Three Unrelated Examples

Yesterday I returned to Ka Glo from a night at Frémy’s house in Darbonne. The trip involves a lot of public transportation. It takes three pick-up trucks, a large bus, and a minivan. As I was riding on the large bus that would take me from the city of Léogane to Pòtoprens, I got to thinking about how what we like to call the “free market” was affecting the character of my experience that day.

It all started because I got a window seat on what had once been an American school bus. Generally speaking, I have a choice to make when I step onto one of the large busses: I can get either a decent seat or a quick departure. Good seats usually disappear quickly, and the wait can be a half hour, 45 minutes, or even longer as the conductors fill up the rest of the bus before it finally leaves. I was in luck, however. Though my seat was excellent – not just a window seat, but near the front of the bus – we took off almost immediately. This driver had apparently decided to hope that he could fill up the bus by picking up passengers on the way.

Things on the bus were tight, as always, because the busses carry three adults on each of the benches – plus small to medium-size children, poultry, and other baggage. (I vaguely remember sitting two to a bank in such busses as a child.) My window was the emergency exit, and it was broken. The bottom edge of the frame was unattached, so the whole window was flapping up and down in the wind all the way into town. Because of the crush, I needed to stick my elbow part way out just to be comfortable, but I had to be careful to avoid getting it whacked by the window as it jumped up and down.

The broken emergency exit was just one sign that the bus was in disrepair. Many of the benches were split, torn, or falling apart, and some of the windows were cracked as well. The bus rattled and wheezed as it bounded swiftly down the highway, and every time it hit a larger bump there was a loud whack from under the frame. It was in sorry shape, and that’s what got me thinking.

The trip was costing me twenty gouds. That’s a little less than fifty cents. Most public transportation seems remarkably cheap to me here in Haiti, so much so that it strikes me that it may be a problem. One rarely sees a vehicle used for public transportation here that is in good condition. They are not public in our sense of “public transportation” because each is owned by an entrepreneur, often but not always the vehicle’s driver. Their poor condition is surely connected in part to the terrible condition of most Haitian roads and to chaotic traffic patterns that make accidents, at least minor ones, a near certainty. But I wonder too whether their condition is related to the low price of transportation, whether their owners have the money to keep them in good repair.

This is where things get hard for me. I took economics in high school but I vaguely remember getting a “D”, and frankly, at the time, I couldn’t have been bothered with such things. Frisbee, ping-pong, and re-runs of 60’s and 70’s sitcoms seemed much more important.

As far as I can figure, though, the problem with the price structure here is that the fare is determined only indirectly by the vehicle operators’ cost of doing business. It is determined more immediately by what people are willing and able to pay. Of course, if what the drivers are getting for a given route falls too low, they can choose not to work that route. But their short-term need for cash may very well trump long-term considerations like whether their business is sustainable at the price they are charging.

Not only that: My experience with Fonkoze is starting to show me that small business people here in Haiti may not even be very clear even about as important a question as whether they are succeeding or failing. Market woman who participate in Fonkoze’s basic business skills course regularly report that before they took the course they had no real control over what they were spending and what they were bringing in. That means they had no good way to evaluate whether their businesses were profitable. I suspect that drivers here are in much the same boat.

And all that doesn’t even take into account the way external factors – like regular or irregular gifts from relatives living abroad – complicate things. It might, for example, be or seem to be in the best interests of a vehicle owner to run a vehicle into the ground, maximizing immediate gains as he hopes to get a replacement from Miami when the vehicle dies. He would thus save the maintenance and repair expenses that good upkeep would entail.

Shortly after I got into my seat, a woman got on with a large basket. She quietly said “gen kasav dous pou vann” and sat down. It seems as though only the man sitting next to me and I heard her, because only we sprang into action. Kasav is the Haitian flatbread made of grated manioc. It comes in two styles, regular and sweet. It’s hard to find, but this woman was saying that she had sweet kasav for sale. As much as many of the Haitians I know like kasav, it’s a real pain to make so they don’t often produce it at home.

Nevertheless, when you can find it, it’s generally quite cheap. The woman on the bus was selling the sweet kind that my neighbors in Ka Glo and I prefer. Since it’s almost impossible to find in our area, I rifled through my pockets for change and bought all that I could. The man next to me bought almost as much. We exchanged pleasantries about how happy our people would be with us when we got home. We wondered why no one else was buying, but we joked that we had already made the woman’s trip worthwhile.

As we entered Kafou, the suburb we had to get through on the way to Pòtoprens, a man climbed into the bus. Measured in distance, our trip was almost over. Measured in time, however, we were less than halfway there. The traffic in Kafou is terrible, so we would have a long way to ride before the trip would end.

