We were standing in front of the Fonkoze office in Twou di Nò at about 7:30 Sunday evening when a shout went through the town. Twou di Nò is a small city in a valley, about halfway between Okap, Haiti’s largest northern port, and Wanament, a city near the Dominican border. I was there with a group of Fonkoze literacy supervisors. A week-long introductory workshop for beginning literacy teachers was to start the next day.

I wasn’t at first sure what the shouting was about. The excitement of a street fight? A political demonstration? A Brazilian soccer victory? Political news? Another coup d’état? Then I saw a flickering streetlight, and someone explained that it was the first time municipal electricity had gone on since February. The excitement for what promised to be an evening of electrical power was both general and intense. It seemed auspicious.

And a good sign was more than welcome. Planning for the workshop had been complicated in a number of ways. Until the last moment, for example, I had not known for certain whether I would be working with 20 teachers or 60. Also, the materials we had planned on using had not been produced in time to make the long drive from Pòtoprens with us. And it wasn’t clear how many of the 28 teachers who we were planning for would in fact be able to sacrifice five full days to a literacy training. These prospective teachers were market women who had agreed to take on the challenge of helping other market women learn to read. They would be giving up five days of work, which was especially hard for them because it was coming at a moment when payments on their Fonkoze loans were due.

But Frémy and I had committed ourselves to working with Fonkoze, and since he had to be away in the south of Haiti, I was with the Fonkoze literacy team by myself.

I’ve written about Fonkoze before. It’s a remarkable organization, providing micro credit to the small merchants who are the backbone of the popular Haitian economy – such as that economy is. It is the largest provider of financial services to rural Haiti using a non-for-profit/for-profit hybrid structure that allows it to establish banking services where commercial banks would not bother to go.

One of its most important services is micro credit. Fonkoze borrowers, almost exclusively women, use small but ever increasing loans as they develop their businesses. And Fonkoze doesn’t limit itself to simply lending them money. It provides educational programs that support the women in their work and in their lives. There are basic literacy classes for non-readers and classes in business and reproductive health for those who already read.

Planning for the workshop had been difficult in part because it had been rushed and in part because we had tried to work around a schedule that had the four members of the team in different parts of Haiti almost all the time.

It had, on the other hand, been made easier because we were adapting the program Fonkoze already had in place rather than inventing something whole cloth. The core of the program would still be Jwèt Korelit, the literacy game invented by Fonkoze’s founder. We would add regular Wonn Refleksyon discussions to help the participants open up to the habit of thinking critically together. In addition, we would create simple lesson plans that would help inexperienced literacy teachers run the classes. Fonkoze would provide an experienced literacy trainer, Renand, to develop the Jwèt Korelit part of the plan. Frémy and I would help with the Wonn Refleksyon part and with the process of writing lesson plans that combined both. Elysée, Fonkoze literacy supervisor in Twou di Nò, would coordinate, format, and type the work.

The lesson plans were particularly important. Fonkoze had made a decision about the kind of literacy teachers it would recruit. In the past, it had recruited those most willing and able to do the teaching. This meant that the teachers were mostly men working with groups made up exclusively of women. Sexism is intense in Haiti, as it is in many places, so that literacy classes that should be liberating would end up simply reproducing the oppressive conditions that many of the women experience all the time. They would end up sitting quietly while their teachers explain the world to them, even repeating the philosophies of equality and liberation that they would be fed. But they would be unlikely to develop much of their own initiative and they would be slow to talk frankly about the issues that they face ever day.

Fonkoze had decided to try something new: to recruit all women teachers from among the same groups of borrowers that the literacy students would come from. But this meant that the teachers would be unlikely to have any teaching experience at all, so lesson plans that would help them decide what they needed to do in the classroom each day, written simply enough as to be easy to follow, seemed like more of a necessity than an option.
The group creating the plans met rarely through the early spring, just often enough to have some sense of the progress we were making. By late March, we had decided we needed to begin implementing by mid-May. We knew we would need to start with a workshop, so we chose a week based on what we thought was the schedule Fonkoze would be working with – it turned out that our information was inaccurate by a month – and on the other commitments we each had, and scheduled one.

This is where the complications started. I had initially believed from conversations with Fonkoze staff that this initial workshop would be for Twou di Nò literacy teachers. My understanding was that there would certainly be fewer than 30, probably by a lot, and so it I figured that it would be easy enough to do the Wonn Refleksyon part of the workshop myself. Leading a Wonn Refleksyon workshop has a lot in common with teaching a Wonn Refleksyon class, and large numbers make it hard. About a week before the workshop, I learned that teachers would be added from two nearby cities, Fò Libète and Wanament. They would bring the numbers up above 60.

I panicked, but I needn’t have. Within another three days, I got word that Fonkoze hadn’t been able to arrange for the other teachers to participate.

Even so, when I got to Twou di Nò and figured out that we didn’t have the materials I had planned on using, I had to try to improvise. I had a USB drive with a couple of images that I thought we could use, but only one of the images turned out to usable, because the places in Twou di Nò that could print an image didn’t have the software that the others were stored with. So we printed the one image and made copies. When we tried to get photocopies of a second image I had with me, the copy store declined. It was too dark, they said, so it would use up too much toner. Between the image, a pair of Haitian proverbs, and the theme of literacy, I had enough material to lead a day’s worth of introductory activities.

As the day’s activities opened, another problem emerged. In addition to the 28 women who came as prospective literacy teachers, there were six Fonkoze literacy supervisors, all men. The two parts of the group had wildly different characteristics, and through most of the morning it was all I could do to prevent the supervisors from dominating. They had all participated in Wonn Refleksyon before. What’s more, part of what made them literacy supervisors is their outgoing, talkative natures. They had a lot to say, and it was interfering with the 28 teachers’ getting involved. By midday, that problem too seemed somehow to solve itself. The literacy supervisors withdrew as they themselves saw that they were imposing.

That first day spent participating in discussions gave the women an initial sense of what Wonn Refleksyon discussions are like. Tuesday afternoon, I led another session, adding a lot of explanation as to what the role of the discussion leader is at each of the discussions stages. Thursday morning, the group split in two and four of the women volunteered to try their hand at leadership. My sense was that one was quite good, two were managing, and the fourth has a long way to go.

