It’s surprising to discover how many people believe that Newton’s laws of motion are false.

I’m not thinking of people who’ve read Einstein or other modern thinkers and who have learned to see the laws’ limitations. I’m thinking rather of people who discover, as soon as they begin to think about the laws seriously, that they just aren’t convincing.

Yesterday’s discussion at Kofaviv offered plenty of instances. We spoke, among other things, about the way Newton explains one of the laws, that for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction. The women especially wanted to talk about an example he uses: that if a horse pulls a rock, the rock pulls the horse just as much. Some of the women thought the claim simply absurd: Rocks, they said, do not pull horses. Most of those who opposed that objection did so by denying Newton’s claim in another way: They said that a rock could pull a horse if it was big enough and if it was falling, rather than sitting still. But that very defense of Newton’s claim still implied that either the rock or the horse would do the pulling, not that a paired action and reaction, always equal, would always be taking place.

As the meeting began, it had felt a little odd that we were to talk about Newton’s laws at all. We meet on a patio in front of Kofaviv’s main office, and that patio is also a waiting room. Women and girls who come to Kofaviv for the services it offers sit along the wall, outside of our circle, while we work. Kofaviv, the Commission of Women Victims for Victims, is a group of women who have suffered rape and other violence. They organize a range of counseling, medical, and advocacy services for other rape victims. So the women sitting with us on the patio as we hold our meeting are rape victims, young and old, and their presence and the images it calls to mind force one to ask whether a text on classical mechanics is really worth talking about. Shouldn’t we be more focused on the difficult problems they face every day?

That’s a serious, not a rhetorical question, and taking it seriously means asking what the texts we use in our discussions are for. Folktales from around the world and Haitian proverbs might not seem to force the question quite as starkly, because they let us feel comfortable as we talk about them in a way that Newton’s laws do not. Tales can be entertaining and, in Haiti, even when proverbs are curious, they’re always familiar. But neither relates more directly to the horrible reality the Kofaviv women have all suffered than the Newton does. The best way to explain what the texts we use are for is not a lot of theory, but an account of the work we did on Newton, so I want to talk about that meeting.

I rarely lead these meetings now. Usually, they are led by volunteers from among the women. We’ve been working together since February, and it has seemed appropriate, even important, to encourage them to take increasing control of our activity. The meeting on Newton’s laws was led by Adjanie, a young woman expecting her first child. I had worked with her two weeks ago, and she had run off every 15 minutes or so to throw up, but she seems now to be over that.

Adjanie started us off, even before having us read the text, by asking us to think about what a law is. She invited us to sit quietly for a few minutes as we thought. After about three minutes, she had us divide ourselves into groups of three or four to discuss our answers.

These conversations were animated and interesting. Though I was in one out of the four small groups, it was easy to see that everyone was very much involved in the work. Small group work is an extremely important part of what we do. It allows several people to speak at once – one in each group – and so facilitates broad participation; it encourages quieter participants, who might initially be afraid to speak in front of a large group, to start talking in a less intimidating environment; and it forces participants to start talking to one another without the group leader’s mediation.

After about 15 minutes, Adjanie had each group give a report. This led to a short conversation about how laws help us and hinder us in our lives. The women drew examples from their own experience: They spoke as mothers of making laws for their kids, as citizens of the laws their political leaders make, and as victims of ways in which various kinds of armed men make rules in the neighborhoods where they live.

Adjanie was now ready to read us the short text. She asked another woman to reread it for us, and then invited us to think about it individually as we read it a third time in silence. After a couple of moments, she started us off by asking what we thought of Newton’s laws.

For the next half-hour, we talked about whether there are exceptions to the laws, whether a rock can pull a horse, whether the right way to characterize the effect of gravity is to say that it makes objects “fall” or makes them “descend,” whether natural laws are like the laws that people make, whether natural laws are useful in our lives, and whether we can throw rocks in a straight line. In other words, we spoke of everything from details in the texts to broader issues.

What was most striking was how the group spoke. Participation was broad. Nearly everyone talked in the course of thirty minutes even though only one person spoke at a time. The women listened to one another, responding to one another directly and encouragingly. The couple of times that the conversation degenerated, Adjanie said nothing but “Remember the rules of the game,” and order was quickly restored.

The text had given the women something to talk about. It raised questions that invited them to talk about their experiences – like whether natural laws and human laws are useful – and other questions that simply invited them to let their imaginations go to work – like whether a rock can pull a horse. Both sorts of questions provided opportunities for the women to work together: listening, encouraging, questioning, responding.

