A guiding principle that Wonn Refleksyon inherited from its US-based parent, the Touchstones Discussion Project (www.touchstones.org), concerns the role that texts play in the activity. For Touchstones, and generally for Wonn Refleksyon as well, texts have been mere tools, useful in the development of a discussion groups’ skills and, so, in the development of individual members, but they have not had further importance.

This may not sound very dramatic, but it distinguishes Touchstones and Wonn Refleksyon from most of the ways we generally use texts. In most circumstances, we choose the texts to read in a group because we want to learn something that we think the text can teach us. We study textbooks in school to learn science or social studies or math. We read newspaper articles or biblical verses because we want to reflect on the issues they raise.

Although Wonn Refleksyon texts raise issues that are familiar and important to members of a discussion group – in fact, they wouldn’t work as texts if they did not – we are not usually that interested in figuring out what the texts have to say. Skill at textual interpretation is rarely a central goal for a group, as much as it tends to improve as a group moves forward, and if a group more or less ignores a text in order to take a conversation in its own direction, we don’t generally worry about that too much.

The usefulness of the approach became clear once again over this past winter and spring as we were working with a group of staff members at the Petyonvil office of Concern Worldwide, an international NGO quite active in Haiti. After several weeks of working with Wonn Refleksyon texts, the group’s members decided during an evaluation that conversations would be more meaningful if they were centered on texts more directly related to their work. So for three weeks, members of the group brought short texts that directly treated the realities they face. There was one about the phenomenon of kidnapping that was too common in Haiti at the time, the second was about reforestation, and the third was about the UN’s role in Haiti.

The texts led to spirited discussions, but after three weeks, the group was very anxious to return to the Wonn Refleksyon collection of folktales and short philosophical reflections. They had come to see that the little bit of distance that Wonn Refleksyon texts allow them from the subjects they were treating made it easier for more of them to participate in the conversations more meaningfully. They realized that they were too inclined to come to discussions about more seemingly relevant topics with their minds made up and, therefore, inclined to argue or shut up.

So Wonn Refleksyon has continued to use texts that are not directly related to lessons that participants need to learn or to issues that groups must face, even as we have added new kinds of texts – images and proverbs – that Touchstones has used either to a lesser extent or not at all.

Until now. In the last months, various opportunities have emerged that have called us to develop programs that invite group participants to face issues of particular importance to them. Concern itself has asked us to develop a Wonn Refleksyon program especially focused on public health issues We are writing very short stories – less than a page long – using information that Concern provides that raise issues around healthy childbirth, family planning, and sanitation.

And for Fonkoze, we are producing stories that raise issues around the way that credit centers are supposed to function. The purpose of the texts is to help its loan officers do their work. These officers are supposed to meet with the credit centers – groups of 30-50 borrowers who take their loans and make their repayments together – twice each month, once for disbursement or repayment and once for discussion. The problem has been that the loan officers don’t know how to lead discussion and they don’t have lots of varied ideas as to what to talk about. So we decided to try to create a series of short stories that raise issues that might be important for the businesswomen who are members of the centers to face. I went to Pòmago to spend a week with loan officers there, helping them learn to use the texts and hoping myself to learn something about how they might work for Fonkoze.

Fonkoze’s branch in Pòmago is in the middle of one of the prettiest parts of Haiti. The mountains that stretch southwest of Okap, in the far north of Haiti, still have a good number of trees. So in the midst of this wet rainy season, they are lushly green. The town, Pòmago, is a little bit out of the way. It’s off the main road, National Highway #1, that runs from Pòtoprens, through Gonayiv, to Okap. The road through Pòmago branches off that highway at Lenbe, just before Okap, and winds along a riverbed that reaches the northern coast near Oboy. It then crosses the river and continues to Pòdpe.

I spent three days working with seven loan officers, leading discussions that they could watch and then watching them lead discussions on their own. We visited six credit centers. After each day’s work, we spent time sitting in the back of the pick-up truck as it made its way back to Pòmago, talking about the way the conversations had gone.

The meetings are designed to have a simple structure: The loan officer first reads the short story aloud – each less than ¾ of a page long, then he invites the women to divide themselves into groups of four-five, and he asks each group to address a question. Finally, he invites each group to report its reflections to the whole credit center, and poses a question for further reflection. He also asks the women whether they have additional questions or comments that they would like the group to address.

The subjects of the stories we’ve created are somewhat varied, but they all center on one of three things: a business issue, like selling for credit, a center organization issue, like how to work with members who are having trouble making repayments, or an issue of general concern, like maternal or infant health.

