A couple of years ago, I was at the University of Oldenburg, in northwest Germany, for a conference of people involved in popular education. The conference couldn’t be what I had hoped it would be for me. I had planned to attend with Frémy, my most important Haitian colleague. I would be his translator, and he would be able to talk as a Haitian about popular education in Haiti. But at the last minute, the European Union denied him the visa he needed to attend, so our chance to talk as a team with international colleagues about our work in Haiti disintegrated.

While in Oldenburg, however, I came across some literacy materials that looked interesting. They were produced and displayed by a London-based international NGO, Action Aid, but they were available in French, so before I left the conference I looked into buying a couple of copies.

Some things take time. The book was not available at Borders or on Amazon. In order to get hold of the book, I arranged for a Shimer colleague who was teaching in England at the time to pay for and pick up four copies. He did so, but they stayed in his hands until he returned to Shimer the following year. Shortly thereafter, he passed the books on to me, and I brought them to Haiti.

The book is a how-to manual, designed help teams implement an approach to literacy called “REFLECT.” The name is one of those awkward, forced-sounding acronyms, too ugly to merit repeating. But the approach itself is interesting enough. Rather than using workbooks, or even pre-selected pictures, as the starting-points for lessons in reading and writing, it uses studies that non-readers can make of their own communities. Participants create graphics that organize knowledge that is already theirs graphically. The graphics might be maps or charts or calendars that they sketch on the ground in an open space outdoors with whatever materials are available: stones, beans, seeds, leaves, sticks. They then use those graphics in two ways: to motivate and plan community action and to develop reading and writing skills. I think the examples I offer below will make this clear.

Just after I entered the country with the books, Abner Sauveur and other friends from Lagonav spoke with me about concerns they had about the long-running and successful literacy program they had been involved in there. The program has, for years, been helping adults in one of the most rural areas of Haiti learn to read and write, but Abner and others were dissatisfied nonetheless. They felt that their literacy centers had begun to resemble ordinary schools too closely. It was as though they were running small academic classrooms for adults.

Such classrooms had never been their intention. The literacy program had been established by a group of community activists called AAPLAG, the Association of Activists and Peasants of Lagonav. They had come to see that organizing themselves and the peasants they serve to improve their communities would simply require that more of the peasants know how to read and write. Community groups, committees, and other organizations require secretaries and treasurers. The local groups that could and should take responsibility for community development were too dependent on literate outsiders make sustainable change happen.

Under the circumstances, REFLECT seemed as though it might be a good fit, but none of us had ever tried it. All we had were a couple of books. I showed them to Abner, and explained as much of the approach as I had gleaned from skimming the book once, and he liked what he heard. So we collected a group of interested people from around Matènwa, and agreed to read the manual together. We hoped that that would both clarify the approach and give us the guidance we’d need to try it out. We also found two literacy teachers who were willing to take the lead in our group. They agreed to study the text with us and implement it in literacy classes they would run for AAPLAG over the coming year. Thanks to a Fonkoze colleague who was making a trip to England, we were able to get hold of a couple of additional books, and we started meeting every two or three weeks, whenever I was in Matènwa. We would read a section of the book in preparation for our meetings, and then discuss them. In other words, we organized ourselves into a more-or-less conventional study group. The more we read, the more we liked. The approach seemed well-suited to putting the accent in the literacy centers back on community development.

So we read through the book, and continued to like what we understood of it. When it seemed as though the time had come to leave general considerations and try to get more concrete, we worked together to write the first lesson plan. The theme we chose for the lesson was trees. One of the many problems facing Lagonav is the lack of them. They’ve been cut down to make the charcoal used for cooking. Farmers needing cash might feel that they have nothing else that they can sell. The graphic we decided to have participants create is a map of their community, showing where all the larger trees in the community are and where they were five years ago.

After participants establish the maps in all its details to everyone’s satisfaction, they will copy it into their notebooks. This act of copying a map they have created is a chance for them to practice using a pencil or pen – a considerable advantage – and a way to ensure they all have records of the group’s work.

They’ll then discuss the map, talking about what it shows. We believe it can provide an occasion for shared reflection about the loss of trees: both about the cause of the loss and about its consequences. They’ll also talk about what they can do about it, individually and collectively. We hope this step will give the program the activist focus its organizers are looking for.

After discussion, it’s time for the actual reading and writing. Together with their teacher, they’ll choose a word that has a place on the map. Early in the process – this is a plan for the first lesson – that word then becomes the basis for a lesson. Participants learn how the word is made of syllables that are, in turn, composed of letters, and they’re encouraged to construct other words they know out of the same or related syllables. What’s crucial is that they are choosing words and writing them, rather than just copying them out of a workbook. Later in the process, the writing lesson can be based on composing sentences and then paragraphs that the group’s discussions suggest.

Numbers have their place as well. Though participants are generally good at doing basic math in their heads, the program aims to teach them to do the same calculations on paper. This step is especcially important for market women, because it means thet they can keep accounts. In this first lesson, they’ll count trees and learn to write and to recognize the numerals that represent the quantities they find.

So we created a lesson plan. The two teachers themselves created a second. But creating them is one thing, using them another thing entirely. We were especially worried about the process of creating a graphic, something unlike any activity any of us had ever led. So we tried an experiment. We were attending the week-long workshop that AAPLAG was holding for all of the literacy teachers it would be using this year, and the workshop organizers asked our REFLECT team to introduce the process to them and to the teachers who would not be using the approach.

