Haitian dogs understand standard Creole. To convince one to leave a house it has entered, or generally to get lost, one need only say “sòti chen!” Creole for “Dog, leave!” My Lilly only appears to be an exception. She ignores what I say to her, but immediately obeys anyone else in the neighborhood. If I really want her to get lost, all I have to do is ask Valouloun, Madan Anténor’s 14-year-old girl, to speak to her.

Cats here are, as they are in the States, a little different. People don’t much bother to tell them to go away, but when they want to call them, they say “Mimi, Mimi.” In a sense, that is their name. They all are called “Mimi”. It’s also a Creole word for “cat.” Haitians sometimes use the word Creole borrowed from French, “chat,” but they just as often use “mimi” instead.

The word’s source is obvious enough. It’s just an imitation of the sound a cat makes.

Things get interesting after dogs and cats. To tell a chicken to get lost, a Haitian says “shee!” Apparently, the word means “go away” in the language of Haitian chickens. It works for other species of domestic fowl as well: ducks, turkeys, and guinea fowl.

But if I’m not talking to a bird, I can’t say “shee”. Goats, for example, respond to “sa!” Donkeys respond to “weed!” Cattle respond to “wach”. It is as though each type of animal has its own language, and Haitians speak them all.

It’s a little curious.

I can’t figure out why, say, goats and donkeys are addressed in different ways. In the case of cats, things are clear. Haitians make a sound like a cat makes. And often enough they do the same thing when calling other animals, such as when they call chickens to feed, as opposed to when they’re driving the away.

But goats do not say “sa.”

One could try to argue that that is how Haitians hear them. It might not seem plausible to someone who’s heard a goat, but, after all, we English speakers somehow think that roosters say “cock-a-doodle-doo”. Nothing could really be farther from the case. So it shouldn’t surprise us too much if Haitians hear goat noises differently from the way we hear them.

But the argument starts to crumble when one hears young Haitians yelling “meh, meh,” when they see UN peacekeepers. Haitians say that the peacekeepers steal and eat their goats, and accuse them by making goat sounds when they pass by. If nothing else, that shows that Haitians think of goats as saying “meh.”

And the same argument can’t even get started in the case of donkeys. The odd noise they make sounds nothing like “weed.”

So I’ve been wondering where these various animal words come from. Why can’t I say “sa” to a Haitian chicken or a dog? Why can’t I say “sa” to a cow?

Surely I could. And the animal I was addressing would just as surely get the message well enough if I used the right tone of voice. No one has ever suggested that the reason Lilly fails to obey me and me alone is that my Creole pronunciation is poor.

Haitians, however, don’t mix these words. Or they don’t very much. And I just can’t figure it out.

I can tend to think of my ignorance about “sa” as contrasting sharply with my good understanding of “sòti”. I might know nothing about “sa”, but I know that “sòti” comes from the French verb “sortir*”, and can trace this latter word even farther to its Latin roots. There are people who can trace the word back farther still.

But I shouldn’t kid myself. I know nothing at all about how a sound like “sòti” came to mean “leave”. Tracing the word backwards through history might push the question into the remote past, but it doesn’t suggest an answer.

Such an unanswered question is surely less important than others, like how to fund Fonkoze’s education programs or how a poor Haitian family will pull together its next meal.

It’s trivial, but that doesn’t make it any less of a question. Enough of a question, at least, for a quiet Saturday morn

Actually, there is no “Lekòl Nòmal Matènwa”. At least, not yet. A “lekòl nòmal” is a school of education, and Matènwa doesn’t have one. What it has is a successful community school, the Matènwa Community Learning Center (www.matenwa.org), which I’ve written about quite a number of times.

That school is at the center of a seven-school network of rural primary schools that have banded together to change education on their island, Lagonav. They have chosen to stand behind certain principles: active, student-centered learning, without beatings and without humiliations; education that’s appropriate to the rural region the schools and, more importantly, their students are in; and education in Creole, the language that’s native to all residents of Lagonav and the only language that students and, indeed, most teachers, speak and understand well. It’s a small start, in a way, but the network is only in its second year. Several other schools are interested in joining.

One of the most important things that the network can do for its member schools is organize faculty development seminars. Though the schools’ principals consistently name raising financial resources as their first need – Who can blame them? They are private schools located in communities of families that cannot really afford to pay – they just as consistently list teacher training as their second. The network’s ambitious goals for the kind of education it aspires to offer must remain nothing but goals unless teachers understand them well and have the skills they need to bring them about. So this past week, the Matènwa school has been hosting a summer workshop for about 25 teachers from member schools – and from some schools that are not members.

