Brother Robert Smith used to talk about a very simple first principle, a rule, that he thought teachers should follow: “Start where the students are.” That rule has been the idea most important in shaping the way I work, in Haiti and elsewhere, so I want to write a little bit about it.

The idea sounds simple, even obvious. But I am convinced that it is neither the one nor the other. Most of the time, I think we start where we want students to be, making their acquisition of to-our-mind-important skills or bodies of knowledge our priority. We can be right about the importance of such skills or such knowledge. And starting where students are doesn’t necessarily force us to give up those thoughts. It does, however, require patience and time.

Starting where students are means, first and foremost, doing more listening than speaking. I’ve seen a beautiful example of this over the last couple of days at the Matènwa Community Learning Center, watching a teacher work with her second graders.

It’s the beginning of the school year, so there’s a lot of reviewing going on. Millienne was reminding her kids how to set up addition problems. They all remembered the horizontal method, 1 + 2 = , but she was trying to remind them of the vertical method as well.

She could have simply stood at the board and shown them how, but that’s not what she did. She asked the children to suggest ways of setting up their problems. Each time one of them suggested a way, Millienne and her class looked at the suggestion, trying to figure out whether it was a clear way to write an addition problem down. There were more suggestions than one might imagine, and they were more varied. Kids had numerals and addition and equal signs scattered across the blackboard in various configurations.

As class was coming to a close, it was becoming clear that they would not suggest a really good way to write problems down, much less hit upon the traditional horizontal method. Millienne made it a homework assignment. The children were to go home and write down as many different ways of organizing additions problems as they could think of.

And rather than simply counting on one of them to come back to class the next day with something really useful, she told them a story. She said that when she goes to the spring to get water, she fills her five-gallon bucket. She’s perfectly able to carry the bucket, with its forty pounds of water, back home on her head, but she can’t actually lift the bucket off the ground and place it on her head. That would take strength in her arms that she doesn’t have. What she does, she said, is ask someone to lift the bucket onto her head for her. Facing a task that she is unable to do by herself, she asks for help. She told the children that they should do the same thing: They should ask older siblings or parents or neighbors to show them ways to put addition problems on paper. They were to bring whatever they came up with back to class the next day.

The next day, she started math class by asking the children how many different ways they had been able to come up with. The most popular answer was four, but one student even said eight. She asked one of the ones who had four possibilities to write them on the board and the girl who had eight possibilities to do the same.

It turned out that each had misunderstood the assignment in a different way. The girl who had discovered eight ways, actually only had thought of eight different addition problems, all of which she wrote horizontally, one problem beneath the other. The girl who had four ways copied four vertical problems out of her notebook: an addition, a subtraction, a multiplication, and a division.

Millienne asked the class to look at what each of the girls had written, first one then the other. It didn’t take long for the class to recognize that the one girl’s eight ways were really one and the same. Looking at the other girls four ways was, however, a little more challenging. But Millienne simply asked the children to read what each written problem said. By insisting they explain the details, she was able to get them to see that only one of the vertical problems was a clear example of addition.

And so she got what needed. She quickly asked each child to write down any five addition problems, and to write each of them in two ways. Most of the kids were able to respond easily.

It may be that Millienne’s method was less efficient at delivering information than some might like. The whole thing could probably happened in 30-45 minutes if she had taken a more traditional role.

But the result would not have been the same. Her kids had to come up with their own ideas, and then analyze those ideas. They had to work together. She, her Matènwa colleagues, and I have read enough Piaget together to be convinced that it is in their interactions with one another that children – maybe I should say “that all people” – develop the discipline of thought. Her students were learning how to be learners, how to teach themselves. Mastery of the content of the lesson was important, but it was not the only thing.

I could not help but think of Brother Robert as I watched Millienne work. In some respects, two people could hardly have less in common than he and she. Last year was his 70th year as a teacher, Millienne has been teaching less than ten. He earned a doctorate over fifty years ago; she hasn’t been able to finish high school. She’s almost a head taller than he and more than sixty years younger. She grew up in rural Haiti; he in Berkeley. And then there are the more obvious differences like gender and race.

