Brother Robert Smith used to talk about a very simple first principle, a rule, that he thought teachers should follow: “Start where the students are.” That rule has been the idea most important in shaping the way I work, in Haiti and elsewhere, so I want to write a little bit about it.

The idea sounds simple, even obvious. But I am convinced that it is neither the one nor the other. Most of the time, I think we start where we want students to be, making their acquisition of to-our-mind-important skills or bodies of knowledge our priority. We can be right about the importance of such skills or such knowledge. And starting where students are doesn’t necessarily force us to give up those thoughts. It does, however, require patience and time.

Starting where students are means, first and foremost, doing more listening than speaking. I’ve seen a beautiful example of this over the last couple of days at the Matènwa Community Learning Center, watching a teacher work with her second graders.

It’s the beginning of the school year, so there’s a lot of reviewing going on. Millienne was reminding her kids how to set up addition problems. They all remembered the horizontal method, 1 + 2 = , but she was trying to remind them of the vertical method as well.

She could have simply stood at the board and shown them how, but that’s not what she did. She asked the children to suggest ways of setting up their problems. Each time one of them suggested a way, Millienne and her class looked at the suggestion, trying to figure out whether it was a clear way to write an addition problem down. There were more suggestions than one might imagine, and they were more varied. Kids had numerals and addition and equal signs scattered across the blackboard in various configurations.

As class was coming to a close, it was becoming clear that they would not suggest a really good way to write problems down, much less hit upon the traditional horizontal method. Millienne made it a homework assignment. The children were to go home and write down as many different ways of organizing additions problems as they could think of.

And rather than simply counting on one of them to come back to class the next day with something really useful, she told them a story. She said that when she goes to the spring to get water, she fills her five-gallon bucket. She’s perfectly able to carry the bucket, with its forty pounds of water, back home on her head, but she can’t actually lift the bucket off the ground and place it on her head. That would take strength in her arms that she doesn’t have. What she does, she said, is ask someone to lift the bucket onto her head for her. Facing a task that she is unable to do by herself, she asks for help. She told the children that they should do the same thing: They should ask older siblings or parents or neighbors to show them ways to put addition problems on paper. They were to bring whatever they came up with back to class the next day.

The next day, she started math class by asking the children how many different ways they had been able to come up with. The most popular answer was four, but one student even said eight. She asked one of the ones who had four possibilities to write them on the board and the girl who had eight possibilities to do the same.

It turned out that each had misunderstood the assignment in a different way. The girl who had discovered eight ways, actually only had thought of eight different addition problems, all of which she wrote horizontally, one problem beneath the other. The girl who had four ways copied four vertical problems out of her notebook: an addition, a subtraction, a multiplication, and a division.

Millienne asked the class to look at what each of the girls had written, first one then the other. It didn’t take long for the class to recognize that the one girl’s eight ways were really one and the same. Looking at the other girls four ways was, however, a little more challenging. But Millienne simply asked the children to read what each written problem said. By insisting they explain the details, she was able to get them to see that only one of the vertical problems was a clear example of addition.

And so she got what needed. She quickly asked each child to write down any five addition problems, and to write each of them in two ways. Most of the kids were able to respond easily.

It may be that Millienne’s method was less efficient at delivering information than some might like. The whole thing could probably happened in 30-45 minutes if she had taken a more traditional role.

But the result would not have been the same. Her kids had to come up with their own ideas, and then analyze those ideas. They had to work together. She, her Matènwa colleagues, and I have read enough Piaget together to be convinced that it is in their interactions with one another that children – maybe I should say “that all people” – develop the discipline of thought. Her students were learning how to be learners, how to teach themselves. Mastery of the content of the lesson was important, but it was not the only thing.

I could not help but think of Brother Robert as I watched Millienne work. In some respects, two people could hardly have less in common than he and she. Last year was his 70th year as a teacher, Millienne has been teaching less than ten. He earned a doctorate over fifty years ago; she hasn’t been able to finish high school. She’s almost a head taller than he and more than sixty years younger. She grew up in rural Haiti; he in Berkeley. And then there are the more obvious differences like gender and race.

