When, occasionally, I feel really sick, I leave my various homes and I move in with my godson, his parents, and siblings. There I count on my makomè, my godson’s mother, to look after me. Jidit’s now a mother of three – Christiana was born in October – and they keep her hands full. But there’s a spare bed in the dining room, and though the space in their two small rooms may appear limited, it’s never been limited enough to keep me out. It didn’t squeeze me out when there was only one room, and it doesn’t now that there are two.

I am entirely at home in their home. It’s the kind thing that means I don’t ask for what I want. I just take it. And they are at home with me. Just this morning I was watching with pleasure as my five-year-old godson, Givens, ate the food off my plate rather than off of his own. He simply knows that he’s entitled to it. His mother laughed, only remarking that he feels alèz, or at ease, with me.

Depending how one counts, I have at least two homes in Haiti. I generally tell people that I live in rural Pétion-Ville, the suburb up the mountain from Port au Prince. The part I stay in is called Ka Glo, and I’ve been spending my time in Haiti in Ka Glo since John Engle placed me in Madan Anténor’s house in June 1997. I’ve spent enough time there to see a generation of young people grow up in front of me, Madan Anténor’s own three children among them. Little kids have become teenagers, teenagers have become young adults, etc. I moved into my own house in February of 2005, and have been there as much as possible ever since.

Often I also mention to people that I have a place in Cité Soleil as well. It’s just a small room, and I’ll soon have to wedge my mattress in between benches when it turns into a school in January. I’ve been sleeping there once or twice a week since the end of last year, as my collaboration with the guys – now the young men and women – of IDEAL have moved forward. I only rent the room – it costs about $100 a year – but the space seems distinctly mine, even if there are two other people who sleep there whenever I’m around.

One could easily point to additional places around Haiti, in Matènwa, Lower Delmas, and Hinche, where I am at home as well.

I was thinking of homes all the way down the mountain this morning. In part, I suppose, it was because I was on my way to a mid-afternoon flight to Florida, for visit to my parents’ home. I am very much an American, and the United States is my home. I don’t currently have my own apartment or house there, but there are a handful of places where I stay very comfortably, some of them regularly. I think of my parents’ house in particular. Even if it’s far from the home they raised me in and even if I’ve never spent more than a couple of days there at a time.

But I had also been thinking of Junior, and his place in one of my Haitian homes. Junior is my new roommate. He moved into the house in Ka Glo just over a week ago. He’s a 26-year-old carpenter from Upper Glo, the poor neighborhood just up the hill, across the main road from where I live. He grew up in his grandmother’s house, raised by her and by a wonderful aunt, who was still with her mother. The aunt died very suddenly last year, and another one of his aunts moved into the house. This other aunt – I don’t know her – is said to be a fine person as well, but she moved into the grandmother’s home with several children of her own. So Junior decided there wasn’t really room for him. He collected his things and moved about a hundred yards to his parents’ home.

That’s when his troubles began. Junior is the third of his mother’s nine kids, and his oldest brother still lives with them. Junior and his older brother shared a room, the younger children shared another, and their parents slept in the third.

I want to avoid judging Mito, the other man, too harshly. As Haitians say “wòch nan dlo pa konnen mizè wòch nan solèy.” That means that a rock in the water doesn’t know the suffering of a rock in the sun. I don’t have a lot of experience with Mito, and I haven’t discussed the tales I’m about to tell with him. But I have always found him difficult to get along with, and I’m not the only one.

What’s more to the point than whether we get along, however, are the insistent expectations he’s had of Junior and the rest of their brothers. He decided long ago that his future was not in Haiti. He would immigrate to the United States. Mito had no way to immigrate legally, but various illegal options are said to be possible. Mito squeezed his family for all the money he could get out of them, and found people who said they could get him to the States.

The problem was that they were liars. Mito threw away a lot of money that his three younger working brothers earned. And he didn’t seem to learn anything from the experience. As soon as he got back to Glo, he began hitting up Junior for the money he’d need to leave again. The second brother, Kevins, is married now and living in his own home. He and Mito are not on speaking terms, so Mito knows he won’t get anything from him. The fourth of the grown brothers, Sonson, lives and works in construction in Santo Domingo. At times, he’s done pretty well for himself. But he’s been sick, however, and Mito’s one visit to see him didn’t bear any fruit. So Mito’s been leaning on Junior.

