Fito must be in his mid-teens. He was sitting next to me at my desk at home, very nearly crying. I had my laptop in Ka Glo, and we were writing an e-mail to an American colleague of mine who had lived in Haiti for several years. That colleague was in contact with another American who had lived here, and this other American had, for a long time, paid the rent that Fito’s mother annually owes for the small room where she lives with her children in Bois Moquette.

This year, something in the communication had broken down. Either their American friend had decided not to pay the rent, or had forgotten about it, or had been stymied by the various difficulties one can encounter sending money here. Fito and his family didn’t know. In any case, the rent was two months late, and the landlord had begun moving the family’s things into the street. It was Thursday, and he had told them to make no mistake: “Saturday will not find you in the room,” he had said, “unless the rent is paid.”

Among the basic aspects of life as a foreigner living in Haiti are the webs of financial dependencies that grow up around one. We create little micro-economies, peopled with those whom we hire to do various kinds of work and those we simply support for one reason or another. I’ll offer several examples.

I don’t do my own laundry here. I certainly could learn to wash everything by hand as Haitians do, and I could decide to build the time to do it into my schedule. I’ve never really wanted to, however. It would take a lot of time, and I’d rather use that time to read and write and do the various kinds of work I do. Or just to relax at home.

That choice is available to me. My neighbor, Rosemarie, does my laundry instead. She earns a little less than four dollars every time she does a load. This is a significant amount of money for her. Her husband, Awol, is a day laborer who has little land of his own. He farms other people’s land, raises a cow, and appears with a shovel or a trowel or a machete or an ax when there’s heavy manual labor to be done. He might get a little over two dollars a day for his efforts. They have three children. The oldest lives in Pòtoprens, with Awol’s sister. The two little ones live at home. Because of the two small children, Rosemarie can’t do much to earn money herself. She has to stay at home. The money she gets from me two or three times a month is probably making a big difference.

But, perhaps more importantly, it has connected her to me in a way that has nurtured a certain hope. Her second daughter, Sofonie is old enough to start preschool, and there is a private preschool just down the hill from the local public elementary school in Mariaman. Rosemarie would like to send Sofonie to school this fall, but she can’t afford to – not even with the laundry money that she earns. So she has already asked whether I would simply pay for the school. This would include various expenses – like shoes, a uniform, and a little backpack as well. The connection we have because of the work she does for me creates an expectation that I’ll accept a certain degree of responsibility in her life. I become the person she decides to depend on. In Creole, I become the patwon.

A patwon is someone who has wealth or power or connections that enable him to do favors for others. They include employers, whom employees depend upon for extra considerations when unexpected expenses arise, and relatives or neighbors with either wealth or connections that enable them to confer favors. They get young people places in schools, they pay for needed medicines, they help in other moments of need. They generally have a social position much highly than the person who comes to depend of them.

Another example: This afternoon, I’ll be visited by a young man from down in Mariaman, close to the school. I like him and respect him. Though he can’t be much more than twenty years old, he’s been living by his own wits and work for awhile. His parents can’t support him. He’s been earning the money that he needs to get through school by raising a couple of goats and by carrying water and doing errands for a couple of my American friends who live just down the hill. As is very common, they went beyond a mere work-for-money relationship. They became patwon. When he needed serious dental work done, they undertook to pay for it.

But the current situation in Haiti, together with changes in their lives, made them decide to leave, and that decision left gaps in the lives of people who had grown to depend on them. The young man who told me he’d be coming to see me is one of those people. Not only does he have a relatively small portion of the dental bill left to pay – something his American friends couldn’t have known about – but he is now trying to figure out how to afford school next year without the little bit of income that working for them earned him. He will speak to me today about those two matters: the last dental expense and school in the coming year. He hopes, I think, that I will be willing and able to take over the role of patwon from the American friends who left.