Brother Robert died a couple of weeks ago, a few hours after I saw him for the last time. But as long as there are teachers like Millienne practicing their craft, I know that something important about him will remain.

I want to try to connect a couple of experiences in Haiti that might seem unrelated. I’m not sure whether the connection quite works. I might be stretching. But they are each related to one rather awkward way that I’ve occasionally tried to express my hope for the educational programs I work with in Haiti. I’ve said that educational programs should help their participants overcome habitual passivity. That’s a mouthful, and a pretty clumsy one. But a couple of examples might make it clear.

Case One: I wrote recently about Vunet, Jidit’s nephew, a 17-year-old who’s just come to Pòtoprens to try to pass the sixth grade and thus, perhaps, to finish school. His aunt has been preparing him for the beginning of school for a couple of weeks: getting the books, ordering a uniform, paying his registration and first term’s tuition. He’s been doing his share as well, studying his schoolbooks whenever he can. We’ve spent some time together doing some basic math.

He seems bright to me. He picks up new things quickly. I don’t think, for example, that he had ever seen decimals before, but within a few minutes he was handling them easily.

We were practicing long division. He was a little unsure of himself. At a certain point, he needed to know how many times eleven goes into sixteen. So he tried nine. He calculated 9 x 11, and discovered the answer was too large. Then he tried eight times, then seven, then six. He finally tried one, writing out 11 x 1, and calculating the answer.

I was dumbfounded. Vunet got the right answer. It’s not as though he couldn’t figure things out. But his extraordinary dependence on an ingrained process rather than on intuition would have been comical if it hadn’t been so real, so limiting. I want to say something like that Vunet felt he lacked permission to look the problem in front of him straight in the face. It was as though letting his real intelligence work for him was not an option. He had learned to follow the rules that had been set out for him and follow them without reflection.

Case Two: It was only natural that the workshop should begin with introductions. Each participant was to respond to series of questions: name, hometown, and a couple of questions about their experience with Fonkoze. The questions were projected on the wall of the room we were meeting in. I should add that, uncharacteristically for groups of adults in Haiti, all participants were literate.

But though they could read, they wouldn’t answer the questions.

Let’s be clear. It’s not as though they refused. No one was taking, as we say in the States, “the fifth.” But each would wait for me to ask every question before she would respond. None would simply make her introductory speech without my close guidance. They each wanted step-by-step instructions, though they each heard those same instructions as I gave them to the women before her.

I was trying to juggle a number of priorities – making sure that the workshop leader, for whom I was translating, would get what he was asking for, ensuring that the introductions would not eat much too much of a packed schedule – so, rather than asking the women why they so patiently and unnecessarily waited for me to explicitly invite them to speak, I simply repeated the questions one after another. It all went smoothly enough, but it was frustrating to watch the women’s dependence on my cues.

Case Three: One of my most consistent experiences when I visit groups of Fonkoze borrowers – mostly poor rural women – is that my questions are greeted with silence. If I put a question to a group, it is likely that no member of the group will answer right away.

If I’m traveling with another member of the Fonkoze staff, they are likely to repeat my question right away, insisting that the women answer. Though I speak Creole with the women, it is as though the staff members think that they need to translate my Creole into Creole again.

I think I understand why they do what they do. First, though my Creole is improving, it is not as though I speak it like a Haitian. They may genuinely believe that rural women could have a hard time understanding me if they are unaccustomed to the way I speak. And I must admit that there’s something to that. Second, they are used to the women’s reluctance to talk in a group setting, and they want to encourage them, even push them, to speak up. Third, they have lots of work to do, and can feel pressed for time. They don’t believe they have the leisure to wait.

So they hurry things up, thus guaranteeing that none of the women need to show the assertiveness it would take to answer my questions directly. Or even just to say that they don’t understand what I’ve said.

What we teach is less important than how we teach, because the knowledge and skills that we acquire are less important than the habits that make us what we are.

Classrooms alone have not made Vunet what he is. Much less are they the force that has shaped the clients of Fonkoze, many of whom haven’t been to school. But they do offer an opportunity. If we design classes – whether they are one-on-one tutoring sessions or larger classrooms – that encourage, even require, initiative, then we can help those whom we work with overcome the passivity they are so used to. And overcoming passivity is equivalent to setting and pursuing one’s own goals.