That’s what this man was counting on. He was a travelling salesperson, selling personal care products: medications of various sorts, soaps, cremes, lotions, toothpaste. Such merchants are common on mid-distance bus routes like the one from Léogane to Pòtoprens. He stood next to where the //kasav// merchant was sitting, and began to sell. He had a big, attractive voice, and soon everyone on the bus was listening. Plenty of them were buying, too.

Before long someone in the back asked the driver to stop. She wanted to get off. Generally here there are no fixed bus stops. Someone who is ready to get off yells “mesi”, or thank you, and the driver stops at the first place he finds where he can pull over. As the woman was getting off, she saw the kasav. She berated the woman loudly for not proclaiming her wares, and then held up the bus while she made a purchase. At this point, chaos broke out. People were suddenly aware of the chance to buy kasav, and they started yelling out their orders, sending their money to her at the front of the bus, and demanding their change. The salesman grimaced as he saw that his own work could not continue.

But then he smiled. With his voice booming over the cacophony, he started calling out instructions to those who were buying kasav. In effect, he joined the kasav merchant as her sales clerk. Within a few minutes, her basket was nearly empty. She was aglow with her success. When people asked her why she hadn’t advertised her wares more firmly, she answered simply that she had announced them when she got on the bus. It was as though she saw it as her customers’ problem if they had not heard her.

Having finished his work as a volunteer assistant, the salesman returned to his own business, but by then we were very nearly at the end of our route. People were getting off at every intersection and between intersections as well. He had lost his best opportunity to make his own sales through his willingness to go with the flow.

When I finally reached downtown Pètyonvil later that day, I walked to the Malik station. That’s where I would get a pick-up truck to Malik, the last town before Ka Glo. From there, it’s a half-hour uphill walk home. When I got to the station, I was surprised by the absence of pick-up trucks. Normally there would be three or four waiting for their turn to load up with passengers for the short trip. I asked someone and got the following explanation: Recent heavy rains had made the road to Malik impassible. It had cut the road in half in Bwa Mokèt. Pick-up trucks could not cross the temporary river that had been created in the ravine there.

So I started to hike up the hill. I was carrying two heavy bags, partly because I had been away for a week but partly because I had stocked up on fruit, kasav, and other groceries for the Sunday I would be spending at home. Before I got very far, I heard someone yelling “Malik” from a large flatbed truck. It seems that in the couple of hours that it had taken to determine that pick-up trucks could no longer cross the ravine in Bwa Mokèt, a man with a bigger truck, an entrepreneur, had stepped into the void. This is, I suppose, how the free market is supposed to work.

In some ways, the economy here seems much freer than the economy in the United States is. The Haitian government is incapable of the sorts of massive subsidies the American government pays – to agribusinesses, for example. I don’t know of laws restricting people’s right to organize into unions – not that there are many powerful unions here. There seems to be little government control in areas like environmental protection or worker safety, little government control of anything. Given all that, the economy seems, in a sense, free to a significant degree. At the same time, the influence that outside forces – like donor nations and multinational corporations – exert here makes it hard to feel that freedom as something serious.

I suppose that I’ve lost any sense I might once have had as to what a free market actually would be. It’s not as though I am or have ever been an economist. But it doesn’t take long here to doubt the otherwise tempting hypothesis that prices and, generally, economic circumstances are being controlled by something like an invisible hand. The hand or hands at work in Haiti leave perfectly visible fingerprints all around me. The difficulty comes in understanding to whom each fingerprint belongs.

I just spent a week in a luxury hotel along a beautiful stretch of the Haitian coast, but it wasn’t my fault. The hotel had all the trimmings, or at least most of them. The hot running water in our room’s clean, spacious bathroom was the least of it. There were manicured lawns; a well-kept koi pond with its own small flock of fat geese; a beautiful outdoor dining room, with clean tableclothes and place settings and great views of Lagonav across the bay; elegant food; a playground with a small basketball court, volleyball court, swing set, jungle gym, and mini-golf; a private beach; a swimming pool full of clear water; a scrupulously polite and attentive staff; and more air-conditioning than a soul could know what to do with.

It took me by surprise. I had been expecting to spend the week in Gonayiv, the coastal city north of Pòtoprens that was hit hardest by last year’s hurricane. Thousands of people were killed. Many more lost their homes and everything else. I’d heard that the engagement of larger aid organizations there had been ressembling nothing more than a feeding-frenzy.