It’s awkward to be treated as a patwon. I sometimes think of the comment Lloyd Bentsen once made as chair of the U.S. Senate Finance Committee: “A billion here, a billion there, and pretty soon you’re talking about real money.” The money that the people around me ask me for is not a lot. The portion of the dental bill I am being asking to help with is less than ten dollars, but that’s money the young man doesn’t have. Sending Sofonie to school might cost forty or fifty dollars – I don’t know – but Rosemarie has no way of earning such a sum. Fito and his mother needed about $175 for their annual rent, but their current family income is, approximately, zero.

At the same time, these sums add up. Though by any reasonable standard I am paid quite well to do the work I do, I have a lot of the same concerns about covering my various expenses that anyone might have. Some of these concerns are real, and some are probably imagined, but both sorts feel like concerns nonetheless. The truth is that my resources are limited and that they feel even more limited than they are.

But what’s worse is that the people who come to me are generally asking for help with things that they have fundamental rights to. Why am I deciding whether someone can get dental care or an education or a roof over his or her head? I feel both as though my right to refuse them is limited and as though what seem to them as gifts from me are not the answer at all.

It would be easy to be theoretical about this – in one sense of that word. On one hand, if my willingness to share a little of what I have makes those who ask me find it easier to accept my privileged social and economic position, then I am doing them a disservice. Their acceptance of the privileges that people like me have is surely part of the larger problem. On the other hand, if my giving nurtures dependence, then the disservice is even more clear.

Even so, in the immediacy of the moment and of the need that’s presented to me, such thoughts of what would really be best can seem pretty distant, pretty abstract. If a toothache keeps an acquaintance from sleeping, should I be asking myself whether paying for dental treatment will undermine his or her larger progress? When asked by someone whether I will help them with some money, I rarely feel as though I know what I should do.

I would be finished with these reflections, but I sense that something’s missing. I need to add at least three notes.

First, the picture is too one-sided. I’ve emphasized fiscal – I won’t even say “economic” – dependence over dependence of other kinds. It is important for me to be continuously aware of my very great dependence on many of those who ask me for monetary help. Cases like Rosemarie’s, who does my laundry, are only the most straightforward ones. The people who feel they need money that I can give them have a lot that they can and do teach me about how to live in Haiti. I depend on them for advice and more. A friend to whom I just gave roughly sixty dollars was effusively grateful, but I think he’s come to know perfectly well how difficult it would be for me to get by without his regular help. And I’m grateful for his awareness.

Second, it would be a mistake to think that only foreigners create such webs of dependencies as the one I’m part of. Steady income is a rare thing in Haiti, and anyone who has one is certain to find plenty of people that need her or his help. The fact that “patwon” is so common a word here testifies to that.

Third, a note about Fito: The people I contacted on his family’s behalf decided not to help out this year. As I prepared to give Fito the news, I tried to think whether the was something I was willing to do. I didn’t want to take on responsibility for a whole household, but I didn’t like the thought of their being cast out into the street. So I imagined a compromise, one that I thought would be both helpful to them and easy for me. I gave Fito a substantial portion of the coming year’s rent but told him that I would not give more. I thought that would be the end of it.

Of course it wasn’t. He is in no position to simply accept me word that I won’t give them more money. Within a couple of days he was back at my house with a long story explaining his need for an addition sum. It’s pretty clear that he’ll be coming regularly now.

In the spring of 1989, I led a classroom discussion that nearly erupted into a fist fight. The members of the class were students with what were described as “learning disabilities.” They were seventh, eighth, and ninth graders at Riverside Junior High School, in Northport, Alabama. I had been working for the University of Alabama for almost two years, and had come across the opportunity to work with these students once-a-week. We were experimenting with materials prepared by the Touchstones Discussion Project (www.touchstones.org), the group that provided much of the advice and support we needed as we were starting our work here.

The near-fight had a perhaps-surprising source. The students were reading a passage taken from Isaac Newton’s laws of motion. In the passage, Newton is explaining what it means to say that an action has an equal and opposite reaction when he says that if a horse is pulling a rock, the rock is pulling the horse just as much. Several of the students thought this was simply dumb: Rocks are not living things; they cannot pull. Others agreed with Newton.