Haiti will not change until the Haitians who need change are constructing a vision of the Haiti they want, expressing that vision, and insisting upon it. The habit of passivity is a barrier on all three counts. Helping overcome that habit thus supports change in the most fundamental way.

Fonkoze is always learning.

That’s not to say that it doesn’t already know a lot. It does. Its success over its first twelve years is easy enough to see: From one branch and a handful of borrowers, to 30 branches, in all parts of Haiti, and almost 40,000 borrowers in its core micro credit program. And that doesn’t include thousands of clients like me who only use other services: like savings accounts, currency exchange, or money transfer.

Not only is Fonkoze serving more and more clients, it is also serving an increasing range of clients through an increasing range of programs. All of Fonkoze’s micro credit clients are poor, but its two newest credit programs are enabling it to reach clients who would previously have been much too poor to benefit from its services, clients so poor that they would be unable to manage a $25 loan.

In addition, the more one meets clients all over Haiti, the more one sees that it’s not just the organization that’s making progress. One hears story after story of women who started with little or nothing but are now run strong businesses, clients whose lives have improved in all sorts of ways.

And all this is happening in a country in which it’s hard to get things done.

But that doesn’t mean Fonkoze is or should be satisfied. Not only is the organization still far too small to serve the enormous number of Haitian families who need the help that micro credit can bring, but it recognizes the need to continually improve the support it offers the clients it already has.

For example, Fonkoze learned something last March. Its Director, Anne Hastings, was leading a guest from the Grameen Foundation on a visit to the Fonkoze branch in Ench. The Grameen Foundation is a spin-off of the Grameen Bank, the bank in Bangladesh that started the micro credit movement thirty years ago. The visitor, a man named Alam, met Fonkoze clients. He and Anne spoke to three that were of particular interest. The three were long-time Fonkoze members with perfect repayment records.

Anne and Alam discovered something striking: Though two of the three clients seemed to be doing quite well, having built houses, purchased real estate, and built up the size and quality of their businesses, the third seemed to have gotten nowhere. She had been a client as long as the other women had. She was borrowing similar amounts and, like them, she was continually repaying her debt. When Anne and Alam met her she was ready to make the final payment on her most recent loan. They found her sitting by a basket that held three onions and two potatoes. When they asked her where her merchandise was, she said that they were looking at it: three onions and two potatoes. She explained that she was about to make her final loan payment, so she had nothing left.

She had taken and repaid three or four years of credit after credit, and still lacked the capital to keep a reasonable inventory in front of her every day. Something wasn’t working.

Anne and Alam came to believe that Fonkoze’s emphasis had slipped away from where it needs to be. Its loan officers were thinking too much in terms of the size and quality of the portfolios they’re responsible for: They want, for very good reasons, to be able to say that they’re lending lots of money to clients whose delinquency rates are low. Anne and Alam became concerned that, in Fonkoze’s conversations with clients, it too focused on good reimbursement and good management of money within the business. As important as good reimbursement and good business practices are for Fonkoze clients, they are not the goal that Fonkoze sets for itself.

Fonkoze is not a commercial bank. It wasn’t founded by entrepreneurs looking to make a buck. Its mission is social: to serve its clients, to help them lift themselves out of poverty and gain a greater measure of control of their own lives. Though low delinquency rates and large amounts of lending can both be useful towards that end, neither is itself a goal.

Alam agreed to return to Haiti to lead workshops for Fonkoze clients and staff. The workshops would aim at clarifying Fonkoze’s goal and helping participants see what the key to achieving the goal is. According to Alam, the key is for clients to use their credit to accumulate assets. Putting more and more money in clients’ hands is not enough. Nor is it enough to help clients learn to run their businesses more profitably. Unless clients develop the discipline it takes to continually reinvest as much of their profit as possible back into their businesses, or into some sort of income-generating asset, so that more and more money is actually working for them, their lives may never change all that much.

