When Abner, Benaja, and I arrived in Latanye, it was midday. We had left Matènwa late in the morning, hoping to observe an afternoon session at the literacy center meeting. We hadn’t been down to the Latanye center in a month, and wanted to check on its progress.

The ride down the mountain and then westward along the coast takes about two hours. On one hand, the current dry season means that the deep pits of gooey mud that make the trip so challenging whenever there’s been rain have disappeared. On the other, the flour-like dust is now inches thick all along the road, and it both chokes you and covers you. For one reason or another, the trip is hard any time of the year.

Latanye is Benaja’s hometown, and the first news we heard when we got there was that his mother was leaving that very day for St. Marc. One of her sons-in-law died suddenly several weeks ago, but she had been sick at the time and, so, hadn’t been able to attend the funeral. Now that she was feeling better, she was anxious to see her daughter.

Sailboats leave Latanye every few days for St. Marc or Arkaye, on the Haitian mainland. Their departure times are irregular. They depend on factors like the wind, the current, and the speed with which they load. We rushed down to the beach to try to catch her before she sailed.

As we got to the shore, the boat was pulling away. I thought that we had missed our chance. We stood waving to Koyotte, Ben’s mom, from the shore, and cursing our timing. But soon Ben was talking with a fisherman, and a few minutes later he and I were sitting in a leaky dugout canoe, paddling into the bay. Abner chose to wait on the beach.

We rowed out to the sailboat, and before I could finish paying my respects Koyotte was handing me a thermos full of hot coffee. When Ben got to her – he was in the back half of the canoe – she handed him a large bag of roasted peanuts, some salted and some covered in sugar. Then she sent us on our way.

We made it most of the way back to the shore before the canoe began to sink. The waves weren’t anything to speak of, but they were more than enough to swamp a vessel already taking on water through a half-dozen or so small holes. Especially since my awkward lack of balance had us dipping to one side or the other every few feet. A beach full of spectators had a lot to talk and laugh about as they watched the two of us wading through waist-deep water, fully clothed, with our precious coffee and peanuts carefully held above the water that was drenching us.

Koyotte had not known that she’d see us that day, so the coffee and peanuts were not waiting for us. She was, however, faced with a sailboat ride to the mainland that might take anywhere from eight to twelve hours. She was at the mercy of the wind and the current, so she couldn’t know when she’d arrive. Not only that, but her daughter probably did not know that she was coming. Telephone communication with Latanye is almost impossible. So Koyotte didn’t know when she’d be able to eat again. The coffee and peanuts were her snack.

But she decided that it was more important to her to give her food to her boy and his friends than enjoy tit herself. She was doing what she could, in a very tight spot, to receive us in her home. I can’t be certain whether she was acting out of her love for her son or out of her strong Haitian sense of hospitality. I suspect it was probably both.

She may have gone hungry that day, or she may have found a fellow passenger willing to share. I don’t know. But her gift was not lost on us. It made for wonderful snacking as we sat through the hot afternoon, waiting for the late-afternoon literacy meeting, our clothes hanging in the hot seaside sun.

Trying to learn a little bit about how people learn math has been one of the most interesting pieces of my apprenticeship here in Haiti. I’ve written before about my frustrations at the way bright and serious Haitian children work with numbers. (See: Needing Permission, Boul Does Math). Many of the children I know are, I think, held back by an approach to teaching math that has them memorizing processes rather than puzzling with quantities. They don’t use their good sense. They use fixed procedures – often poorly remembered – instead.

One teacher who has been for me a pleasant exception to the rule is Millienne Angervil. She teaches second grade at the Matènwa Community Learning Center. (www.matenwa.org.) I’ve written before about her teaching style, which I very much enjoy watching. (See: Starting Where They Are.) When I returned from the States with new teaching materials for math to try out, it was only natural for me to ask Millienne whether she would be interested in experimenting with them.

The materials I brought were created by a company called Friendly Math. (www.friendlymath.com.) The program helps kids develop basic quantitative skills. That means learning to do the four basic operations, but also gaining a sense of shape and size and an ability to estimate. Generally, it helps them towards a sense of quantity and form. Part of its premise is that such work can be done most effectively through play. Ruth Champagne, whose husband is interim president of Shimer College, developed the program. I found out about it through him, and he gave me several of their books to try out.

The particular activity Millienne and I set out to try with her students involved shape puzzles. The kids would get a certain number of brightly colored shapes – triangles, squares, diamonds, trapezoids, and hexagons – and then would get a larger shape that they’d have to somehow fit them into. The activity has two main goals: to help the kids practice reasoning with one another and to sharpen their sense of space. The Friendly Math book also talks of measurement, but since all the game pieces are measured in inches, a unit that the Matènwa second-graders don’t know yet, Millienne and I decided to leave that piece out for now.