We don’t know exactly what we can expect of the program here, but a lot is at stake. Fonkoze’s funding for the program involves a lot of pressure to meet very specific goals at very specific times. By changing its approach to literacy at such a critical moment, it has chosen in a sense to shoot itself in the foot. Things could go wrong, and a lot would be at stake.

But perhaps shooting oneself in the foot is the wrong image. It’s too violent, too destructive. Maybe it would be better to say that Fonkoze has painted itself into a corner. The institution has decided to meet or miss its goals with literacy teachers of a sort that it has not generally engaged before.

Painting oneself into a corner could be a problem. But if you’ve chosen the corner carefully, and the corner is just where you want to be, painting yourself in might be the right thing to do.

Here in Haiti, I think of myself as being part of a long-term exchange. The people I live and work with have a lot of experience that I don’t have, and so I learn with and from them constantly. At the same time, I bring them experience of my own that’s quite different from theirs: most importantly, perhaps, the different types of classrooms I’ve been in, whether as teacher, student, or observer. As a student or an observer, I’ve seen a lot of very good teachers working in a number of different ways, and I have colleagues here who show a lot of interest in learning from what I’ve seen.

When I think of the exchange possibilities that my presense here opens up, however, it would be a mistake for me to focus to exclusively on what I myself can and cannot share. My work here brings me to different parts of the country. I travel within Haiti much more than my Haitian colleagues can, and so I have the chance to see and learn from a wider range of them than they themselves normally could. I can thus serve as a resource for my Haitian colleagues not only by sharing what I have, but by making it easier for them to share with one another. One way for me to do this is by helping to organize vizit echanj, or exchange visits – visits my colleagues make to see one another at work.

“Toma” is a nickname, but it’s the only name I’ve ever heard Abraham use. He is a veterinary worker from the mountains outside of Darbonne. It’s not that he’s a full-blown veterinarian, but he has had considerable training over a number of years. He gives vaccinations and first aid to livestock in the area he lives in and gives advice and information to the farmers whose livestock he treats.

And that’s not all he does. The farmers he works for can’t really pay very much for his services, so, like many Haitians, he stitches together a living for himself and his family with a range of activities. He does a little farming. He teaches science in a local primary school, and literacy in an afternoon school for adults.
It is because of this last piece of his work that I am getting to know him. He participates every Saturday in a workshop that my colleague Frémy and I are leading for literacy teachers in the countryside outside of Darbonne. For Toma, it’s a two-hour hike each way to participate, but there are no roads that lead to where he lives, so he’s used to walking, and the hike doesn’t seem like very much to him. He can be counted on to arrive early for the 8:00 AM literacy team meeting before our weekly, two-hour workshop begins at 9:00.

From the very first, Toma inpressed me with the frankness and the seriousness of his contributions – both the questions he would ask and the comments he would make. So when I mentioned one day that I visit the Matenwa Community Learning Center almost every week, and he said that he had heard of the Center and was interested in how it works, I was happy to ask him whether he would like to join me on one of my trips. He would get the chance to see how the school works – visit classes, a faculty meeting, a discussion group – and to talk to the teachers about what he sees.

He jumped at the chance, and there are good reasons why he would. On one hand, the Center is rightly developing a reputation in and even beyond the circles that I travel in for doing something quite remarkable. It is a school that works without the belts, paddles, humiliating words and other painful punishments that characterize most Haitian schools. Even Haitian educators who are attracted by the idea of teaching without hitting or humiliating their students can have a hard time imagining how it really works. It’s something that they have probably never seen. Toma specifically mentioned his questions as to how the Matenwa teachers maintain discipline as one aspect of their work that interested him most. On the other hand, the trip from Port au Prince to Matenwa and back is a little bit complicated and, in Haitian terms, rather expensive. It would have been hard for him to arrange the trip himself, and hard for him to finance it.

And there was another barrier as well. Though we in the States may think of Haiti as an island, and though it’s full of lovely beaches, most Haitians live away from the water. Separated from it enough that they cannot swim. Toma can’t. He smiled to me as he described a trip to the beach in Jacmel and showed my the spot low on his calf that marked the depth of the water he was willing to wade in. He was therefore nervous about the trip across the bay to Lagonav and pleased at the chance to make it with me.

So we met in Pétion-Ville one Sunday afternoon, in the one place there he was familiar enough with that he could easily find, and we hiked up to Ka Glo to spend the night. We left for Lagonav Monday morning.
The trip to Lagonav has become more complicated lately. We used to simply go to the Okap bus station in Port au Prince, where we would board a bus to St. Marc that would take us all the way to Carries, where the old Duvalier seaside mansion that now serves as the passenger wharf to Lagonav is. But the Okap station is right next to Cité Soleil, and I’ve beed strongly advised to avoid the area as much as possible for safety reasons. So I’ve been take a series of rides from Pétion-Ville, through Croix de Missions, to Cabaret, to St. Médard, to Carries. It’s six different rides to get to the wharf.

Toma and I got there without much trouble, and we walked onto the bow of the sailboat, where I generally sit, as the boat was just beginning to fill. The sea was extremely calm, but as we stepped onto the bow, it dipped and rose, and I looked to Toma to see how he was. He seemed calm nough to me, but when I suggested that we get back off the boat to grab a bite to eat – we hadn’t eaten before leaving in the morning – he was very quick to agree. We ate, returned to the boat, and were off in a few minutes to Lagonav. From Anse à Galets, it’s one ride, but a hard one, up the hill to Matenwa. We arrive just in time for the regular Monday evening faculty meeting. We sat with the teachers for over two hours as they discussed various pieces of school and community business. The next day, Toma spent the morning observing classes as I worked in Todd’s house, the house in Matenwa that has come to be my home. Wednesday, Tma watched more classes, then he participated in the discussion group for teachers that I lead there almost every week.

Todd’s house is small, with one large bed that Toma and I had to share, so we had lots of time to talk over the course of the couple of nights we were there. It was instructive to watch how a curious and thoughtful Haitian reacted to seeing the school in Matenwa that has grown so dear to me.