So Alam and I spent two weeks traveling through Haiti, talking about asset accumulation. Not that I have any wisdom to share on the subject. All the micro credit experience is Alam’s. He’s been working in the field for 23 years. But Alam speaks no Creole. So I translated for him, ran his PowerPoint presentation, and led the participatory parts at each workshop.

Alam spends a certain amount of each meeting just talking about micro credit fundamentals. Micro credit is a thirty-year-old movement that aims to address poverty by lending poor women money to invest in small businesses. It works with borrowers who would not traditionally be viewed as credit worthy. And it works without asking borrowers to put up collateral and without reserving the right to take those who don’t pay to court.

Even without such remedies, borrowers repay their loans at a very high rate. They do so first and foremost because they are businesswomen who feel a strong need to have money in their hands. Many support themselves and their children without help from a partner or spouse. Repayment becomes a priority because they want to keep getting more loans.

They also repay because of the way the loans are structured. In the first place, loan amounts are small, and frequent installments are easy to manage. In the second place, loans are organized in a manner that makes it possible for struggling women to get help now and again. Groups of five friends enter the program together, agreeing to share responsibility to help one another pay back their loans. Installments are made at regular meetings of credit centers, collections of six-eight such groups, and if one of the women is short, the others pitch in to make up the difference. It’s a process designed to encouragement the development of a strong sense of solidarity among the women, but it also helps guarantee that repayment is prompt.

Alam spent much of the workshop driving home the importance of the solidarity among group and center members. He spoke both about ways in which Fonkoze staff can nurture that solidarity and about how Fonkoze can put it to good use. A lot of what he said must have been familiar to his listeners, many of whom have been with Fonkoze for years, but they seemed to appreciate hearing it reinforced.

The hardest part of his presentation, both for me as the translator and for those listening to him, was its main point: his explanation of how asset accumulation should work. He presented a chart showing the progress a Fonkoze client could make. The data in his chart assumed that, at the end of each loan period, an amount of capital equal to the loan amount stays in her business. According to Alam, a client who can manage her household and make her repayments out of the profit her business earns can reasonably expect to work her way out of poverty within five years. He insisted that, in Bangladesh and elsewhere, experience has shown that five years is a reasonable expectation for most micro credit clients.

This chart created long discussions most of the times we showed it. Many workshop participants insisted that Fonkoze clients would not be able to repay their loans and run their lives without using the capital – in idiomatic Creole the “//manman lajan//” or “mother money.” Alam tried to explain that this is like eating the hen that lays the eggs you sell, but many were adamant that the situation in Haiti, where a dollar-affected economy with low national production keeps living costs high, simply requires that borrowers at least nibble at that hen. And most said that they would have to take a very healthy bite.

It took some work just to help participants see that Alam was not insisting that they must run their lives and make their repayments out of their profit exclusively. The initial reaction to the chart was most often that it wouldn’t work. But once participants really understood what the chart was measuring – namely the rate at which capital would increase according to one assumption – it became possible to change tack and ask them to estimate what percentage of their loans they might reasonably expect to retain in their businesses after each credit cycle. Most estimates ranged between 10% and 50%. And we were able to follow up each estimate by showing how each would permit a woman’s capital investment to grow.

It will take a lot more work to make Alam’s lessons really sink in. It will take conversations, all across Haiti, where women think through the steps they each need to take to orient their businesses and, in fact, their lives towards achieving that sort of growth.

Figuring out how to organize those conversations will take some reflection, but the effort to think through the problem will be effort well spent. Nothing except asset accumulation can help Fonkoze clients escape from poverty. Helping clients clarify the point for themselves might be as important as almost anything Fonkoze’s education team could undertake.

Vunet Jean is seventeen. He’s from Lower Koladè, a small, extremely rural area of the Central Plateau. Koladè itself is small and rural, about an hour’s drive over a bad section of Route 3 that heads north out of Ench. Lower Koladè is a modest walk to the west, a walk down a hill, off the highway.

Vunet came to Pòtoprens with his aunt, Jidit, the mother of my godson, Givens. She spent a month in the countryside with her boys this summer, wanting to get away from the city and to make sure her sons come to know both the part of Haiti that they come from and their family. Her father-in-law, Marinot, lives in a house along the main road in Koladè itself, but she spent her time at her own parents’ house, well off the road in nearby Kalifòn.