Junior does have a small, regular income. He works in a carpentry shop, and makes something like $50 a month as long as the workshop is getting orders. But Junior is a major contributor in his parents’ household. He’s been putting a couple of his younger siblings through school, and paying as well for his own continuing education. He keeps signing up for various professional courses. Right now, he’s finishing a nine-month class in videography. So he resents Mito’s demands. He did what he could the first time. A brother is, after all, a brother. But doesn’t see how he can pay for Mito to throw away a bunch of money again. Or why he should.

This meant conflict in their small bedroom, and Mito actually went so far as to throw Junior’s things into the yard. Their parents objected. They reminded Mito that he wasn’t the one who built the house. But he ignored them. Junior tried sleeping with the younger kids, but they are noisy – Why shouldn’t they be? – so it wasn’t really working.

I learned all this because I asked Junior how he was. He had come by to see me. He thinks of me as his godfather. There are various ways to become a godfather in Haiti, and I am Junior’s godfather in what is, perhaps, the most trivial possible sense. Junior made me his by inviting me to attend his videography-school graduation. It’s something I’ve done for a couple of young people, but Junior has taken it more seriously than others did. He stopped addressing me by my name, using the title “godfather”, or “parenn”, instead. This is true even though he hasn’t yet graduated. And he started coming by regularly to pay his respects.

Junior told me the story, and added that he now had to find another place to live. I told him that he could stay in my house for a while if that would help, and it was settled right away. He now appears to have moved in for the long term. He told me that he has land near his grandmother’s home when he will build a house, and that he hopes to start saving up for it soon.

So now Junior has a place to stay, too, though he doesn’t yet appear to feel at home there. One can see him walking on eggshells, trying hard to please. He’s taken over the housework that Byton, the house’s builder and other resident, and I are, frankly, too lazy and too disarray-tolerant to do. Today, on his rare day off, he got up well before 5:00 to make me breakfast. I like the way the house is now cleaner, but I hope he relaxes soon.

Thinking of Junior – and, for that matter, Givens, Jidit, my parents, and the guys who sleep with me in Cité Soleil – has suggested one harsh fact about what it really means to have a home.

Junior did not have a real home because he couldn’t be at ease once he left his grandmother’s house. If he and I play our cards right, he’ll settle in soon and have a home in some sense.

The case of Givens and Jidit is more complicated. For years, they’ve been living in a small building in the yard next to a large house off of a street called Delmas 75. Saül, who is Givens’ father and Jidit’s husband, has been the live-in custodian for the organization that rents the house. But that organization plans to move out of the house next summer, and Saül’s future with them is unclear. At the very least, the will have to find a new place. They are being cast out through a decision that is not their own. They have a number of options, but it’s bound to be stressful nonetheless.

So I think that having a home is more than the warm fuzzies we get about the places where we are at ease. It’s surely about safety and comfort, but it’s about authority as well. My home is a place I can make decisions about. I have the power – a power no one else has –to decide who will live in the house in Ka Glo. Though I only rent in Cité Soleil, it would not have occurred to anyone to put a school in the room unless I had suggested it first. Various friends know that they can stay any time in either place, and some come without asking, but no one would just move in.

Home is where my heart is. That’s true enough. By that standard, my homes are a little hard to count. They are on three continents and a small island. They speak four languages. And the lifestyles they represent cover quite a range.

But home is also someplace where I have authority, where I have power. It’s not a beautiful truth, perhaps, but I think it’s true nonetheless.

I had a pretty likely hunch as to what the problem we were facing was, but I wanted to be sure. I also wanted to hear it from the folks I was working with. So I started the conversation by asking, in a sense, why we were meeting together.

I had been invited to Fayette, a small rural area outside of Darbonne, which is outside of Léogâne, which is outside of Port au Prince. I was asked there to talk to a group of teachers about how they could use the dialogue techniques they have learned through the practice of Reflection Circles in their regular classes to teach subjects like math. They were particularly interested in the small group work that Reflection Circles always include. I have been meeting on and off with these school and adult literacy teachers for three years. For what seemed like a long time, my partner Frémy César and I were going to Fayette almost weekly, helping the team study discussion leadership.

So the teachers knew very well how to use Reflection Circles and the small group work they were asking about, but they were somehow hesitant about using a technique that they’ve already mastered to face a problem they have not faced with it before – like how to teach math. This was true, even through they very much wanted to do just that.

The question I started by asking was not, therefore, just “What are we doing here?” I was able to give that question more precision by asking why they, as experienced as they are, don’t feel as though they can use Reflection Circles for math, and the answer was predictable. Miracle, one of the teachers at the new community school in Fayette, is the one who spoke up. He said that Reflection Circles is just about opinions, whereas when we do math, even if we pursue different routes, we are required to come up with the same answer nonetheless. How, they wanted to know, could a conversation teach a precise, inflexible skill?