He was especially impressed by a couple of things. First, that at the faculty meeting it would have been had to guess which of the teachers is the principal. The whole faculty speaks so comfortably, so informally, with one another, they speak as such equals, that often the only sign that Abner is in charge is that he’s a lot older than the others. Toma was struck that this was a group of people that really works together. He also paid close attention to all the little disciplinary techniques he saw the teachers use: counting to five, sitting a disruptive student in a time-out chair, making students stand. He saw, however, no corporal punishment and no humiliation, and a school full of students who were nevertheless busily at work. And he was impressed by their work: they way even little ones already read Creole well, the way the read for understanding rather than just to pronounce the words.

Wednesday afternoon we strolled over to Bòs Wolan’s wonderful vegetable garden, where Toma was inspired by all the very many little things Wolan is doing to make he garden grow. He decided on te spot that he would try to start a similar garden of his own, a decision that Wolan generously supported with a gift of carrot, cucumber, zucchini, leek, and other seeds. That evening, Abner came by to talk to Toma about the visit. Toma got a sense of the history of the school, and Abner got a sense of the impression it made on a thoughtful Haitian observer, seeing it for the first time.

We had an easy voyage back to Carries the next morning, delayed by the long, wonderful rain that finally came to Lagonav Wednedsay night. Toma and I parted in Port au Prince. He headed straigt to Darbonne. I would head there after spending a short night back in Ka Glo first.

It’s hardly worth saying that Haiti is full of wisdom and experience. As a foreigner here, however, I can have the tendency to distract the people I’m around from sharing and developing what they know. For all sorts of reasons, they can tend to focus too much on what they think I might know instead. And I can easily slip into the same mistake, even though I, of all people, should surely know better. Cultivation exchange among my Haitian colleagues can thus be an important part of my work. Both for them and for me.

1. Once I was strolling in downtown Annapolis, Maryland. I passed a seafood restaurant that was holding a promotional event that involved boiling a lobster. An animal rights group was protesting in front of the restaurant. I walked over to the protesters and chatted for awhile. Though I had already been a vegetarian for almost ten years by that time, it had never occurred to me to protest the consumption of meat by others, even when that consumption involves boiling a creature alive. I find it hard to think of lobsters as anything but big bugs.

What I remember most about the protesters was the one I spoke to who was wearing leather. He thought it wrong, I suppose, to put a dead creature in his mouth, but not to put one on his feet.

I stopped wearing leather several years after I stopped eating meat, and though I’ve ended up with leather on me several times in the years since – a belt, a pair of shoes – for the most part the principle has held just as my decision to eat no meat has held for the most part as well. My decision was helped a few years ago when one of my former students from Shimer, perhaps pitying the embarrassment I felt at wearing black sneakers as the Dean at a Shimer graduation, sent me wonderful dress shoes from a company called “Vegetarian Shoes.”

Avoiding leather footwear in Haiti has be easy so far. I wear sandals almost exclusively, rather fancy American ones for the most part. I had a pair of Tevas for several years, then I bought a pair of Chakos. I’ve liked them so much, and they’ve lasted so well, that I haven’t had to give them another thought.

Until recently. Over the last months, it was growing ever clearer that my Chakos were just about done. So I began thinking about what could take their place. I had been very reluctant to buy another pair for two reasons. On one hand, they are expensive. I live around people who struggle to get by, who struggle to send their children to school. Under the circumstances, it seems odd to spend $100 on shoes.

On the other hand, I wonder whether either Chakos or Tevas are the right shoes for me. And this is where my objection to leather gives me problems. My Chakos, for example, are not leather. They’re made of what appears to be a high-tech synthetic material. Several high-tech materials, actually. And they are made to last. Though they were getting very close to uselessness, the very great majority of the material they are made of remained intact. It’s trash. And it’s hard to imagine what it can ever be but discarded plastic in a country where trash is a problem too easy to see.

So I waited. When I came here in January, I almost decided to buy a new pair, but I didn’t. When I was in the States in April, I almost bought new sandals once again, but I decided not to. I suppose I was hoping without quite telling myself so that the last damage to the sandals would never quite be done.

But I was walking down the steep hill from Mariaman to Malik on Friday and I slipped on the road wet from a night’s rain. I caught myself well before I fell, but I felt my foot move in an odd way, and I knew what happened without looking. The last threads that were holding the right sandal’s strap together tore through.

The sandals were finished.

I was in a bind. I made it from Malik to Darbonne, and then borrowed sandals from a friend. They got me through classes on Friday and Saturday, and then back to Pétion-Ville. When I got to the market there, I went by to see Madanm Jean-Claude, a sandal merchant who’s the mother of several of my friends. I spent a little less than three bucks on a temporary fix: a pair of plastic Chinese bath sandals that I can at least keep to wear around my house and to offer to guests.

Tomorrow I will wear my bath sandals down to Port au Prince. I’m going to a street corner where Haitian cobblers sell sandals that they make. The sandals are leather, but they’ll cost a lot less than my American Chakos, and the money I pay will go to a Haitian craftsperson rather than the stockholders of an American manufacturer. They should last well, but that remains to be seen. Because they’re made here, they should be reparable here as well. At least I hope so. And as the leather rots, it will return to the earth it came from. Ashes to ashes. Though I’ll be sorry to have another creature’s skin on my feet, it seems like the right thing to do.

2. Today I joked with Frantzy that he and I would have to schedule a reyinyon gran moun. A “meeting of the adults” is part of the traditional process leading towards marriage in Haiti. The parents of a man who wants to marry pay a visit to the woman’s parents’ home. The meeting can involve more than parents as well. Aunts, uncles, older siblings or godparents might be involved. My friend Saül has told stories both of his parents’ visit to his in-laws and of the role he’s played in such meetings for his younger brothers as their times have come. If the meeting goes well, the adults decide that the marriage can go forward and the set a date.
My joke had to do with Frantzy’s male puppy. It had been chasing my Lilly all over the place for at least a couple of days.

Lilly’s not just a little puppy any more. She’s nearly full grown at ten months, and the array of male dogs that follow her around our yard day and night shows that she could start producing litters of puppies any time now. So she has an appointment with a veterinarian on Wednesday. She will be spayed. I should have had it done long ago, but I never quite got around to it. It can’t wait any longer.

