We sat in the meeting room at the top of the school in Matenwa with ten little stones, a pen, and a pile of scrap paper. I was trying to determine whether he knew his numbers, one-four.

He could write them on paper. “2” gave him some problems, but he was even able to write a perfectly good “6” at one point. It soon became apparent, however, that the fact that he could write the various digits did not mean that he knew what they meant. He did not seem to connect a “1” with one thing or a “2” with two things or a “3” with three.

Jantoutou joined Vana’s third-grade class this year. He’d been friends for years with other kids in the class, but hadn’t been going to school. He is what Haitians call a “bèbè”, a deaf-mute, and such children generally miss out on the chance to go to school. There’s just no place for them in a traditional Haitian classroom, where the emphasis is on recitation of memorized texts. There is, for example, a deaf-mute who lives in Nankonble, just a little way down along the hill from where I live in Ka Glo. He’s a full-grown young man, big and muscular, and he makes a living working for the masons and carpenters who build houses in the area. He does the heavy work: mixing and carrying mortar, lugging rocks or cinder block or planks, digging holes. But he didn’t get to go to school. His ability to communicate is limited.

But the Matenwa Community Learning Center is different from almost all other Haitian schools. Teachers there focus on creating classrooms where children can work together to discover the world. The children work individually, in small groups, and in large groups to teach one another and themselves to read, to write, to appreciate and improve the environment that surrounds them, and to learn math and the other skills and information they’ll need as they grow.

And the freer, more participative approach the school takes leaves plenty of room for students who would not traditionally find their ways into Haitian primary schools. I’ve written before of the adult women who attend classes with the Matenwa kids. These women are only the most obvious example of students who would not be in primary school were they elsewhere in Haiti.

Jantoutou is an example of a very different kind. Vana is happy with his presence in her class. He is growing socially, integrating himself increasingly into the class’s activities. As long as he has something to do, he is hard to distinguish from the other kids. Only when he feels lost does he tend to misbehave. Naturally enough, I suppose. When the kids are writing or drawing, he works closely with another student, copying whatever she does. And so he is getting better at drawing, and he can write some words.

But Vana has been increasingly concerned at the difficulty of determining exactly how much Jantoutou is learning beyond how to behave in a group. It’s hard to be certain what the drawings he creates or the words he copies mean to him. The example Vana cited when I spoke to her was straightforward: He seemed to understand addition problems some of the time, but not always. She knew that he probably needed more individual attention, but with twenty-something other students to worry about, and without experience or training to help her know how to work with a deaf child, she was a little bit stumped.

I certainly don’t know any more about working with deaf children than Vana does. If anything, I know less. She is, at least, an experienced and successful teacher of kids. But I’d become fascinated during my monthly visits to the school as I got to see Jantoutou working in her class, and I was curious to see what doing some math with him would be like. So I asked her whether I could work with him for a few minutes, and she quickly agreed.

I started by making three piles of stones: one with a single stone, one with two, and one with three, and I wrote the appropriate digits under each. I used pointing in an effort to associate the digits with the piles. We then spent about twenty minutes alternating between two games. In one, I would put out one, two, or three stones, and he would have to write the correct digit. In the other, I would point to a “1”, a “2”, or a “3” on a sheet of paper in front of him, and he would have to choose the right number of rocks.

It soon became clear that he had not really been associating the digits with the quantities. He seemed to be choosing digits more-or-less at random. That is, in fact, why I know he can write a perfectly good “6.” He wrote at least two of them that I can remember, though he never had six rocks in front of him at once.

Slowly, his answers became more and more regular, more and more correct. It will take a lot more practice for me to be able to be certain that he’s getting it. I just don’t know what I’m doing. If nothing else he seemed to be having a great time.

I hope to make sitting with him a part of my daily schedule when I’m in Matenwa. Abner Sauveur, the school’s principal, spoke to me about the activity later that day, and he plans to start spending time with him as well.

My work here in Haiti is an apprenticeship. I think of myself as learning all the time. Working with Jantoutou will be a new challenge. I don’t know what he’ll get out of it, but I am very sure I’ll learn a lot.