We planned to spend about fifteen minutes talking about the REFLECT process and why we wanted to try it out, but we knew it would remain unclear until we offered a demonstration. That demonstration could both help the workshop participants understand what we are up to and also give us the dry run that we felt we needed.

We realized, however, that the lesson we created would not work. The workshop’s participants were from all over Lagonav, a rather large island. A map of the island, showing individual trees was well beyond what we could do.

But over the course of the workshop’s week, we had heard lots of talk about water problems, and we realized that such problems were just the sort of topic we could use. We decided to have participants make a chart. AAPLAG divides the island into six zones, and we would have the group say, for each zone, how much time per day it takes a family to get the water it needs each month of the year. We cleared a space in the middle of the concrete floor in the room where we were working, and listed the months in a column on the left. Then we made six other columns, one for each zone, and invited folks to fill it out.

Their reaction was immediate and lively. They got right to work. There were lots of discussions, both among representatives of individual zones and between those from different zones. Within a half hour, we had a chart that everyone was happy with.

Then we started to talk. We identified the zones where water problems are more acute, and where they are not quite as bad. It turns out there are parts of Lagonav where families need two-fours hours each day all through the year. There are plenty of months during which some zones need a many as six hours. In Zone Six, on the western side of the island, people need eight hours a day for the two hardest months. It became clear as well that different zones have different problems. In some zones, the main problem is the distance to decent water. In others, it’s the length of time one has to wait in line once one gets to a busy water source.

When Robert, who was leading the activity, asked how things had been in the past, we learned a lot more. In several zones, things had formerly been easier. In Zone Six, however, they had been even worse.

This led to a conversation about the differences. Participants from the zones that had been getting worse pointed to loss of trees around the water sources. They said that, as a result of this loss, they had had to dig deeper and deeper to get water and that the water was flowing more slowly than it once had. In Zone Six, things had improved for certain parts of the year because some communities had built rainwater cisterns. When there’s rain, they have that addition source to turn to. If we had had the time, we could have moved directly to the action phase. We would have talked about trees and cisterns. A writing lesson could easily have followed as well.

We left thinking that this demonstration had given us just the help we needed, though it might be too soon to say. Creating a written document on a concrete floor with educated young people is one thing. Working with adult literay learners to create a graphic with rocks and beans and sticks in the middle of a dirt yard will be another. But at least now we can imagine our task with a certain amount of clarity. And imagining a job clearly might be, as they say, half the battle.

The first news I heard as I walked up the hill after a week and a half spent away was from Jhony’s father. I don’t see Flambert very often. I suppose he’s down the hill most of the time, looking for work. He hasn’t had consistent work for four years. His wife, Bebette, has been supporting him and their five children with her small business. She sells roasted and ground coffee, bread, and homemade coconut candy by the side of the road just below Kaglo.

Flambert told me that Jhony was home. This might not sound very earth-shattering, but it’s a pretty big deal. Since last November, Jhony’s been living at their church, about two hundred yards down the hill from his mother’s small house. I’ve written about Jhony before: about the surprising way he spells his name and about the reason he was living at the church. (See: InterVention.) Last fall, he got sick. His family was convinced the sickness was caused by a curse that had been placed on him, so they put him under the protection of the pastor. Several efforts I made to lead them towards seeking conventional medical treatment for Jhony got nowhere.

When my own doctor – fourth-year medical student Dr. Job – went to the church with me for a casual visit, he talked with Jhony and looked him over. By then Jhony had been sick for awhile, and the symptoms had shifted some. Job couldn’t do a full examination. The circumstances didn’t really allow one. But what he saw and what he heard led him to voice his suspicion: Some kind of blood infection had led to anemia. He could be sure, but he thought daily vitamins with iron might help. Since they couldn’t really hurt, I bought some on my next visit to the States, and Jhony’s been taking them ever since.

When I heard that Jhony was home, I went to see him right away. I also needed to pick up a can of coffee that his mother had been holding for me since before my last trip. I spoke with Bebette, and she gave me more details. Jhony’s problems turn out to have started, from her perspective, as a silly argument among kids. One of Jhony’s cousins was ridiculing him and his mother because they live with their family in an unusually small, beaten-up house. They appear to be one of the poorer families in the area. Jhony is extremely loyal to his mother, so he answered the ridicule with hard words of his own. Apparently, the cousin’s father, who is Jhony’s uncle and Bebette’s brother-in-law, took what Jhony said badly and said that he’d make Jhony pay for his words. Bebette believes that he then went to a local Voudoun practitioner and paid to have a curse placed on Jhony.

It took the most curious conversation to bring this story out. She was complaining about the way her children – delightful kids, one and all, as far as I can tell – are constantly fighting. I answered that I remember fighting with my siblings. Worse than that, I remember that, as much as I adore and admire my sister right now, there was a time when we hardly spoke with or wanted to speak with one another. That’s when Bebette started talking about her broken relation with her formerly favorite sister. They haven’t exchanged a word, not even a “good morning”, since her brother-in-law cursed Jhony. And it’s hard to describe how grave a matter withholding a “good morning” is in Haiti.