Brother Robert died a couple of weeks ago, a few hours after I saw him for the last time. But as long as there are teachers like Millienne practicing their craft, I know that something important about him will remain.

I want to try to connect a couple of experiences in Haiti that might seem unrelated. I’m not sure whether the connection quite works. I might be stretching. But they are each related to one rather awkward way that I’ve occasionally tried to express my hope for the educational programs I work with in Haiti. I’ve said that educational programs should help their participants overcome habitual passivity. That’s a mouthful, and a pretty clumsy one. But a couple of examples might make it clear.

Case One: I wrote recently about Vunet, Jidit’s nephew, a 17-year-old who’s just come to Pòtoprens to try to pass the sixth grade and thus, perhaps, to finish school. His aunt has been preparing him for the beginning of school for a couple of weeks: getting the books, ordering a uniform, paying his registration and first term’s tuition. He’s been doing his share as well, studying his schoolbooks whenever he can. We’ve spent some time together doing some basic math.

He seems bright to me. He picks up new things quickly. I don’t think, for example, that he had ever seen decimals before, but within a few minutes he was handling them easily.

We were practicing long division. He was a little unsure of himself. At a certain point, he needed to know how many times eleven goes into sixteen. So he tried nine. He calculated 9 x 11, and discovered the answer was too large. Then he tried eight times, then seven, then six. He finally tried one, writing out 11 x 1, and calculating the answer.

I was dumbfounded. Vunet got the right answer. It’s not as though he couldn’t figure things out. But his extraordinary dependence on an ingrained process rather than on intuition would have been comical if it hadn’t been so real, so limiting. I want to say something like that Vunet felt he lacked permission to look the problem in front of him straight in the face. It was as though letting his real intelligence work for him was not an option. He had learned to follow the rules that had been set out for him and follow them without reflection.

Case Two: It was only natural that the workshop should begin with introductions. Each participant was to respond to series of questions: name, hometown, and a couple of questions about their experience with Fonkoze. The questions were projected on the wall of the room we were meeting in. I should add that, uncharacteristically for groups of adults in Haiti, all participants were literate.

But though they could read, they wouldn’t answer the questions.

Let’s be clear. It’s not as though they refused. No one was taking, as we say in the States, “the fifth.” But each would wait for me to ask every question before she would respond. None would simply make her introductory speech without my close guidance. They each wanted step-by-step instructions, though they each heard those same instructions as I gave them to the women before her.

I was trying to juggle a number of priorities – making sure that the workshop leader, for whom I was translating, would get what he was asking for, ensuring that the introductions would not eat much too much of a packed schedule – so, rather than asking the women why they so patiently and unnecessarily waited for me to explicitly invite them to speak, I simply repeated the questions one after another. It all went smoothly enough, but it was frustrating to watch the women’s dependence on my cues.

Case Three: One of my most consistent experiences when I visit groups of Fonkoze borrowers – mostly poor rural women – is that my questions are greeted with silence. If I put a question to a group, it is likely that no member of the group will answer right away.

If I’m traveling with another member of the Fonkoze staff, they are likely to repeat my question right away, insisting that the women answer. Though I speak Creole with the women, it is as though the staff members think that they need to translate my Creole into Creole again.

I think I understand why they do what they do. First, though my Creole is improving, it is not as though I speak it like a Haitian. They may genuinely believe that rural women could have a hard time understanding me if they are unaccustomed to the way I speak. And I must admit that there’s something to that. Second, they are used to the women’s reluctance to talk in a group setting, and they want to encourage them, even push them, to speak up. Third, they have lots of work to do, and can feel pressed for time. They don’t believe they have the leisure to wait.

So they hurry things up, thus guaranteeing that none of the women need to show the assertiveness it would take to answer my questions directly. Or even just to say that they don’t understand what I’ve said.

What we teach is less important than how we teach, because the knowledge and skills that we acquire are less important than the habits that make us what we are.

