Héguel’s mood dramatically soured half-way through our English lesson. This is extremely unusual, the first time I had seen it in the more than seven years of our acquaintance. But it turned out to be understandable enough.

The class itself could hardly have been the reason. It was a joy. As difficult as it might be to see the good that English classes are doing – even though some of the guys’ English is improving very quickly – the meetings we spend learning songs are always a pleasure. The guys had been working hard to master “I Can’t Help Falling in Love with You”, and the results were encouraging.

We are, however, making more serious progress as well. The Cité Soleil group has begun to focus its attention on an aspiration that is becoming ever clearer: They would like to establish a business. I came across an interesting project that might work well for them while I was visiting Oxford in December on behalf of Shimer College. A British engineer had developed a way to produce small solar electric panels very cheaply. They are large enough to run a little transistor radio.

Or, what seemed more to the point to us, to charge, though slowly, a cellular phone. Cell phones are spreading quickly through Haiti, but electricity is unavailable in many areas and unreliable in many others. The guys are very confident that cell phone owners will snap up solar chargers as quickly as they can produce them as long as we can keep the price down, and I’m pretty sure they’re right. They’ll be a couple of hurdles – getting some of the materials into Haiti, organizing the group in a manner that’s productive, but also transparent enough to prevent misunderstandings, and finding the small amount of start-up capital we’ll need to get the ball rolling. But it’s the most promising possibility we’ve come up with thus far. Héguel is especially excited about it, because he’s an experienced electrician and, so, he knows he can contribute in important ways to making the guys’ dream real.

Héguel and I have been friends since 1999, when he was one of my colleague Erik’s principal Creole teachers. Over the years, he’s become more and more involved in the Wonn Refleksyon education movement that we are part of here. He participates in regular events, and has co-led groups of new participants. He is the one that invited me to begin meeting with his young neighbors in Cité Soleil, where he has spent almost all his life, and is my apartmentmate when I stay there.

On Wednesday evening, I had an interesting conversation that he arranged. We chatted for almost an hour with one of the leaders of the militia that controls Belenkou, the area of Cité Soleil where the apartment sits. He dropped by on his motor scooter, on the way home from playing soccer.

Héguel and I had thought it was important for us to talk. Nothing can happen in the neighborhood without this man’s knowledge and approval. Trying to go around him or behind his back could only lead to trouble. It will be best – in this case, “best” means “safest” – if everything is out in the open, so that we can address any questions or concerns the guy might have.

So he came by, and we had a friendly talk. It was interesting to learn something about his life. Though he circulates freely within Cité Soleil, he cannot leave the area. He would be arrested. Since police don’t enter Cité Soleil, he’s safe there. He talked about a recent trip just outside of the neighborhood a few months ago. It was his first in two years. He talked with energy about how much of what he saw seemed new, how much of it seemed to have changed since he last left Cité Soleil. He made fun of his feeling that he didn’t really know his way around. He was a little discouraged because he hadn’t had the chance to see very much because it was dark – he wouldn’t risk even a short trip during the day.

He was most interested in discussing recent news. Early that same morning, UN forces had attacked the next neighborhood over from ours, an area called Boston. They had occupied an abandoned school, the one tall building left in the area, and thus acquired a vantage point that enables them to control a lot of movement.

Now people in Belenkou were worried about the UN’s next move. That very afternoon, UN soldiers had rolled through in tanks, distributing leaflets in Creole. The leaflets advised folks to go inside and get on the floor whenever they hear gunfire. Such warnings had been the preface to UN attacks into Belaire last year, and so people in Belenkou were scared – and still are.

The man we were talking with had, however, a more specific, a more tactical concern. The second-floor room we were sitting in was my bedroom, the group’s classroom. Héguel and I live in the only two-story building on the intersection leading into Belenkou. It would be the perfect spot for the UN if they wanted to occupy a building to have a good view of Belenkou. So the guy told us that he and his main partner were thinking about what they might do.

In the middle of our musical English class, Héguel heard a rumor that made it sound as though they had settled on a plan. A neighbor came by to tell him that the local militia had decided to tear down the building the next day. They would give residents the chance to collect their things – which is more than can be said for UN forces – but they would then rip the building down.

The move would make some sense for them. Though they have lots of big guns, they do not have the arms to stand up to a concerted UN attack. The UN has tanks and helicopters and is willing to use both. So they can’t hope to defend the building if it comes to an attack. And if the UN were to set up a base on the roof of the building, no one would be able to leave or enter Belenkou – or even circulate much within the neighborhood – without their seeing.