And for Jhony, living at the church for these past months was a grave matter as well. Though he seemed much better by the middle of the winter, after he had lost one full marking period of school, the pastor insisted that he could not leave the church grounds on secular business, like education. So he missed another marking period, and then another. Three out of four of the year’s marking periods. His grades for the first period had been excellent – as they have been his whole life – but the year, the eighth grade for him, was definitively lost. There was no way he could pass.

And this promised to mean more than simply losing out on a year of school. Jhony was attending the public high school down the hill in Petyonvil. The only free high school anywhere near him and, so, the only high school his mother could afford. Petyonvil’s population is something around 100,000, and there is only one public high school, so even though it is much too far away from many of the county’s residents for them to send there children there, places in the school are nonetheless hard to come by. Somehow Bebette had secured one for Jhony, but there are so many kids who can’t get into the school at all that the school’s firm rule is that students who fail a grade are out. They are left to go to private schools instead. No exceptions.

Jhony’s situation appeared lost. Bebette would not be able to pay for a private secondary school, so he seemed to have lost any chance of moving forward in school.

This is a very big deal to him and to his mother as well. Her parents didn’t believe in sending girls to school, so they didn’t send her sisters or her. She somehow got herself through first and second grade without their help – I don’t know how – but she can barely read at all since her two year’s of education was in French and it’s a language she doesn’t speak or understand. She’s been very determined that her sons and her daughters as well would be more fortunate than she was, so she’s worked very hard to keep them in school. Her oldest child, a daughter, moved down the hill to go to high school, and, without Bebette’s supervision, has gotten into all sorts of trouble, but her younger daughter and her four boys have been with her and have been in school. She’s insisted on it.

My neighbor, Mèt Anténor, has been helpful in this respect. He’s the principal of the local elementary school, and it’s there that all of Bebette’s children have gone. Unlike a lot of public school directors in Haiti, he’s inclined to view all sorts of rules loosely. Though he is forced to charge parents a small yearly fee – the government pays nothing but the teachers’ salaries – he does not insist on the fee when parents cannot pay. He’s a local resident, and he knows well enough who can pay and who cannot. Children are expected to come to school in uniforms, but children without uniforms are never sent home. Mothers and fathers like Bebette do as much as they can, and Mèt Anténor overlooks the rest.

Mèt Anténor and I were talking one day about Jhony last spring, and it turned out that he had already gotten to work. It also turned out that, rightly or wrongly, “no exceptions” depends on who asks whom. As a public school principal, Mèt Anténor has connections to the principal of the public high school. Apparently, one can ask for favors. And when Mèt Anténor personally introduced Bebette and Jhony to the school’s principal, an exception to the “no exceptions” was created. The principal remembered Jhony as a serious boy who worked had and caused no trouble, and decided to give him a chance. If he appears at school on the very first day of classes, he will be allowed to stay. He’ll be repeating the eighth grade.

It remained only to get Jhony out of the pastor’s hands and, then, to get him a new uniform – the rules at the high school are stricter than the rules Mèt Anténor applies. Bebette managed the first piece in the simplest possible way. She went to the church, announced that Jhony was going home with her, and simply took him away. She did so over the pastor’s objections. Though she credits the church and its pastor with helping Jhony back to health, and though she continues to view herself and her children as devout members of his congregation, she would not allow Jhony to continue to live in other people’s hands. She told me by way of an aside that she believed that the pastor did not want Jhony to leave because he is a very well-behaved boy who is willing to do all sorts of chores and never argues or talks back. This she was willing to say about a religious authority whom she credits with saving the boy’s life.

She’s now having he uniform made, so Jhony will be ready to go. She glowed as she told me how she finally sees that Jhony’s health has returned. He has good color and seems to be at full strength. We agreed that we wouldn’t know for certain until he starts hiking up and down the hill every day, as he will have to do when September comes. Even if he were to take a tap-tap from Malik, he’d still have a half-hour hike each way, and the sixty cents the round trip between Malik and Petyonvil would cost every day is more than Bebette can afford.

I was half an hour early, but I felt as though I was a least that late.

This in itself was striking. I’ve worked in Haiti with perfectly successful groups, groups that met consistently over months or even years, and have had to adapt myself to the fact that half the participants or more would often arrive for a two-hour meeting as much as one hour late. Lots of Haitians live without watches. Transportation is unreliable. Things can take a lot of time. And punctuality, while respected, isn’t generally viewed as all that important. I’ve never seen a Haitian here start to panic because they’re going to be late.

But when I got to the 10:00 General Assembly at 9:30 on Saturday morning, everyone was already there and busy. The singing and dancing and talking were in full swing.

The General Assembly is the annual meeting of Fonkoze members from all over Haiti. Fonkoze’s core activity is what is called “solidarity group” credit. A Solidarity Group is five close friends who organize themselves to take out their loans as a group. Responsibility for repayment is shared. They agree in advance that if one of them has trouble meeting a repayment deadline, the others will come to her aid. Solidarity Groups are then organized into Credit Centers of six-eight groups. These Centers are designed to be permanent associations of women committed to improving their lives. Through these centers, Fonkoze organizes loan disbursements and repayments and educational services.

For the General Assembly, members from all of Fonkoze’s branches choose representatives that they send to Pòtoprens. That they send their representatives is true quite literally. Fonkoze does not pay the expensive transportation costs, nor does it cover lodging. The women themselves and the others whom they represent are left to make their own arrangements. For women who joined Fonkoze because they are on the edge of poverty but are ready to fight to improve their situations, these expenses are considerable. The round trip from Wanament, for example, might be as much as $50. And this is in a country in which much of the population lives on less than $1 a day.