Just as it seems strange to buy leather sandals, it feels odd to take my dog down to Pétion-Ville to be spayed. The operation will cost 3250 Haitian gourds, or about $85.00 US. It may not seem like much, but most of the people I know here make less than that in a month. Not only that, but few of them have simple access to good medical care. So I feel as though I’m doing something for a dog that I cannot do for the people who are my friends.

My neighbors all approve of my decision. Then I tell them how much the operation will cost, and they smile. Or even laugh. One older women was especially amused. Then I pointed out that the are people we both know who could profit from better acess to medical care, and she agreed with a frown.

Even so, the lives that most dogs here lead really bother me. Litter after litter is born. A few puppies survive; most either starve or die other rotten deaths. They are beaten with sticks and with rocks, treated as thoroughly expendable, feelingless beings. Some of the dogs I’ve come across in Haiti are among the most pitiful beings I’ve ever seen. The last thing I would want is to see puppies born in my yard, with no prospect of finding a home anywhere, with no prospect of living well.

So I will spend the money on the operation. And live with the fact that I’m offering better quality care to my dog than many people in Haiti would be able to afford.

And I’ll continue to buy her dog food as well. She’s my responsibility. In for a penny, in for a pound.

Last semester, I introduced a new practice into my classes at Shimer College. Every few weeks, we spent the beginning of class evaluating ourselves. I asked each student to say a few words about what they had liked most about their own contribution to class over the previous couple of weeks and to share some thoughts as to what they would like to accomplish in the weeks to come. I participated in the evaluations just as everyone else did, speaking of my own goals and the ways in which I was working towards them. I think the evaluations were valuable as a way to keep us all thinking about what we were doing well and where we wanted to improve.

Self-evaluation plays a central role in the kind of education I believe in. Members of a group can only take responsibility for the progress they make together if they are clear about where they are and where they want to be. This is true whether the group is a class or another kind of gathering. Comments and grades from a group’s teacher or a leader cannot substitute for its members’ own thoughtfulness. And that thoughtfulness emerges most clearly when we try to put what we think into words.

The public self-evaluation I requested of my Shimer students was hard for them. Initially, they were inclined towards familiar, easy, and not very helpful analyses. They would say they needed to talk more in class or less, that they needed to read more carefully. Only over the course of the semester did their thoughts about themselves start to take clearer and more specific shape.

We are all, perhaps, more accustomed to responding to others’ views of us than to struggling to express our own. For the students with whom my colleagues and I are working in Haiti, evaluation is that much more unfamiliar. They are told what classes they will take, what those classes will teach, and they are evaluated in the most straightforward way by regular examinations. They are not generally asked how a class is going or whether their teachers are working with them well. So it was surely a surprise to our 9th and 10th graders at the Institut Abélard when Johny and I started class by telling them that we’d like to talk about how we and they thought class was going.

Johny and I shared the sense that it wasn’t going very well. The project that we brought to the students was translation. We chose Andromache, a classic French play by Racine that is a regular part of high school French literature classes in Haiti. Johny and I had felt that translating with the students could accomplish several things. It would push them to understand the French they read more exactly than they are accustomed to doing and to express themselves in written Creole with more than their usual care. In addition, it would be a chance to read a play that they might otherwise only read about and do so in a manner that would leave it up to them to decide what they think about it. Finally, it would give them a chance to work together in a class where they would share the responsibility to teach themselves and one another. The schools’ leadership was excited enough about the experiment that it agreed to add the activity to the students’ official program for the rest of the year.

But the clearest sign that something was missing was that few of the students were preparing for class. We had been assigning them to translate a number of lines at home each week, and most were just not bothering. A few would. In fact they were doing a pretty good job of it. And they would put their translations on the blackboard for the group to study. But most were, at best, participating only by criticizing details that they found lacking in their classmates’ work, the kind of details that suggest themselves to someone who hasn’t bothered to give a reading much thought. We had a long discussion, for example, about how to spell the play’s French names. At worst, the students would simply disengage for the hour that we spent together.

So Johny and I decided to talk with the students about our impressions and to ask them for theirs. What we discovered was saddening, but also encouraging.

After much hemming and hawing, a number of the students reported that they found our discussions frustrating because Johny and I were not telling them who among them was right and who wrong. Without decisive feedback of that kind from us, they felt that their work wasn’t leading them anywhere. Pushed farther, some also complained that our style wasn’t forceful or pushy enough. We were told that we were insufficiently move, which means mean or nasty, that we were too dou, or soft.

Needless to say, the comments made us sad because they expressed just the views that we want to change. We are committed to pushing the students to look more to themselves for answers, especially when answers are matters of individual judgment, and to inviting a collaboration based on something other than the authority we have as their teachers. At the same time, the students’ willingness to criticize us was encouraging. It made it important that we respond in a way that shows them that their views matter; we could not simply respond by arguing insistently for our own views. We could not tell them that we wanted them to take more control and then fail to incorporate their opinions into our plans.

We felt trapped. So I playfully slapped the young man who asked us to be more move on the back of the head. That brought out some laughter. More importantly, Johny and I agreed that we would collect written homework each week and return it with corrections and suggestions. All this could push the classes back towards more conventional teaching, and it will be our job to see that that doesn’t happen.

It will be hard. Johny and I are not able to spend a lot of time together, and it could take a lot of time to find ways to respond to the students’ written work that both gives them the comfortable sense that they are being judged and helps them see the questions their work raises that are beyond simple answers we can be expected to provide.

I hope that the more the students see that their work raises real and difficult questions, the less satisfied they’ll be with answers from Johny and me. That might be what they need to start looking towards themselves, but we do not know that it is.

We ourselves are in a situation of great uncertainty, but that’s just as things should be. After all, the problems our classes confront us with are closely bound to our reasons for leading them.

I asked Byton the following question: If we were talking to someone, and I mentioned that you had had a younger brother named Oli who got sick and died when he was about five, would you correct me?

