fact has a lot to do with the name of the project I’m a part of: the Apprenticeship in Alternative Education. Although it can be important, when talking with people about my work, especially with those who help me with their support, to be able to explain what I am offering to the Haitians I collaborate with, my own emphasis should always be on what the work offers to me.

Bearing that in mind is not a struggle.

I spent last Friday morning in Tonmgato. Tonmgato is on the road between Léogane and Jakmèl. The road is a beautiful, twisting ride through the mountains, one of the best-made roads in the country. Tonmgato is the location of Fonkoze’s Fondwa branch. I was meeting with Rony Mery, Fonkoze’s education coordinator for that branch and the neighboring one in Twen. He and I have a little project we’re working on together, and we needed the morning to push the project forward.

The project began to take shape in February, when I attended part of a week-long workshop he gave for credit center members who were to become teachers of a four-month class that Fonkoze offers in Business Skills. The class is designed for the market women who are Fonkoze’s core members, and it helps them develop a sense of control over their own businesses. They learn to calculate their investment in the business, their expenses, their income, and their profit or loss. Though many of them have been running their own businesses for years, they often have a surprisingly vague sense of how the business is doing. After the four-month class, however, many report that they feel they know what they are doing for the very first time.

But as helpful as the class is for many of our members, we’ve been unhappy with it nonetheless. Observing Business Skills classes in the field made it clear that they were turning into conventional, teacher-led courses. Many of the teachers were standing in the front of the classroom, leading group reading and repetition. They were behaving, understandably, like most of the teachers whom they had seen in Haiti, where teachers typically dictate to students or write texts on a blackboard that students then copy down and memorize. They lead recitations of the texts to help students get them down.

This was not at all what we were looking for. Like all of Fonkoze’s education programs, the Business Skills class has, as its overarching goal, reinforcing our members’ leadership and initiative, their sense of control. We are working to help them increasingly think of themselves as actors, as people capable of changing their own situation and of serving their communities as agents of change.

In one sense, the class was succeeding. It was helping them gain better control over their businesses, their sources of income, and, so, helping them develop the tools they need to make good decisions in that sphere.

In another sense, though, the classes were undermining themselves. Participants were turning passive as their teachers stood filling them with the contents of a book. They were not developing initiative. They were not developing the habit of looking to themselves and to one another for answers. They were not figuring things out.

I spoke to Rony about the problem following a visit to a Business Skills class that occurred shortly after his workshop. We agreed that the problem was largely our team’s fault. Much of what the team has generally done during the workshop for prospective teachers has modeled the very behaviors we want teachers avoid. The team had mainly been using the week to summarize the contents of the workbook that the course depends on. Under the pressure for time that summarizing four months of work in a single week inevitably creates, they were finding themselves talking a lot. And so, when the teachers finished following our team’s explanations for a week, they were going into their classrooms and offering their students the very same explanations.

Worst of all, it seemed entirely unnecessary for them to do so. The Business Skills class uses a workbook, with explanations that are simple and relevant and plenty of practice exercises. If we could just get teachers into the habit of pushing their students to use the book as a tool, a real study guide, that might be enough to draw participants into the action. And we might be able to get teachers to work that way with their participants if we work that way during the week we spend with them.

So Rony and I decided to redesign the workshop for prospective Business Skills teachers. I say “we”, but he’s really doing the main work. We met last Friday so that we could go over a draft schedule that he had created. We talked about each part of the workshop, about how we could maximize the amount of activity it would demand on the part of workshop participants, how it could move away from simple explanations of the book’s contents towards helping them learn to use the books we have as tools. It was a great way to spend a few hours with a colleague. The schedule will need a little more revision, but we hope to have tested in one or two places by the end of June. The real proof will come in July and August, when we visit Business Skills classes. Only then will we begin to learn whether changing our workshop can push us in a new direction.

Move changes for the class are in the works. Even if we can succeed in making it a participative, active experience that helps our members take charge of their businesses, it will still fall short of what it needs to become. It will never be enough to help our member ensure that their businesses are profitable. We want them to be able to lift themselves out of poverty, and they can only do so if the learn to use their profits well.

The class’s emphasis needs to broaden so that it helps them learn to use their businesses to accumulate wealth – if “wealth” is the word for the kind of accumulation we hope for. In August, Rony and I will have the chance to spend a couple of weeks with a real expert. We hope that, with his help, we will be able to make the changes we need to make.

We have a lot to learn if we’re to move forward. And as we do move forward, we’re certain to learn even more.

Water in Twoulwi

It turns out that not everything in Haiti is improving.

I was headed back from Lagonav this morning. It was in a good trip, because I had had a decent night’s sleep. Rather than getting up in Matenwa at 2:00 AM, I had left Matenwa Sunday afternoon, and slept at a friend’s in Ansagale, the port that boats for the mainland leave from. This meant that I could sleep until 5:00 or later and still get the 6:00 boat. It also meant I got to spend a very pleasant evening with Freda and her three kids.