For Héguel and our downstairs neighbors, losing the building would be a real blow. I don’t know our neighbors’ stories, but I know something about Hèguel. He’s been living alone in the apartment for years. It’s inexpensive, and he’s comfortable there. He’s filled it over the years with the books and other personal possessions that shape his life. He’s worried because he doesn’t know where he would go if he loses his home; he doesn’t know where he might find living space he could afford. A simple room in most other neighborhoods of Port au Prince could cost almost ten times what Héguel pays. As they say, “location, location, location.” Not to mention how uncomfortable it would be for him to have to figure out a new life in a new, unfamiliar part of town.

He and I were in touch on and off all throughout the day on Friday, and as of the last time I spoke to him, no move had yet been made to tear down the house. Where there is life, there is hope.

Here’s the Belenkou Boys’ rendition of “I Can’t Help Falling in Love with You”:

A final note about vocabulary: I describe the man whom Héguel and I spoke with as a militia leader, but I’m not sure whether that’s the best term. He and his partners are regularly referred to as gang leaders by some, as community activists by others.

The latter term seems wrong, or at least incomplete, because it overlooks the fact that they are heavily armed. But the former makes it sound as though they are simply criminals, and I’m not sure that’s entirely fair either. In their own view, they are struggling against a foreign occupying force, and there is much in the UN’s behavior to justify such an attitude – whether or not it is, as a description, any more accurate than “gang” is for those for whom it’s used.

I don’t think I should be neutral at the cost of being truthful, but I don’t think I should pretend to understand more than I do. It makes naming things an uncomfortable business.

The group in Cité Soleil continues to show signs of flourishing, even if, as I have written before, I’m not sure towards what end. The guys will sit with me for three or four or even five hours at a time, engaged in one activity or another: the English class, Wonn Refleksyon, Business Skills Development, or just talking. It can be almost more than I can handle.

But I was a little concerned about one of the group’s members when I first saw him on Saturday. His name is Ari. He’s a dark, slender young man, probably around twenty. I hadn’t seen him for awhile. Just before the New Year, he had told me he would be missing a few meetings because his parents decided to send him to spend the holiday visiting his grandmother. I didn’t think anything of that. It seemed natural enough. I wished him a good trip.

Now that he was back, though, he seemed different: gloomy and much thinner. And though I don’t know his grandmother, I’ve known enough other grandmothers – including two wonderful ones of my own and my mother and aunt, who are grandmothers to an appreciative younger generation – that I was surprised to see that a teenager would lose weight while visiting his.

Saturday things became clear. As soon as I arrived in Cité Soleil, after the long trip from Matènwa, Ari took my backpack and walked up to my room with me. As I went in to greet Héguel, Ari started sweeping my room. I was grateful: I was tired and the pack was heavy. It felt nice to be getting un-requested support from a young friend. I asked him how he was, and then noticed he was close to tears. He motioned me to sit down next to him as he said he wasn’t doing so well.

He asked me whether I had noticed how skinny he had gotten. He lifted his sleeveless basketball short, as though things weren’t otherwise clear enough. I immediately admitted that I had. Though he was already skinny – the “slender” I used above was really just a euphemism – he was now terribly, terribly thin, his cheekbones protruding, the flesh just below his eyes sunken, the skin drawn around his elbows and knees. I asked him whether he was sick, and he said he wasn’t.

Then he told me the following story: Ari earns a few gouds now and then by pulling one of the large transport carts that carry merchandise around Port au Prince. One sees the carts in cities throughout Haiti. They look a little like giant, elongated wheelbarrows, with two wheels on an axel at one end, and two handles at the other. The guy working puts the two handles under his arms, and pulls the wheelbarrow behind him. They’ll be piled high with 30-40 cases of bottled soft drinks, a couple dozen 110-pound sacks of flour or sugar, stacks of crates of used clothing, or various sorts of building materials. For a really heavy load, a second and sometimes even a third man will push from behind. I had heard that Ari sometimes did this work, when he’s not fixing motorcycle tires or washing those same cycles with rainwater he collects for the purpose – anything for a little honest income.

Just before the New Year, someone had hired him to buy and deliver a load of ice. Haitians like their drinks cold, and since electricity is unreliable, they depend on ice companies that make the ice with big diesel generators. Wholesalers drive around in flat-bed trucks with enormous blocks of the stuff selling to retailers. Ari’s client had given him 330 Haitian dollars, which is 1650 gouds, or about $44 US in cash, and sent him off.