But 175 women came to the meeting, representing all 28 of Fonkoze’s branches. They heard reports from Fonkoze staff and a presentation from an expert in decentralization. Interspersed through these presentations were songs and a short play about the importance of Fonkoze services. The play was created and performed by the group of women from Wanament. I later learned that they had been asked to perform something only that same morning. They created the play and learned the lines within a couple of hours.

The most important phase of the meeting began when the women were invited to step forward and ask questions or offer comments about Fonkoze. One way of describing what happened at that moment would be to say that chaos broke out. Women stood up from all through the auditorium and rushed forward to take the microphone. Multiple women tried to speak at once. When Fonkoze staff tried to suggest that questions be written out, a large portion of the women refused. They had not traveled to Pòtoprens in order to leave someone a note. They wanted their voices to be heard. Fonkoze’s staff had to abandon its carefully-planned agenda and go with the flow.

There is, however, a deeper and, therefore, truer way to interpret the apparent chaos. Fonkoze’s core objective is to help poor Haitian women take greater control of their lives. One way it does so is to offer well-structured credit programs. Women cannot have control of their lives unless they have their own sources of income. But credit is not enough. Another way Fonkoze helps women take increased control of their lives is by offering educational programs, like Basic Literacy. Fonkoze feels that it should be helping women develop the tools they need to manage their affairs well.

When Fonkoze’s members took control of the General Assembly, when they forced the organization to give up its plans and respond to their need for space and time to speak up, they were showing a willingness to assert themselves that Fonkoze’s leadership could only welcome. The chaos was a clear sign of progress Fonkoze has made.

The challenge that remains for Fonkoze will be to find new ways to respond to its members’ assertiveness. Already there are plans to create a newsletter in which Fonkoze staff will respond to questions and comments that members send. The dialogue will have to be ongoing, but Saturday’s meeting was a very promising point from which to depart.

Here are some photos of the meeting: PhotosoftheGeneralAssembly.

It’s taken a couple of weeks, but I’m myself again. For what that’s worth. I could feel it especially as I walked uphill to get home last night with a rather full backpack. The hike felt easy, though it was hot. There were none of the struggles or the perceived need to pace myself that I had been feeling of late. This morning I tore down the mountain at the pace that some neighbors tease me about.

I’ve been very lucky about my health in Haiti. I’m not very careful about what I eat or drink, and I spend lots of time in the sometimes-chaotic traffic that fills Port au Prince streets and getting whacked around on the none-too-smooth roads across the haiitan countryside. But, on the whole, my health has been excellent. I’m rarely under the weather, even for a day. My most serious injuries have been cuts on the top of my head – from foolishly jumping onto a moving tap-tap – and on my shin – I fell backwards off a rock I was climbing. Both healed promptly without further consequences. As I say, I’ve been lucky.

So when fever hit a couple of weeks ago, I felt not only miserable, but a little dumbfounded. I was in Mibale, at the tail end of a long, varied, and busy trip through the Central Plateau. And by midway through a Wednesday morning, I could think of nothing but lying in bed. I had a high fever, with all the associated aches in all parts of my body, and a deep cough to boot.

It had been a hard few days. Part of the trip had involved long rides on the back of a motorcycle along roads made extra dusty by a prolonged draught. I can tend to be a little asthmatic here in Haiti, but normally an inhaler is perfectly adequate as treatment. But the dust on the Central Plateau affected me badly. The inhaler stopped helping. There’s a very effective, Haitian-made pill to treat asthma, and I started taking one each day. It has insomnia as a side-effect, though, so I started to lose a lot of sleep. Tuesday night I couldn’t get any sleep at all. By midnight, I gave into the wakefulness. I decided I could make use of it to finish a large piece of editorial work I had hanging over me. Mibale is quite different from most of Haiti in at least one respect: It has electricity all the time, 24/7. So I finished the work around 7:30, and e-mailed it off by 8:00 or so. Then I went straight back to bed. I felt miserable.

I was in Mibale for a couple of reasons. It had been a base from which I could visit Fonkoze’s newest branch in Beladè, a small city near the Dominican border. There I was scheduled to meet with representatives of the Dominican office of an important funder of Fonkoze’s literacy projects, Plan International. Plan’s team wanted to bring a representative from Fonkoze to their new office in Elias Piña, the Dominican city across from Beladè, to talk with Dominican microfinance institutions. Plan likes Fonkoze’s approach, and was wondering whether we could help them push their potential Dominican partners closer to it.

In Mibale itself, I was scheduled to visit a workshop for Fonkoze members who would be leading meetings of other women from their credit centers as they studied Fonkoze’s very popular, four-month unit on Sexual and Reproductive Health. The week-long workshop was being led by Freda Catheus, Fonkoze’s main trainer of discussion leaders for the unit. She was also working with another woman who is apprenticing with her as a trainer of discussion leaders, so investing a day of so in observing their work seemed like a great idea.

