“On March 24th, 2007, we met at 8:00 AM, at Steven’s house in Kaglo in order to finish writing the statutes for IDEAL . . .”

The last week or so has been important for the group in Cité Soleil and for me.

The first thing that happened was trivial in a way, but very much telling. I arrived in Cité Soleil on a Friday afternoon, having spent the day at the Fonkoze office after arriving from Wanament in the far northeast corner of Haiti. When the guys saw me, they invited me to hurry up and change clothes so that I could go play basketball with them. The unimportant side of this is that I used to really enjoy playing basketball, but hadn’t played in several years. So though I was a little nervous about playing with a bunch of spritely young men, I was very pleased to be back on a court. The important side of this is that the basketball court is several blocks from my room in Belekou, in the very heart of the neighborhood.

Here’s why that’s interesting: Since I started going to Belekou, I have spent all of my time either inside my room or on the street right in front of it. The room is on the second floor of a building at the intersection that leads into the neighborhood. When we started meeting together back in October, the guys I work with asked the gang leader who controlled the area whether my presence would be alright with him, and he said he had no objections. Even so, the guys always thought I should avoid raising questions about my presence in anyone’s mind, so they more or less insisted that I stay right where we work together and not stroll around other parts of the area.

But things have changed since UN forces took over the area about a month ago without firing a shot. It’s quite calm. And though residents resent the presence of the occupying force and though they shout curses and slogans when armored personnel carriers make their regular, heavily-armed rounds, they also seem happy about the peace. When the guys invited me to play ball, it required that I walk deeper in Belekou than they had ever allowed me to go, and they did so very casually. This was a clear indication of the improved safety that they feel.

The importance of the second thing that happened is hard to judge with certainty, but it’s very promising at least: The guys spent the last two days writing out a formal charter for their organization and electing its officers. The name the chose is “IDEAL,” which stand for “Independence, Development, Education, Association, and Lawfulness.”

It was nevertheless important in at least a couple of respects. For one thing, it’s something that they’ve wanted. From my very first meeting with them, they spoke of their sense that they needed to be organized. They have felt, rightly or wrongly, that their being part of a recognized organization, with an official charter, letterhead, and membership cards will give them an identity that they’ve lacked. Though I tried to convince them that they should link their identity to what they accomplish together rather than to pieces of paper, they have found my reasoning to be only very partially satisfying. Though several of them are rightly proud of the progress they’ve made through the English lessons that Héguel and I provide, it’s been clear enough that they want something more. And they think that they now have what they were looking for. In addition, their willingness to stay focused over the course of two days on the tedious work of formulating their charter is a testimony to how ready they are to invest themselves in moving themselves forward.

In writing down their charter, they got help from my long-time colleague Gerald Lumarque, a community organizer and literacy teacher from Fayette, a rural area outside of Léogâne. He’s helped numerous grassroots organizations establish themselves. He came to Cité Soleil and met with them in our room there for a day. It was his first trip to Cité Soleil, and he was very nervous. In fact, midway through the week he contacted me to say that he had been advised not to go there, that it was too dangerous. Only when I told him that I would be sleeping there the night before he came to work, did he change his mind.

At the end of that first day, we all went up to my house in Kaglo. The twenty-six of us spent the night, and then worked through the next day until the statutes were completed.

The photos below are from the evening and the following day in Kaglo.

I went up a little early on Friday to help get the house ready. Neither Byton nor I are good about doing dishes or keeping things clean, so there was some work to do. As always, Ti Kel and Mackenson came to help.

Lilly very quickly made new friends. Here she is with Haril. He’s an eighth-grader, his parents’ second child. He earns what he can by collecting rainwater in an otherwise-unused basin and washing motorcycles.

Here she is with Daniel. Daniel is less fortunate than Haril. He isn’t able to go to school, though he went long enough that he can read and write. He earns a living fixing the flat tires that are so common among the motorcycles and bicycles that work in and around Cité Soleil.

Once Gerald and the whole team got to my house, they had a long discussion about what they had achieved through their first day of work and how they would organize themselves for the second day.

The house wasn’t really designed to sleep twenty-six, but we managed well enough.

When they got up Saturday morning, we had a small breakfast of coffee with bread and butter. Here are some of the guys, ready to get to work.

In the front are Papito, Jasmin, Frantzeau, Guynold, and Raynold. In the back are Hugens, Rissa, Osnel, and Picard.

The group spent most of the day following Gerald at the blackboard on the front patio, working out the rules they would set for themselves. He would write down proposed formulations. They would then debate them, tinkering until they came to agreement. Their newly-elected Secretary General would then write them down. The rules covered everything for admission to the group, to its governance, to its name and objectives.

At the end of the day, before they left Kaglo, the group asked me to take a picture of all of them, standing under the great Mapou.