The workshop’s subject is the psychology of learning. How we chose the subject is itself a story. About two years ago, I spent a week with the Matènwa teachers studying psychology (See: HardQuestions). Even at the time, we had heard that the same Haitian university that had produced the textbook on psychology generally was producing a second on the educational psychology in particular. We knew right away that we’d want to study it. So we began asking the publisher for the book. For a while I was going to their bookstore every few weeks, expecting that it would finally be there. But over a year later, it was still pending.

Then we heard this spring that it was finally available. The university in question had opened a satellite campus in Lagonav’s one large town, and one of our colleagues had signed up for classes. There he discovered that the book was in use. He suggested that we arrange a workshop on the book because he felt that, even for him, the participatory methods we use would help him get more out of it than the lectures the university offers him. For most of the teachers we work with, who cannot go to college, a workshop would be the only chance they’d have.

When I began planning the workshop with the Matènwa teachers, we decided that a two-part approach would be best: I would spend one week meeting with them, going through the book as carefully as we could in such a short time. We’d then spend a second week with the larger group of teachers. During that second week, the Matènwa teachers would divide themselves into teams of two and three. Each team would be responsible for leading the workshop for a group of six to ten other teachers. For the Matènwa teachers, this would mean that they would not only get a second chance to study the book but also that they would gain experience as workshop leaders.

The first week we spent together was hard. We had seven chapters to get through, and five days to do it in. And we had to spend time the first day establishing a work plan, and reserve time on the last day for establishing a second work plan for the second week.

Fortunately, most of the teachers had read through the whole book by the beginning of the week, so we worked through the first chapter on Monday, and then two chapters a day for the next three days. Friday we finished Chapter Seven and had our planning meeting.

The biggest challenge we felt ourselves facing looking towards the second week was that the other teachers would not have the chance to read the book in advance. They would get the book on Monday, and would have to read its chapters during the workshop week itself. Since some of them would have long walks to join us every day, and plenty of chores to do on returning each afternoon to their rural homes, we knew that reading time would be limited. We therefore decided to build quiet reading time right into the daily schedule. We’d serve a very light breakfast at 8:00, but then wouldn’t start talking until just after 9:00. We announced that the interim was time for reading or reading the day’s assignment.

From 9:00 until noon we studied chapters in groups of eight to ten, each led by a couple of Matènwa teachers. The groups would spend the first couple of hours discussing any chapter subjects that participants had questions about. Together they would try to get the clarity they sought. After that, even these small groups would divide into small ones, with three or four members at most. These smaller groups would answer the questions that the textbook’s author put at the end of each chapter.

We had lunch at noon, and got back to work at 1:00. We spend about 15 minutes addressing whatever questions lingered after the morning’s work.

After that, we tried something we had never tried before. To explain, I need to go back and touch upon something that initially puzzled us: We wanted to cover seven chapters, but we knew that we couldn’t ask participants to read more than one chapter each day. Since we wanted to reserve Friday for a different activity, we had four days, or time for four chapters at most. The Matènwa teachers chose Chapters One-Three, which are general treatments of the subject, and chapter seven, an introduction to Piaget. That left Chapters Four and Five, each on a different aspect of behaviorism, and Chapter Six, on //Gestalt// theory.

We decided that on Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday afternoon, we would have a short lecture and discussion. One of the Matènwa teachers would present a fifteen-twenty minute talk, and then open the floor for questions.

This was very new ground for them all. In the first place, the habits they have been cultivating at Matènwa have been running precisely contrary to the traditional lecture format. Everything we’ve been working on has been discussion-based. And the Matènwa teachers aren’t much inclined to the lecture mode, especially in front of colleagues. They don’t usually view themselves as experts. So while they speak well and comfortably about their experiences at the school, presenting a more academic topic would be entirely new.

But these presentations went well. The teachers didn’t over-reach. They were brief enough that they were able to stay clearly focused, but long enough that their listeners were able to start ask meaningful questions.

Thursday afternoon was a general review of the four days’ work. We drew a tree on a blackboard and filled the tree with fruit. Each piece of fruits had a topic we had covered written on it. If everyone felt they understood the topic, the fruit was ripe and we harvested it with an eraser. If anyone had questions, we left the fruit on the tree until the questions were addressed.

Friday is an Open Space meeting. We used that very flexible format to invite teachers to talk about how they will be able to apply the week’s learning in the classes that they teach. The teachers themselves proposed a list of topics that they fitted into a previously blank agenda for the morning that we had drawn on a board. There would be two sessions, and six-eight topics were proposed for each. Once the agenda was filled, the teachers scattered, going to participate in whatever discussion of whatever topic interested them most.