The photo above was taken in Madanm Anténor’s dining room on January 1st, 2006. It’s room a know well because it’s what I called home in Haiti from 1998 to February 2005, when I moved into the house that Byton built. January 1st is Haitian Independence Day, the anniversary of the 1804 declaration of independence from France and Haitians everywhere celebrate it by feasting on soup joumou.

Soup joumou is pumpkin soup, and the story goes that when the French still controlled Haiti it was consumed only by slaveholders, never by slaves, so that when independence was declared former slaves decided to celebrate by consuming what had, until then, been forbidden goods. It came to be known as independence soup. When Jean-Bertrand Aristide was elected in 1991 after years of dictatorship and oppression, he called it democracy soup.

So it is a meal that means a lot to Haitians. And it also tastes great. I’ve grown fond of all sorts of Haitian foods, but love none as a love pumpkin soup.

The photo was taken midmorning, about 10:00, and so lots of soup had been consumed by the time it was taken. Andrelita and Myrtane, Byton’s sisters, had borrowed and alarm clock from Byton the night before so they could get up at 3:00 and start cooking. Their soup arrived in my house as I was finishing my coffee around 6:00.

So the fact that so much soup had already been consumed and the quantity still sitting on Madanm Anténor’s table requires some explanation. In fact, only one of the bowls on the table has any remnant of the soup Madanm Anténor herself had made that morning. Each of the other bowls contains a generous portion of soup, prepared in one of her neighbors’ kitchens: Madanm Clébert, Madanm Willy, Andrelita and Myrtane, Madanm Frénel, and Merline, Madanm Jean-Claude’s youngest daughter.

Because that’s what happens all through the morning of January 1st. Children weave through the neighborhood, carrying bowls of soup from one home to another, sent with good wishes for the year to come. Adults circulate around the neighborhood as well, wishing one another a good year and good health and that they will always continue to live together as neighbors just as they do now.

It’s a practice the merits careful attention and, perhaps, imitation: a whole neighborhood of friends and relatives that eat together once a year, celebrating their friendship, their sense of community, with the meal most meaningful to them all.

And, as I said, the soup is great. I’m not the only one that thinks so. Madanm Anténor can’t get enough of it. The photo below is of Valouloun her youngest daughter, who loves it perhaps even more than Madanm Anténor and I combined.

Happy New Year.

There’s good news.

In September, I wrote to many of you that Jacob had been killed. He was an artist-entrepreneur who had been building an arts and crafts workshop in Site Solèy, Port au Prince’s most notorious neighborhood.

Jethro

He was murdered by a gang that was jealous of his connections to foreigners or of his growing business or for other reasons that I don’t understand. His wife and children had to flee, as did the group of young people who were building the workshop with him. The workshop was destroyed, along with all its recently acquired equipment.

The workshop’s destruction was a disaster for many of those who were involved. It was the way that some of them paid for school for themselves or their kids. Some depended on the work for more than just school. It gave lots of young people work to do in a country where unemployment is said to be at least 70%. It would be hard to exaggerate the importance it had.

I thought that the story was more or less over, but it wasn’t. Soon after the crime, I learned through a mutual friend that Jacob’s wife and children were safe in hiding and that at least some of the members of the workshop were ok as well. They had gone out to the countryside to escape and to grieve.

Wisly

Some time later, I heard that two of the workshop’s members, Jethro and Wisly, would be coming to Port au Prince. They had things to do and people to see. They had determined to try to re-open the workshop, and while they couldn’t safely return to Site Solèy, they could not accomplish everything they would need to accomplish from the countryside where they were staying. I let them know though our mutual friend that if they needed a safe place to spend a few days while they were in Port au Prince – someplace close enough to allow them to run their errands in the city but far enough to be out of harm’s way – they could come to Ka Glo. I soon got an e-mail from them in the countryside letting me know that they liked the idea and would come.

That was a few weeks ago, and since then they’ve been living in my house. I can’t really say that they’ve been living with me, since I myself haven’t been home more than a few days since mid-November, but they’ve been in the house, with Byton making friends in Ka Glo and getting to work. To see photos of them as they work, click TheArtists.