It will take more to make the group into something important than it took to write out the statutes and elect the officers, but everything has to start somewhere.

Latònal is a two-hour uphill hike from Fayèt, a small rural community already well outside of Leyogann and Gresyè, the closest little cities. Fayèt and Latònal have been important in our activities for some time, since Frémy and I spent more than a year meeting each week with EPA, a team of literacy teachers based there, coaching them in how to use Wonn Refleksyon and then helping them develop the guidebook they use for the book of images and proverbs that we created for non-readers.

In their years teaching literacy, EPA’s members had grown increasingly frustrated at the age of their students. Though most were still adults, they were getting more and more young people, kids in their early teens or even younger. These kids and their families had apparently resigned themselves to the fact that they were never going to attend a school, so they decided to join a literacy program to learn at least the rudiments of reading and writing. The EPA team began to feel as though the task
of teaching adult literacy would be endless as long as significant numbers of kids were unable to go to school. According to the 2003 Haitian census, less than half of all school age children in Haiti attend school.

The group undertook their own little census. They learned how many kids in their areas were not in school, and exactly where those kids live. They decided to open a school for these children especially.

This was not a small matter: they had no building, no materials, and no money to speak of. They found a small, four-room building they could rent for about $110 for the year. They pitched in their own money to build benches and buy chairs, blackboards, notebooks, pencils, chalk, and other materials. They set up a desk in the schoolhouse to begin registration. They decided to charge 100 gourdes for the year. That’s about $2.75. Kids whose parents couldn’t come up with the money would be accepted anyway.

Since September, I’ve heard reports of the school any number of times. I occasionally cross paths with the teachers at Wonn Refleksyon meetings in Pòtoprens and elsewhere. But I hadn’t been able to visit. When it became clear that the guys from Cité Soleil were interested in starting a school, visiting the school near Fayèt came to seem like it was too important to miss. I decided to invite a couple of representatives of the Soleil group to go with me, to see the work of a group that is somewhat farther along than they themselves are, but close enough to have clear memories of the challenges the Soleil guys were about to face.

So Junior, Anel, and I took a bus and some pick-up trucks to Dabòn and a motorcycle to Nan Mapou. From there, we waded across the river to Fayèt. The river was high because there have been good rains so far this year, but not so high as to be un-fordable. We spent a long afternoon and a morning in Fayèt. Between those two half-days, we spent a day in Latònal, meeting with the Fayèt group’s partner there.

The first afternoon in Fayèt was a chance for Junior and Anel to meet some members of the EPA team, Job and Ormilien, and to see their adult literacy centers at work. Junior and Anel are both a little over twenty, and they’ve both been through primary school, though not much farther. They were shocked to see kids younger than them, much younger than them, already in literacy programs. Neither of them had ever attended a literacy class meeting, and they were excited to see how enthusiastic, how engaged, men and women their parents’ age were.

After visiting the centers, we bathed in a beautifully transparent freshwater spring, had a bite to eat, and then chatted for a while before heading to bed.

The next morning we left Fayèt before 5:00 because I knew that the road up the mountain would be a challenge, and would be all the worse once the sun came out. It was almost 7:00 before the sun burned through some cloud cover, and by then we were within 15 minutes of our goal.

We had two objectives for our day in Latònal. In the morning, we would visit a community school just a few years old. It’s run by an experienced educator, but staffed mostly by recent graduates – recent primary school graduates, that is. I thought it would help the guys imagine themselves as teachers. I also wanted to watch our host, Thomas, lead a Wonn Refleksyon discussion for a community group he’s part of. Few of the group’s members can read, so Thomas is using the book of images and proverbs that a group of us created several years ago. I hadn’t seen the book used in some time – there never were many copies – and I wanted to be reminded how it works.

I was glad I went. The Wonn Refleksyon discussion reminded me of something important. I had stopped thinking much about the use of images. Our in-many-ways-successful experience using proverbs exclusively on Lagonav made it seem unimportant. One could use proverbs with those who can’t read, they work well as tools to get conversations going, and they don’t involve having to print or distribute books. It seemed like a much easier way to address the same need that images address.

The problem is that it’s just not true. Proverbs and images do not work in the same way, and those using proverbs only were probably missing something.

Proverbs give participants something to talk about. They are familiar, and participants have an easy time connecting them with their lives. They encourage them to share their experiences.

But images do something quite different. I can explain this by talking about the discussion that Thomas led. It was on a Haitian proverb, “//Se lè poul la mare, ravèt ka bay eksplikasyon l,//” or “It’s when the chicken is tied up that the roach can explain itself.” Apparently, chickens just love cockroaches. The proverb was accompanied by a drawing that was done by a student at the Matènwa Community Learning Center.