I had been through Gonayiv several times on my way to the northeast, and was struck by the number of large signs advertising that this or that NGO was hard at work, helping the city and its residents rebuild. But I had also been struck by the clear evidence of the hurricane’s destructive path. There’s a new inland lake in an area just outside the city that was once inhabited. People even fish in it. There are remnants of walls and houses both in the city and around it. Some buildings in the city still show their high-water marks.

One of the organizations very active in Gonayiv is Care, and Care contacted Fonkoze for help organizing a literacy program. It had undertaken to find foster homes for children who had been orphaned by AIDS or the hurricane or otherwise. Care was providing a good deal of financial support to these homes, but was looking for ways to help them build the capacity to support themselves. Helping them do so would involve educational programs, and the educational programs would be hard to organize because many of those who need them are unable to read. Care had heard of Fonkoze’s literacy curriculum, which is built around a board game called “Korelit”, and had asked Fonkoze to send someone to teach a group of ten how to use Korelit. Fonkoze had, in turn, asked me to organize and run the workshop together with one of its literacy field workers, a young man named Elysée.

The two of us arrived at Care’s Petyonvil office Monday morning at 7:00. We were supposed to leave at 7:30. I had been surprised by the planning, because I knew that the workshop was supposed run for five days and that unless we arrived in Gonayiv Sunday night we would lose most of, if not all of, Monday. Gonayiv is a good four-hour drive from the Pòtoprens area. I had also read the contract between Care and Fonkoze and knew that we were to return from Gonayiv Friday. The would mean losing much of Friday as well, especially since few people or organizations would plan to arrive in Pòtoprens after midafternoon. To do so would mean risking arrival after dark, and that’s not prudent.

So I was unclear as to just how much time Elysée and I would have with the Care team, and this complicated our planning. Fonkoze had sent Care its standard schedule for a five-day introductory workshop. That it do so was stipulated in the contract it signed with Care. But Elysée and I wouldn’t be able to count on following it because we didn’t know how many days we would actually have: Four seemed like a best-case scenario, but we would need to know what we would do if we only had three. To complicate matters further: Elysée had been providing technical support to Fonkoze literacy teachers for almost a year, and he had done the logistical work to organize a workshop, he had never actually taught literacy using Korelit nor led a workshop.

Elysée and I had spent the preceding Friday afternoon organizing the minimally necessary topics into six half-day modules that we could present in order, whether we started Monday afternoon or Tuesday morning. An extra half-day or two with the Care team would give us the important chance to have them practice what we had done together.

When we were still sitting in care’s office at almost ten, I figured that all of Monday had been lost, but Elysée and I had done our planning, so we were calm. When we finally set out, I learned that we’d be going only as far as Monri. That’s where the workshop would be held. Monri is much closer to Pòtoprens than Gonayiv is, so it became clear that an extra half-day or two would be possible after all.

My guess was that four days would be enough to present a five-day workshop if we managed our time well – a big “if”. As much as Fonkoze tries to emphasize participatory learning, its literacy staff tends to do so through long speeches. The staff tends to model just what it wants its literacy teachers to avoid. This is a very general problem in the alternative education that I’ve seen. In any case, I felt that if we could reduce our talking time, increase the focus on putting the Care team to work, we could get more done in less time.

What I didn’t know was what the members of the team we’d be working with would be like. I’ve been very reluctant to push Fonkoze to shrink its workshops because the women that Fonkoze is preparing to work as teachers aren’t, for the most part, very educated themselves. It can take a lot of time to explain things like what a vowel is.

The Care team was something quite different, though. It too, like the Fonkoze groups we had been working with, was all women. But these women were university graduates: nurses, public health experts, administrators, and even medical doctors. They are flawlessly literate and fluent in French, but some had problems writing Creole correctly at first. Though it is their native language, some of them had never really learned to read and write it well. Nevertheless they are used to sitting in a classroom, working to master something new, so getting them up to speed was quick and easy. My own part of the workshop was easy as well: None lacked the confidence to speak in a group. And though they weren’t always the most patient of listeners, they were more than astute enough to recognize that as a problem they would need to work on.

So they workshop went smoothly. There will be problems in the coming three or four months as Care implements its program. It turns out that Fonkoze and Care were not at all clear with one another as to Care’s goals for the project, so adapting what we at Fonkoze planned so that it meets Care’s needs will take some work. But it’s work that can be done. Care understands better now what it wants from Fonkoze and is prepared to work with us to see that its goals can be met.

I myself have to wonder about the decision to put the workshop in such a luxurious setting. Fonkoze would not have chosen to do so. First and foremost because of the expense. Lacking the funds to offer even basic literacy to all its clients, Fonkoze could not justify the extra money that holding the workshop at Moulin Sur Mer entails.