Jidit is the fourth of her parents’ eight surviving children: seven daughters and a son. Saül, her husband, is one of seven children, so their boys have lots of family to get to know. Vunet is her oldest sister’s oldest son. He would be the oldest child of his generation except that his sister, Vunette, is a few minutes older than he is. They’re twins.

I don’t know how the discussions went that led to Vunet coming to Pòtoprens with his aunt, but I know a couple of things. Vunet had just taken the national primary school graduation exam. He and his sister both had. They had taken it for the second time, having both failed it the previous year. They repeated sixth grade after the failure, the first that either of them had ever experienced, and were waiting for the results. Pass or fail, their parents had decided that they could not pay for more education. They have five younger siblings who need to go to school as well. They arranged to send Vunette to stay with relatives in Tomonn, a small city south of Ench. She was going to learn dressmaking. Vunet would spend the fall with Jidit, and then go to Okap in December. His uncle, Jidit’s one brother, lives there. He’s Vunet’s godfather, and their family decided to send Vunet to live with him. He would try to help young Vunet find work.

It took unusually long for the results of the exam for kids in the Ench region to be published. It was a couple of weeks after al the results for other parts of the country had been published that we learned that Vunet had failed, as had everyone from his school. For that matter, so had all but one of the kids from the other school in Koladè. So Vunet resigned himself to moving on with his life without graduating from sixth grade.

But Jidit was not so ready to let it go at that. She had found over the course of a couple of weeks that she and her children very much like having Vunet around, so she started to think about sending him to school for a third attempt at sixth grade. Her youngest sister, Amiz, had just passed the exam after spending the past year attending a school not far from Jidit’s home. Amiz was in her mid-twenties, and had given up on school years before until she returned with Jidit’s encouragement. Jidit imagined that there was no reason Vunet could not succeed as well.

I don’t know how much schooling Jidit herself had. She can read Creole slowly, and sign her name. She’s able to help her boys with their preschool homework. But she cannot have gotten very far. Nevertheless – or maybe just for that reason – she is devoted to her children’s education and to education for other young people that come under her influence.

So she registered Vunet for school, promising the principal that she’d bring him the documents about Vunet – birth certificate, last year’s report card – as soon as they can be sent in from the countryside. She started going about arranging for Vunet’s uniform and for him books.

In the meantime, she and I decided that Vunet would come up the mountain and spend a weekend with me in Kaglo. We thought he’d enjoy a couple days in the countryside, especially since there’d be boys his own age for him to meet and hang around with. We imagined that, as good as he is with his little cousins, who are six and three, he might need a change of pace. Jidit knew that she could count on Madanm Anténor to welcome him warmly, which is to say that she knew he would not be hungry. Vunet himself was pleased about the plan.

We went up the hill Saturday afternoon, arriving rather late because a heavy rain had stopped us on the way. We went straight to meet Madanm Anténor. I knew that, once she knew he was with me, his weekend would be as good as arranged. We also wanted to talk to Mèt Anténor. As the principal of a public primary school, he knows a lot about the exam and about helping kids pass it. As miserable as the resources available to his school are, a very high percentage of kids always pass. So we wanted to ask his advice.

I was a little puzzled by then. I had spent enough time with Vunet to judge that he is a bright and serious young man. I did some basic math with him because it was something we could do together and I was curious as to his level, and I was impressed with how quickly he caught on to things he had not previously seen. I couldn’t quite figure how he failed the exam not once but twice. After a few minutes questioning, however, Mèt Anténor was able to make the picture very clear.

Most schools in Haiti are private businesses. Their owners’ profits can be affected by anything that affects their reputations, and perhaps nothing could affect a small primary school’s reputation more than the success of its students in the exam. The year Vunet took the exam the first time, his classmates had done poorly. Apparently, the principal tried to dramatically change that, and his effort backfired. The story that Mèt Anténor pieced together suggests that he arranged for his students to cheat, that they were caught, and that the result was disastrous for the kids. This requires some explanation.