In the meantime, they are creating their wonderful cards again, and looking for ways to sell them. They are business people, and want to get their business running again.

Some of you have seen their work, so know its value. Here are a few photos that can give one at least some sense of what they do:

We hope that very soon their website will be running again and that they will therefore be able to accept regular orders directly. Meanwhile, orders can be placed by e-mailing me at [email protected]. The cards are ninety cents each, and the price includes an envelope. 100% of the sale price goes to the artists.

They have lots of different designs, but it’s not right now possible to accept detailed orders. Please specify, however, whether you would like religious or secular themes – if you have a preference.

Please order by January 10th. Delivery will take place in early February.

I had heard that one of the thirty-something candidates for the presidency of Haiti is a woman, but I had yet to see her campaign posters. But last week her posters appeared all over the place and all at once. Her name is Judy C. Roy, and her slogan is pretty straightforward. “Vote fanm nan” means, “vote for the woman.” It says nothing about her professional experience or her opinions, but it does set her apart. All the other candidates are men.

The other slogan that has caught my attention during these last weeks belongs to Simeus Dumarsais. He’s a Haitian-born American billionaire, and banners proclaiming his candidacy read “Yon lòt chemen ak milyonè a.” That means, roughly, “A different path with the millionaire.” He has decided, in other words, to identify himself as both different and rich. Here’s the banner itself:

I have been careful to stay out of electoral politics in Haiti. It’s not that I see my work as apolitical or as neutral. I’m not sure that any public activity either can or should be neutral. And my activity is, perhaps, especially political: The only appropriate basis for public decision-making is dialogue, and building the skills and habits that make constructive dialogue possible is the central goal of my work. But it would be improper for me to enter into discussions in favor of any of the parties or candidates that are running for office. Foreigners, especially Americans, have wielded too much influence in Haiti for much too long. Not only that, I couldn’t contribute competently to such conversations even if I wanted to. I just don’t understand things well enough. I don’t know what Haiti needs from its government and I don’t know what the various candidates might be able to offer.

The preliminaries leading up to the election are fascinating, though. So I follow news when I can, and I listen to any conversations I come across.

Perhaps the most interesting story in this election thus far has centered on the candidacy of Dumarsais. He’s been in the States, making his fortune, for something like forty years. And he has American citizenship.

And that’s the curious point, because the Haitian constitution seems to proclaim rather clearly that anyone with dual citizenship is ineligible. And the provisional government and its electoral council proclaimed Dumarsais ineligible.

But that’s not the end of the story, because Dumarsais sued and the Haitian Supreme Court, for reasons I don’t understand, declared him eligible after all. The government responded by creating a special committee whose charge was to evaluate the citizenship of each of the candidates. The committee declared that Dumarsais and two other candidates are not Haitian citizens and, so, it invalidated their candidacies. The matter seemed decided and ballots were ordered printed.

But last week, the matter opened up again. The Supreme Court re-affirmed, still for reasons I don’t understand, that Dumarsais’ candidacy is valid. Surprisingly, the government fired the justices – actually announced their retirement. This although the Haitian constitution does not appear to give it the right to do so. Within days, the government arranged to swear new justices in, but the apparently-though-illegally fired justices and their supporters blockaded the ceremony. A few days after that, the government swore in its new judges, but installed them in offices in the Presidential Palace rather than in the White House.

It’s hard to guess where this all might lead, with a first round of voting scheduled for January 8th and ballots already printed. If someone had wanted to undermine the possible legitimacy of the election, then the manner in which Dumarsais’ candidacy has unfolded would have been a clever way to do it. If the Electoral Council is forced to include him, over their objections and over the apparent letter of the Constitution, then the election will most likely have to be delayed, again, because ballots will need to be reprinted. And we are already near two years of a provisional government whose constitutional mandate would have been to hold elections within three months. If he is excluded, it will be at the price of ignoring the Supreme Court.

Whether the coming election can be legitimate under any circumstances is a serious question. One possible candidate was blocked from participating by his arrest. The electoral council ruled him ineligible because he could not deliver his candidacy papers personally. At the time he was, and in fact still is, in jail. Not that he’s been charged with anything. His imprisonment could easily appear to be a strategy for excluding him from the ballot. And it might just be that.