Just to make the activity work, Millienne and I had a lot to prepare. Part of what’s so good about the Friendly Math books is that they come with all the materials that you’d usually need. There were three pages of small geometrical forms to be cut out, and lots of puzzles to solve with them. But the books are not really designed for a school that would have one book in a classroom of 22 kids. To make them work, Millienne and I would have to keep track of how many puzzle pieces we’d need, and create extra copies of the puzzles we wanted to use.

I’m left-handed, and as bad with scissors as many lefties are. So cutting out the little pieces was for Millienne. I traced multiple copies of the various figures that the kids would have to cover by figuring out how to deploy their little game pieces.

I also made a giant puzzle for the blackboard. I made a couple of eight-inch squares and four similarly sized triangles out of plain paper. On the board, I traced one possible way to assemble them. Millienne and I both felt that the easiest way to help the kids understand the task at hand would be to lead them through one puzzle together, and doing one big enough for everyone to see seemed as though it might be the key.

The kids took some time getting the puzzle on the blackboard right, partly because of the way I had them work at it. I asked volunteers to come to the board one at a time to tape one puzzle piece into position. By the time four of them had positioned their pieces, they had left two pieces that couldn’t be combined to cover the last bit of space. But after a couple of tries, they got it right, and, more importantly, they got clear about how the game was supposed to work.

Millienne organizes her classroom in several different ways, depending on the activity she’s leading the children through. But it’s furnished with five tables with benches. The kids sat around the tables and, so, were organized into obvious teams of four-five. We chose three of the puzzles from the Friendly Math book, and gave one to each table. We told the kids that the first table to finish would win.

The class that followed was a funny mixture of periods of loud, seemingly chaotic chatter and surprisingly quiet intervals. The kids really worked at the puzzles. And though the different tables worked at different speeds, and though some of the puzzles were distinctly more challenging than others, they were consistently able to finish them in a reasonable amount of time.

It turned out that, not too surprisingly, the kids ranged pretty significantly in their initial ability to work the puzzles out. But what was most important was how willing they were to play with them. Rather than stand back and wait for the answer to appear, most of them became very hands on. They would simply start placing pieces, and see where they got. Generally speaking, one of the kids at each table would dominate, at least until he or she got stuck. That is: until they got to a point at which the pieces that remained could not be fit into the remaining space. Then another child would take over, often with a different idea about how to get started.

Millienne and I were pretty hands-off-ish. We wanted, at least this first time, to see how things would play out. And several points became clear:

First, most of the kids really liked the work. They were engaged and showed that they felt distinctly rewarded each time they got a puzzle right. This was true, whether their table was first or last. None seemed to mind being the fifth of five groups to win.

Second, groups of five children were too large. Two, or at most three, in a group would work much better. Five made it too easy for kids to hide if they were inclined to doubt their own ability to figure things out. I saw one little boy, sitting at his table, with his back turned to the other kids who were at work. When I asked him why he wasn’t participating, he insisted repeatedly that he couldn’t do it.

Third, and in the same line, Millienne thinks that what she might need to do is work individually with several of the weaker kids on days when she can assign the rest of the children something to do on their own. It might be hard, given how much the kids like the puzzles. Those to whom she assigns something else will be drawn to the puzzles and her. But she manages her classroom well, so should be able to overcome the challenge.

What will be interesting to try to gauge is how this and other Friendly Math games – Millienne has already assigned me to return to Matènwa with more – affect her students as learners as math. For now, her optimism is enough for me, with or without further evidence. That optimism was linked mainly to the enthusiasm and the beginnings of teamwork that she saw in her kids, two very promising signs.

Spring is supposed to be the season of new beginnings, but for students and teachers – and I’ve been one or the other all my life – things are much more likely to start in September. At least in most of the places I’ve lived and worked. In any case, January 1st has never really felt like the beginning of anything, except the new calendar year.

But this last week has marked the beginning of two of the interesting initiatives I’m involved in here. They have very little in common beyond their starting dates and their adherence to certain core principles. But their very differences argue for writing of them together. They offer a broad view of the very different levels of intervention my work here involves.

The Active Learning Center

Fonkoze’s Active Learning Center is a new branch opening in Lenbe, in northern Haiti, in Mid-January. Normally, opening a new branch, though a challenge full of problems that must be overcome, would hardly be news for Fonkoze. The Lenbe branch will be its 34th, with two or three to be opened closely following it. Fonkoze’s core strategy, but also its style, involves charging hard towards expansion. Its mission is not to change a few businesswomen’s lives, but to change the economy of the nation. And expanding the reach of its services – geographically and otherwise – is a key element of its plan.

