Life Goes On2

>>Life Goes On: Part Two<<
  
Life goes on in the midst of the current difficulties in Haiti, for better and 
for worse. Last weekend, I got a heavy dose of the better and it seems worth 
sharing.
  
I spent most of the weekend at the Villa Ormiso. It’s a guesthouse run by 
conservative Protestant missionaries, here in Haiti to convert the masses. They 
would not normally be my cup of tea, but the guesthouse they run is valuable to 
us as a pleasant and  accessible place where we can organize inexpensive 
meetings that last several days. Last weekend, more than forty of us gathered 
there for the fourth annual meeting of the Haitian Open Space Institute. I 
missed last year’s meeting, but had attended the others, so I was anxious 
to attend this year’s as well.
  
Open Space meetings are something special. They were designed around the notion 
that the most productive time that groups spend together is often the 
unscheduled time: the coffee breaks, the lunches, the unforeseen delays in 
otherwise tight agendas. Those are the times during which meeting participants 
talk with the people they want to talk with, and talk to them about the things 
that are important to them. 
  
At an Open Space gathering, the participants create an agenda for the a meeting 
– ours was to be two-and-a-half days long – during its first few 
minutes. The agenda consists of a schedule of group discussions running 
parallel to one another on themes chosen by the participants who propose them. 
Each participant then chooses the small group discussions he or she wants to 
attend. The guiding principle is that you should not be part of anything 
you’re not interested in. The underlying assumption is that, given the 
freedom to do so, people will make good decisions about how to use their time.
  
For me, the most important thing about the structure of these meetings is that 
it allows me to find time to meet individually with various people I want to 
talk with. I find that I don’t often attend many of the scheduled 
conversations, but that I get a lot accomplished nonetheless, much more than I 
could accomplish if we were all following a carefully planned schedule.
  
I was especially grateful this year for the opportunity to meet with people on 
the edge of the meeting because I was actually able to attend rather little of 
it. Life goes on here in Haiti even as the political situation seems to spin 
into chaos, and that means work goes on as well. I had a busy schedule of 
meetings to attend in various places as the large Open Space meeting at the 
Villa Ormiso was going on.
  
We arrived at the Ormiso on Thursday afternoon. It’s located in Bizoton, 
a neighborhood on the road from Pòtoprens into Kafou, its overcrowded 
southern suburb. The opening ceremony was Thursday evening, and it was 
unforgettable. My partner Frémy used the meeting as the occasion to get 
married. He and Nadine exchanged rings in front of the group of friends and 
colleagues that he has come to think of as his family. The whole crowd of 45 of 
us sat around with them in a circle, and as we passed a small box with their 
wedding rings from hand to hand, we each had the opportunity to share with them 
whatever thoughts or wishes we might want to share. It was, perhaps, an unusual 
ceremony, but Frémy and Nadine are unusual people. 
  
I had to leave the meeting just before breakfast on Friday morning. I needed to
get back to downtown Pòtoprens by 8:30. As always I left much earlier than
I should have had to. The trip could be more than a couple of miles, but I
couldn’t tell how long it would take for me to get onto a pick-up truck
heading downtown, I couldn’t be sure of the traffic, and I wasn’t
certain how long I would need to make the long walk I’d chosen to make so
that I could get to my meeting without passing through any of the parts of the
city that are dangerous these days. I was supposed to be at Fonkoze (See:
www.fonkoze.org.) http://www.fonkoze.org.) by 8:30 so that Anne Hastings, the
foundation’s director, and I could drive together to a meeting with
colleagues at PLAN International. PLAN is funding the literacy work we are doing
in the northeast, and we had some questions about the budget they had approved
and about their reporting requirements.
  
I hadn’t initially been looking forward to the meeting. The work with 
Fonkoze was already pulling me more towards administration than I would 
normally want to be. I had needed, for example, to teach myself to use Excel 
both to translate the literacy program’s budget and to simplify it so 
that the field supervisors would be able to work with it easily. Though I 
don’t mind dealing with simple numbers, and understand well the 
importance of a willingness to do some math, such work is not what I normally 
choose to do. I’d much rather be in and around the classroom. 
  
But the prospect of sitting around a table with NGO decision-makers intrigued 
me. It’s a class of people I’ve had little contact with – 
except for Anne herself – and I’m learning so much by watching her 
work that the chance to see her meet with her equals was too intriguing to 
miss.
  
The meeting was short, but pointed. We had a detailed agenda of specific 
questions that Fonkoze had for PLAN, and Anne stuck to it closely. I spoke when 
called on, but not really otherwise. The other assistant that Anne brought with 
her didn’t speak at all. It was the farthest thing from the kind of fluid 
and creative environment that Open Space nurtures, and that seemed just 
perfect. The meeting’s focus allowed us to achieve our very particular 
objectives in very little time.
  
When I got back to Ormiso early afternoon, I was just in time to meet as part 
of a group that has gotten together to discuss the guidebook that several of us 
had created for the first volume of Wonn Refleksyon texts. They were mainly 
primary school teachers, and they wanted to talk about what they could do to 
better adapt the guidebook for use with children. (See: GuideBooks.)
  