Voter registration was problematic. Distribution of voting cards to those who did register continues to be difficult.

At the same time, it’s hard to imagine what alternative there is to at least accepting whatever the election’s results might be. The frontrunner appears to be Rene Preval, the man who replaced Aristide in 1995 and was replaced by him five years after that. He has been strikingly quiet through the campaign thus far, bearing himself like a classic frontrunner. He recently said that he would not “engage anyone in polemics.” This seems only to promise that he won’t discuss any differences he might have with other candidates.

The current government has no mandate to continue governing, if it ever had any mandate to govern in the first place. It can’t reasonably continue. And replacing it by any means other than election would surely be less legitimate than even a poor election would be.

And plenty of Haitians are engaging themselves in the current electoral process, at least in the sense that they’re willingly talking about the different candidates, both in terms of their strengths and weaknesses as possible presidents and in terms of their respective chances of winning. One hears discussions everywhere: on the streets, in the busses and trucks that serve as public transportation, on front porches, in places of work, and elsewhere. This is true even though many of those who involve themselves in the conversations will say, at the same time, that they don’t really believe that there will be an election and that, if there is, the results don’t matter because the outside world will impose whatever governance on Haiti it desires. Former President Aristide was, after all, elected.

But there are, as I said, few alternatives to hoping that the election will go reasonably well and that its result will be accepted by most. At least there are none that I can see.

I’ve been trying to figure out a way to explain the enormity of the challenge that Fonkoze faces. It’s not easy to convey.

Let’s assume I’ve already made it to the appropriate bus station. The trip to any one of them, starting from Ka Glo, is about two hours, but I’m happy to make it. It’s the price I pay for the luxury of living in the countryside, rather than Port-au-Prince, and it’s not really part of the point I want to make anyway.

Getting to Trouin from the station in Carrefour is, at least, uncomplicated. The simplest way is to climb onto a truck headed to Bainet, in south-central Haiti. The trucks that make this trip are large, open crates. They fill with cargo, stacked about seven or eight feet high, and passengers climb onto the top. If it rains, you get wet. If there’s dust, you are dusted. You hang on as best you can as you’re shaken and tossed along the road through Carrefour past Léogane up the mountain on the road towards Jacmel. You turn off the paved road at St. Etienne, and take the long, rocky, narrow road down towards Bainet. About an hour later, you hop off in Trouin. In all, it’s about four bone-shaking hours.

Or it should be. I was once on one of those trucks headed back from Trouin when an dispute erupted between the conductors and the passengers as to the correct fare. So the truck just stopped for over an hour, in a downpour, while the argument raged. I eventually gave up, got down, and walked the last hour through the rain to St. Etienne, where I got a bus back to the city. It’s the sort of thing that happens sometimes.

Getting to Baptiste from the station in Croix-de-Bouquets can be almost as simple, if you’re lucky. There are a couple of busses that make daily trips between Croix-de-Bouquets and Belladère. From there, you hire a motorcycle for the 90 minute ride southward into the mountains.

The busses are uncomfortable even on good roads, like the excellent one between Lascahobas and Belladère. You sit packed three to a bench that wouldn’t carry more than two in the States. That’s three adults: bags, backpacks, sacks, chickens, children and other luggage don’t count. If you’re on the aisle, you’ll be looking for something to do with 50% or more of your – excuse me – rear end, because it won’t all be on the bench. If you’re not on the aisle, you’ll be trying to figure out if there’s a way to add an additional joint to your legs, a way to fold them one more time, because the distance to the seat in front of you won’t be quite enough.

If you don’t get one of those busses, you’ll be taking a similar one to Mirebalais instead. Then it’s the back of one pick-up truck to Lascahobas and another from there to Belladère, where you get that same motorcycle into the mountains. It’s a full day’s work.