The exam papers are centrally graded by teams of teachers whom the government pays to do the job. Answer sheets have neither the student’s name nor the school’s name on them. They are anonymous. But it’s not unusual for a principal to have connections to a teacher who’s grading papers. The principal can have his or her students leave a pre-arranged mark on their answer sheet. The grader sees the mark, and gives the student as high a grade as he or she can. There is a certain amount of leeway in the way points are allotted because partial credit is awarded for answers that are partially correct. So a well-disposed grader can have a big impact on an individual student or on a group of kids from a single school.

If, however, the wrong person – maybe I should rather say the right person – sees that the answer sheets have a suspicious mark on them, a whole school’s pile of answer sheets can be thrown out. Everyone fails. And that is what Mèt Anténor suspects. Vunet himself reported that one of his teachers had been hired to work as part of the correction team and that their principal had taught the kids in their school to mark their sheets a certain way.

So Vunet was instructed by his principal to cheat, and now he is paying the consequences. Though I’m sure he wishes he had passed the exam, he doesn’t seem discouraged, and he seems excited about the chance that Jidit is providing. He also tells me that he likes staying with Jidit, Saül, and their boys. His parents have agreed to postpone any thought of sending him to his uncle in Okap. I suppose that they’re excited about this new opportunity as well. When I asked Vunet what he wants to do when he passes the exam next year – and I very much believe he will – he said he wants to go on to seventh grade. That is still a year away, a long time in the life of a seventeen-year-old boy, but he didn’t show any sign of doubt. Like many Haitians he is excited about any chance for education. I’m excited for him as well.

Here’s a picture of Vunet that I took while he was up in Kaglo.

Vunet

This is a story about, in part, how hard it is to accomplish things in Haiti. Despite difficulties of all sorts – logistical, political, economic – Fonkoze is serving over 36,000 clients all over Haiti, and serving them well. It is making plans to serve 200,000 within five years. It is enabling all sorts of poor Haitian women to lift themselves out of poverty.

Mibale is the first major city you come to as you leave the Pòtoprens area on National Route 3, the main inland route into the north. Route 3 leads from the important market in Kwadeboukèt, on the edge of the capital, up and over the mountains that divide the Pòtoprens-area from the Central Plateau. Beyond Mibale is Ench, then Piyon. Eventually, the highway winds into Okap, on the northern coast.

I was only going as far as Mibale. I wanted to spend two days visiting Fonkoze educational programs based at its branch there. We had re-opened educational services in Mibale at the end of May. I had passed through on my way back to Pòtoprens from almost a week of translating for a visitor in early June, but I had gotten sick, so I didn’t get to see anything. This time, I had called Emile, Fonkoze’s coordinator of educational programs for Mibale, and he had planned a schedule of visits that would allow me to see several Basic Literacy classes and several classes on Sexual and Reproductive Health. We would also discuss when Emile wanted to start offering classes in Fonkoze’s third program, Business Development Skills, while I was there.

It was important for me to get to Mibale in the morning because I couldn’t be certain when the classes Emile had scheduled us to visit would meet or how far they would be from his office. He is responsible for educational activities in credit centers that can be almost two hours away by motorcycle.

So I left home early, right at daybreak. I decided to take the back way down the mountain, past Nankonble to Penye, because it would get me to a tap-tap station where I could get a truck straight to Kwadeboukèt. I’d be able to avoid downtown Petyonvil and Delma, so I might save a lot of time sitting in traffic. The part of the trip I’d make on foot is a lot longer than the main route through Mariaman to Malik, and the path isn’t as good, but it’s all downhill. It seemed worth the extra walk.

I was at the station in Penye by 7:00 and in Kwadeboukèt by 7:30. The truck and bus stops for the various destinations on the Central Plateau are crowded along a street by the market. They used to be in downtown Pòtoprens, but moved outside the city a couple of years ago during a period when the violence downtown was especially bad.

There was a pick-up truck waiting when I got to the station, and I stepped right on. It was a small, four-wheel drive with the high clearance that the road through the Central Plateau requires. It has long been a terrible road in places, with deep ruts that fill with mud whenever there’s been rain, steep hills, and large rocks scattered throughout. It took over an hour for the truck to fill up. By the time we were ready to leave, there were 21 of us crowded into the back, five sitting on the cab, fourteen on benches around the sides of the bed, and two on the floor in the middle, plus a considerable amount of luggage.