That’s when disaster struck. Ari somehow lost the money. He couldn’t tell me how. He simply said that it disappeared in his hands. I didn’t have the heart to press him. Just speaking to me about the matter was manifestly causing him such pain. I had to make it worse, because I could hardly hear him. His usually lively, penetrating voice was down to a bare whisper.

The client was furious, threatening to have Ari killed. The trip to his grandmother’s had been an escape ploy, a way for him to flee to safety while his father, who was willing to stand behind his son, negotiated a repayment plan with the angry client. The father could no more produce $44 US all at once than the son could.

Ari was so upset, about the danger he was facing and the burden he had placed on his dad, that he had stopped eating. And he was withering away. So he got up the courage to ask me whether I might be able to help in some way.

I happened to have a lot of Haitian cash with me, several hundred dollars worth of gouds. This is much more than I would usually carry, but someone had just paid back a for-me-large loan I had made. So, there was no question as to whether I could give him the money he needed. Though money is shorter for me right now than it normally is, things haven’t gotten to the point that I can’t afford to give someone $44 in a jam.

But I was frozen at first. I told him that I would definitely do something for him, but I couldn’t right away say what. He went downstairs, and I went across to Héguel’s room to ask for advice.

What had paralyzed me initially was the following consideration: Ever since I came to Cité Soleil I had consistently told the guys I work with that I would invest all the time I could spare, but that I would not put money into our work, that I simply couldn’t. I was worried that if I became a source of handouts, we would not be able to accomplish anything: The genuine and in some cases even urgent needs of the people around me in Cité Soleil so distantly outstrip any financial help I could hope to bring. Setting myself up as a source of money would uselessly distract us from the difficult but perhaps achievable task of organizing ourselves to make small, sustainable progress together. After the first weeks, the couple of the guys who had initially asked me for money stopped doing so.

So I was worried that I was opening a door that I had only just been able to close. Once it gets around that I gave one of the kids money for something, why wouldn’t others start turning to me as well? So I had decided that I would stick by the principle that I wouldn’t give handouts. It’s a good principle, as principles go.

But it doesn’t feel right. I am living and working in the midst of a community that is terribly poor – poor enough, for example, that $44 can be, very literally, a life-threatening loss. It represents more than a month’s income for many of the Haitian families who live on as little as a dollar a day. A few days earlier, for example, I had spoken with a couple of young guys who were running off at 5:30 in the morning, in their best clothes, to apply for factory work that pays 70 gouds a day, or a little less than $2 US. At that rate, they would not earn the $44 in a month, much less be able to accumulate $44 in savings. And they were very much hoping for the jobs.

The reality is that, whatever I think of my salary, as convenient as it would be to earn somewhat more, I am stunningly wealthy compared with many of those around me. I cannot pretend to be living and working in solidarity with them if I hide this simple truth about our lives.

So I gave Ari the money. He and Héguel then had a long talk about how Ari might be able to handle things so that word does not spread that I’m the one he got it from. I myself am skeptical. I can’t imagine that others won’t hear, or at least figure out, that that’s what happened.

But that’s ok, I suppose. Facing such requests seems reasonably to belong to living in Haiti. To avoid hearing them or, what might be worse, to avoid giving them individual consideration, would be cowardly. Or, at least, unrealistic.

I was afraid something of the sort would happen.

Two-thirds of the way through my first experience as a fully-fledged substitute sixth-grade teacher, I was separating two kids who were ready to exchange blows. It was easy enough to do. I simply changed seats with one of them. They weren’t very intent on fighting. But that things had gotten that far didn’t exactly show strong great classroom management skills on my part.

I was taking their class because their teacher is a member of a theatre troop. The troop had been invited to perform in another part of Haiti. The teacher had to miss a day of classes, and her sixth-graders, who are preparing for the national graduation exam they will take this summer, couldn’t really afford to lose the day. Though I doubted my ability to manage a class of twelve and thirteen-year-olds, I couldn’t well say no.

Passing the national sixth-grade exam in Haiti is a big deal. Being in school at all is a right that not all Haitian children can take advantage of. Though the Haitian constitution specifies a right to free primary education, and even makes it compulsory, the reality is that a third of Haitian children never go to school at all and fewer than half of primary-school-age children are in school at any given time.

Of the minority who make it through primary school to take the sixth-grade exam, the percentage that passes is not very high. Though there are elite schools that are able to get virtually every student through, there are many schools where only a few or only very few pass. I’ve written before about my godson’s cousin Vunet, who failed the exam for the second time last year – together with his twin sister and all the other sixth-graders from his school. (See: Vunet).