What was striking to me about the conversation is that participants spent a considerable amount of time talking about whether the leash that was holding the chicken in place was really short enough to prevent her from eating the roaches. At first, I was frustrated by what seemed like an example of a group’s veering into bickering. I thought they would be sharing experiences related to the proverb. But then I realized that something important was happening: Participants were working together to iron out the details of an interpretation of the drawing in front of them.

And what was pushing them to work together was a feature of a visual image that proverbs simply don’t share: a range of details that one can argue about. I might not care very much about how long the leash in the picture is. I might be perfectly happy to have the group conclude whatever it wants to. But developing the habit of working together, through whatever agreements and disagreements they have, is enormously valuable. Proverbs encourage participants to share experiences, but they don’t tend to lead to disagreements. Or if they do, they are the kind of disagreements that cannot be resolved: You see the proverb in one way, and I see it in another.

We got up just before 5:00 the next morning to go back down the hill. We wanted to get back to Fayèt as early as possible so that we could spend as much of the morning as possible as the school. We got to the small, four-room building at about 8:30.

The school has four teachers. Three of them are volunteers, part of the team that decided to establish the school. The fourth is a trained kindergarten teacher that the volunteers pitched in to hire with their own money. That having be said: It turns out that they don’t really pay her, because they don’t really have any money.

I spend most of our visit sitting in the room that held the kindergarten and first grade. The kids wanted to show me what they had learned, so they asked me to put some addition and subtraction problems up on their blackboard. I kept the problems simple, not knowing how far along they were. There was one boy who wanted to do al the problems. He must have been twelve or thirteen, but his teachers told me that he had never been to school before. He seemed to be learning so fast that his teachers could easily have had a hard time keeping up with him.

Eventually, I hit upon a plan. I asked whether any of the kids wanted to put problems on the board for other kids. The boy volunteered right away. But instead of the simply, one-digit problems I had been giving them, he went straight to four-five digit problems that involved all sorts of borrowing and carrying. Job and I watched in stunned silence as the kids handled the problems easily. Job wasn’t sure how. He hadn’t, he said, taught them how to borrow or carry. But somehow that knowledge existed in the group. Perhaps siblings or neighbors have shared such techniques with these kids. Maybe the few of them that have spent some time in schools before brought the knowledge with them. In any case, the kids were farther along than even their teacher suspected.

The trip back to Port au Prince seemed to pass too quickly. Anel and Junior had been excited by what they had seen, and they wanted to talk about it. What most impressed them was how well they had been fed, both at Thomas’s house and at the house in Fayèt. But they also had a lot to say about the young people who were teaching at the school in Latònal, the excitement of the kids in the school in Fayèt, and the considerable amount of work that is before them.

The credit center in Fòche is beautiful. It’s underneath the massive spread of an old mango tree. The branches must cover a circle, at least forty feet across, that is enclosed by a fence of woven palm leaves that’s five or six feet high. A couple of additional palm-leaf walls reach ten-twelve feet from the outer wall towards the center. They divide the space along the circumference into classrooms. This same tree is home to a primary school. There were two groups of little kids doing very basic Math and French while we were visiting.

I call what I visited in Fòche a “credit center.” The term has a precise meeting in the context of Fonkoze’s method for disbursing microcredit.

Fonkoze’s main credit program does not involve loans to individuals. Instead, money is lent to groups of five women – friends, family, or neighbors – who borrow it together. The women agree to take shared responsibility for repayment. This has two important advantages. First, it serves in lieu of collateral to guarantee repayment of the loan. Fonkoze borrowers don’t sign over anything, and yet they repay their loans at high rates, partly because of the responsibility they share. Second, it encourages solidarity and collaboration among the women. It helps ensure that they all have obvious places to seek advice and support. They can just turn to one another.

These groups of five are collected into credit centers of six-eight groups, or thirty to forty women. The centers give Fonkoze a way to organize the delivery of services like credit, but also other financial and educational services. Members of a credit center do not have to come to Fonkoze’s branch to receive credit or to make a payment. The branch sends a loan officer to them. Centers broaden the sphere of solidarity available to members. Instead of having just five women to depend on, a woman is a member of an organized collection of thirty to forty women who come together regularly to get new loans or repay old ones, but also to share their problems, their advice, and their experiences with one another.

Ideally, centers would meet quite regularly: once a month for loan transactions – either disbursement or repayment – and once or twice a week for educational programs like Basic Literacy, Business Development Skills, and Health Education. In addition, there would be one meeting per month just to chat.

But providing educational programs depends on funding. The programs Fonkoze offers are inexpensive. They cost only about $25 per participant for a four-month class. But income from interest doesn’t yet cover this cost, so Fonkoze has to depend on outside funding. We work very hard at fundraising, but it hasn’t been enough to offer the programs at all thirty of Fonkoze’s branches. So at least half of Fonkoze’s credit centers have occasion to meet only twice per month – once for loan activity and once to chat.