At the end of Friday’s meeting, Abner Sauveur, Principal of the Matènwa school, summed things up beautifully. “When you told us that we ourselves would lead a workshop on psychology for the other teachers,” he said, “I was pretty skeptical. It was wonderful to discover what we were able to do.”

So there is, as yet, no School of Education in Matènwa. But there’s lots of teacher education going on there nonetheless.

A source of minor confusion for someone who’s in Haiti for the first time is the dollar. Prices are usually given in dollars, Haitian dollars. This is confusing because no such currency exists.

Haiti’s currency is the gourd. Right now, a buck buys about 35 of them. When I started coming to Haiti in the 90s, they were worth twice as much. A couple of years ago, they were worth 20% less. The value they have recently gained against the dollar both reflects and argues for cautious optimism, I suppose.

When Haitians speak of dollars, what they usually mean is five gourds. American dollars are called “dola US” or “dola vèt”. The latter expression means “green dollars.” Talk of Haitian dollars has its roots, I’m told, in a time under the Duvalier dictatorships when the exchange rate was held at five gourds.

So when Haril told me on Tuesday night that he had made sixteen dollars the Sunday before last, I knew he meant 80 gourds, or about $2.30. He had washed four motorcycles using the rainwater he collects in a basin next to my apartment in Belekou. He takes the water in a battered five-gallon bucket, and then splashes it onto a motorcycle every which way, scrubbing as he does. He used to get more business, but pressurized-water car and motorcycle washes are close by, on the main road, and they are, if not necessarily better, certainly faster.

It’s been a hard summer for Haril. I wrote of his dental problem. I also wrote of the fact that he got caught between his parents as their relationship deteriorated. His mother left their household some weeks ago. His father finally moved out of the neighborhood with Haril’s four younger siblings. Haril was left behind. He moved in with a couple of other young, parent-less men who share a room that opens onto one of the narrow corridors behind where I live. It’s a small, dark, hot, and airless space, but for now it’s home.

So Haril’s now fending for himself. He has a small business selling prepaid telephone cards. Someone helped him buy a first set of 25, and now every time he turns them over he earns 20 Haitians dollars, or about $2.85. He gives that money to an older neighbor whom he trusts to hold it for him. She keeps him from spending it. This is important because he’s counting on that money to buy the things he’ll need for school in the fall. He also assumes that he could need to help one or more of his siblings with school expenses, too. He’s especially concerned about the youngest two, a girl named Lovely and a little boy they call Pipi, because they’re really much too young to help themselves.

But if he’s to keep from eating his phone card money, he needs another way to live. So he tries hard to find motorcycles to wash, especially on the weekends. The Belekou intersection where we live is a major motorcycle taxi station, and the drivers seem to like him, so he can usually get a job or two. When he told me that he had made sixteen dollars by washing four motorcycles, I was pleased for him, but not surprised. What surprised me was hearing him explain how he had been able to make it through the week, Monday through Friday, on that money, $2.30.

He explained. Every morning he bought coffee and a little bit of bread for breakfast. It cost one Haitian dollar a day, less than fifteen cents. At lunch, he would go to lower Belekou, where there is a community restaurant, something like a soup kitchen, run by a Roman Catholic priest. There he can get a plate of beans and rice for another dollar. In the evening he buys a roll spread with peanut butter from a street vendor for the same price. It’s not much, but it’s three small meals each day for only fifteen gourds, or 43 cents.

And he does a little better than that because the older boys he now lives with are really kind. They like Haril, and they understand his situation. Guynold is in his mid-twenties, and he’s unemployed right now, but he had a job for a while in a factory. There, he earned 70 gourds a day, working six days a week. He’s now living mainly off savings, but if Haril’s at the corner when Guynold comes out in the morning, he’s more than likely to buy Haril breakfast: ten gourds of beans and rice or fifteen of spaghetti. They then share five gourds worth of juice. Daniel isn’t much older than Haril, but he’s been supporting himself by fixing flat tires for some time. He shares what he has with Haril as well. I’m not sure what Jonas lives on, but I’ve seen him share it, too.

So Haril is scraping by, thanks in part to friends who have taken the place of family, and he can probably continue to do so for the next weeks. As long as nothing goes wrong. Any unexpected expense will use up the money he’s saving for school, and even that won’t go very far.

When school starts in September, things will be quite different. Whether he can go to school, do his homework, and earn the money he needs to support himself and help his siblings is hard to guess. I want to say “no”, but it’s the same “no” I would have offered to someone asking me whether he could live on fifteen gourds a day.