The result of the work was all the more striking on Tuesday because it was my second meeting of the day. Earlier I had met with a group of Haitian professionals, the staff of an important NGO. It was the first of planned weekly meetings, and the text we used was an engaging little folktale. These professionals interrupted each other constantly. They spoke two or three at a time. They spoke to me, the group’s leader, rather than to one another. There was, in other words, very little listening, very little cooperation.

The women of Kofaviv have made very good use of ten months of texts. The texts, both the excerpt from Newton’s laws and the others, have helped them learn to speak with one another, to listen to one another, to work together. If all groups worked together the way the Kofaviv women do, the world would be a very different place.

Saturdays can be physically challenging. On the weeks when I visit Lagonav, I generally rise at about 2:00 AM so I can get down the mountain in time for an early boat. About the trip down the mountain, suffice it to say that, if there’s a moon and if I don’t have much baggage, walking a few hours is a tempting alternative to the bone-rattling truck ride. When I get to Pòtoprens, I go straight into Site Solèy, where I have an increasing range of groups and individuals who are asking me for my time. I grab a cup of coffee when I get there, and am then on my feet, talking with young people, most of the day.

The contrast between the two communities could hardly appear to be greater. Both are poor, but that’s where the similarity stops. Matènwa, my base on Lagonav, is a very rural place; Site Solèy is a crowded urban slum.

At the same time, a series of experiences in the two places over a couple of days brought to light a single principle. It’s an assumption that guides almost all of my work, so it’s interesting to me to see it exemplified in different ways. One way to state the principle is like this: People make progress through their own activity.

I spent some of Thursday afternoon with Catheline. She’s a first-grader at the Matènwa Community Learning Center. An orphan since her father died, her mother sent her and her older sister to Matènwa, where they live with their paternal grandmother.

Catheline was counting her fingers, tallying one hand, and then moving to the other, as people normally do. But she kept getting different answers. One time it would be seven, another time nine, and a third, eleven. She was having a hard time keeping track of which fingers she had counted. She just wasn’t seeing the array of them clearly. She giggled after each new result, but it wasn’t joyful laughter. She seemed to recognize that she could only have one quantity of fingers.

Finally, she did something I’d never seen. She placed her hands together palm to palm, with her fingers spread. She counted her two thumbs, her two index fingers, her two middle fingers, her two ring fingers, and her two pinkies. She reported the new total, ten, with a big smile.

By thinking about the problem she was facing, she had discovered her own solution. She found a way of keeping good track of her count. She was proud of the certainty she felt. When I asked her the next day how many fingers she has, she answered correctly without hesitating.

Friday I was working with the Matènwa teachers. We are learning to use the microscopes they have. The microscopes have been at the school for some time, but they haven’t been used much in the classroom. I am very far from being a skilled microscopist, or even an unskilled one, but I’ve taken as many science classes as most Americans. I’ve even taught a few. I also had a microscope as a kid, and I remember how much fun it was to look at all sorts of stuff.

We started by working on the basic techniques they would need: preparing slides and focusing. Though these are things that one could continue to improve at for years, especially slide preparation, nevertheless five or ten minutes of coaching is more than enough to get one started.

For the teachers, seeing things, like an ant, under a microscope is, first and foremost, a spectacle. Their initial temptation is to let their excitement be the center of the experience, to just leaves things at “Wow! Isn’t that cool?” and then to look at something else. I wanted to help them slightly change their focus. Rather than seeing the microscopes as the wonderful toys that they are, I wanted to help them see them as tools of investigation. So I had given them homework. They were to identify a question that they wanted to answer by looking at something under a microscope. They would write down the question and the answer that their study revealed.

The most interesting answer came from Fritzner, a teaching intern visiting the school from the Haitian mainland to learn how the Matènwa teachers work with kids. He had wanted to know how many legs ants have, and had learned that they have ten.

Fritzner had not been the only teacher interested in looking at ants. Robert had look at them as well. So had Isaac, another intern. They each reported that they had seen only six legs. So we all went back to the drawing board together. Fritzner hypothesized that the way his ant had been curled up on the slide had confused him, so the teachers talked about what they might do to ensure that they were getting a good, clear look. They decided to use a drop of water to spread its legs.

It was not long before our judgment was unanimous. Ants have six legs.

Twenty-four hours later, I was in a hot, cramped second-floor hallway in Site Solèy. I was talking with about a dozen young guys, teenagers mostly. It was our third conversation. In our previous meetings, they had asked me to organize them and to give them a mission. They had insisted that they had nothing, that they were capable of nothing. They needed a savior, they said. They used that very word. And they had chosen me.