But it is not only a question of money. One of the problems we struggle with is the tendency for a distance to appear between the literacy teachers we prepare and the students they are teaching. The person who’s serving as teacher may be a market woman with a busines right next to those belonging to the other market women in her class. But having been identified as a teacher, she will often tend to slip into a traditonal authority role.

We try to combat this tendency both in word and in deed. In our words, we encourage our literacy teachers to consider themselves, first and foremost, as participants working with other participants in their classes. In our actions, we try to model equality between teachers and students by organizing workshops that are as informal and as participatory as possible. So it would make little sense for Fonkoze to whisk its literacy teachers away to a luxury resort, someplace none of them would otherwise go. It would send the wrong sort of message.

But Care’s situation is different. Its highly educated staff members already belong to a class quite different from the one the families they’ll be working with belong to. There’s no denying that. They are preparing to take on a new responsibility in an area where they have no expertise. Hosting them in a comfortable space while they prepare themselves makes a certain amount of sense: They need to get started with as positive a sense of the project as possible.

When I asked Elysée what he thought of the workshop’s setting, he said that the type of person that Care is using has certain expectations. Failing to host them in comfort would only cause problems. When I asked him whether what he meant was that they are already spoiled and that we have to accept that, he smiled and said “yes.”

Whether it’s worth the extra money is a question I can not answer. I must admit that the clean bathroom was nice.

Telling people that I’m not really a doctor normally feels like a joke. Of course I’m not a real doctor, and I couldn’t be one. I’m too squeamish.

But when I got to the school that Tuesday afternoon, I knew I had to act. A small boy was sitting on a stone wall, bleeding badly from the back of his head. The teachers had known how to clean and dress his wound, and they had done what was, as far as I could tell, a good job of it. But blood was still pouring down his face. I guess they didn’t know about applying direct pressure.

So I sat down with the boy, and took his head firmly in my hands. Meanwhile, one of the teachers borrowed a donkey on which to take the boy the half-hour or so to Masikren. That’s where they would find the nearest health clinic. When the donkey arrived, they grabbed an older boy to take over for me – either to protect me from having to mount the donkey or to protect the donkey from having to carry my weight, I don’t know which. From that point on, the matter was out of my hands.

I mention the incident because it reminded me how difficult the Matènwa Community Learning Center’s situation is. I rarely think of the problems the school faces, because it generally functions so beautifully, but the school’s staff struggles hard to make it what it is.

I don’t want to say that the school is remote, because that word would imply that those of us who live miles or hours from Matènwa are where one ought to be, that the residents of Matènwa are removed from the center and that the center is us. Pòtoprens and Chicago are just as remote from Matènwa as Matènwa is from them.

But there are things that Matènwa lacks. There are two primary schools – the Community Learning Center and another – but a couple of additional ones might be needed before it will be possible for all children to go to school. And the additional schools will need to be cheap. They would have be organized so that they do not make demands that exceed the financial resources of the families they are to serve.

Matènwa has a store, but many purchases require a trip, in the best case, to one of the markets in Masikren or Nankafe. These are only 30-45 minutes by foot. In cases enough, however, one needs to go to Ansagale, the island’s major city, which is an expensive and uncomfortable hour-and-a-half’s ride on the back of a pick-up truck, or even to Pòtoprens, across the bay.

Health care is a major problem. Even for basic first aid, the closest places are Masikren and Nankafe, and the clinics there aren’t open all the time. More serious issues, anything requiring a doctor, means a trip to Ansagale. That’s where the one or two doctors that serve the island’s 100,000 or so residents are to be found.

And yet the Learning Center is a wonderful place. I’m particularly excited about it this year. I have visited regularly over the years and have been there frequently since I moved to Haiti in January.

I entered the country with twenty copies of a short book by Swiss psychologist Jean Piaget. The Learning Center is already unique among the schools I visit in Haiti in the way it creates a non-violent, student-centered learning environment for the children who attend it. Reading Piaget, however, gave the teachers a deeper sense of some of the reasoning behind a child-centered approach. They began to understand why Piaget thinks that only a child-centered approach could make sense for schools.

When we finished the book in April, the teachers wanted to start a more general study of psychology. We found a Haitian psychology textbook, and we used the teachers’ summer vacation to organize two one-week sessions that enabled us to get most of the way through it. We’ll need two more meetings to get us the rest of the way. The same Haitian publisher is right now coming out with an educational psychology textbook that will be a fitting sequel. Meeting together every two or three weeks through the school year should be more than enough to study that book as well.

When we met during their first week of school they decided that they will take leadership of the group from me. I’ll meet with one of the teachers a couple of days before each of our meetings, and plan with that teacher how he or she will lead the group. I’ll then attend the meetings as one of their participants.