The initial experience with the texts was quite positive. The loan officers were happy, because the simplicity of the instructions they had to follow left them with the sense that they knew what they were supposed to do. Center members took to the activity right away. Once they were in small groups, their discussions were lively. At each center, a short discussion followed the group reports. Women commented on the reports and on other related questions.

When they were invited to pose their own question, however, something interesting happened. Rather than continuing the conversation along the lines on which it had been traveling, the women presented a wide range of questions and requests that concerned their relation to Fonkoze. The presence of not one, but two representatives of Fonkoze’s central office was an opportunity too good to miss. The women pressed us with a range of requests from lower interest rates, to accelerated access to new credit, to possible new locations for branch offices. These questions, though off the topic in a certain narrow sense, served well to show that the women we were talking with were willing and able to take control of the conversation to steer it where they needed it to go.

We will need more experience, with more loan officers at more branches, before we’ll be able to say how effective the texts are. If they give the officers and the women they work with the sense that they have a useful way to spend time together, then attendance at the monthly discussions may improve. The consequence would be both a building of the solidarity that the centers depend upon and a better sense on the part of the loan officers of the clients that they serve.

Guifobert’s suggestion conveyed a lot. He is a fifth-grader at the Matènwa Community Learning Center (www.matenwa.org), and he and his class were working with me to make a map of the property his school sits on. It was our second day of work.

We had measured the back border of the property to be 98 students long by lining one after another, spreading our arms out as wide as we could. We decided to ignore the differences in size that are predictable in a fifth grade class, no to mention the way Enel and I skewed the numbers. We had already traced the front wall on the blackboard using a scale of three centimeters to one student. We had fixed the angles at the corners of the property by using a pair of pencils, opening them as though they were a compass and copying the angle they formed. We had then traced one side of the property and were prepared to trace the back.

That’s when we ran out of space. We needed enough space to trace a line 294 centimeters long, but ran into the edge of the blackboard just before we reached 200. I asked the class what we should do, and Guifobert suggested that we bend the line inward so that it would fit on the board.

Enel, who is the school’s fifth-grade teacher, and I had been planning the class for about a month. He and I had spoken about how struck he had been when he visited the States by the use Americans make of maps. He was surprised to see how Americans he knows can find their ways around unfamiliar areas by looking at maps and reading signs. I had talked about the vague memories I still have of the importance that was given to map reading when I was in elementary school. We had started discussing whether there was something we could do with his students that would help them learn to use maps as I do.

This is what we came up with: We would spend a class sitting outside in the schoolyard, scratching a map of the school into the ground with a stick. We would trace it as we sat on benches in a circle around it. Everyone would have a chance to take the stick, erase previous work, and trace out new suggestions. Enel and I would push the students to argue through their disagreements so that the class would reach rough consensus on every point: the size and position of each school building, and of everything important in the schoolyard, as well as the outline of the schoolyard itself. After that, every student would copy the map onto a piece of paper. They would thus each have a map of their own. We then sent them home with an assignment to draw a map showing the route they take from home to school.

Drawing the original map in the dirt went well. Though it took a few minutes for students to get involved, soon they were grabbing for the stick each time one of them finished with it, jumping to make a correction or add a new detail. There was a lot of discussion of the shape of the schoolyard, and lots more about how to represent the school’s principle building.

The latter point was especially striking. Most of them wanted to represent the building with a drawing that showed it as they see it when standing in front, as though one were to draw a map of Manhattan with pictures of the front of each skyscraper showing where it stands. I asked them to consider what the building would look like if they were looking at it from the air, where they would have to be to see the schoolyard the way we had drawn it. One or two were able to trace a bird’s eye view of the school, and others were willing to agree with them, but it was clear enough that this wasn’t how they saw things.

Things started to get really interesting when they began to copy the map onto their own sheets of paper. The schoolyard has an odd shape. The front wall is much shorter than the back fence. As you face the school, the left-hand boundary slants inward making an acute angle with the front of the property. Its short – only about fifteen students long – and then makes an obtuse angle with the back of the property, which extends well off towards the right. The right-hand boundary then curves inward to meet the front border.

Most of the kids, however, traced the property as a rectangle, drawing its boundary a quarter- to a half-inch inside the edge of the paper they used. A few introduced a slight irregularity in the shape, pinching the boundaries on the back right-hand side to leave a little bulge. But those bulges were nothing like the way the property extends. It was as though neither the shape of the property nor the shape of the map they had already drawn together had anything to do with their choice. It was the shape of the paper that was guiding them.