Classrooms alone have not made Vunet what he is. Much less are they the force that has shaped the clients of Fonkoze, many of whom haven’t been to school. But they do offer an opportunity. If we design classes – whether they are one-on-one tutoring sessions or larger classrooms – that encourage, even require, initiative, then we can help those whom we work with overcome the passivity they are so used to. And overcoming passivity is equivalent to setting and pursuing one’s own goals.

Haiti will not change until the Haitians who need change are constructing a vision of the Haiti they want, expressing that vision, and insisting upon it. The habit of passivity is a barrier on all three counts. Helping overcome that habit thus supports change in the most fundamental way.

Fonkoze is always learning.

That’s not to say that it doesn’t already know a lot. It does. Its success over its first twelve years is easy enough to see: From one branch and a handful of borrowers, to 30 branches, in all parts of Haiti, and almost 40,000 borrowers in its core micro credit program. And that doesn’t include thousands of clients like me who only use other services: like savings accounts, currency exchange, or money transfer.

Not only is Fonkoze serving more and more clients, it is also serving an increasing range of clients through an increasing range of programs. All of Fonkoze’s micro credit clients are poor, but its two newest credit programs are enabling it to reach clients who would previously have been much too poor to benefit from its services, clients so poor that they would be unable to manage a $25 loan.

In addition, the more one meets clients all over Haiti, the more one sees that it’s not just the organization that’s making progress. One hears story after story of women who started with little or nothing but are now run strong businesses, clients whose lives have improved in all sorts of ways.

And all this is happening in a country in which it’s hard to get things done.

But that doesn’t mean Fonkoze is or should be satisfied. Not only is the organization still far too small to serve the enormous number of Haitian families who need the help that micro credit can bring, but it recognizes the need to continually improve the support it offers the clients it already has.

For example, Fonkoze learned something last March. Its Director, Anne Hastings, was leading a guest from the Grameen Foundation on a visit to the Fonkoze branch in Ench. The Grameen Foundation is a spin-off of the Grameen Bank, the bank in Bangladesh that started the micro credit movement thirty years ago. The visitor, a man named Alam, met Fonkoze clients. He and Anne spoke to three that were of particular interest. The three were long-time Fonkoze members with perfect repayment records.

Anne and Alam discovered something striking: Though two of the three clients seemed to be doing quite well, having built houses, purchased real estate, and built up the size and quality of their businesses, the third seemed to have gotten nowhere. She had been a client as long as the other women had. She was borrowing similar amounts and, like them, she was continually repaying her debt. When Anne and Alam met her she was ready to make the final payment on her most recent loan. They found her sitting by a basket that held three onions and two potatoes. When they asked her where her merchandise was, she said that they were looking at it: three onions and two potatoes. She explained that she was about to make her final loan payment, so she had nothing left.

She had taken and repaid three or four years of credit after credit, and still lacked the capital to keep a reasonable inventory in front of her every day. Something wasn’t working.

Anne and Alam came to believe that Fonkoze’s emphasis had slipped away from where it needs to be. Its loan officers were thinking too much in terms of the size and quality of the portfolios they’re responsible for: They want, for very good reasons, to be able to say that they’re lending lots of money to clients whose delinquency rates are low. Anne and Alam became concerned that, in Fonkoze’s conversations with clients, it too focused on good reimbursement and good management of money within the business. As important as good reimbursement and good business practices are for Fonkoze clients, they are not the goal that Fonkoze sets for itself.

Fonkoze is not a commercial bank. It wasn’t founded by entrepreneurs looking to make a buck. Its mission is social: to serve its clients, to help them lift themselves out of poverty and gain a greater measure of control of their own lives. Though low delinquency rates and large amounts of lending can both be useful towards that end, neither is itself a goal.