I was, of course, put off by the thought that a group of guys I hardly know, who live in circumstances I can hardly imagine, were looking to me to change their lives. I had insisted through our conversations that I could give them nothing but my time; they had responded that they needed much more. I should add that I’m sure they’re right: There’s precious little that residents of Site Solèy don’t lack. But I don’t have the resources to even begin to address all, or even some, of their needs properly.

So we focused in our second conversation on their desire to feel organized. They wanted me to help them create an organization. They even thought that I should give it a name. But I tried to talk about what it means to be organized. I spoke about organizations I’ve seen. They have by-laws and hierarchies. They might have a president, a secretary, a treasurer, and more. None of that actually means that they’re doing anything.

The Site Solèy guys, on the other hand, as lost as they felt, were already organized in a very important way. Every morning, they put together whatever little money they can find and buy the ingredients to make a very simple meal. And then they share it, even, as they explained, if everyone gets only a single spoonful.

I explained that as soon as they set out to accomplish some specific goals that they set for themselves, they will discover they are already organized. They’ll discover that the tasks themselves will organize them in a much more meaningful way than by-laws could.

And we talked about things they might try to do with the resources available to them. One idea that came up was spending a day clearing away litter from their street. They complained that they would need wheelbarrows, shovels, and brooms, all things that they don’t have. I told them that they should consider either how to get hold of such things or how to make do without them. They seemed so pessimistic about themselves that I wasn’t sure what, if anything, they would try.

When we met Saturday, the first thing they wanted to say was that they had spent Wednesday cleaning up the street. They had used sticks, pieces of cardboard, beat-up old buckets, and their bare hands. They had divided themselves into teams, with various responsibilities, shifting duties as the day went on. They seemed happy with the result, and said they would make clean-up a regular activity.

If I had had any doubt at all about their sense of accomplishment, it was washed away by something that happened when the conversation closed so we could start the English class I had promised to give them. These are young men live in what is sometimes cited as the worst slum in the hemisphere. They have no work and are not in school. They are underfed and have limited access to healthcare and safe water. Their neighborhood is subject to flooding, and poor sewage ensures that mud is the best part of the oozy fluid that sometimes covers their streets. But when I asked them, in Creole, what the first thing they wanted to learn how to say was, they replied, without hesitation, that they wanted to know how to say, “What a beautiful day.”

I could have told Catheline that she had ten fingers. Her big sister, Sondie, was trying to do just that as she struggled. But taking in an answer passively would not have accomplished what the solution she discovered did. By facing and overcoming the difficulty herself, Catheline developed more than new knowledge. She developed as a thinker, as a problem-solver. And her happiness shows that, at some level, she was excited about that result.

Fritzner and the rest of us could have learned that ants have six legs from any book about insects, but the lesson would not have been the same. Rather than just capturing information, we had experienced what it means to investigate. And Fritzner had learned a more important lesson that he was able to clearly express: What you see depends very much on the care with which you prepare your slide. That is to say that real investigation is not the business of what we now call “couch potatoes”, but exacting work. A textbook could never have taught him such a thing. When he wrote up his homework a second time, he included a very detailed drawing of a six-legged ant. He was learning to look with care.

Listening to the guys from Site Solèy say to each other, one after another, “What a beautiful day!” was a stunning result of their own achievement. It’s hard to imagine anything that someone could have done for them affecting them in quite that way.

The work in Site Solèy will continue to be challenging. I try not to fool myself. They may need help choosing objectives that challenge them more and more without overwhelming them. And despite everything I’ve told them, they surely still have expectations that, at some point, I will invest much more with them than time. That would be only too natural for struggling guys who befriend a wealthy foreigner who enters their midst. But by being as clear and as frank as possible, both about what we expect and what we intend, we should be able to move forward.

Zilmit sells household items in the market in Gonayiv. She sits behind a patch of sidewalk, with careful piles of pots, pans, dishes, glasses, and cups arranged in front of her. It’s the beginning of the school year, so she extends her business to sell school wares as well. Colorful backpacks, book bags, and lunch boxes hang on a fence behind where she sits.

By September 2004, Zilmit had already been a member of Fonkoze for two years. On Wednesday, September 15th, she received a new credit for 12,000 gourds, or about $300. On Thursday, she went to Port au Prince to buy merchandise. She returned to Gonayiv early on Friday, as a storm was starting. By late evening, the water was rising in her home. As it reached her knees, then her hips, then her chest, she knew that she and her little boy had to flee. They ran to a neighbor’s house and climbed onto the roof. From there, they watched as the water swept their belongings away. Her merchandise disappeared with everything else she own.