The maps they drew of their routes from home to school were just as telling. They showed roads curving gracefully, positioning the houses evenly around the page. So when Guifobert suggested that we simply bend the back boundary inward to fit on the blackboard, he was neither kidding nor trying to take an easy way out of the problem we found ourselves facing. He was expressing the way he and most of his classmates were approaching the task. They were thinking like artists, arranging objects on a canvas.

Enel and I had originally planned to move quickly from what we naively expected to be simple maps of the students’ routes to school to a writing assignment: We would ask the students to write out directions. But it turns out that things will need to move forward more slowly than that.

Two things are clear. On one hand, we need to keep them working together, whether in small groups or as a single large class. The chance to argue with one another, to correct one another and be corrected, took them much farther as mapmakers than any was able to travel by themselves.

One the other hand, we need to help the students think more clearly about the difference between drawings and maps. We need to help them draw more from observation, and less from the constraints that the paper in front of them provides. Taking the trouble to measure out the schoolyard with their bodies might have been a first step. As they work to infuse their maps with more information about distances, sizes, and shapes, they may become more inclined to impose their vision on the paper they use.

If nothing else, stretching ourselves hand-to-hand around the schoolyard was lots of fun.

Discussion groups should never stop learning. Or maybe it would be better to say that, if they feel that they have no more to learn together, they probably no longer need to be a group.

I had been working with the women from Kofaviv – the Commission of Women Victims for Victims – for about a year, and I had begun to feel that they had reached a plateau, that they were no longer moving forward. They are an accomplished group, both in our work together and otherwise. We could simply have decided to continue enjoying the pleasant meetings that we have, or to end our collaboration, but neither of those options seemed right.

They have learned to follow Wonn Refleksyon procedures more than competently. They are fearless in the face of texts that other groups in Haiti have thought to be too hard. For example, whereas Haitian university students and others have doubted whether one can even discuss Newton’s laws of motion, or at least whether someone without a fair amount of education is qualified to talk about such things, the women of Kofaviv, who range from high school graduates to women without any formal education at all, have simply done it. They listen to one another and encourage one another to speak. Each of them seems to recognize that she has something to say. As a result, any one of them might be the next one to speak at any time. This is true when I’m the one leading their conversations, but it’s just as true when one of them is playing that role. We take turns leading, and they respond well to one another just as they respond very, very well to me. It’s wonderful.

At the same time, I can’t get away from my sense that there are steps the group hasn’t taken. While they are really good at helping one another share their thoughts, I don’t see much evidence that their thoughts are changing, or developing. One of Wonn Refleksyon’s core objectives is to make our opinions visible to us in a manner that invites us to challenge them, and I have to admit to myself that the Kofaviv women do not seem to me to be challenging their own thoughts.

So we decided to try a couple of experiments in an effort to shake things up a bit. One was intended to help them make better use of texts, the other to help them rethink what it means for them to lead discussions.

I wanted to help them look at texts differently because I thought the texts they have been using could be much more useful than they’ve been so far. Some of them express puzzling, surprising thoughts. We include a text in which Herodotus quotes the Athenian lawmaker Solon as saying that he can judge no man happy until he’s dead. Some of the texts we use make ordinary thoughts seem surprising. Newton’s explanation of the laws of motion includes the claim that, if a horse pulls a rock, the rock pulls the horse just as much. The example has the power to create more intense and varied discussion than one might imagine.

But the women of Kofaviv rarely find that the texts challenge their thinking because the way they use the texts doesn’t draw that sort of help out of them. They let the texts suggest issues to discuss, but once the texts suggest what we’ll be talking about, more or less, the women don’t much return to them.

For example, one of the postulates that Euclid’s geometry is based on, that a straight line can be drawn from any point to any other point, occasioned a wide-ranging discussion about how they find their various ways around Port au Prince, about how the best route is not always straight. There’s nothing wrong with using the text in that way. We are not a math class. The fact that the text invites them to share their experiences is a good thing. But once they start talking about how to get around Port au Prince, the text can’t help them anymore. They are on their own, and the degree to which they can challenge one another and themselves will simply depend on the habits they’ve already established.

We tried to address the group’s use of the text by spending two weeks working through the Euclid slowly. We all agreed we would temporarily try a different style of work, one that was more focused on figuring out what that text can tell us. We went through it together, almost line-by-line. In order to emphasize that what we were doing was not a standard part of Wonn Refleksyon, we even gave it a different name. We said we would be working in something called a “study group”.