A lot of work has been done on this road over the last couple of months, so what was a three-four hour drive – less than twenty miles, I think – can now be managed, with some luck, in two. I was in Mibale before 11:00.

Emile was waiting for me at the office. He had arranged for us to visit some centers near Beladè, almost two hours by motorcycle to the east of Mibale. It was Wednesday, which is a market day in Mibale, so none of the nearby centers could meet. The centers we would visit are now served by Fonkoze’s new branch in Beladè, but that branch has no educational programs of its own. We haven’t found the funding. So some of its centers that were formerly served by Mibale still get educational services from there. The first meetings would start at 3:00, so we had just enough time to talk about how things are going and grab a bite to eat before we left.

Communication is hard between Mibale and Beladè. The branch in Beladè is without a phone. In some spots around the Beladè area, Dominican cell phones work, but that means calling Haitian phone numbers is international long-distance. In most of the surrounding mountains, there’s no phone service at all. When we got to the first center just before 3:00, we learned that the meeting day had been switched to Tuesdays. The centers’ teachers hadn’t yet been able to get that message to Emile. We spoke to them about how things were going, and they reported they were pleased. We had come a long way to leave without seeing anything, but, on the whole, Emile was glad of the change. He takes a computer course on Wednesdays, so the Tuesday meetings will be better for him. We had another center to visit, so we had no reason to suspect that the trip would be in vain. We got back on his motorcycle and headed off.

When we got to the second center it was almost 3:30. The center was at a church, about fifty steep feet up a winding path from a road that leads from the main route to Beladè into the mountains around Batis. (See: TheCenterNearBeladè for a couple of pictures.) The closest town is called Paspòm, an odd name that means “my passport.” Emile explained that the name is connected with the proximity to the Dominican border.

The class was scheduled to start at 4:00, but clouds were getting darker and thicker as we waited. Just before 4:00, heavy rains started. The center would not be able to meet that day. We had made the trip for nothing. Or not quite. Shortly after the rain started, the literacy teacher arrived, holding a sheet of plastic over her head. She had come just in case a participant showed up – not very likely, I thought. But she turned out to be right. A few minutes later, a small, fifty-ish woman arrived. She said that she didn’t know whether the class would meet. She herself had just arrived home from a trip to Beladè. But she didn’t like to miss her class, so rain or no rain she decided to show up.

The little shelter that the class meets in has no blackboard. The literacy teacher keeps one at home that she would normally bring to class, but she hadn’t wanted to carry it through the rain. I talked with the participant for a few minutes. Then she and I began an improvised class on the church’s dusty dirt floor. I scratched some letters out with a small rock, and was pleased to see how easily she recognized them. Then she drew a few herself. It seemed as though her progress thus far had been reasonably good. She was, in any case, very excited to be learning to read and write.

Emile and I tried to wait until the rain stop, but though it let up considerably it showed no sign of ending. So we resigned ourselves to getting wet and headed back to Mibale. By the time we arrived, we were thoroughly drenched. It was disappointing to have gotten almost to Beladè and then to have failed to accomplish what we set out to do, but we resigned ourselves, knowing that we’d have another day of center visits before I had to return to Pòtoprens.

Or so we thought. On Thursday, we would be visiting classes closer to Mibale, but they would be meeting earlier. Emile told me that we’d have to be ready to go by 1:00. He’s very conscientious about arriving places on time. It’s an unusual quality in Haiti, but it makes him a good colleague for me.

Late in the morning he got a call from one of his Fonkoze colleagues. The man who called was a credit agent, responsible for disbursing loans and collecting reimbursements. Fonkoze clients do not need to come to a branch to do their banking. Traveling to branches would be both expensive and time-consuming for many of them, so credit agents go to them. This credit agent was in a fix. He had run out of gas while out visiting clients, and was stuck somewhere with lots of cash on his hands. Emile jumped on his motorcycle and rushed off with a gallon of gas in his hand.