But when I returned to my hotel room after sending off my e-mail, a hotel room in the very same center that was hosting the workshop, there was no question of observing anything. Everything ached, I couldn’t think of eating, and I felt as though I was burning up. Mystal, the Fonkoze staff member who had made the trip to Beladè with me, immediately got to work. He went out and bought several bottles of very cold drinking water, and delivered it from downtown Mibale to the room we were sharing. When Emile, the Fonkoze education coordinator who had organized the workshop, arrived, he took action as well. By then, Mystal had been forced to leave. He had a day’s work to do in the branch in nearby Boukan Kare. Emile got the workshop started, and then went back downtown in search of pills.

He came back with ibuprofen in a wide range of strengths and with chloroquin. The latter is the standard treatment in Haiti for malaria, which is often the assumed cause of a high fever. I think that, at that point, one could have done whatever one wanted with me.

But the one thing I couldn’t do was eat, and the one thing I wanted was to get back to Kaglo. A Fonkoze truck was scheduled to return to Pòtoprens from Beladè via Mibale, and I prepared myself to make the trip with them. Meanwhile Emile, Freda, and Malya, who was her assistant for the workshop, took turns sitting with me as we waited. The workshop continued on the other side of a thin concrete wall from me. It seemed to go well.

Late in the day, it became clear that my hoped-for ride from Fonkoze would not materialize. The truck had gone to Beladè to bring a team that was helping with the opening of the new branch, and they had a lot of work to do. They didn’t get back to Mibale until after dark, but by late afternoon it was clear that they wouldn’t be back in time to return to Pòtoprens. The next day, Thursday, the team took the truck back to Beladè. They had more work to do. They said they would pick me up on their way back to Pòtoprens. They promised they would be going that day.

That evening, Emile and Mystal talked seriously about taking me to the hospital. If they had had a car available, I might have let them do it, but I couldn’t imagine mounting the back of Emile’s motorcycle. The hospital they had in mind was in Laskawobas, and though the road from Mibale to Laskawobas is excellent, the ride seemed like it would be much too much. Freda sent off to buy key limes. Lime juice was the only thing that appealed to me. In fact, I craved it terribly.

When I got up the next morning, I felt a little better, and when I thought of waiting most of the day to return to Pòtoprens with Fonkoze, I blanched. I decided instead to pack my things and walk downtown to take a midmorning bus. I took a seat on the bus, and waited as it started to fill up. A bus won’t normally leave until it is full, and filling up a big bus can take time. By the time this bus was ready to go, I couldn’t not imagine what could have convinced me that I’d be able to make the rough three-hour trip alone, in the large bus, with its blaring music. Still worse, on arrival in Pòtoprens, I’d have to walk through the crowded market in Kwadeboukèt to get a tap-tap to Delma, from which I could get another to Petyonvil. It would be a lot of moving around with a backpack that held ten days worth of clothes, books and a laptop, and I was starting to feel weak and feverish again. I got down of the bus, and went back to bed.

Mid-afternoon, the truck returned from Beladè, and we headed back to Pòtoprens. When we got to the city, we dropped off the other Fonkoze staff members at their homes, and then Rodrigue, the driver, took me to my godson’s house off of Delma 75. There we picked up my godson’s Uncle Job, a fourth-year med student, and Rodrigue took us both all the way up to Kaglo.

Job came up with all his medical equipment. He took my temperature, listened to my heart and lungs, poked and probed, looked in my eyes and ears. He even took a bit of blood, and tested it for something. He voiced a couple of suspicions, but immediately added that, if I was up to it, he would take me to a lab in Petyonvil the next morning for tests. By then, I was already feeling much better, just a little weak. That weakness, both physical and mental, lasted over a week.

The lab tests didn’t show much: no malaria, no parasites. Lots of white blood cells, suggesting they were fighting some kind of invasive presence, and low protein, suggesting bad eating habits. Job suggested paying more attention to making sure I eat decently and taking vitamins. He also said I should get more rest. Meanwhile, my neighbor Madanm Boby, who knows a lot about medicinal teas, starting producing them in quantity for me every day. Between rest, the teas, and forcing myself to eat even when I had no appetite, things eventually go back to normal.

It was a hard couple of days. Being sick is never fun, but it’s probably a little harder when you’re out of your native element. At the same time, I was struck by the extent to which the things that make it easier to be sick at home were true for me here in Haiti. I have my own doctor, Job, and a striking array of colleagues and friends who immediately huddled around me when they heard that I was unwell. Madanm Boby turned into a tea factory, and the only thing that get Madanm Anténor out of the action was that she was off visiting her sister in the Dominican Republic. When she learned I had been sick behind her back, she was horrified. My colleagues at Fonkoze could not have huddled around me more closely than they did.

Having been down for a couple of days only served to reaffirm the very great degree to which I am now at home in Haiti.

When we decided to call our project an apprenticeship, Frémy and I were choosing to emphasize our status as learners, and not just teachers. We felt, and continue to feel, that it’s important. We are not masters working to accumulate and train disciples. We do not presume to talk very much about services we provide. We view ourselves as apprentices, constantly discovering more about the kind of work we do.

At the same time, the word “apprenticeship” suggests a teacher/learner relationship that’s a far as possible from what we seek to promote. In English, at least, it suggests learning at a teacher’s side, internalizing the principles of a craft under the watchful eye of an authority who has already mastered them. Neither Frémy nor I think of ourselves as master teachers, and we don’t see our partners as apprentices learning under our watchful eye. But we don’t think of the folks we work with as masters either. We don’t feel as though we’re absorbing a craft that they already know. We believe that we learn together with our partners, so we like to speak of a “shared apprenticeship.” We want to emphasize the way a group can make progress when its members work together. Meetings I attended over the past couple of weeks with two very different groups illustrate this point well.