But the most remarkable thing about the school has nothing to do with me or my work. It is, instead, a direct consequence of the wonderful, welcoming learning environment that the Learning Center’s staff has created. Over the last four-five years many of us who visit the Center regularly have noticed a change in the student population. The kids are getting younger and younger. Back when the school opened, Matènwa was full of young people who wanted to be in school but hadn’t had the chance. It was not unusual to have kids eleven or twelve or older starting in the first grade. By the time classes made there way to the sixth grade, they were peopled with young adults. Over time, that stopped. Kids were starting school earlier – first grade at five or six – and so finishing as children of eleven or twelve. We were all very pleased.

This fall, however, the average age has shifted again, in a surprising way. The are ten adult women, most of them mothers of students attending the school, who have decided to return to school themselves. They sit in the classes with their own children, or with kids who could easily be theirs, and learn to read and to write and to do simple math.

Of course none of us knows how this new development will turn out. It could easily become hard for the women to find themselves, day after day, sitting and learning with little kids. For the teachers and the school, the presence of students who are adults could create dynamics that are hard to predict.

At the same time, right now one can not help but be very pleased. The women’s decision demonstrates both an inspiring enthusiasm for education and an encouraging confidence in the school and the teachers they’ve chosen to make their own.

Earlier that day, I had made a mental note to have a talk with Toto. He had made a silly mistake, and I had suffered its consequences.

It started in the morning. My neighbors and I were scheduled to spend much of the day – a Sunday – working on the church they are building. It is long, slow project. They’ve been at it for several years, and are very far from finishing. They do a little bit of work any time they collect enough money to buy building materials. We were very glad to be able to spend even just a day taking a small step forward. We would be pouring a concrete cover over the large rainwater cistern that had been built into the foundation under what will be the entrance to the church. A local mason had spent two days the previous week assembling and connecting the wire supports for the concrete.

My neighbors clearly like it when I pitch in with this sort of work. My willingness to help with the church in particular may take some of the sting out of the hurt I believe that I inflict by avoiding their church services. I also think it helps them see me as a real member of the community rather than as a mere visitor. Almost as soon as the day began, I started carrying water, bucket by five-gallon bucket. It was a short walk from our water source to the spot where the teenagers would be mixing concrete. The young people like it especially when I carry things on my head. I must make quite a spectacle. So as I filled the drums they had put at the construction site, I drew a small but animated crowd of onlookers. We were having a grand time.

Toto asked a couple of the larger teenage boys to go get the sacks of cement, and that’s when he did something foolish. When I started to follow them to help with the job, he stopped me and told me not to. He said that I would not be able.

Big mistake. I insisted that I certainly could and would carry a sack or two, that I had carried cement for them in the past. I took a sack from the group’s storage shed, which is the house in which Mèt Anténor’s parents once lived, and lugged it to the construction site. I was very sore for the several days that followed. All the more so because I had seen how very easily the young boys whom I was helping did the same job.

As I scolded Toto that evening, telling him that he should never tell me that I can’t do something, especially when he’s right, we all had a good laugh. I explained that he needed to be more diplomatic, and he gravely pretended to recognize his error. Though Byton’s sisters made an appropriate show of apparent sympathy, they were evidently as amused as everyone else. It was all a a part of the evening ambiance.

One of the unfortunate aspects of the way that my work is developing is that I am rarely at home. I spend little more than one day at home each week. This, despite how comfortable I am in the house Byton built me, and despite how at ease I feel among my neighbors there. The house has a large and comfortable living room, and when I’m in Ka Glo on a Sunday evening it’s common for a crowd to gather. Though I rarely cook in Haiti – the food my neighbors still send in quantities makes it unnecessary – I do make popcorn. Byton makes limeade, and these snacks are more than enough to satisfy a gathering.

On the Sunday in question, we had a muskmelon and a couple of avocados as well, so the atmosphere was festive. Toto was there, as were Byton’s sisters: Yanick, Andrelita and Myrtane.

Their cousin and neighbor, Eli, was there as usual. For Eli it was a nervous moment. He had taken the first part of the high school graduation exam in July. Passing that first part qualifies a student for the final year of high school. It is a road block that keeps many Haitian young people from ever finishing. The previous year, Eli had narrowly failed, but he took courage and returned to try again. This year his result had been better. Though he hadn’t passed outright, he did qualify for the make-up exam in August. He had taken that make-up, and was expecting the results any day. We would learn later that week that he passed decisively, but as we sat that evening, he could not be sure of his result.