I was surprised at the time at how important this seemingly-remote question was for the students. Not only did they nearly fight over it the first time it came up, but for weeks afterwards, anytime there was a lull in our dialogue – no matter what I might have thought we were talking about – the students would start arguing angrily about the rock and the horse all over again.

Groups sometimes come across issues that they find they cannot talk about. The example from Riverside Junior High School was extreme and, at the time, perplexing. But it’s nonetheless an example of something that comes up often enough. Something about a question touches a group’s members so closely that they are unable to listen to one another. They can’t speak with the openness to letting their opinions be affected that real conversation requires. They are defensive. They argue. Or they are unwilling to speak at all.

When Roseline shouted “anmwe!” at the mention of the word “eredite,” I was reminded of the Riverside group. In Haiti, yelling “anmwe” is a little like shouting for help. And she was yelling for some sort of help because the question of heredity – in Creole, “eredite” – had come up once again.

Roseline is a teacher at the Matenwa Community Learning Center, in Matenwa, Lagonav (http://matenwa.tripod.com). We were in the first week of a two-week seminar on psychology. Through the spring, I had been meeting with the teachers a couple of times each month, discussing a book by Swiss psychologist Jean Piaget. At the end of the semester, we met to evaluate the time we had spent together and to decide how we wanted to continue. The teachers had become interested in psychology and asked whether we could spend some time studying it together. We found a textbook that had been published by a Haitian press. It’s partly in French, partly in Creole. We figured that reading it all would take a little over two weeks of meetings. We scheduled a first week for early July and a second for early August.

These teachers have been working together for sometime, working together more closely than any other teaching staff I know of. Though the school has a principal, Abner Sauveur, he is the farthest thing from a tyrant. His opinions carry a lot of weight in staff decision making, but for that very reason he’s slow to express them, preferring to listen closely to his colleagues first. And even after he expresses them, they feel free to disagree and to express their disagreements strongly. And in the end, the group decides together.

It would be an exaggeration for any outsider to take credit for the way they talk with one another, but they themselves point to the difference that Wonn Refleksyon made. In the States, Touchstones Discussions have been most often and most importantly used in classes of school children. But the example of Matenwa has shown that, in Haiti, Wonn Refleksyon might be even more important among groups of teachers. When Erik was here as part of our team in 1999-2001, he invested a lot of time leading and participating in discussions for and with the Matenwa teachers, and they are quick to say that those exercises helped them learn to collaborate the way they do.

But when they come across the question of heredity, their ability to converse productively reaches its limit. They argue, several speaking loudly and angrily at the same time. They stop listening.

The issue is a hard one indeed. The question they see before them is whether intelligence is inherited, and there is a tremendous amount at stake. For example: they regularly have students whom they have trouble teaching. Some of the teachers have noticed, or believe they have noticed, that many of these children come from families in which other children have difficulties as well. Many of the children’s parents have no education. Many of the parents raise their children in ways the teachers disapprove of. It can be tempting for teachers to say that this or that student is troublesome or troubled because of the family he or she comes from. From there it can seem like a short step to conclude that the problem is hereditary. The apparent advantage to this conclusion is that it seems to let the teachers off the hook. They tried, they can say, but there was nothing they could have done. A student’s limits can simply be too great, and those limits are with him or her from birth.

Various members of the Matenwa faculty present arguments against almost every step in this reasoning, as they very well might. There are plenty of wholes in the argument. For one thing, families can share traits without those traits being hereditary in the biological sense of the word. The traits might thus be very much susceptible to influence. For another, suppose for the sake of argument that a child has severe limitations to his or her potential development that he or she inherits from parents at birth. Even then, we cannot conclude that we cannot work to help such a child succeed. We can’t know in advance exactly what a child’s limits are, so there’s no point to arguing about where the limits derive. We must in any case treat each child as though they can succeed, so we might as well assume that they can.

That has more or less been Abner’s argument: That the discussion of hereditary is pointless because we must behave as though we believe that a student’s development can be influenced nonetheless. But he has had a hard time expressing it. And even if he could express it well, it might not help. The issue of their students’ limits has pushed the teachers up against a limit of their own, though a limit of a different kind.