But the Active Learning Center is not an ordinary branch. It is designed to be a super-branch. This requires explanation.

The plan to open a branch in Lenbe grew out of a request for a proposal that Fonkoze received. A significant social investor was planning an integrated development project in the Lenbe area, and one element of its plans required microfinance. It asked Fonkoze to take responsibility for that element. So we wrote a proposal, and it was accepted. Finally securing that piece of the financing turned out to be a long process, but Fonkoze succeeded in the end.

Then Fonkoze, along with other microfinance institutions in Haiti, received an invitation from USAID to submit a request for support. USAID’s goal was to encourage innovation in the Haitian microfinance sector. Institutions would be eligible for up to $100,000 to support creative new ways to get things done.

We were excited by the opportunity, but in a very restricted sense. Fonkoze is experimenting with new approaches all the time. Microinsurance, extreme poverty alleviation, social performance management, and new education programs: These are just a few of the innovations Fonkoze is currently managing. In fact, if anything, the amount of innovation going on within Fonkoze all the time is always in danger of exceeding Fonkoze’s management capacity. The “innovation” that Fonkoze needed was not so much a new program for its members and clients, but a new way to study its programs, both old and new, and to make them as strong as they can be.

So, we took advantage of the fact that Lenbe was one of the regions that USAID named as one of its priorities to ask it to invest in the very same branch that our other donor was already funding. The innovation would be the creation of a master branch, or an active learning center. It would differ from an ordinary new branch in two respects: On one hand, it would start with all of Fonkoze’s programs already in place, rather than just the most important core programs; on the other, it would open with a staff selected from Fonkoze’s highest-performing employees, who would live together at the branch, rather than new hires living in homes scattered around town.

The branch would serve Fonkoze in four ways: First, it would be a model branch, a showpiece; second, it would be a place where other employees could come serve short apprenticeships with Fonkoze’s best; third, it would give Fonkoze a place where its very best staff members could experiment with new programs or, more importantly, new approaches to existing ones; finally, it would be a place for field study, where Fonkoze could collect and analyze data that help it better understand both the rural Haitian economy in general, and the finances and lives of its members and clients in particular.

The branch is to be opened later this month, but we decided to start things off with a two-day retreat for its staff. That retreat took place this past weekend.

The retreat had a couple of different objectives. The most obvious was to give the members of the Lenbe staff, who come from all over Haiti, the chance to get to know one another before they begin working together. We also wanted them to accept a detailed set of objectives for the branch and develop a plan for meeting them. Finally, we wanted them to develop the principles with which they will govern the space that they will live and work in.

The weekend’s work included various activities. There were skits. (I played an American missionary, who had to be persuaded not just to change dollars at Fonkoze but also to open a U.S.-dollar account.) There were presentations, like the PowerPoint I gave detailing the history of the Lenbe plan and its overarching goals. There were general discussions, the most important being a detailed look at the financial and social objectives that Fonkoze Director Anne Hastings and I, as grant writers, had presented to funders. And there was small group work, like the time we spent when separate parts of the team – the credit group, the education group, the operations group, and the social performance group – studied the objectives they would most especially be responsible for. They modified the objectives, and developed action plans for attaining the objectives as modified.

In the end, every member of the team, from the branch director to the custodians and security guards, signed a series of four posters we created that had all the objectives written on them. This marked the team’s commitment that they would work together to ensure that every objective would be attained.

The goals are ambitious, far in excess of any expectation we would normally make of a new branch. But the investment we are making in Lenbe is extraordinary, too. The final budget includes funding from four external sources and Fonkoze’s own money as well. It will cost more than three times what Fonkoze usually spends to open a branch, but it will all be worth it if the branch becomes an engine of change within Fonkoze. This doesn’t mean that it will develop lots of new products and services, though we wouldn’t mind if it did. It means, more importantly, that it should discover and test better ways of doing the things we already do and then help us spread that kind of innovation throughout Fonkoze. Fonkoze has 50,000 members and 120,000 savings clients, so even minor institutional improvements can affect very many lives.

The IDEAL Community School in Belekou

This week also marked the opening of the IDEAL Community School in Belekou. I have already shared photos of the first day’s work. (See: TheFirstDay.) But I wanted to write something more substantial about the project.

Since the first time I met with the group in Belekou, one of the needs they expressed was for a school that would offer more kids in the neighborhood the chance for an education. At the time, their idea was that I would simply create a school, much as other foreigners have opened schools in Cité Soleil. They also mentioned a clinic, a library, a water and sewer system, and various other projects.