It is a strange and wonderful privilege for me to be part of these gatherings. Almost everyone sitting in the room grew up within fifty feet of my house. Only Eli arrived more recently: He moved to his Uncle’s house in Ka Glo in 1998, when his mother died. But even he grew up in Metivier, only about a half-hur’s walk away. These are people who have been together, living the same shared realities, for all of their 25 or 30 years. They know each other very, very well. I am the single stranger, the one person who does not seem to belong.

And yet I do belong. Younger than I am by a decade or more, and separated from me by a whole set of experiences that we do not share, my friends have nevertheless made me part of their crowd. They engage themselves in the goings on of my work and my life, and they accept my engagement in theirs. They know about my friends and family in the States, and about my friends and colleagues in Haiti. They tease me as they tease one another, and they casually accept the little hospitality I can offer as their due. This last point is especially important, because it gives me a comforting sense of the comfort that they feel.

In a very real sense, I’m still an outsider in our small village, set permanently apart from my friends by everything from my cultural background, to my work and my interests, to the color of my skin. And yet it’s not that simple. Perhaps it would be best to say that I am a outsider who belongs very much to the village as an outsider, as its outsider.

One of the pleasures of my life in Haiti has been to live there more and more as a foreigner who is not quite foreign. The foreign-ness that I carry around with me everywhere in Haiti gives me a sense of freedom that cultural expectations might otherwise diminish, but the comfort I have found as I’ve grown to be part of the world I live in there enables me to enjoy that freedom in ways that someone who felt more alien could not.

Penya giggled when I asked him whether he knew his right hand from his left. He’s my six-year-old neighbor. He graduated in the spring from a three-year pre-school program, and is ready to start first grade in the fall. Madanm Mèt, who is his aunt, laughed and said that the question was beneath him.

In a sense she was right. When I asked him to show me his right hand, he had no trouble doing so. But he was standing directly opposite me, and when I asked him to point to my right hand, he immediately indicated my left.

It was just what Swiss psychologist Jean Piaget said he would do. In the book I had been studying with a group in Dabòn, Piaget claims that young children are egocentric. He means it literally. They view themselves, he says, as the center of everything, and are unable to see things from a perspective other than their own. By asking Penya to identify my right hand, I was reproducing one of the examples that Piaget cites to make his case.

The discussion group was organized by a group called “Rasin Lespwa.” The name means “Roots of Hope.” Rasin Lespwa is a cultural organization that has been advancing education and cultural life in Dabòn for almost fifteen years. They run a small library – the only one anywhere near Dabòn – and arrange various kinds of seminars, lectures, concerts, contests, cultural exchanges, and other events.

This was the third consecutive year they have invited me to lead a two-week short course during the summer vacation. The first year, we read Descartes’ Discourse on the Method. Last year, we read Paulo Freire’s Education as the Practice of Freedom. This year, we chose a collection of essays by Piaget called On Pedagogy. We spent two weeks talking about various aspects of his approach to the psychology of learning. The largest number of participants were primary school teachers. The most active, however, were a high school teacher, a librarian, and a couple of recent high school grads.

For most of the first week, and into the beginning of the second, we were working hard to understand, at least in outline, Piaget’s view of how a child’s intellect grows. He is very much convinced of at least two things: First, that knowledge is something each of us creates in ourselves. It’s not, in other words, something that a teacher can simply transmit to a passive student, but must be constructed by an active learner. Second, that clarity, sophistication, and rigor of thought only develop as we interact within a group. In other words, our intellectual development and our social development go hand-in-hand, so that it is, in his view, tremendously important that schools be built around collaboration rather than individual achievement.

It was towards that middle of the second week that this second point really hit home. The group came to the realization that Piaget was not just saying that group collaboration was an interesting classroom technique that a teacher might employ to help students learn more effectively, but that he was really insisting that students could only grow as thinkers to the degree that they worked together with one another. In effect, they began to see that, if Piaget is right, they are not really teaching their students anything at all.

This was easy for the recent graduates to accept. They even liked it. They were excited by the chance it offered them to bemoan the education they had been subjected to, to criticize the teachers they had had and the schools they had attended. It was an easy pill for the high school teacher to swallow as well. For a number of years he had been carefully choosing the schools he worked in, selecting only those in which the classes would be small so that he could run them in the ways he wanted to run them. He was already emphasizing teamwork among his students.

But when the enthusiasm for Piaget’s argument had gathered real momentum, something surprising happened: Two of the primary school teachers, who were sitting next to each other, started laughing. At first they made efforts to cover up their laughter. But they couldn’t, and soon enough their laughter was perfectly clear.