I once heard that no good deed goes unpunished. Emile’s good deed certainly didn’t. He was hurrying back to the branch when a dog sped across his path. Before he could react, he had hit the dog and taken a fall. Fortunately, he wasn’t badly injured. Nothing was broken, and he had no deep wounds. But he was scraped up pretty badly. He went to a nearby hospital, where they treated his wounds. I saw him there, and he was more frustrated than hurt. He told me that he felt badly because that meant, once again, that we wouldn’t get to visit centers. I told him not to worry, that I would come again, and that he should just think about healing.

Once I was sure that Emile was alright, I realized that there was no reason for me to spend the night in Mibale. I could save a night’s hotel bill by catching an afternoon bus to Pòtoprens. The vehicles that work these longer routes in the afternoon are, for reasons I don’t understand, less reliable than the ones that work in the morning, but it wasn’t that late just yet, so I decided to try my luck, even though it hadn’t been good so far. I bought a ticket for 75 gourdes, almost two dollars, and got on a big bus that was just about full. My seat was all the way in the back, in the very last row, so I was sure to feel every little bump of the ride, but I wanted to get home, so I took what was available. There was no telling when the next bus would leave.

The return trip took a lot longer than I had hoped. We stopped for over half and hour in Tèwouj. The driver grabbed a wretch, and disappeared under the front of his bus. When we got to Kwadeboukèt it was almost 6:00, and I wasn’t sure whether I’d get home before dark. I had to make a quick choice, either to head to Delma and up through Petyonvil or to take the same shorter route I’d taken down the hill. The shorter route was risky, because I wouldn’t be able to take it after dark. On the other hand, I thought I’d at least be able to make it to the home of Bòs Jacques St. Martin, the father of my friend Elie. Bòs Jacques and his children have been asking me to spend a night with them for a couple of years, so I thought my worst-case scenario would still be pretty good.

Bad decision-making moves as though it obeyed Newton’s laws of motion: Once it gets started it is very much inclined to continue. Deciding to head up through Penye was a bad idea. We were halfway up the road to Penye when the tap-tap I was in was caught in a real downpour. I had my laptop with me, and was sitting in the uncovered area in the back, so I quickly passed my backpack to someone dry and braced myself. I was soaked long before we got to the station, and even when we arrived there was no sign that the rain would stop.

I found an approximately-covered market space and waited for the end of the rain. When it finally did, it was dark, and I decided – once again badly – that I would give up my plan of making it to Bòs Jacque’s house. I’m not sure enough of the way to risk it in the dark. (Elie later pointed out that I could have just called his older brother, who would have cheerfully come to get me.) Instead, I got on another tap-tap, this one headed up Route Frère, to Petyonvil. From there I could walk home along my accustomed route even if it was quite late.

But I had forgotten what heavy rains do to Route Frère. It was badly flooded, almost closed, and the traffic was terrible. The tap-tap made very little progress. Eventually, I lost patience, and decided to walk. Probably another mistake. By this time, it was really dark. I gave up the hope of getting home, and decided just to hike to my godchild’s house. I knew about a back road from Route Frère to the bottom of Delma 75, the street he lives off, but I had never taken it. I didn’t imagine it could be that far.

It is. I had been walking for 45 minutes, and was starting to feel lost. There were no streetlights anywhere, and it was hard to see anything. Finally, I got lucky. A tap-tap drove by, heading to a station down at the bottom of Delma 75. I jumped on. From that station, I’d be able to catch another to the top of the road.

The long day ended well. I had called to say I was on my way, and Jidit, my godson’s mom, was waiting for me. Coffee was ready. By the time I finished a cup of coffee, she was feeding me a plate of rice with a light tomato sauce. For my sister’s sake, I should mention that the sauce was loaded with cashews. She had just received some from her father’s house in the countryside outside of Ench. She and her husband, Saül, couldn’t keep from smiling as they listened to me tell about my trip. There house is small: It’s just one room that they share with their two boys and Jidit’s nephew, Vunet, a seventeen-year-old who came in from the countryside with the cashews. Jidit put me and Vunet on the bed, and she and Saül joined the kids on the floor. She wouldn’t have it any other way.

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.