When I got to the wharf, I bumped into some friends who were heading in the same direction as I was. We got onto the boat together, and then got the same bus to Pòtoprens.

One of the annoyances of these bus rides used to be that you were likely to have someone stand up and deliver a long, loud sermon. You’d be expected to keep quiet so that he – it was almost invariably a man – could give a version of the same old talk about putting oneself in Jesus’ hands.

Now, I don’t object to people having strong religious beliefs. On the whole, however, I’d rather not hear about them. I’m much more impressed by the wonderful things that many of the people around me do for one another every day than I am by a speech about convictions I’m supposed to hold.

For awhile, though, these sermons were replaced. Especially on mid-length bus routes like the one from Karyès, the port of entry from Lagonav, to Pòtoprens, what you would hear is pharmaceutical salesmen – or, rarely, saleswomen. They would stand up and try to generate interest in their various Haitian and foreign wares: a wide range of pills, liquids, and creams ranging from Haitian cough syrup to Chinese pain ointment to Indian or Indonesian antibiotics. You could never be certain what you might come across. They might have various Haitian herbal or folk remedies, and, like American drugstores, they would sell soaps, lotions, and toothpastes as well. I was never that interested in the items, but the sales chatter was easier to listen to than the sermons had been. And, like the sermons, they meant that the driver would not be blasting loud music over the radio.

In the last couple of weeks, however, things have taken a serious turn. Now before starting their sales pitch, the hawkers deliver a long sermon. I’m not sure who it was at Abdai, the company that employs many of them, who decided that sermons would increase sales, but I hope it’s not true, because now I have to listen to a whole lot of both.

Of course, that’s not much to complain of. There are more serious problems in Haiti. I was thinking about all this as I walked through putrid mud, two inches deep, along the road that leads between the Okap bus station and the base of Route Delmas, where I would get a tap-tap up the hill. It’s been raining regularly in the Pòtoprens area for the last couple of weeks, and the water descends from above Petyonvil, through Delmas, to this road. It doesn’t drain well, so the area can be quite a mess.

Even this used to be much worse, however. When I first starting visiting Haiti, the road was only spottily paved. Ditches and puddles of mud a foot deep or more were common. And “mud” fails to express how nasty the goop really was. And last year at this time, the road was more-or-less impassible on foot because it was such a dangerous part of town.

But one serious problem that just seems to be getting worse is the water situation on Lagonav. I spent much of Sunday in Twoulwi, a seaside village in lower Lagonav with Benaja, a Matenwa teacher and community activist who’s involved in trying to address the water situation, and it was an experience worth sharing.

Benaja invited me on Saturday. He hadn’t known that I would be on Lagonav that weekend, but neither had I. It had been a last-minute decision that Abner, his principal, and I had made to take advantage of time freed up by another plan that fell through. Benaja would be getting a ride in a truck belonging to an NGO called Concern Worldwide, and the truck would return all the way to Ansagale, so it would be very convenient for me. I had only been to lower Lagonav once, when I walked there with Benaja’s colleague Robert to visit his sick brother, and I had not been nearly as far as Twoulwi. So I was glad to have the chance to see more of the island.

The truck got to Matenwa at about 8:30, only ninety minutes late. I knew that the plan was to hold a community meeting about water problems with Twoulwi residents after they left church. Benaja had hoped that we would get to Twoulwi before church was over so he would be able to announce the meeting to a captive audience, but the late start had killed that idea. He and his colleague from Concern would have to do their best to collect folks when we arrived mid-morning.

The ride to Twoulwi is long and hard. Twoulwi is on the island’s south coast, only about 20 kilometers from Matenwa through the Lagonav hills, but the road is so bad that, even in a very rugged-seeming Landrover, it’s almost a three-hour trip. It’s hard to describe just how bad the road is: narrow, winding, rock-strewn, steeply-rising-and-falling. Under the best of circumstances – and riding in the back of the Landrover were pretty much the best circumstances – you take a beating as you bump along the way.

It can be much worse. Later that night, Freda told me about the trip she made there with her older son, Egens. Their motorcycle broke down on the way home, and they had a six-hour hike just to get as far as their rural home in Ti Palmis. There’s very little shade along much of the road, and water is extremely scarce, so it must have been a miserable walk. Egens is 20, and he was a boy at the time, but he remembers the trip well.

On the way, we passed through mountain communities like Ti Palmis and Plezans, and Benaja began to tell me about the water problem they were trying to address. It has been a wet spring in Petyonvil and Pòtoprens, but lower Lagonav has seen no rain since September. In Plezans, he said that folks might have to walk two hours each way to find potable water. When I joked that I hoped they all had donkeys to help carry their load, Benaja simply replied that, during the dry season, donkeys die in route. They don’t eat enough to carry their burdens.