Kofaviv is the Commission of Women Victims for Victims. Its members are rape victims who have organized themselves to provide a range of support services to other women who’ve suffered rape or violence of other kinds. Frémy and I have been meeting with them weekly since February, using Reflection Circles to help them develop the skills they need both to work together more effectively and, eventually, to lead their own Reflection Circle groups.

Reflection Circles are structured discussions of texts or images or topics. Their nominal subject is chosen to help the group develop skills. Members work on speaking clearly, on listening actively, on learning from one another. In this sense, though the choice of a subject can be enormously important, it nevertheless remains less important than the process used. Choosing a subject is choosing a means, a tool, that will help the group develop its skills. Nothing more.

The process always includes at least three steps: individual work, small-group work, and work by the group as a whole. We had been focusing for a couple of weeks on improving our individual and small-group work. Working on these two aspects is in some ways more urgent than working on the large group discussions is. But last week we turned to the work we do when we’re meeting in the group as a whole. Though this is the part of the work that one might normally think of first when one imagines a group discussion, it’s also the hardest part to master. It requires more patience, more attentive listening, and more of a commitment to encouraging others to speak.

And it’s more than just a question of making the large-group discussions somehow succeed. The point is to help a group learn to nurture its own best tendencies and to correct the problems that it sees. The point is to help a group take substantial responsibility for its own learning. So whereas one might otherwise, as a group leader, just tell a group what it’s doing wrong and then act to set the ship on course, we much prefer to create activities that invite participants to look at one another and at themselves and to speak together about the progress and problems that they see.

Last week, for example, we held two successive large-group conversations, each involving half the group. While one half discussed, the other half observed their work. After the two discussions, we brought the two half-groups together for a third discussion, one in which we all talked about our perceptions.

The first thing that emerged from that third discussion is that the group was pleased with itself – rightly, I think. Participants had only positive things to say: They were good about speaking one at a time, without interrupting; about speaking their mind to the whole group, rather than whispering to neighbors; and about encouraging one another to speak. On an impulse, I asked them to grade themselves on a scale of ten, and a couple of them awarded the group ten out of ten. When I said that I had been hoping they would give themselves no more than seven or eight, they called me a cheapskate and we all laughed.

So I backtracked a little. I told them that I was as impressed with them as they were, but I added that, as I see it, there is no such thing as a perfect group, that the point is always to improve. I said that the reason I hoped that they would give themselves only seven or eight was that I wanted to ask them what they thought they should do to earn eight or nine or ten.

And that’s when the real conversation started. I admitted that they were very good about letting each other speak, that they were not interrupting one another as they regularly had when we began our work. But I added that there is a difference between letting someone speak and listening to what they say. I was struck that, though they patiently waited their turn to make a contribution to the dialogue, they rarely responded to one another directly. They rarely challenged one another or even asked one another a follow-up question.

Suzette immediately responded that she was glad that I raised the point because she had been thinking of raising the same point as a criticism of Frémy, who had led the activity that morning. Suzette is an imposing figure, a large and forceful woman who organizes other women around her very poor neighborhood in Cité Soleil. I don’t know what her history as a victim is. We haven’t really spoken with any of the women about their histories, though parts of their stories occasionally arise in our meetings. But when I look at her and listen to her, I find it hard to think of her as a victim. She seems so strong. I know this is naïve of me.

Suzette had noticed that, often enough, Frémy would respond to a participant directly, questioning or even challenging what she said. She had understood, however, that everyone had a right to express their opinion, so she thought that Frémy’s direct questions were somehow violating our rules.

Frémy responded that, in the weeks when the group was just starting, our highest priority had been to encourage participation. We wanted to hear as many voices as possible, so we were reluctant to engage participants too earnestly. It would have been too easy to intimidate, to turn someone off. As the group progressed, however, and the women were speaking with more confidence, it was becoming increasingly important that we look at our own and one another’s opinions carefully. The group will only really give us a way to learn from one another when it begins to help us evaluate and, sometimes, change what we think. This requires not just that we make good use of all the opinions that are expressed in the group but also that fellow participants help us look at the opinions that are our own. And neither of the steps is possible until we learn to challenge and criticize one another and to accept the criticism our own views might receive.

Time ran out a few minutes after Suzette’s question. But I returned a week later to continue the work. At that meeting, we decided to begin the activity by talking about the importance of a group’s establishing the habit of evaluating itself and of proposing the direction it wants to move in, and the women formed small groups to do just that. I asked the small groups to answer two questions: what progress they would like to see their group make together and what steps they could take towards that progress. They jumped right into the work, and came up with a number of answers to each question. To the first, however, two answers stood out. Several groups said that they wanted their discussion to be livelier and several said that they wanted to see more reliable solidarity within the group.

And they also proposed solutions. The suggested two steps they could take to make the activity livelier. One would be to add singing or other warm-up activities. The other would be to respond more directly to the things that each of them said. To increase their sense of solidarity, they could make a name and address list so that, whenever one of them is absent, someone can take responsibility for getting in touch with her to make sure everything is ok.