And with the exception of the very interesting discussion of getting around Port au Prince, it seemed to work. The women patiently pieced together different ways of understanding Euclid’s definition of right angles, for example. More importantly, it seemed to help them in the weeks that followed when we returned to our usual style. Shortly afterwards I led them in a discussion of a short excerpt from one of Darwin’s books, and they were willing to let it puzzle them and raise questions about some of their own thoughts.

The second experiment was very different, and it’s far too early to hazard a guess as to its results. It took shape in a conversation with Kerline, a lab technician who does blood tests for the rape victims that come in a too-constant stream to the Kofaviv office. Kerline is a strong member of the group, and has begun working with Frémy and me on other Wonn Refleksyon projects. She and I were talking about a discussion we led together at the office of a large international NGO in Pétion-Ville. Kerline said that what she felt she was learning as she worked with Frémy and me – and a third experienced leader named Abélard – was how to intervene in the discussions she leads with confidence.

This requires some explanation. The first thing that generally strikes Haitians about the way Frémy and I lead discussions is how relatively silent we are. Group leaders in Haiti generally dominate. Haiti is not unique in this respect. They do most of the talking, they respond to almost everything that others say, and they always have the last word. Compared to what the Haitians we work with are accustomed to, Frémy and I really are quiet. We push people to talk directly with one another, to set the course of their own conversation, and to do without a leader’s final word. Most of this we try to accomplish by simply leaving them the space to take these responsibilities on. In other words, by shutting our own mouths long enough so that others can talk.

One consequence of this is that many of the people who learn the process from us are reticent about asserting themselves. They can tend to think that shutting up is their role. When they do speak, it’s generally in one of two simple ways: Either they’re reminding participants of the rules that Wonn Refleksyon asks them to follow, or they’re expressing an opinion about the topic being discussed much as any participant might.

Kerline said that she thought that the members of the Kofaviv group needed to think more about what real leadership requires. They are good at encouraging participation and at energizing their groups, at monitoring rules, and at entering the groups they lead as one participant among equals. But they weren’t actively helping one another deepen their collaboration or their thinking. They were, rather, just letting things happen.

So we decided to spend a meeting focusing on what discussion leadership requires. We proceeded in four steps. First, we asked the women to separate into groups of five-six. Each group was to make three short lists: one of the three qualities of a good traditional classroom teacher, one of the three qualities of a good community organizer, and a third of the qualities of a good discussion leader. Neither Kerline nor I were very interested in the first two lists, but we thought that creating the three lists together would help the women concentrate on the most essential, unique qualities of a discussion leader.

Second, we brought the small groups back together and made a list of all the qualities of a discussion leader they had proposed. There were eight in all, including things like the ability to be on time, the abilities to motivate participants to come to meetings and encouraging them to participate actively once they come, and the ability to explain procedures clearly.

The third step was for the group to grade itself on each of the eight qualities. We decided to keep things simple. For each quality, they would say they are good, weak, or between the two.

There was a lot of consensus about these grades, and they graded themselves much as Kerline and I would have. There were only two points on which they gave themselves the lowest grade: One was for them not to be shy, and the other was to know when to intervene.

It turned out that these amounted to the same thing. The shyness that some of them were worried about was precisely a shyness about when to intervene strongly in a conversation. And a little talk was able to make this more precise. They don’t feel they’re timid about intervening to enforce the rules or that they’re timid about jumping in as participants with their own contributions. They feel they’re too timid, however, about jumping in to a conversation to change its direction: to suggest paths that might be more fruitful that the one a group is taking, to push a group to stick to a topic so they can deepen their reflections, to keep things from merely jumping from one opinion to another.

The fourth step we took was to return to small groups so that they could think about how to work on their ability to intervene decisively and well. Though the groups worked independently, they answered as if with one voice. They said that they don’t think they’re good at preparing for a discussion they are to lead. They think that if they had a clearer sense, from the outset, as to where a discussion might profitably go, if they were better able to formulate clear objectives before a group meets, it would be easier for them to feel as though they know what they’re doing.

It was an obvious point, but one neither Kerline nor I had considered. So we decided that we would all think about what we can do to learn how to better prepare for the discussions we are to lead. It will be a couple of weeks before I see the group again, and we all agreed we would come with ideas.

I haven’t come up with anything yet, but it’s a great question. If we are able to come up with a really good approach, it could quickly become an important part of teaching Wonn Refleksyon all over Haiti.

“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.