The water situation in Twoulwi isn’t quite as bad as Plezans. There are a couple of small springs in the area. But the water quality is poor: It’s salty and none too clean. Benaja’s organization, the Association of Peasants and Activitists of Lagonav (AAPLAG) and Concern were thinking of investing resources in helping to solve the problem, but they needed to get a good sense of the situation first. Not only do they need to know as exactly as possible what the water situation is, they also need to understand the community well. They need to know who its leaders are, who might be counted on to take an important role in managing a local water project. If outside organizations don’t do a good job of linking up with well-respected members of a community where they want to work, their efforts can end up doing as much or more harm than good.

When we got to Twoulwi, Benaja spent a few minutes generating interest in the meeting he wanted to call. He spoke to a half-dozen or so young people who were just hanging out, and waited. Within a half-hour, there were two meetings running. One was led by the colleague from Concern. It involved about forty adults. Benaja himself led the other, for almost as many kids. Both groups met in circles, and both meetings were focus groups, or group interviews. They were attempts to gather information about the community in general and the water situation in particular.

I spent most of the time in the group with adults, watching and listening. It was clear that they weren’t used to meeting for discussions in such large groups. At various times, I counted as many as 14-17 speakers either trying to talk over one another or talking to those closest to them rather than listening to what was being said.

The most interesting part of the meeting was when the group stopped simply talking and got to work. We had brought large sheets of paper with us, and the man from Concern put them in the middle of the circle, with a bunch of colored markers, and asked the group to draw a map of their area showing all the sources of drinking water and the paths to those sources. About a third of the group crowded around three or four men who picked up magic markers and started to draw. The discussion that ensued was lively – just as the argument had been up to then – but now it was very much focused. All the various questions of detail that are involved in mapping came to the fore, and within about fifteen minutes the group had produced a complex map which had the support of nearly the everyone there.

Benaja was finishing with the kids at about the same time. He had been asking them to talk about the sorts of difficulties they have because of the water situation, and they had a lot to say. Before we left, he spoke to the group. He talked to them about AAPLAG, and explained that the reason he was there with them is that the organization had no members in the area. AAPLAG members are dynamic community organizers, scattered all over Lagonav. The absence of an AAPLAG organizer in the Twoulwi area makes it something of an exception. Benaja explained how one qualifies to become an AAPLAG member, and let the group know that he hoped, in the not-too-distant future, they would have an AAPLAG organizer of their own.

It’s not yet clear what, if anything, the Concern/AAPLAG partnership will do about the water situation in Twoulwi or in other areas of lower Lagonav. Freda, who was my host that evening, is a former AAPLAG president, and she assured me that there are parts of the island much worse off than Twoulwi.

One gets so accustomed to simply turning on a faucet. Even in Ka Glo, where there are no faucets, safe, cool, good-tasting drinking water is never more than a few feet away. It’s a little hard to imagine how my life would change if securing drinking water became a major part of it. Much less if such drinking water as I could secure was never very good.

Things Are Looking Up

The strongest impression you have standing at the wharf in the midst of Cité Soleil is of the many children swimming. There did not happen to be any boats being loaded or unloaded. There were no boats at the wharf at all. But there must have been a couple of dozen kids, running off one end of the dock or the other splashing, playing. It’s probably not what most of us think of when we imagine a place like Cité Soleil, the sprawling slum on the edge of Port au Prince.

Cité Soleil made up only one large piece of the day I spent with Geto today. We walked around a number of what have been the most dangerous parts of Port au Prince, and it’s very hard to avoid concluding that things are very much looking up.

When Abner and I were in the United States through much of April, it was striking and frustrating to be confronted with the persistent impressions that people we encountered have of Haiti. Haiti was in the news a little bit during the hard days before the election, and a little bit in the days during and after it as well. But since then, apparently, there’s been mostly silence. It’s a little hard to bear that in mind when you’re here in Haiti. My main access to American news is the internet, and by entering “Haiti” on Google’s news page I am able to keep up with much that’s written. What’s written is something of a mixed bag, but there is always something. So it’s easy to forget that someone back in the States, someone not intentionally seeking out stories about Haiti, might hear very little of what’s going on at all. The vast majority of folks we spoke to were aware that things before and around the election had been hard, but had lost track of things in the ensuing weeks, as things have turned calm, as optimism has increasingly ruled. The good news, news of the ways things here are improving, has not spread.

Geto and I started the day by hiking down from Ka Glo to my godson, Givens’, house. Job, Givens’ uncle, had spent the night with us in Glo. He came up because he hadn’t seen me since I left for the States at the end of March. He’s a fourth-year medical student, and had been at a week-long seminar. He had received a certificate of participation, and it was made out to Dr. Job Antoine. It was the first time that anything official-looking referred to him as Dr. Antoine, and he was beaming. His excitement had made for a pleasant evening.