Alam agreed to return to Haiti to lead workshops for Fonkoze clients and staff. The workshops would aim at clarifying Fonkoze’s goal and helping participants see what the key to achieving the goal is. According to Alam, the key is for clients to use their credit to accumulate assets. Putting more and more money in clients’ hands is not enough. Nor is it enough to help clients learn to run their businesses more profitably. Unless clients develop the discipline it takes to continually reinvest as much of their profit as possible back into their businesses, or into some sort of income-generating asset, so that more and more money is actually working for them, their lives may never change all that much.

So Alam and I spent two weeks traveling through Haiti, talking about asset accumulation. Not that I have any wisdom to share on the subject. All the micro credit experience is Alam’s. He’s been working in the field for 23 years. But Alam speaks no Creole. So I translated for him, ran his PowerPoint presentation, and led the participatory parts at each workshop.

Alam spends a certain amount of each meeting just talking about micro credit fundamentals. Micro credit is a thirty-year-old movement that aims to address poverty by lending poor women money to invest in small businesses. It works with borrowers who would not traditionally be viewed as credit worthy. And it works without asking borrowers to put up collateral and without reserving the right to take those who don’t pay to court.

Even without such remedies, borrowers repay their loans at a very high rate. They do so first and foremost because they are businesswomen who feel a strong need to have money in their hands. Many support themselves and their children without help from a partner or spouse. Repayment becomes a priority because they want to keep getting more loans.

They also repay because of the way the loans are structured. In the first place, loan amounts are small, and frequent installments are easy to manage. In the second place, loans are organized in a manner that makes it possible for struggling women to get help now and again. Groups of five friends enter the program together, agreeing to share responsibility to help one another pay back their loans. Installments are made at regular meetings of credit centers, collections of six-eight such groups, and if one of the women is short, the others pitch in to make up the difference. It’s a process designed to encouragement the development of a strong sense of solidarity among the women, but it also helps guarantee that repayment is prompt.

Alam spent much of the workshop driving home the importance of the solidarity among group and center members. He spoke both about ways in which Fonkoze staff can nurture that solidarity and about how Fonkoze can put it to good use. A lot of what he said must have been familiar to his listeners, many of whom have been with Fonkoze for years, but they seemed to appreciate hearing it reinforced.

The hardest part of his presentation, both for me as the translator and for those listening to him, was its main point: his explanation of how asset accumulation should work. He presented a chart showing the progress a Fonkoze client could make. The data in his chart assumed that, at the end of each loan period, an amount of capital equal to the loan amount stays in her business. According to Alam, a client who can manage her household and make her repayments out of the profit her business earns can reasonably expect to work her way out of poverty within five years. He insisted that, in Bangladesh and elsewhere, experience has shown that five years is a reasonable expectation for most micro credit clients.

This chart created long discussions most of the times we showed it. Many workshop participants insisted that Fonkoze clients would not be able to repay their loans and run their lives without using the capital – in idiomatic Creole the “//manman lajan//” or “mother money.” Alam tried to explain that this is like eating the hen that lays the eggs you sell, but many were adamant that the situation in Haiti, where a dollar-affected economy with low national production keeps living costs high, simply requires that borrowers at least nibble at that hen. And most said that they would have to take a very healthy bite.

It took some work just to help participants see that Alam was not insisting that they must run their lives and make their repayments out of their profit exclusively. The initial reaction to the chart was most often that it wouldn’t work. But once participants really understood what the chart was measuring – namely the rate at which capital would increase according to one assumption – it became possible to change tack and ask them to estimate what percentage of their loans they might reasonably expect to retain in their businesses after each credit cycle. Most estimates ranged between 10% and 50%. And we were able to follow up each estimate by showing how each would permit a woman’s capital investment to grow.

It will take a lot more work to make Alam’s lessons really sink in. It will take conversations, all across Haiti, where women think through the steps they each need to take to orient their businesses and, in fact, their lives towards achieving that sort of growth.

Figuring out how to organize those conversations will take some reflection, but the effort to think through the problem will be effort well spent. Nothing except asset accumulation can help Fonkoze clients escape from poverty. Helping clients clarify the point for themselves might be as important as almost anything Fonkoze’s education team could undertake.