The Matènwa Community Learning Center takes the exam seriously, though it’s an uncomfortable fit for them and it’s not easy. The school emphasizes learning based, at every level and in every way it can, on understanding gained through practical investigation and on the reality the school’s children face every day. The philosophy fits poorly with the exam, which can tend to emphasize skills and knowledge very much abstracted from life on Lagonav. Many of the schools that get high percentages of children through the exam do it by putting a premium on memorization. In Mèt Anténor’s school, near my home, Anténor consistently gets a high percentage through by spending a lot of time throughout the sixth-grade year testing the kids with old exams and forcing them to memorize what they don’t know.

The Matènwa school has been trying to do things the hard way. They work with the kids in the way they think best for their intellectual and social development, and hope that a consequence will be strong showing on the test.

The results have been mixed. Generally, results for schools on Lagonav have been terrible, and the Matènwa children have done better, but they are by no means passing at a rate the school can be satisfied with. And the school’s staff recognizes the fact that, whatever it thinks of the exam, it has to take it very seriously. Like it or not, it is the gateway to further education for the children of Haiti. Kids who fail cannot go to secondary school.

So they really work hard at it, providing the kids all the time and support they can. For one thing, the have the kids come to school at 6:00 AM, two hours before the other children. And they offer extra afternoon sessions whenever they can. All this extra time is referred to as “kou siplimantè”, or “supplementary classes”.

I first started working with the kids in the afternoons. A very bright but mischievous boy named Josias had asked in his class’s name whether I would do some math with them. He had seen me doing math with his teachers. I readily agreed. I enjoy doing simple math with young people. I’ve discovered that I can help Haitian kids through about the eleventh grade. After that, they start getting beyond what I can easily remember.

The Matènwa kids were doing what looked like a kind of pre-algebra. Here is a sample problem: If seven pumpkins cost $35, how many would ten cost?

They have learned a way to set the problems up by drawing a four-square grid. In the upper left-hand square, the write “7”, and in the upper right-hand one the write “35”. On the lower left-hand side they write “10”, and they draw a question mark in the lower right-hand one.

They then make a large “x,” connecting the diagonal values, and they “cross-multiply.” Under the grid, they can thus write:

35*10 = 7*?

They are taught to “get the question mark by itself” by moving the 7 over to the left-hand side. They then have:

35*10/7 = ?

So they can calculate the answer.

The problem is that, though most of them can remember the procedure pretty reliably, it’s not clear how much of it they understand. For example, most do not know that what they’re doing when they isolate the question mark is dividing **both** sides of the equation by seven, and that, in general, they are always free to treat both sides of an equation in the same way. Their teacher wasn’t around, so I wasn’t even sure what I should expect them to understand. Maybe it’s ok for them to learn the process first.

In any case, we spent a couple of long afternoons working together, so by Friday we had a developed a report. The first thing I noticed was that the kids, who for years had been calling me “Steven” or “Estiven” or “Estiv” were suddenly calling me “Mèt la”, or “master”, the standard title for a teacher who is male.

And there was a lot in the group’s dynamics, in the ways in which the kids worked with and related to one another, that I was figuring out on the fly. To take one example: the kids have a competitive edge. They enjoy putting one another on the spot. They liked it when each person who went to work out a problem at the blackboard got to create the next problem and choose who had to solve it. We were able to spend a lot of time cycling through the class, as each put a progressively harder question on the board for the next.

But along with the competitiveness, there is an equally intense sense of solidarity. It is very hard to evaluate what each one can do because they cannot resist working together. As soon as one of them starts to struggle, other will immediately jump in. I very often asked them not to, but my words had no effect. They couldn’t seem to help themselves.

I eventually got around the problem by creating a question that would be different for each of them. I told them to imagine that their mother had bought them sneakers for a certain price, and then asked them to calculate how much it would cost to purchase sneakers for all their other siblings as well. The question wasn’t as straightforward as I had thought it would be: Some of them needed to know whether half-siblings and step-siblings should be included as well. But I left it up to their own discretion. By the end, we had spent an awful lot of enjoyable and productive time going back and forth between work at the blackboard and work in their little notebooks.

The day I finally took them was, fortunately for me, a half-day. The school sends kids home early every Friday to allow for faculty development. I would have been worried about spending a longer day with them, because my bag of tricks is so limited. Without significant preparation, I can do nothing but math with the kids, and it’s hard to make them spend a whole day that way. But I was glad for the time I was with them. I gave me a larger, though still very incomplete sense, of the challenges the school teachers I work with face.

And the kids are very nice. It’s beautiful to watch them get new stuff down. Young people wear their learning so vividly on their sleeves.