And when we left the evaluative phase of the activity to enter into the conversation about the text, that conversation was indeed somewhat different than the previous two or three meetings had been. It was less orderly. There were more interruptions. Participants returned to their tendency to whisper to their neighbor rather than to speak up to the whole group. In a sense, it could have appeared as though the group had taken a step backwards.

But this appearance was hiding a more important truth. They were interrupting one another with direct responses. Their side conversations were giving them needed space in which to voice judgments about what was being said. We spent the last few minutes of the meeting discussing how things had gone and they pointed out both the improvement and the work they had ahead of them. They then got to work on the name and address list. As I was leaving, they began to sing a song.

I was surprised that the group of fifth-graders in Jan-Jan started their meeting with a game that resembled Simon Says. I’ve written about this group before. They are the ones who told their teacher, Dorlys, that they wanted to lead the meetings themselves. To his credit, Dorlys encouraged them in this, and members of the class have been using the teacher’s guide we produced several years ago to take turns leading their weekly discussions ever since.

A couple of weeks ago, they had come to Dorlys with a problem. They had counted out the number of weeks remaining in the school year and had realized that they wouldn’t all get a turn to lead. They wondered whether it would be ok to lead the discussions in groups of three. I happened to be in Jan-Jan that day, visiting an adult literacy center, so Dorlys had the children call me over to ask me what I thought. I told them that I think it can be much better when two or three discussion leaders work as a team, but that, in order for it to really succeed, the team should meet a day or two before the discussion to discuss their objectives for the week and divvy out the roles that they would play. At the end of that conversation the children asked me to be sure to come by to watch their again before the end of the school year, and I said I’d try.

I went yesterday. It was quickly clear that the children had taken my advice. Three of them took turns leading the various steps in the process, starting with Simon Says and ending with a short evaluation of how the day’s work had gone. The transitions went seamlessly, without discussion. The three of them had, in this respect, a clear plan, and they were able to follow it without prompting of any kind.

When they were finished I asked whether I might ask them some questions, and they agreed. The first thing I wanted to know had to do with their use of Simon says. I wondered why they chose to start that way. I mentioned that I had never seen a group do anything like it before. They said that they hold their discussions at the end of the school day, and that they find that some of them have a hard time concentrating. They thought that a little physical game at the start of class would liven things up and get everyone tuned it. It was the first time they had tried it, and we all had to agree it worked well.

I could hardly believe what I was seeing and hearing. The level of self-understanding and self-mastery that they were showing was entirely new to me. In some respects, they know what they are doing more than any group I’ve seen.

The children then asked me whether I had seen anything about the group that wasn’t good, and I started to think of the women of Kofaviv. These kids, in their little uniforms, could hardly appear any more different from the Kofaviv women than they do. But there was something fundamentally similar in the way they understand what Reflection Circles are about. Like the Kofaviv women, they have mastered procedural aspects of the activity. If anything, they are even more advanced than the very strong Kofaviv women in this respect. These kids never interrupt one another. They address everything they say to the whole class, never turning to a neighbor to whisper a few words. Participation is really general, even if there are a few of them who talk much more than others.

But they will not argue with one another. Their conversations have become well-disciplined events at which they all patiently wait their turn, but little real dialogue is emerging from all this because they studiously avoid reacting to each other directly. They are so entirely focused on procedures that they have no time for questions like whether the conversation they holding is teaching them anything. This is explicit when they evaluate themselves: The only criterion that’s even mentioned is whether the rules of discussion were respected.

So I told them that as much as I admire what they’ve accomplished, I would like to see them argue a little more. Even if it means that they break one of their rules now and again. They would like to continue to meet next school year. I know, though they don’t yet, that Dorlys will not be with them. But I’ll have to see whether there’s any way for me to arrange an occasional visit.

The two groups go a long way towards defining the limits of formal mastery of group discussion. Each is rightly pleased with the way that they’ve been able to internalize patience, respect, and a willingness to speak out as principles they scrupulously observe. But that progress has come with a cost: It’s taken them away from the kind of engagement with ideas that is, in large part, what conversations are really for. My ongoing commitment to Kofaviv will enable to learn with them how to bring their mastery of principles to bear on achieving deeper goals. I hope I can find time to accompany the children of Jan-Jan as they try to move forward in the same way.

One of the things that makes Haiti an exciting place for an educator to work is the way Haitians value education. People here regularly make real sacrifices to go to school. I can offer all sorts of examples: from the kids who live in Bawosiya and Blancha, ten and twenty minutes up the hill from where I live in Ka Glo, who walk an hour or more to schools in Petyonvil, Delma, and Pòtoprens every day in freshly washed and ironed uniforms only to have to hike back up the hill that afternoon; to the kids from farther up the mountain who leave home every Sunday afternoon to live with relatives during the week, only to return home Friday; to families struggling to get by who invest money they don’t really have in their children’s education; to young people who will sign up for class after class at vocational schools hoping that this or that training will give them a way to earn a living down the road.

I used to ask children whether they like school. These are children who attend schools where they are asked to turn off their minds in order to memorize passages in a language they don’t know, schools at which customary discipline includes beatings and humiliation. They would invariably answer, with enthusiasm, that indeed they do.

But that enthusiasm for education can take surprising forms. One of those forms is the seriousness of graduations. And as yesterday’s graduation reached and passed the three-hour mark – after beginning two hours late – and as I saw through the hot, dank auditorium’s very small window that the rains had started, and as I realized that, from where I was in deep downtown Pòtoprens it would take at least two hours to get home, the Haitian enthusiasm for education seemed, briefly, less attractive than it normally would.