I enjoyed the session and I profited from it. I think that a couple of us 
gained a clearer sense of how we want to proceed to write a new guide. I also 
learned from the clear contrast between the style of this small meeting and the 
style of the one I had attended in the morning. In the talk about guidebooks, 
everyone spoke. We were all there because we had contributions to make, and 
since there was nothing that distinguished who among us had the power to make 
decisions, nothing that distinguished whose words would really count, we all 
had our say. 
  
The contrast struck me at first as a trade off. We had given up something of 
the narrow, efficient focus on needed results that governed the Fonkoze/PLAN 
meeting and had traded it for a broad involvement that opened us up to the 
possibility that we might be pushed in any direction that persuaded us. But as 
I thought more about it, that analysis came to seem too shallow. The focus of 
the Fonkoze/PLAN meeting was not available to us because we were a group coming 
together without a designated leader to guide us. No one had the right or the 
power to stipulate a rigid agenda in advance. We could not trade off something 
that was not available to us in the first place. What was remarkable was the 
way that, even without that tight focus, we were able to talk ourselves towards 
a relatively clear plan of action. Our conversation took on a life of its own, 
in a very literal sense. It organized itself, which is to say that it became 
something organic.
  
Saturday morning, I left early together with Frémy and Abner Sauveur, the 
founder and principal of the Matenwa Community Learning Center. We had been 
invited to visit the Peasant Association in Fondwa, a small town between 
Léogane and Jacmel (See: http://haitiforever.com/fondwa/fondwa.htm.) The 
founder of the association, Father Joseph, asked us to come to talk to him 
about some concerns he has both with the association’s school and its 
university. 
  
Father Joseph, who also founded Fonkoze, explained that both the school and the 
university had been created with a view towards preparing young people to live 
in the rural areas that they come from, but he also explained that, in just 
this respect, both institutions were falling short. The school is hampered in 
two ways. On one hand, the importance of the national exam system pushes 
teachers towards a traditional academic program that has little relationship 
with the lives the students actually lead. On the other, the teachers’ 
own experience in the classroom has offered them little in the way of 
alternative models to learn from and explore. 
The issues at the university level are slightly different. Though the 
curriculum at that level does, he think, respond to the real needs of rural 
communities – it offers such majors as veterinary medicine and agronomy, 
areas of expertise that rural communities badly need to develop – there 
is something about the university’s culture that fails to integrate its 
faculty and students with the people that live around them.
  
As Father Joseph detailed the kind of training he wanted us to provide the 
faculties of both institutions, we could only sit and listen. He had a lot to 
say. He had already developed a very detailed notion as to how our work with 
them should go. He’s been a stunningly effective leader, at the heart of 
a movement that’s produced some of the most interesting, most compelling 
organizations I know of.
  
At the same time, we simply do not take the approach that he suggested we take. 
We call ourselves apprentices, and we mean it seriously. We cannot enter a 
relationship with even the outlines of a prefabricated solution in hand. We are 
delighted to sit together with colleagues that have a problem they want to 
address and to help them decided how they want to address it, but more we 
cannot do. We proposed to Father Joseph that we organize an Open Space meeting 
for both school and university leadership. The theme of the meeting could be 
the problem Father Joseph was trying to pose: namely, how can both institutions 
better succeed at preparing their students for life in rural communities?
  
Father Joseph seemed open to our idea, only adding that it was crucial that 
clear and concrete plans emerge from whatever we do. It was hard to tell, 
however, whether he was really open or simply unwilling to get too involved in 
the matter, preferring to leave it in other people’s hands. For now, the 
difference doesn’t matter to us very much. What we need is for his strong 
leadership to allow for space in which the people working under him can 
reflect, make plans, and act. We would be pleased if the space opened up 
because he was convinced of its importance. We can be satisfied initially if it 
opens up because he is too busy to keep it closed.
The ride to Fondwa and back took us through heavy Kafou traffic both on the way 
there and on our way back, so it was early evening by the time we returned. We 
had missed the day’s activities, and so were left to read about them in 
the notes that were taken. 
  
We spent the evening, however, hearing about various conversations that had 
been held that day and watching a theatrical piece presented by a group of 
women who were attended the meeting from Lagonav. The group, //Fanm Kouraj//, 
or “Courageous Women,” creates and performs pieces presenting 
problems that rural Haitian women face. The women then lead their audience in 
discussions of the pieces. (See: 
http://www.womens-rights.org/pdf/PopularTheater.pdf.) They had performed a 
similar piece Friday night as well. 
  
Sunday morning there were more small group discussions, and then we met at 
11:00 for final reflections and goodbyes. There were several visitors from the 
States who had planned to attend the meeting but couldn’t because of the 
unstable situation here, but our Haitian colleagues accepted no such 
inconvenience. Though those from the countryside fear entering Pòtoprens, 
and though those from Pòtoprens might be reluctant to circulate, the 
meeting at Ormiso was their best chance to get together and further their own 
work. And the work of conversation and of the practices that nurture it could 
hardly be more important here in Haiti than they are right now.
  
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