He and I were talking about some of the differences in the ways that we look at things, and I wanted to ask him about lougawou, the mystical beasts that are said to feed on Haitian children. He had long ago told me that Oli had been eaten by a lougawou, and I had never been very clear about what he meant by that. It was a problem of communication that none of my efforts seemed able to solve. Byton would say that he doesn’t believe in lougawou, but that they are a reality, and I couldn’t make any sense of it. We were sitting with Ronald, a friend who’s a fourth-year med student, and he only made things harder. He would not, he said, base his treatment of a sick child on the thought that the child’s spirit had been eaten because he doesn’t believe in such things. At the same time, he added, he could not, as a doctor, ignore such a possibility, because it is something real.

Communication is often a problem for me here. Some of it has to do with my Creole. Though I am always improving, and though my colleagues and I manage pretty well, there’s still stuff that I miss or that I have trouble saying.

But there are other issues, too. Issues that emerge especially in my work, when I am trying to say something too strange to fit comfortably with the habits or expectations of those I’m speaking with.
It was only a couple of weeks ago that I was saying how little I have to do these days with Wonn Refleksyon, the Haitian adaptation of the Touchstones Discussion Project (www.touchstones.org) that brought me to Haiti in 1997. That has changed, and I couldn’t be happier about it. Two pieces of work have developed since then. One is a large collaboration with Fonkoze (www.fonkoze.org), the bank that serves thousands of Haiti’s poor. The other is a long-term workshop organized by GTAPF, a grassroots organization based in a rural area outside of Darbonne.

There’s a lot to be said about the Fonkoze project, partly because the organization itself is so compelling and partly because what Frémy and I have been asked to help them create is such an exciting new direction for us. They want us to guide them as they develop a basic literacy curriculum based on combining an adaptation of Wonn Refleksyon with the literacy game they have used for years, and – what’s most exciting to me – they want us to figure out a way to effectively present the curriculum to literacy teachers who are not teachers but are, instead, market women willing to teach other market women to read.

Nevertheless, I want right now to write about GTAPF. The work that Frémy and I are doing with them is exposing a very basic problem in our practice, and it’s doing it in a helpful way and at a helpful time. The problem expresses itself when we regularly discover that there are things we would have thought to be obvious that the folks we’re working with do not understand. Here the communication problem is not my Creole. Frémy is struggling as much as I am.

GTAPF is based in Fayette. It’s a farming area near the spring that supplies much of the region, including the city of Léogane. It sits at the base of the hills that rise just outside the Léogane plain and that lead to mountains that bar the way to Jacmel in the south. It’s lush with trees and gardens. There’s no town to speak of. The small houses seem pretty evenly scattered in small clusters of two or three or four.

GTAPF is the local peasant organization, and it’s working on a couple of different projects. One is latrines, a collaboration with outside funding sources to build latrines for its members. Having good latrines is an important public health issue. A second is adult literacy. For a couple of years, different attempts were made to offer literacy classes in the region but they didn’t really take. They didn’t hold the interest of participants. Last year, with support from Shimer College, GTAPF was able to introduce a new literacy program emphasizing an approach which encourages students to tell, and then write down, their own stories. They turn the stories into small books, which they also illustrate. The approach has been a big success. A large number of students were able to graduate from the first year of the program in early January.

A second grant from Shimer College has made a second year of literacy possible. The centers that were active last year are offering an advanced literacy class to their students, and several new centers that are opening. GTAPF wants to integrate Wonn Refleksyon into the work of all the centers. Once each week, the teachers will lead discussions. The second-year centers can use the book of basic texts in Creole, which was the first one we developed for use here. The first-year centers will need to use our newest book, which uses images and Haitian proverbs instead of texts.

GTAPF needed to prepare its literacy teachers to use Wonn Refleksyon, and Frémy and I were happy to sign up for that work ourselves. It offered us a couple of advantages. First, though Frémy and I consult one another very closely regarding all our work, we do not right now have a regular group that we work with together. The work with Fonkoze is irregular, and the other groups we’re participating in right now involve only one or the other of us. Taking on a project we would carry out jointly seemed like a good idea. Second, I have not participated in serious Wonn Refleksyon training in a long time, and it would be useful to me in particular to relearn how such training can work.

When it became clear that we were all interested in a longer, fuller workshop, GTAPF decided to add some additional participants. The organization works together with other peasant organizations in the mountains outside of Fayette, and its leadership felt that if representatives from those groups participated in a Wonn Refleksyon training the groups themselves might be able to function more effectively and more democratically.
So Frémy and I scheduled a weekly, two-hour meeting with the group of twelve. In addition, we planned a one-time, two-day workshop. We started three weeks ago, and held the two-day session last week. Initially, we wanted to introduce the group to the Wonn Refleksyon process by letting them experience what it feels like to be part of a discussion of a text, an image, or a proverb. At the same time, we also felt a little pressed to help them arrive quickly at the point from which they would feel comfortable leading discussions because they are in fact scheduled to start doing so soon.

The first two weeks, we divided the sessions into two activities. Frémy and I each led a discussion. When time came for the two-day event, we decided to spent the first morning leading more discussions, but also inviting discussions of the discussions. We wanted to group to start questioning us about what we were doing. That afternoon, a pair of the groups’ participants would take responsibility for leading a discussion. We would spend the lunch break with them helping them plan what they wanted to accomplish and how. The last part of the day could then be spent, first, in a larger discussion of the various examples of leadership the group had seen. We’d then finish with a very short introduction to the guidebook for discussion leaders that the Wonn Refleksyon team produced a couple of years ago. We would invite three different participants volunteer to lead three discussions on the second day of the workshop. They would have their copies of the guidebook, which they could use to plan their discussions at home.

This last part of our plan failed in the most interesting way. When we returned on day two, it became clear that the folks who had volunteered to lead the group had not looked at the guidebook in advance. They held it in their hands as they directed the group, in the way that inexperienced cooks will work from a recipe that they’ve never read. The first participant-leader understood even less well. He started his session with every intention of leading a discussion on the pages from the guidebook instead of on the reading they were meant to accompany. Frémy and I had assumed, without even saying as much to one another, that assigning leadership of the groups in advance would mean that the leaders would prepare, but we were working with people who had never used anything like our guidebook. It’s relationship to the class they would lead was mysterious to them. Our preference – perhaps I should say “our prejudice” – for letting people discover what they think our work is about and how it functions had lined up our volunteers for failure. Fortunately, the ambience in the group is such that they could fail without really being hurt.