Some things are handled quite differently in Haiti than they would be in the States. There’s so much less infrastructure here, so much less governance, so many fewer public services. We in the States can tend to take a lot for granted.

I was on the way back to Pòtoprens on Friday from Sodo, a small town in the Central Plateau. I was a little annoyed, because my host’s planning had cost me a day at a very busy moment. I had been in Sodo since Wednesday morning, and had asked my host, at that time, to simply help me get to Mibalè Thursday afternoon, after we finished our work. I would sleep there, and then take public transportation to Pòtoprens early Friday morning. I could use the evening in Mibalè to meet some people I wanted to talk with, and would be able to travel back into Pòtoprens early enough to do most of a day’s work and then still ride up to Ka Glo by a reasonable hour. I needed to get home to make sure everything was ready for the workshop I was to host in my house in all day Saturday.

My hosts would hear nothing of it. They would drive my all the way to Pòtoprens early Friday morning. They had brought to Sodo, and they would take me home.

By Thursday evening, they were telling me that I would no longer be able to leave first thing Friday morning. They were down to only one truck. They would, however, send me to Pòtoprens when their truck returned from an errand in Mibalè.

When the truck got back, they told me that they could only take me to Mibalè. They could not afford to send their only truck away for the half-day it would take to get to Pòtoprens and back.

So I was sitting in the back of a pick-up truck that I had found in Mibalè, and pouting because I hadn’t been on my way half a day sooner. I got the last seat as the pick-up pulled off towards Pòtoprens. I’d get to the Kwadeboukèt station by early afternoon, and would be home by 4:00. Not ideal, but workable.

The road from Mibalè to Kwadeboukèt winds over a mountain, rising out of the Plateau and then descending into the so-called “Cul de Sac,” the coastal plain that Pòtoprens sits in. It’s a dry, dusty part of the country during this rainless time of the year. Water sources can be a long way away for the folks that have to get their drinking, bathing, washing, and cooking water everyday. Young boys often try to shorten their trip by hopping onto the back of trucks and busses that drive by. They stand on the fenders and hang on. Some drivers will chase them off, but most just let them ride.

Of course it’s dangerous. And when we got to a level part of the road just short of Trianon, we saw why.

There was a large flat-bed truck, pointed towards Mibalè, parked in to middle of the road. Its engine was still running. A few yards behind it was a boy, eleven or twelve perhaps, sitting in the dust at the side of the road. He was wincing in pain as two middle-aged women and a pack of smaller children looked on. He had jumped onto the truck for a ride to water – his gallon jug was still in his hand – but he fallen and had, to all appearances, broken his leg.

The truck’s driver had intended to simply drive on to Mibalè. It was not, he thought, his problem or his fault. He had told the boy to get down, but the boy hadn’t listened. The two women were market women who had hired the truck to take them and merchandise they had bought in Pòtoprens back home with them. When the driver started to continue on his way, they had gotten of the truck, refusing to go on. They wanted him to take the boy back to Tè Wouj, where he could get medical attention.

It was a stalemate. The driver wouldn’t turn around, but he wouldn’t continue without the two women either.

The women explained the situation to our driver. They asked him to take the boy to Tè Wouj, but he said that it wouldn’t be right. The boy should not have jumped on the truck, but the fact that he did made him the truck driver’s responsibility. He took out a notebook, and went to talk with the other driver.

There was a lot of yelling between them. It turned out that one of the reasons that the truck driver was reluctant to return was that he was driving without license plates on his truck. He was worried that stopping in Tè Wouj – a market town he had just driven through where there is a UN military base and a Haitian police station – could mean no end of trouble.

But they argued and they argued, and finally the truck driver gave in. He turned his rig around, and headed back to Tè Wouj, about 45 minutes away. Our pick-up could have made the trip much more quickly, but our driver refused to pass. He didn’t really trust the other driver to keep his word, so he followed him all the way.

There’s an amusing scene at the beginning of //The Man without Qualities//, Robert Musil’s massive unfinished novel. A couple, strolling through pre-World-War-One Vienna, is witness to a traffic accident. They see a man struck by a speeding truck. The couple looks on in awe as a crowd of witnesses makes way for the clean, professional-looking ambulance attendants who whisk the victim swiftly away in their bright, new machine. The narrator can only remark, “How admirably everything was functioning!”

That was 1913. Here, it is 2007, and the boy on the road through the Central Plateau – National Highway #3 – has nothing of the advantages of the book’s nameless victim. Here in Haiti, not everything is functioning so admirably.

At the same time, the market women and the pick-up driver handled things very well given the means available to them. I certainly would not have known how to accomplish what they managed to do.