It was Titi’s graduation. He’s a young man, in his early twenties, but he has long been living by his own resources. His parents have never really been in a position to support him. He works in a wealthier neighbor’s home, does errands for me and for a couple of other foreigners who visit our mountain now and again, and raises a couple of goats.

Titi had completed a nine-month class in videography in downtown Pòtoprens. And the whole thing was striking to me in a number of ways. First, he was one of a class of 19 students, and it was stunning that his school – which is, by the way, relatively inexpensive – would invest in rental of a large auditorium and organize a three-and-a-half hour graduation for nineteen young people who had taken a nine-month course. Second, I wondered how one could spend nine months learning to use a video camera. This was not, after all, a school of filmmaking, but just a class for those who want to know how to use a video camera. This second point was especially perplexing because I know that Titi has no video camera, and I doubt that he’s any different from most of his classmates in this respect. I also know that the school’s video camera was stolen mid-way through the class, so the course must have mainly covered videography’s theoretical aspects. And I have a hard time imagining what those theoretical aspects might be.

I had been invited to the graduation as Titi’s godfather. This requires explanation. I was not, previously, Titi’s godfather. All my Haitian godchildren are less than four years old, acquired after I had been coming to Haiti for a number of years. And my oldest godchild, a wonderful Colombian girl named Catalina, is still a ways from entering her teens. Titi was baptized long before I got into the godfather trade. When I write, therefore, that he had invited me as his godfather, I am referring to one of several Haitian extensions of the most traditional meaning of that word.

Haitians acquire godparents at a range of occasions. Baptisms may be the most important one, but weddings and graduations require godparents as well. I’ve been around very few weddings here, but as far as I can tell Haitians don’t speak of having a “maid of honor” or a “best man.” They speak of having a godmother and a godfather, and each title comes with a range of duties that traditions here more-or-less fix. Graduations have godparents in two respects: A graduating class will have its godfather and its godmother, and each graduate will acquire a new set as well.

I had once been the godfather of a graduating class at an elementary school. This involved donning as suit, making a speech, and buying a couple of gifts for students who had earned special rewards. This would be, however, my first chance to acquire a new graduate as a godchild individually, and I had no real idea what my duties were. I asked Mèt Anténor, and he made the picture very clear: I was to attend the graduation, dressed suitably for the occasion, buy Titi a gift, and offer him such help and advice as I could down the road.

So I appeared at Titi’s house at 11:30. He wanted to leave by 12:00 for the 1:00 ceremony. Getting down the mountain, if we were very lucky, would only take 90 minutes, so we wouldn’t be more than a half-hour late. There was no chance that the activity would actually begin on time.

We waited in a courtyard in front of the auditorium until 3:00. Apparently, the auditorium is popular: Titi’s was the day’s second graduation, and the first was running late. We used the time to take photos and to talk. Titi told me that he had chosen the videography course because he had long been attracted to the role that camera people play at weddings, graduations, funerals, and the other occasions at which Haitians like to hire them. He had initially purchased an old, used video camera, but it had never worked properly. He eventually brought it to his school, hoping that it could be repaired, but when robbers hit the school his camera disappeared with the school’s own.

Nevertheless, he was pleased with the class and hoped that, eventually, he would be able to make use of what he learned. He was satisfied enough with the school that he had already signed up for its summer class in Driver’s Ed.

The graduation seemed endless: songs, sketch comedy, poetry, and speech after speech. These speeches were all in French, a language few Haitians speak really well, so they were stilted, formulaic. They did nothing to express the unique thoughts and passions of those who gave them. There was plenty of loud, piped-in background music, and an emcee who talked almost constantly, in French, through the entire event. About ten or fifteen minutes were reserved for handing out the diplomas. As each student stepped forward, the announcer read the school’s comments about her or him. We learned who had been punctual, who respectful; who had been quiet, who comical. One young woman was even described as perpetually tardy and difficult. It seemed an odd thing to say at her graduation.

It was past 6:30 by the time we were ready for the long trek home. The rains had stopped, and we had surprisingly little trouble finding a bus headed for Petyonvil. There, however, we got stuck, because the drivers for Malik had, apparently, called it a day. We headed home on foot, just as everyone from Malik, Mariaman, and Ka Glo had done before the road to Malik was built in 1999. The rains returned as we arrived in Malik, and I was pretty wet by the time I got home, but Titi had clearly been pleased by the day.

Part of me wanted to talk with him about the many more useful ways he and his school could have invested the resources that they put into the graduation. His case isn’t the only one that’s been on my mind. Another godson, Givens, has an older brother who’ll graduate from kindergarten this month. His parents will pay a graduation fee of over $150.00, over and above the steep tuition they already paid, and they’ll spend a fair amount on the reception they’ll hold for the little guy after that. It will, of course, be a very happy occasion, but his parents work hard for the little money they have. His father’s monthly salary is much less than the graduation will cost, so one has to wonder whether it really makes sense.

It does for the schools. These ceremonies are advertisements. The emcee at Titi’s graduation, for example, could hardly have said more than he did in praise of the school. And it must make sense to the Haitians who choose to participate. Something about achieving a milestone, any kind of milestone, must feel worth celebrating.