In any case, yesterday I met again with the group. Frémy was away. I decided to take the bull by the horns. Instead of jumping into the discussion I intended to lead, I spoke at some length at the start about my goal for the day – presenting the way the guidebook works – and my reasons for setting that goal. I then led a discussion which closely, but not exactly, followed the guidebook’s instructions.

The group spent some time reading the section of the guidebook I had followed and talking about how I had used it and where I had diverged. This was not a discussion. It was a question-and-answer session, and I think it helped. They noticed how much I had prepared in advance and saw the advantages. They saw the changes that I made relative to the guidebook’s instructions, and they asked me about them, so they got to see me thinking about what would succeed with our group.

They still have some hard work to do. For one thing, when it came time to judge the day’s events, they seemed to have forgotten our specific goals and instead judged only that they had had a good discussion in which everyone participated well. That’s nice enough, but a group’s progress depends on a leader’s attention to much more specific goals then that. The guidebook had set some out for us, but they hadn’t caught the group’s attention. Keeping specific goals in mind even as you try to make each discussion feel successful in the more general sense as well is a real challenge.

For me, the session was valuable in a very different and very important way. The group’s clear need finally succeeded in pushing me towards a level of communication that I had not previously achieved. In the last stage of the conversation, I spoke much more, and in a much more teacherly way than I normally would.
The more I work here with people inexperienced at leading discussions, the more I will learn about what I can expect them to discover for themselves and what I should simply say.

Jogging has been going well. I have a new route that I’m enjoying. I run up the hill past Blancha towards Divye. Just below the market in Grifen, I head down towards Franswa. I turn at the church in Franswa, and then descend past Kafou Mortel to Nan Konble. From there, it’s a short, hard uphill run back to Ka Glo. The whole thing takes a little less than an hour. Though I’m not in Ka Glo as much as I’d like to be – I sleep there two or thee nights most weeks – when I’m there, I’m jogging. And that feels good.

The other day, as I was working my way up the steep stretch of road that leads to lower Blancha, I passed Micanol. He was hiking up the hill with a five-gallon bucket of water on his head. He goes down each morning to Ba Osiya, a ten minute walk from his parents’ house, to get the water from the public faucet there. He makes three or four trips each day, starting early to avoid the crowd. Five gallons of water is about forty pounds, so the total amount of work he does each day to supply his family with water is considerable.

I often see him during my run, and it makes me wonder. I ask myself why my jogging doesn’t seem pretty silly to him. He has more than enough work to do every day to keep himself both busy and strong. The idea that someone would need to add something otherwise useless – like jogging – to their schedule in order to stay in shape must seem strange. But he has never shown any evidence that he finds my jogging strange.

He works a lot. It’s not just a matter of carrying water. He’s in the final year of a course designed to teach something like general contracting. The course involves masonry and carpentry, but also home design, drawing, classes on building materials, and some other stuff. He started after deciding that he could no longer afford to attend a conventional high school that was not preparing him for a job. He made that decision despite the fact that he had always been a very fine student. We talked about the decision at the time, and it was clear that he partly regretted his sense that he had to make it. Before the start of last year, he decided to return to high school, not instead of the course but in addition to it. He would go to his academic school all morning and then to the professional course all afternoon. He would be in class for something like ten to twelve hours each day, then he’d need to figure out how to do homework and chores. Despite those obstacles, he passed the first part of the national high school exam last summer, qualifying therefore to start his last year of high school in September and to take the second part of the exam this July.

He and I spoke recently about hard work, and it was striking how little he thought about himself. He was much more focused on his parents. When I mentioned that I thought that many Haitians work very hard, he immediately offered his father then his mother as examples. His father is a farmer, and even in this season without rain and, therefore, without planting, he leaves the house before sunrise each day and isn’t back until late. His mother is a marketwoman, hiking the hour or so from Blancha to Petyonvil six days each week to sell various low-margin foodstuffs in a stall in the midst of the market.

It would be hard to spend a lot of time in Haiti without thinking about work. I often hear colleagues at Shimer and other folks back home complaining that they are busy. I sometimes engage in the practice myself. But the only time I’ve ever heard my Haitian friends and colleagues complain that they are busy is when they are explaining why they had no time to do something specific that they had expected or hoped to be able to do. What I recognize from the States – the talk of busy-ness as though it was an undesirable state that one could find oneself trapped in, a kind of disease – is something I just don’t hear here.

This is true, though many people I know are doing something or other almost all the time. If Madanm Anténor isn’t cleaning some part of her home, she’s in the kitchen preparing food or headed off to work or to do the marketing. From my back porch I can see the fire in her kitchen light up light up before dawn each day when I’m in Glo. The last few hours before bed, she sits in her pantry where her children do their schoolwork and prepares a supper and, then, the ingredients she will need for the meals she’ll prepare the next day. She’s never idle, yet I’ve never heard her say that she’s too busy.

When I’m in Matenwa, I live next door to Abner Sauveur, the principal of the school I work with there, and it almost never happens that I see him sitting around his pleasant front porch, relaxing. If he isn’t at the school leading a class, he’s in the school’s garden or his own, or he’s meeting with some or all of his faculty or headed to Ansagale on school business or to a literacy center or a meeting of the grassroots network he’s a part of.

One last example: In Darbonne I know a woman name Sipòtè. I doubt it’s her real name, but it’s what she goes by. It means “supporter.” She has business selling food at the side of the road that leads from the Darbonne tap-tap station to Frémy’s house, where I stay when I’m there. She serves big midday meals: rice with bean sauce or vegetable sauce or both. The servings are large enough that I had to make a special arrangement with her so that I could get a smaller portion. She’s never stopped to count how many people she feeds each day, but she thinks it’s in the neighborhood of two hundered.

In fact, she never really stops at all. She’s sitting at the side of the road by 5:00 AM and is there into the evening preparing the day’s food, serving it, or doing clean-up and prep work for the following day. Her children work with her, as do a couple of adult employees. I try to spend a few minutes sitting with them as I return from the station where I have coffee most mornings here, and they like to chat, but they don’t stop working while I’m there.