This was all perfectly sensible on their part. Other foreigners that have been in Cité Soleil have entered with significant resources and predetermined plans. As Haitians say, “mande pa vòlò.” That means, “Asking isn’t stealing.” Belekou is a neighborhood with lots serious problems. Everything they mentioned was a perfectly real need. And they were looking for someone who would address one or more of them.

When I explained that I really only do two things, talk and listen, half of the sixty or so folks in attendance disappeared. A week later, the conversation continued with about thirty, and it’s continued with that same thirty ever since. In the months that followed, they’ve established a bakery and a street-cleaning team.

But the school was their most ambitious project. What started as something as general as a felt need began to take clearer shape when I invited two members of the group to go to Lagonav with me for a visit to the school in Matènwa, a very strong community school, which has been functioning at a high level for years. (See: AnotherExchange.) Other members of the group visited a much newer, less established community school in Fayette.

These two experiences helped the team to begin seeing what a community school could look like. It would be different than anything they had experienced themselves. Non-violent, student-centered teaching and a respectful attitude towards students and parents alike would be the two cornerstones of their approach. In addition, all the little requirements that stand between some kids in their neighborhood and other free schools – uniforms, occasional fees, various other demands that can be hard for parents to meet – would be eliminated.

But even as the guys’ vision cleared, they hesitated. I think they were simply afraid. The two schools they had seen had been opened and were staffed by very experienced educators. They had no reason to imagine that they could do anything similar themselves.

The final push came from a third visit. I took them to see a school near downtown Pétion-Ville, only about an hour’s walk from where I live. It had been opened over two years ago by a community organization that was founded by a group of young people not unlike the guys in Belekou. They too had felt the need to provide education to their neighbors’ kids. (See: www.sodahaiti.org.) Seeing a school that was flourishing in the hands of such young people turned a felt need into a hope with all the shape that the two other visits had given it. What remained was to develop an approach to making their hope real.

Here they might have been stumped, not by perceiving lack of know-how, but by lack of know-how of a very real sort. But the group got lucky. Abner Sauveur, the Haitian director of the Matènwa Community School ( See: www.matenwa.org.) was inspired by their earnestness and their young but clear commitment to ideals he’s been fighting for for much of his life, and decided to do what he could.

With all his years of experience both as a teacher and as a principal, he was able to do a lot. He took advantage of two visits to Port au Prince to lead long planning meetings for the Belekou guys. Other Matènwa professors got interested. One of them, Benaja Antoine, led a workshop on Creole orthography. Another, Matènwa’s excellent first-grade teacher Robert Cajuste, actually came to accompany the guys through their first week of school.

Meanwhile, IDEAL members who had no interest in teaching, or no confidence that they could become teachers, took responsibility for creating a suitable space or helped in other ways. One team renovated my bedroom. Another made the furniture the school would need.

A third team took to the streets, looking for children they could serve. We had a fairly specific profile of the kind of student we wanted. We had no interest, for example, in taking students from already-functioning schools. We wanted none who were already in school and none who were young enough that they might easily wait and start in another school next year. We wanted exactly those kids that existing schools had failed to reach.

The guys found fifteen, and twelve came on the first day. Some are too young, and some have been to school before. As they say, the best laid plans . . .

But the first two days have been wonderful. The kids come more than an hour early, and don’t want to go home. The guys feel their sense of accomplishment, visibly so. Additional parents are already trying to send their kids, and it will be hard to refuse them, as the guys must. But if that is their biggest problem, they’ll be in very good shape.

***

The center in Lenbe and the school in Belekou are fruits of two very different sorts of work. Though I will continue to support the work in Lenbe, visiting whenever I can, consulting with staff, and writing reports, the most important piece of my involvement is over. It consisted mainly of close consultation with Fonkoze’s Director as we developed the idea and wrote the grant proposals that secured the necessary funds.

This might seem like a far cry from my work as a teacher. But the fundamental idea that guides the opening of the Lenbe center is that Fonkoze can improve as a learning institution through the center we are establishing there. And that learning will be participatory and active, just as I believe all learning must be.

Opening the school, on the other hand, has involved close collaboration with the IDEAL team, hours and hours of discussions both with them alone and with people I’ve been able to bring them into contact with. It’s a kind of support that will have to continue, I suspect, for quite some time. Even when they’re doing things very well, they still need to be told that they are. And sometimes they need to be pushed to make the best use of their natural problem solving skills and the wisdom that can come when they listen to one another.

There’s a lot to be said for a job that confronts me with such diverse and different work. It feels like a remarkable, multi-directional extension of the classroom experience that’s long meant so much to me.

Here is a book the children created on their second day of school. It’s about their first day: Firstbook (pdf)