But things are more complicated. Holding a meeting of busy business women just to chat turns out to be difficult. Credit agents and the centers’ elected leaders, who share responsibility for these meetings, can lack both the skills to nurture dialogue and ideas about issues that center members might profitably discuss. The meetings can deteriorate into lectures – or, rather, sermons – about the importance of timely loan repayment and proper loan investment. Attendance at these meetings drops off, and understandably so, because participants who are working hard to build their businesses don’t really feel their benefit.

The loss of these discussion meetings is expensive for Fonkoze and its membership in two ways. On one hand, there is the cost of a lost opportunity. The advantages the women could gain by getting together regularly and sharing advice fall away. On the other, the discipline of loan repayment tends to weaken because center solidarity isn’t there to reinforce it.

So we decided to work at making these monthly dialogues more meaningful. We would create lesson plans for them. The plans would address issues important for Fonkoze’s membership, and they would also outline simple procedures designed to help the credit agents who use them to encourage dialogue among members.

I’ve written two so far. One is about credit center security. This is extremely important because the centers are unguarded locations where large amounts of cash regularly changes hands. Few of these centers are anywhere near the nearest police. The lesson is built around a short story I wrote based on a theft that actually occurred at one credit center when members and their credit agent were negligent. The other lesson plan is about different ways a small business woman might decide to invest her profit. It’s a story of three women: one who reinvests profit into her business, one who uses it to buy additional income-generating assets, and one who uses it to send her children to fancy and expensive schools in Pòtoprens. Both lessons come with questions for the women to reflect upon and with instructions for the credit agents as to how to divide the women into small groups to address the questions.

Our first experience with one of the lessons was last week, in Fòche, a small community off the main southern highway from Pòtoprens to Okay. It’s just outside of Grangwav. The center in Fòche is served by Fonkoze’s small branch in Twen, which currently has no educational programs. It’s long haul from Twen to Fòche. The direct road has been so badly eroded by flooding as to be nearly impassable. Only during the dry season can a motorcycle weave along and through shallow river beds. So the credit agent regularly makes a great circle out of the Twen valley, up to the stunning mountaintop road that runs between Leyogann and Jakmel. He takes that road all the way down to the southern highway, which he then takes to Fòche. The route takes about an hour and a half.

I went to Fòche with two Fonkoze credit agents. Our plan was that I would lead the meeting, following the lesson plan, and they would observe. Later in the day, we had another credit center meeting scheduled back in Twen, and one of them would lead the same discussion there. That way, we would all get to see whether they were comfortable with the way the lessons were designed to work.

We got to the center as the women were beginning to arrive, and soon there were almost twenty, a little more than half the center’s membership. After introductions, I explained why we had come. I then read the story out loud – many of the women need to learn to read – and one of the credit agents read it a second time. Then we divided the center into groups of four to five women, and asked each group to come up with answers to a couple of questions. Each group was asked to explain what caused the security problem in the center the story describes, and then each group was asked to say what one or more of the characters in the story might have done differently to prevent the problem. After about fifteen minutes, we returned to the circle to share answers and for further conversation.

The meeting went splendidly. The women seemed to really enjoy themselves, and they had a lot to say. They spoke well about the importance of secrecy, and also of attending all center meetings. They pointed out that if they only come to the center when cash is going to change hands they make the center an attractive target. If, on the other hand, there are other regular activities, robbery becomes harder to plan.

The women had good questions, too. For example, one asked whether, when a credit agent is robbed as he returns to his branch after collecting repayments, the credit center members are then responsible for making up the loss. It provided a great chance to remind them of the importance of keeping their receipts.

The women really held us there with them with their questions. They are very upset that they’re not getting the educational programs that they’ve heard about. They resent having to sign loan agreements and receipts with their thumbprints. They feel they need to learn more about running their businesses. I explained the problem we have funding these programs for everyone, and they understood, but my saying that we are growing quickly is cold comfort to those whom we haven’t reached yet. On the way back to Twen, the credit agents and I worked on a cheap way we might get some version of a literacy program to them.

By the time we were able to leave the center, it was getting near time to be back in Twen for the other meeting. We took a chance and took the direct road, hoping it would help us arrive in time. It was very tough going for the agent who was driving the motorcycle. We crossed a shallow but quickly-flowing river at a couple of points and, what was sometimes harder, had to run along the river’s pebble-ly bed. We were within reach of Twen, when the back tire went flat. The driver managed to get the cycle the rest of the way, but the other credit agent and I had to walk almost 45 minutes. By the time we arrived, it was much to late to go to the meeting.

The experiment will now continue. Fonkoze has chosen three branches in different parts of the country. By the end of April, we like to have implemented the new lesson plans branch-wide in all three. We would like to do a real study to see whether credit agents can learn to use these lesson plans and whether the plans can improve attendance at credit center meetings. If both answers are positive, we’ll know we have a new tool that it’s worth really investing in.