It’s not that everyone in Haiti is active all the time. There’s idleness her, lot’s of it, just as you’d expect in a place where unemployment figures are extraordinarily high. It’s just that being busy is not a problem I find my Haitian friends and colleagues presenting themselves as having.

I suspect it has something to do with what it really means to be busy. One thing I noticed when I was Dean at Shimer is that there was only a weak correlation between the degree to which colleagues and students described themselves as being busy and the amount of work that it seemed as though they were doing. The same is very much true when I consider only myself: There’s not much connection that I’ve noticed between how busy I feel and how much I’m accomplishing.

Being busy has, perhaps, as much to do with our imaginations as with any other part of us. It implies that we’re imagining ourselves doing things other than what we’re doing, that we feel blocked from doing, because what we’re actually doing takes up too much time. It implies that we imagine ourselves entitled to rest that we’re not getting or to quiet times that never come.

For thosed immersed in the lives they lead, too fully engaged to imagine other things they migh be doing, for those wrapped up in what they do, the feeling of busy-ness, busy-ness as a disease, what I’d call “maladi okipe a” just doesn’t exist. That was that point Frémy made as we headed to Fayette, a village on the outskirts of Darbonne, for the first day of a two-day workshop. He put things ironically: the busiest Haitians he knows are, he said, too busy to feel busy. Busy-ness is felt by those who have time on their hands.

Once in a while, someone expresses a thought so perfectly that the phrase just jumps out at you.

I was meeting with a small group of university students. They are studying a range of subjects – administration, medicine, accounting – at a range of schools, public and private, in Port-au-Prince. What they have in common is that they are all from Hinche or thereabouts. Hinche is an important city in Haiti’s central plateau, a rough five-hour ride from the Port-au-Prince outskirts. Our meeting had been arranged by a med-school student who is a friend of mine and is also part of the group.

He suggested that we start by introducing ourselves to one another, so we went around the circle we were seated in, saying a few words about ourselves. After that, the one of them who seemed oldest started to speak. He had been chosen as their spokesperson. He talked about the group and about why they had wanted to meet with me. He said that they were all committed to development in Hinche. He talked about various problems he and his friends see Hinche as facing and about how much the group feels that Haiti’s central government ignores the region. He showed me the group’s statute, written in what looked to me to be good formal French, and explained that they had applied for official government recognition that they had not yet received. The recognition is in the works.

The group had, he said, lots of dreams, but they found themselves hindered in their hoped-for progress, and that was where they thought I might be able to help them. Their group, he explained, lacked clear direction. They needed someone to show them the way, someone older, he said, someone with “plis bagaj intelektyèl,” or “more intellectual baggage.”

I managed not to laugh.

As I thought about what he actually meant, I also thought to myself that my years at Shimer and St. John’s College, at the T.U. Braunschweig and Loyola University of Chicago had certainly provided me with all the intellectual baggage that someone could want. I had been granted the opportunity study, both a student and as teacher, a nice range of classical European works. Almost all of this is precisely intellectual baggage – at least in the sense that we might give the phrase. I once was, for example, something like an expert with respect to a certain book by Anselm, Archbishop of Cantebury, but little needs to be said about the value of that knowledge for the group from Hinche.

It is hard to explain what I am doing in Haiti. I can talk in detail about the different projects I’m involved in, whether they are classes I’m teaching, study groups I join in, or something else entirely. I can explain why Johny St. Louis and I decided to read Racine with his high school students, or why the teachers at the Matenwa Community Learning Center and I are studying Piaget, or what’s behind the literacy work that Frémy César and I are joining in with Fonkoze and GTAPF. But each of those activities is unique, with its own goals and difficulties. There’s no clear overall picture. It’s hard to say what, precisely, I bring here. I have no expertise in Racine or Piaget, or in literacy or adult education for that matter. What I have is a lot of intellectual baggage. My meeting with the students from Hinche brought to mind in a striking way just what such baggage might be for.

Haiti is a place where formally acknowledged expertise counts for a lot. It is probably not alone in this, but the example I come across most regularly here is the constant desire among some of the people I work with for a certification process for Wonn Refleksyon discussion leaders. The desire can come up in the very first meeting of a new group: Someone will ask whether they will be awarded a certificate. Or it can emerge after a group has been meeting for awhile. Several members of the group that Johny and I are reading Rousseau’s Emile with asked the two of us to arrange for them to receive a certificate of participation. They want certificates so that they have a way to show people what they’ve done and can do.

The members of the group from Hinche are especially likely to feel the importance of such expertise because they all are working so hard to acquire it. That is, after all, a big part of what their university education is about.

So if their growing expertise is not giving their hopes for Hinche any direction, it’s not hard to imagine why they would look to someone whom they seen as being farther along than they are at more or less the same game. All this is to say nothing of the range of reasons they might have for assuming that a blan, or a white foreigner, is the one who is likely to have their answers, let alone one ten or more years older than they are and with the gray hairs to prove it.

It’s just as easy to imagine at least one explanation for the fact that they don’t know what to do for Hinche: They aren’t there. Some of them have been living in Port-au-Prince since they were children. Instead of being immersed in the realities of the Central Plateau, they are living and working in Port-au-Prince, a city with its own very particular set of realities. They may all have family members and friends who daily face all the challenges that life in Hinche throws at them, but they themselves must focus on very different things.

There are simple questions about the nature of expertise, or know-how, very near the surface when one confronts a situation like this one. Apart from the prejudice that pretends that know-how is the province of those who have completed formal training and who have the documentation to prove it, the notion that know-how is something absolute, that it’s something that can be detached from the particular conditions in which it is supposed to act is at least questionable. What is the basis, after all, for an assumption that plans and programs developed in Washington, Paris, or Port-au-Prince will work when they have to enter a plce like Hinche?

At the same time, there is a logic that argues against continually reinventing the wheel. It’s hard to see why the lessons of experience drawn from one context should be without any application to another. If the students from Hinche were learning nothing in Port-au-Prince that they can apply towards improving life in their home city, then it would be hard to imagine why we should have anything like higher education at all.

So there must be a middle ground, a place where young people who are pursuing advanced studies in a major city can bring what they are learning to bear on a set of problems most clearly understood by the population that is living with those problems everyday. The challenge is to find that middle ground.