We left him at Givens’ house in Delmas and then headed down to Cité Soleil. We had to make a short stop at a cybercafé at the entrance to Nazon, a neighborhood between Delmas and downtown Port au Prince, but we were soon on our way. We got off a tap-tap at an intersection that had been a notorious place for kidnappings, and strolled from there into Cité Soleil, winding through narrow passageways until we got to Geto’s grandmother’s house.

She was there with the one son who lives with her, and was very happy to see us. She sat us down on the edge of the bed that takes up most of her one-room, corrugated-tin shack and served us bread and coffee, very sweet and very strong, with evaporated milk. We sat and chatted for awhile and then I talked to her son. Like Geto, he’s an artist. He makes colorful tin wall hangings, birds and lizards, and trees and flowers. They’re beautiful. He sells them to a man who has a shop in Labadie, the cruise ship destination in the very north of Haiti. He was pleased because he’s been getting orders and he expects to start getting more. People are starting to come to Haiti, foreigners and Haitians who live abroad, and they want to buy “Creole stuff,” he said.

When Geto and I left the house, we took a tap-tap to the Cité Soleil market and walked from there to the wharf. It was a hot, sunny day, and people were out in the streets going about their business or just hanging out. Geto bumped into friends with almost every step. Some hadn’t seen him since he had been forced to flee, and they were only now discovering that he is well, so these were happy encounters. When we got to the wharf, we stood for a few minutes trying to take it all in: the folks in the street, the kids in the water, the burned-out government buildings, the beat-up shacks. It is an area of great poverty, but its liveliness is more striking than anything else to me.

We walked back to the market, and hopped on a tap-tap to Belaire. Belaire was a place of constant violence over the last year. Shootings, beatings, kidnappings of all sorts. It’s also an area where UN and government forces were especially violent. The first block or so that we walked through bore clear marks of the conflict. Whole chunks were missing from concrete buildings that were standing, and some buildings weren’t really standing at all. But as we walked into and through the neighborhood, it seemed cheerful, even peaceful.

The high-light of the day was waiting for us at Champ Mars, the park just uphill of downtown Port au Prince, above the presidential palace and the national museum. Today, May 1st, was the last day of a week-end-long exposition of Haitian agricultural products and handcrafts. It was a big fair. People were strolling around the various stands eating the food and looking at the beautiful range of crafts: jewelry, wall hangings, clothing, and other sorts of stuff as well. The last thing we saw was a gallery of photos that had been taken of René Préval during the recent presidential campaign. His inauguration is scheduled for the 14th, and preparations are well underway. We saw where new palm trees are being planted on one of the Champ Mars lawns.

This is a good time to be in Haiti. All sorts of people feel optimistic, though perhaps cautiously optimistic, about the months to come. There is genuine excitement about Préval’s presidency. The violence that was plaguing this place stopped abruptly when his victory was announced. There is a sense that things here might just be able to begin to change and, just maybe, that they will.

Most of the walk we took today would have been very, very unwise as recently as January. I found myself wishing that Abner and I had come upon more of an awareness of that side of the story when we were in the States, but “Haiti” has become such a watchword for violence, sickness, and misery – at least in American English – that more positive impressions are hard to establish. And American media outlets don’t seem very interested in trying.

I’d like to end my essay there, but I shouldn’t. I can begin to explain why by going back to the image of the kids playing on the Cité Soleil wharf. There were, as I said, a couple of dozen of them. And every one of them was a boy. Not a single girl was enjoying herself in the late morning sun. I asked Geto about it, and he said that girls sometimes swim there too, but in the face of the facts before me, the claim was unconvincing. My guess – and, of course, it’s only a guess – is that the boys I was watching have sisters enough, both younger and older, but that many of those girls are at home, doing housework, while their brothers play.

My point is not that Haiti is a sexist society. It is. But I’m not sure whether it’s any more or less sexist than other societies are. I want, rather, to let the deep sexism here serve as an emblem, a reminder. I wouldn’t want anyone to confuse my claims that things are much better right now in Haiti than Americans are accustomed to imagining with a claim that everything’s ok. And the very first one who should practice avoiding that confusion is me.

Things are looking up in Haiti right now. It’s a good time to be here. But there’s still lots of work to be done. I enjoyed my walk with Geto through Cité Soleil, but it’s not a place I’d want to live or even to visit every day. There’s terrible poverty, and if the criminal-political gang violence has stopped, there’s enough violence of other sorts. Domestic violence, racist and classist oppression, and economic exploitation are examples. So as important as it might be for be to communicate my enthusiasm for the turn that Haiti’s taking, it’s just as important for me to communicate a good-sized grain of salt.

As John Paul II said when he came towards the end of the Duvalier dictatorship: “Things must change.”