We asked them what they were laughing about, and though they didn’t want to say so clearly, it became evident that they were laughing at the rest of us. We just didn’t get it. How in the world were they supposed to use student-centered education or teamwork in the classes they actually were teaching. They both worked, they explained, for a school supported by a Christain mission, where the cost of the education is very much subsidized. Parents pay almost nothing to send their children, and the kids get free school uniforms and free hot lunches to boot. As a consequence, there is an enormous and insistent demand from parents for the school to accept their kids. Maximum class size is supposed to be 35, but that maximum is largely ignored, and classes can have 40 or 50 or more. Try to imagine working with a class of 60-70 first-graders. We need not even get into the inadequacies of the classroom spaces they are assigned.

Our group had failed to consider the perspective of someone actually working in a Haitian schoolroom, so our insistence that education in Haiti take a new shape, though we believed it to be based on compelling arguments, failed to account for the reality that these teachers face every day. And it wasn’t just that I, as a foreigner, was guilty of this. The high school grads had been much worse than I had been, beginning many of their comments with phrases like “I hope the teachers who are here will . . .”

The teachers themselves would be willing to try new approaches, but not until someone can help them imagine just how to move forward. The two weeks we had spent reading together had been useful. Reading a book together, and talking about what its author said, helped all of us develop an initial picture of the kind of classroom we would like to see. At the same time, such a conversation can at best serve as a beginning for change. Actually changing the way classrooms work will take more time and energy. We’ll need to talk through specific strategies that enable teachers to imagine how they are to implement the classroom that we all hope for. And implementation is certain to be hard: Continued dialague through the whole process will be necessary if real changes are to take root. The follow-up of our seminar is in the group’s hands. We have scheduled a meeting for the end of September to discuss our plans.

In the meantime, I want to say one more thing about Piaget. The question I asked Penya is only one of the simple questions that Piaget suggests to make his point. I had already asked Penya the other one. I asked him whether he has brothers. He told me he has two, Christopher and Breny. I then asked him how many brothers Christopher has, and he said one. Then he thought for a minute and corrected himself. Christopher has two, he said, Breny and himself. At six years old, Penya was doing what Piaget says is first done at eight or nine. He was looking at the question of brotherhood from his brother’s perspective.

Now, Penya is a very bright child, and the ages Piaget gives are only averages, so I wasn’t really surprised. But I decided to try another experiment. I asked Givens, my godson, whether he has a brother. He told me that he does, Cedrick. I then asked him whether Cedrick has a brother. Givens smiled, hid his face in my lap, and said “Givens.”

Givens is not yet three, so I had to wonder whether there was something wrong with Piaget’s view. Is the perspective that he speaks from limited by the time and place of his experiments and by the population of children he interviewed?

It’s a little hard to imagine that he’s entirely mistaken. So much of what he describes seems right on. But he himself strongly emphasizes the role that our social life plays in developing our intellectual capacities. Maybe the great difference between Givens’ life and the lives of the children of Geneva lead them to develop in very different ways as well. Just how different would be hard to say, but it would be a very appropriate matter for further investigation.

There are two kinds of bad handwriting. I’ve had friends and students over the years who write in ways that I find hardly legible. I think, for example, of a wonderful student I worked with at Shimer. His name was Larry. When it came time to type the evaluations of his teachers that he would fill out by hand each semester, a team of three of us would gather in the registrar’s office to interpret what he wrote. One member of the team was a scholar with experience deciphering old manuscripts. Reading Larry’s writing was challenging.

At the same time, no one would have confused his handwriting with a child’s. It was very much developed, even elegant in places. The lines were smooth, the shapes showed Larry’s nice sense of proportions.

The poor handwriting I had when I was learning to write Chinese was quite a different matter. It lacked clarity because it lacked proportion. Its lines were wavering, as if unsure. It resembled nothing so much as the first efforts of a five-year-old child. It was the work of an unpracticed hand.

I was thinking of the different sorts of bad handwriting as I looked at the blackboard in the literacy center we were observing in the countryside outside of Twoudinò, a small city in the northeast of Haiti. It took the teacher about ten minutes to write two short sentences – they were common Haitian proverbs – on the board, and she did it with an evidently unpracticed hand.

Watching her struggle to write, and seeing the results of her struggle, brought to focus the interesting and difficult problem we’re trying to help Fonkoze solve. I’ve written about Fonkoze before. It’s a bank that offers financial services to the rural poor. (See www.fonkoze.org.) It’s also committed to offering its borrowers – nearly 100% of whom are market women – education, starting with basic literacy when necessary. Not just that, but it is committed to developing the very same market women as their own teachers.