Hurricane Jeanne devastated Gonayiv. It’s said that 250,000 lost their homes. Flood waters rushed down the mountains that surround the city. Those mountains are utterly bare. Not a tree remains. Plant life, with the topsoil that could have held some of the cascading water, has long been torn away. The slopes give the city and its surroundings the appearance of a large, porcelain bowl. It’s easy to imagine how the torrents of rainwater must have rushed in from all sides. The shallow new lake that the hurricane created just south of the city remains two years later.

Zilmit was ruined. She and her son escaped with nothing but the clothes on their backs.

For the first months after the flood, she could do nothing. It was all she could do to get her hands on the food, clothes, and water that she and her boy needed to live. She could make no repayments on the loan she had taken, because she had no merchandise to sell and no money to buy new merchandise with. She spent the time clearing the mud from her house and replacing the roof that the flood washed away.

Fonkoze contacted Zilmit shortly after the flood to see how she was doing. When she was ready to go back to work, Fonkoze lent her another 12,000 gourds for twelve months with no interest, and cancelled the interest on the first 12,000 gourds. She was able to rebuild her business, and now she’s repaid both of the loans.

Madanm Awòl Jeune had already been a Fonkoze client for three years when the flood hit. She sells foodstuffs – rice, beans, sugar – by the sack or in smaller quantities, working from a small room in a building in the same yard where she has her home.

She too lost everything in the flood, having to flee from her home with her five children. Shortly after the six of them escaped to a neighbor’s cement roof, the waters in and around the house they abandoned were more than six feet deep. The family had no drinking water, no food, no clothes. When Madanm Awòl returned to her shop the Monday after the storm, she simply threw everything away. Not a scrap of unspoiled merchandise remained.

That Monday, she and her children had to leave the roof where they had spent two days. They eventually settled at a friend’s home, where they lived on a porch while they worked to reconstruct their lives.

Fonkoze worked with them. Not as an aid agency, but as a partner. When Madanm Awòl was ready to re-establish her business she received an interest-free loan, just like the one that Zilmit received. Fonkoze cancelled the interest on her outstanding debt and stretched out the repayment schedule, giving her a year rather than the usual six months. Like Zilmit, Madanm Awòl has repaid her loans and once again has a business that ensures a livelihood for her children and herself. She’s moved back into her house, though she says that, occasionally, little clumps of mud that she and her children failed to remove still fall from the ceiling of their small home.

By lending the flood victims money, Fonkoze went against all sorts of conventional wisdom. Generally speaking, disaster victims get well-intentioned aid . . . if they get any help at all. Most would assume that such women, left without assets that could be used as collateral, left without much of anything at all, would not be creditworthy. It would be easy to assume that such women would have very little chance of repaying a loan. Those who make such assumptions could tend to think that they are only being realistic.

But the reality turns out to be rather different from what such realists might think. For poor women whose livelihoods depend on the small businesses they run, access to relatively inexpensive credit is crucial. Poor women repay their micro credit loans at rates that commercial banks, with their well-to-do borrowers, can only dream of. Their desire to qualify for the next loan, to make their businesses grow, to improve their families’ lives is all the motivation that they need.

It’s not that the formula for success is simple. Fonkoze has Gonayiv customers who continue to suffer the consequences of the flood. Mirlande, for example, used to sell cosmetics and other notions in Passe Reine, a short way out of Gonayiv on the road north to Okap. She spent the night of the flood standing with other adults in chest-high water in her house. They put the children in the ceiling rafters. Most of her neighbors were forced to flee to a nearby church, but her house was saved when the house next to it was washed entirely of its foundation. The waters pushed the one house into the other, creating a barrier that protected the folks who were in her house from the worst of the flood.

Mirlande too lost almost everything in the flood: her clothes, her livestock, her merchandise, and 15,000 gourds, or about $375, that she had saved up so that she could buy more goods to sell. But unlike the other women, Mirlande has not really recovered. She received the same interest-free Fonkoze loan that the other women received, but two years after the flood her business still does not exist.

Part of the problem is that when she received that new loan, she used it to buy household items that she felt she needed. She surely did need them, but their purchase ensured that the money she borrowed would not be used to generate income. She thus lost any chance to rebuild her business, let alone to repay her loan.

But the lesson to draw from Mirlande’s story is not that flood victims cannot make good use of credit. The stories of Zilmit and Madanm Awòl would counter such a claim. And theirs are not the only happy stories I could relate. The lesson is, rather, that one must work with flood victims to help them ensure that they use their credit well. For Fonkoze, this is a work in progress. Just as Zilmit and Madanm Awòl are just two exemplary success stories, Mirlande is only one example out of many as well.

But the story of Mirlande and of other women who are still in trouble is not over, and Fonkoze will continue to try to work with them in whatever way it can. It’s not yet time to call the loans made to such women a failure.