To get to Trou du Nord, you take a bus to Cap Haitian from the station at the base of Delmas. The ride takes six-eight hours if all goes well, cramped into those same busses. From there, it’s a twenty-minute walk to the northeast bus station, where you get an hour-and-a-half’s ride across rotten roads to Trou du Nord. It’s an hour or two longer if you need to go to Fort Libertè or Ouanaminthe. All on those busses that I’ve already mentioned.

My point in all of this is not to complain about a hard and uncomfortable job. It turns out that one gets used to such circumstances rather easily. As my friend Erik was reminding me recently, those trips can actually be fun as long as your health is good. A camaraderie can develop among passengers, and it’s an instructive pleasure to be a part of it. People talk about themselves, their family, their work, their country. All sorts of things. They exchange advice and sometimes teasing. They tell stories and they jest.

My point is rather, as I said, to talk about the enormity of the challenge Fonkoze takes upon itself as it attempts to bring banking and educational services into the countryside. I’ve written before about others aspect of Fonkoze’s challenge. I’ve written of how hard it is to prepare poorly educated women to teach other women how to read and to do so quickly and inexpensively. This would be formidable in any environment. I’ve also written about how hard it is to support such teachers through site visits because one’s presence as an observer so forcefully affects what one sees. All this apart from how basically hard it is to help a busy adult, living in a culture where there’s little reading and little to read, learn to read and write.

Fonkoze’s mission is more difficult still because it aims to reach rural women. It would be difficult enough to serve women in Port-au-Prince and a few major cities, but Fonkoze has as its goal serving women in Haiti’s hard-to-reach corners, and that’s another matter entirely.

Because the challenging voyages I just described only get one to Fonkoze’s offices in the countryside. (At least the trips to Trouin and Trou du Nord. Baptiste is somewhat different.) Getting all the way to the credit centers where educational services need to be offered can involve much more time and trouble. In other words, all that traveling still doesn’t get me into the field in any meaningful sense.

When I visited Trouin, the literacy supervisor, Rony, and I had an hour’s trip to the credit center in Meyè that we wanted to visit. And that center wasn’t one of his more distant ones. Though his office is already in the countryside, he’s responsible for centers for which site visits require overnight stays. In Trou du Nord, the supervisor, Saül, has a motorcycle to use. But he still has site visits that require an hour’s ride or more.
If you’re at Fonkoze’s Lagonav office, which requires not only between one and four busses or trucks, but also a boat, you are still a couple of hours by motorcycle from some of the more remote centers. And the roads are bad enough to make the motorcycle trip genuinely hard riding. Even for someone like me, who sits as a passenger behind the driver, who’s doing the real work.

And it’s not as though Fonkoze can choose to save its resources – its time, energy, and money – by not sending its staff to the more distant centers. Not only do the literacy teachers at work in the centers need support, but even just the credit operations require extensive travel because Fonkoze’s clients cannot be required to come even to the branch offices in the countryside. They do not have motorcycles, and they’re hard at work almost constantly building the businesses they’ve created with their loans. The couple of hours that a round trip to a Fonkoze office would require is out of the question for them. So Fonkoze credit agents take loan applications, disperse loans, and accept payments during visits to the scattered credit centers. And Fonkoze literacy supervisors get out into the field to coach teachers, encourage and evaluate students, and collect data.

And the fact that Fonkoze is a financial institution, and the fact that it spends money it receives from other institutions that have a range of their own reporting requirements, all means that, as scattered as Fonkoze’s branch offices are, and as very much more scattered still as its credit centers are, they all require a close, unified oversight. And there are over twenty branches, all over Haiti. Some of them are easier to get to than the ones I’ve mentioned, but many are not.

Trying to imagine how it’s all supposed to work for Fonkoze’s 27,000 clients, at all of Fonkoze’s 20+ branches would be overwhelming at least for me. So we just try to focus on getting jobs in front of us done. Sometimes we succeed.

That’s what makes all the traveling I do for Fonkoze really worthwhile. I see Fonkoze’s success in the excitement of its clients who are learning to read or to build their businesses or to talk about sex and protect themselves from AIDS. I get to talk to them individually and in groups. So I know that, even if we not accomplishing everything we’d like to do, there are lots of rural Haitian women pleased with what we are able to do.