Fonkoze helps its clients organize themselves into “credit centers” of 30-40 borrowers. The dream it is pursuing is for those credit centers to become long-term solidarity groups in which, among other things, members are regularly pursuing educational opportunities that they then share with one another. At different moments in a center’s history, different women will step forward to terach the group.

The problem is that there are plenty of credit centers that don’t have members with strong educational backgrounds. Often enough, the best candidates that Fonkoze can find within the centers to serve as literacy teachers are not all that literate themselves. They are, at least, without strong reading and writing skills.

It is in this context that Frémy and I were invited to help Fonkoze develop its program. It’s not that Frémy and I are literacy experts. Fonkoze has a number of people on its staff who have much more experience in literacy that he and I do. What Frémy and I bring is experience at preparing and coaching inexperienced teachers and at organizing simple lesson plans in Creole. We spent the spring working with Fonkoze’s most experienced literacy teacher to do four things. First, we divided the existing Fonkoze basic literacy program into twenty-four weekly units that could be taught over a six-month period. Second, we integrated a discussion component, based on an adaptation of Wonn Refleksyon, into the units. Third, we developed twenty-four simple lesson plans that would help an inexperienced teacher stay on-schedule. Finally, we help devise a way to present the whole package to new teachers of literacy in a five-day introductory workshop.

The problem is that there is no way to know whether the teachers have been able to benefit from the workshops or whether they are able to make good use of the lesson plans without observing them in the classroom. And if there was ever an example of an observer whose presence greatly effects the results of the events under observation then that example is me, sitting in a classroom in the middle of the Haitian countryside, attempting to unobtrusively watch a teacher at work.

I try not to kid myself. For all my efforts to be quiet, to be undemanding of attention, I always stick out here like the proverbial sore thumb.

The classroom outside of Twoudinò was a great example. The activity the literacy teacher was leading the women in her class through involved inviting them to divide into small groups of three-four to answer a simple and important question: How had their work in the literacy center gone so far? What had they accomplished in the six weeks they had been working together? What had they failed to do?

In the presence of the white man whom they knew to have been sent by Fonkoze, all three small groups instead answered the following question: How would you express the gratitude you feel toward Fonkoze for all it is doing for you? No one had asked that question, but it was as though my presence required the women to address it.

So what happened in front of me was not necessarily what generally might have happened had I not been there. At the same time, I gained some useful information from the visit, enough to suggest ways that our preparations are working and ways that they’re not.

For one thing, the teacher did not have the women organize the benches they were seated at into a circle. They made something between a half-circle and a straight line, facing the blackboard, instead. Our insistence that classes should meet in circles if at all possible had not been clear and convincing enough. One the other hand, the teacher behaved very much like one of the participants of the group. Though she spent a good deal of time making sure that members of each of the small groups new just what they were supposed to be working on, she eventually joined one of the small groups, becoming one of its members. She had understood, in other words, the importance we place on a teacher’s viewing herselfas a member of the group.

What struck me most, however, was what happened after the various small groups presented the large group with the answers they had agreed on. What happened was this: Nothing. Or almost nothing. Normally, the work in small groups is intended to serve as preparation for a larger discussion by the group as a whole. In Twoudinò that larger discussion never got off the ground. The teacher didn’t have a sense of how to get it moving.

A few weeks after the visit to Twoudinò, I was in the middle of a field outside the southern town of Twen observing a very different group. The group was much larger because the literacy monitor had convinced all the members of the credit center, even the ones not participating in the basic literacy class, to participate in the class’s discussion. He was an experienced literacy teacher – a primary school teacher, in fact – one of the few men who have been retained from Fonkoze’s last literacy cycle, which took place before the decision to engage members of the credit centers to teach the classes.

He gave the group’s members good clear instructions, and he worked hard but quietly through the individual and small-group work to ensure that the market women understood each aspect of the class’s task. He eventually joined one of the small groups and participated in it actively, but without dominating.

When the small groups were finished, and they had reported the results of their reflections, and it was time to encourage a broader discussion among the group as a whole, nothing happened. Just as had been the case in Twoudinò, the literacy teacher lacked a sense of what he was to do.

I’m not in a panic about this, because I believe that much of what the discussions we’ve integrated into the literacy program are designed to accomplish can happen in the small groups. If the two classes I saw are good examples, these seem to be going well. But it seems clear that the step of the process we still need very much to struggle with is its heart: helping teacher’s learn to sit in a circle with their students and lead a conversation. We need to help them listen closely and to respond in lively and creative ways to what their students say.

In one sense, we’re asking nothing more than for them to reliably serve as good partners in dialogue. And one could easily imagine that that would be the most natural thing in the world.

Clearly it’s not, and we have a lot more work to do.