His answer was, from my perspective, a stroke of luck. I couldn’t have anticipated that he himself would make reference to the way that different routes to the same answer are possible. So I made a claim: The real mathematical moment is not in the correct use of predetermined methods of calculation. I said that what is more important in math learning is the discovery of means to resolve mathematical problems. And I added that such discoveries could be effectively developed through small group work.

I had to be careful. People here, just as in a lot of places, can be inclined to hear things in black and white terms. The last thing I wanted was for them to think I was saying that right answers don’t matter. So I tried to really emphasize that what I was proposing would remain one part of an approach to teaching math and that the exercises, sometimes repetitive, that they assign their students would remain important. But I wanted them to think about the way they typically teach math and consider whether other means were possible.

This is the way math classes in Haiti tend to work: The teacher puts a problem on the board, almost certainly in French, and then solves it. The students copy it into their notebooks, and then study it at home. The teachers might also assign two or three similar problems as homework. I asked the teachers why they couldn’t put a new problem on the board and then divide their classes into groups. The groups would have the task of figuring out how to solve the problem. Each group would present their solution to the rest of the class. The class – including its teacher – would pose questions to groups about their answers and the reasonings they used to find them.

But all that was just my talk, and though the teachers said they understood and liked what I was saying, it seemed important to try putting things into practice. So we divided into groups. I asked each group to develop a problem that they felt would be appropriate for the level of students they teach. We would then exchange problems. Each group would take one of the problems another group had created and work out at least two different methods for solving it.

I emphasized this last point. Even though they said that they recognized different routes could be valid as long as the answer they arrived at was correct, it would be hard for them to really feel that until they were faced with multiple correct routes.

The exercise turned out to be harder than they had anticipated. A couple of groups proposed problems that could not be solved because key information was missing. The groups who were asked to work with those problems had to add assumptions, which they specified as part of their presentations. For example, one group proposed the following problem: “A man bought six cows for 20,000 gourds apiece. One died before he could resell them. How much should he sell the five surviving cows for?”

The first participants who understood the problem wanted to say, very simply, that he should sell them for as much as he could get. And they were right. But then they decided that they would do a calculation based on an assumption: namely, that the man should retrieve what he spent for the six cows.

So they divided the 20,000 gourds that the dead cow had cost him by five, the number of living cows, and added that quotient, 4000 gourds, to the price of each cow. The answer they got was 24,000 gourds. And they had little trouble fining a second way: One member of the group multiplied 20,000 gourds by six cows. He then divided that product, 120,000 gourds, by 5. He got the same 24,000 gourds for an answer.

The groups with simpler problems, however, had a much harder time coming up with two routes. The problem that caused the most trouble was the following: “A women buys six dozen notebooks for 250 gourds, buys 55 gourds worth of pens, and buys pencils for the same amount of money that she spent on notebooks. How much did she spend in total?” The group simply did the addition: 250 + 55 + 250 = 555 gourds. They could see no other approach.

After they presented their solution to the group, they admitted that it was the only one they could think of. Job, who had seen that he could multiply and divide the cows jumped right in: He would have multiplied 250 by two, and then added 55. His route was not very, very different, but it was different nonetheless.

In talking over the results, the teachers said they were pleased by our work. Marjorie and Emmanuel both said that they really hadn’t understood what “different routes” meant until Job made it clear. Thomas talked about his own experience as a schoolboy, when a teacher had seen him attack a multiplication problem through addition. He had gotten the right answer, but the teacher hadn’t even looked at anything beyond the fact that he hadn’t applied the method the teacher had expected. Thomas was excited to see us validating the sense of things he had developed way back when.

All this had to happen in a couple of hours. We only had half a day, and that meant much less than half a day because everyone had to get to Fayette. So there was a critical piece of the puzzle we could address.

All the small groups that morning had come up with correct solutions to the problems before them. But to really start teaching subject areas through dialogue, they will need to think about what they can do when the solutions their students arrive at are wrong. They need to learn how to help their students see their own mistakes by posing questions that point them in the right direction.

It is, as they say, “not brain surgery.” In a sense, it is simple enough. They need to learn to ask questions about what they themselves don’t understand in their students’ responses, trusting that such questioning can lead to discovery: their students’ discovery, their own discovery, or both. But until they see examples of such teaching, it will be hard for them to imagine how it works. The temptation will always be to simply tell students that they are wrong, and to present the correct answer, in a manner similar to what they already are inclined to do.