But that ground will remain hidden from those students as long as, rather than seeking it, they look instead for a formal expertise even more rarified than the one they are struggling to acquire. If what they look for is a more expert expert, taking that word in its traditional sense, then the people who could truly give them direction will appear as though they have nothing to tell them.

What will happen, however, if the expert they turn to tells them that he has no idea what they should do? And what if he explains that he cannot have any idea what to do for Hinche because he’s not part of daily life there?

I am right now scheduled to continue to meet with the group. What I hope to do is help them see that I am not the place they should be turning to. I hope to help them see that intellectual baggage is the last thing they should be looking for. I will try to convince them that their friends and families in Hinche must know much better than they or I could what the Central Plateau really needs. I’ll encourage them to try to organize a meeting back home at which they can figure out how to turn to the people living and working there for direction. They might find that there is a lot that they can, as emerging experts, do for their home region once they learn to listen to the people they would be doing it for.

This is a role that my intellectual baggage – and the other baggage I carry around with me – can usefully play, I think, and it is one part of the supportive role I can play in Haiti. If I can put to use the importance that I’m sometimes given by virtue of the fact that I am a middle-aged white foreigner with a doctorate, if I can make it help people turn to themselves and to the people around them for the guidance they need, then that importance can become a tool, and a useful one.

I got to the American Consulate shortly before 9:00 AM. At 2:00 Lukha and I were still trying to secure the visa that we needed for him to visit Shimer with me in April. These were not hours of intense activity. We were waiting, just waiting. I was on the floor, because I didn’t want to stand up any longer and the benches were packed. Haiti’s not a place where one wants to whine, and I was sitting in air-conditioned comfort, but I wanted to be able to get home soon. I had a long trip planned for the following day, and I had a lot of reading to do.

For a combination of reasons, Lukha and I were in the part of the consulate where the interviews for visas were actually going on, so we could see who was getting approved and who rejected. Those who were approved would step over to a cashier and pay $5.00. That’s not much, but the interview itself costs $100.00. Very few get approved, and it was a striking scene.

I was trying to imagine what a parallel scene might be like in the United States: several hundred Americans who had paid a lot for the privilege of being packed into a small, bare space for hours, waiting to stand in a semi-enclosed cubicle and be interviewed briefly by someone who would only speak to them through thick glass and who would 19 times out of twenty swiftly deny them the request they came to make. It struck me that, in the States, such a scene would be spectacular. There would be yelling and cursing of all sorts. People would be demanding to see the next person up in the hierarchy. They would be arguing loudly and insistently. They would, as we say, “not take ‘no’ for an answer.” I was thinking of times when I had seen people at airports complaining bitterly, loudly, and sometimes foully about even minor inconveniences.

The scene at the Consulate was nothing like that. As each person’s request was denied, the request they spent a lot of money and a lot of time making, they quietly left and the next person stepped up, very likely to face the same fate. They left silently, quietly putting the documents they had brought in support of their request back in order, replacing them in the envelope or the folder or the briefcase they had brought them in. There were no loud complaints and there were no arguments. The one exception really just proved the rule: A German doctor was there with a patient for whom she had secured a six-month medical visa to visit Germany for treatment. Her patient needed an American transit visa for a two-hour layover at JFK, and it had been denied. She was furious, and was loudly and theatrically explaining to anyone who would listen how idiotic she thought the whole thing was. She phoned someone higher up — she was the only one in the waiting area talking on a phone; there were signs clearly forbidding it that she chose to ignore — and within five hours the decision had been reversed for her.

But she was not a Haitian. The Haitians who were there, without exception, quietly resigned themselves.

And that is what I found so striking. I was impressed by their dignity, and I mentioned that to Lukha. I told him that one generalization that I remembered Europeans I knew sometimes made about Americans was that we seemed a little childish to them in the sense that we seem to them to always expect that our dreams can come true. I asked Lukha whether he thought that something like that might be hidden behind the very different ways that Americans might react if they were set into the scene in front of us, and he had to agree.

But he also made an important point. If Haitians were showing their maturity by resigning themselves to the consuls’ decisions with dignity, then that maturity was not entirely a good thing. He pointed out that sometimes one should, perhaps, be ready to stand up and shout.

Lukha eventually got the visa, and I went my way, grumbling. I got a ride up to Petyonvil, and another to Malik, and then started the short walk from Malik to Ka Glo. I was struck by the number of people on the road, old and young, with gallon jugs in hand or five-gallon buckets on their heads, walking down the mountain from Ka Glo. I saw one medium-sized young man with two five-gallon buckets on his head, one stacked on top of the other. For several days, two of the major water sources in our area had stopped functioning. Problems in the pipes leading to them from the main source up the hill had caused them to be shut off, so people were walking to Ka Glo from as far as Dendenn, on the other side of Malik, to get water to drink and bath and cook and clean. They might have to walk almost an hour each way, and the triply heavy traffic at the source might mean more than an hour’s wait for their turn.

So Lukha and I had lost a day waiting to get a visa to visit the States, and folks on the mountain were losing their days getting the water they need to live. That helped put things in perspective.

The next day I went to Lagonav, and I returned two days later. There has been no rain on Lagonav in five months. Most rainwater cisterns are dry, and functioning water sources are few. I am told that it’s not unusual for someone to have to walk two hours each way for water, and, with the wait at the sources, that getting water is truly a day-long event. While on Lagonav I heard that there are areas so dry that, in order to get their donkeys to make the whole trip back from the water source, people light fires underneath them when they want to lie down.

I shared that story with Madanm Anténor, and she shuddered. I told her about how irritated I was by the wait for the visa, but how things looked different to me when I as forced to remember that I have neighbors with much more important concerns. When she heard about the donkeys, she proceeded to count her blessings, almost literally. She started to rattle-off all the things she could think off to be thankful for.

It made me think. Gratitude for the good things that are ours surely has its place, but what happens when that admirable gratitude interferes with anger or resentment that might move us to act? How many of the water issues, for example, could be managed effectively by a community that decided it could no longer accept the problems it faces every day? What would happen if the consuls knew that every visa denied would mean prolonged arguments and explanations?