Colladere is at an intersection, about halfway between Hinche and Pignon, on Route Nationale 3 from Port au Prince to Cap Haitien. A right turn takes you toward Cerca Carvajal, near the Dominican border. The town is important to me because that’s where both Saül and Jidit are from, and it’s where her parents and his father still live. Jidit and Saül are my makomè and my monkonpè, the parents of my godson, Givens. They are more than friends. They are family.

The road is to Colladere is terrible, as bad as any major road I’ve experienced in Haiti. Colladere is probably less than 50 miles from Port au Prince, but just to get to Hinche can take four-five hours. And then it’s another hour to Colladere. So I don’t get there often.

I arrived Saturday morning at Kenise’s house. She’s one of Jidit’s younger sisters. They have three even younger sisters, women in their early twenties, and two older ones. They have an older brother, too. I know Kenise because when Jidit was pregnant with her first son, Cedric, she and Saül hired Kenise to work in their home. Kenise spent some time with them.

Then she went off to start her own family. She married a primary school teacher named Beny. They have two daughters. Da is four and Beka was born in August.

But that’s not quite the right way to put it. She has two daughters. Beny doesn’t have them anymore. Or, more precisely, they no longer have him. He died suddenly a couple of weeks ago.

It’s an awful story.

On Saturday the 17th, in the late afternoon, Beny told Kenise he was going out to drive their goats home. That’s the last thing he ever said to her. He took a change of clothes, intending to bathe at the river, and went off.

When he hadn’t returned after a couple of hours, neighbors went looking for him, but had no success. Eventually, Kenise herself went out. It was after 10:00 by then. She figured that well-meaning neighbors wouldn’t look as hard as she would because Beny meant so much more to her than to them.

She was right. She found Beny lying naked at the river. He was already dead.

She telephoned Jidit right away, and Saül left by 5:00 the next morning to attend the funeral, which was held early afternoon. I went by Jidit’s Monday morning to check on her. She recently gave birth. Givens, who’s four, ran to tell me the news.

When I arrived on Saturday, Da ran up to me. She clung to me all through the day, hardly leaving my lap. This was new. She had been shy in the past. There could be various explanations. For one thing, it was the first time she remembered me from a previous visit. The last time I saw her was only two months ago. For another, two months is a long time in a four-year-old’s life. She could simply have changed. But it’s hard to avoid the suspicion that her father’s death, which I can’t imagine that she can understand, has left her missing his warmth. He was a very demonstrative, affectionate dad.

I know nothing bad to say about him. I saw him as a loving father to his own daughters, and uncle to his young nieces and nephews as well. I knew how Jidit and Kenise depended on him to help them help their parents, who are aging and who have two of their younger daughters – young women in poor health – to support. This much I have seen.

But his neighbors can not speak enough about his neighborliness. He was, it seems, someone they all counted on, too. He tended to teach the lower grades of primary school, and his students loved him. He was one of the two lay deacons that ran his church. I spent Saturday night with Saül’s family in Hinche. A young mechanic lives with them. His name is Tolo, and he grew up in the family’s home in Colladere, helping with the farming. When he came of age, he moved to their house in Hinche to learn a trade. But he used to walk to Colladere every Saturday to practice with a church choir there, walking back to Hinche on Sunday afternoon. Saturday, he told me he couldn’t go it was too sad. His church was Beny’s church, and he couldn’t bear to be there. He, a guy in his mid-twenties, wept openly as he explained.

Kenise herself told me that the death is simply a mystery. Beny, she said, was loved by all. She spent five years married to him and said that she had absolutely nothing to reproach him with.

But Beny’s co-deacon said that there’s reason to think that Beny was murdered. Not because he could imagine why someone would do such a thing, but because of the condition the body was found in. It will be hard to pursue the matter. The body was buried less than a day after it was found, and there is no police presence anywhere nearby. Kenise showed no interest in pursuing the matter as we chatted on Saturday, but the deacon is trying to make inquiries.

I suppose that, if Beny was in fact killed, I would be glad to see justice done, but I’m really more interested in Kenise and the girls. Da started preschool this year, and that is only one of the expenses that Kenise will have to deal with. Soon enough, she will have to turn her attention to how she will move ahead with her own and her daughters’ lives. She has a supportive family – supportive, at least, as they can be – but she’ll have to figure out a way to make a living. Since their marriage, she has worked only within their home.

I suspect that things will sort themselves out financially. More or less. Kenise is smart and capable, she has some basic assets – like farmland and livestock – to work with, and she has friends and family she can count on for help.

But as Da sat with me throughout the day, I kept having the same simple thought. Neither she or her little sister will remember the wonderful father they had. She and Beka, and Kenise and Beny, deserved much better than that.