I hope the question keep arising. I know that, at some point, someone will say something that breaks through their colleagues’ inability to hear or to learn.

In the conversation in which we evaluated our discussions of Piaget, Abner said something both striking and encouraging. He said that our conversations were helping him appreciate how much more we can learn when we work together. I think that the opinion he was expressing was general. I myself certainly felt the same way. And a group whose members are devoted to the idea that they learn best, that they work best, together can only continue to move ahead.

Life goes on in the midst of the current difficulties in Haiti, for better and for worse. Last weekend, I got a heavy dose of the better and it seems worth sharing.

I spent most of the weekend at the Villa Ormiso. It’s a guesthouse run by conservative Protestant missionaries, here in Haiti to convert the masses. They would not normally be my cup of tea, but the guesthouse they run is valuable to us as a pleasant and accessible place where we can organize inexpensive meetings that last several days. Last weekend, more than forty of us gathered there for the fourth annual meeting of the Haitian Open Space Institute. I missed last year’s meeting, but had attended the others, so I was anxious to attend this year’s as well.

Open Space meetings are something special. They were designed around the notion that the most productive time that groups spend together is often the unscheduled time: the coffee breaks, the lunches, the unforeseen delays in otherwise tight agendas. Those are the times during which meeting participants talk with the people they want to talk with, and talk to them about the things that are important to them.

At an Open Space gathering, the participants create an agenda for the a meeting – ours was to be two-and-a-half days long – during its first few minutes. The agenda consists of a schedule of group discussions running parallel to one another on themes chosen by the participants who propose them. Each participant then chooses the small group discussions he or she wants to attend. The guiding principle is that you should not be part of anything you’re not interested in. The underlying assumption is that, given the freedom to do so, people will make good decisions about how to use their time.

For me, the most important thing about the structure of these meetings is that it allows me to find time to meet individually with various people I want to talk with. I find that I don’t often attend many of the scheduled conversations, but that I get a lot accomplished nonetheless, much more than I could accomplish if we were all following a carefully planned schedule.

I was especially grateful this year for the opportunity to meet with people on the edge of the meeting because I was actually able to attend rather little of it. Life goes on here in Haiti even as the political situation seems to spin into chaos, and that means work goes on as well. I had a busy schedule of meetings to attend in various places as the large Open Space meeting at the Villa Ormiso was going on.

We arrived at the Ormiso on Thursday afternoon. It’s located in Bizoton, a neighborhood on the road from Pòtoprens into Kafou, its overcrowded southern suburb. The opening ceremony was Thursday evening, and it was unforgettable. My partner Frémy used the meeting as the occasion to get married. He and Nadine exchanged rings in front of the group of friends and colleagues that he has come to think of as his family. The whole crowd of 45 of us sat around with them in a circle, and as we passed a small box with their wedding rings from hand to hand, we each had the opportunity to share with them whatever thoughts or wishes we might want to share. It was, perhaps, an unusual ceremony, but Frémy and Nadine are unusual people.

I had to leave the meeting just before breakfast on Friday morning. I needed to get back to downtown Pòtoprens by 8:30. As always I left much earlier than I should have had to. The trip could be more than a couple of miles, but I couldn’t tell how long it would take for me to get onto a pick-up truck heading downtown, I couldn’t be sure of the traffic, and I wasn’t certain how long I would need to make the long walk I’d chosen to make so that I could get to my meeting without passing through any of the parts of the city that are dangerous these days. I was supposed to be at Fonkoze (See: www.fonkoze.org.) by 8:30 so that Anne Hastings, the foundation’s director, and I could drive together to a meeting with colleagues at PLAN International. PLAN is funding the literacy work we are doing in the northeast, and we had some questions about the budget they had approved and about their reporting requirements.

I hadn’t initially been looking forward to the meeting. The work with Fonkoze was already pulling me more towards administration than I would normally want to be. I had needed, for example, to teach myself to use Excel both to translate the literacy program’s budget and to simplify it so that the field supervisors would be able to work with it easily. Though I don’t mind dealing with simple numbers, and understand well the importance of a willingness to do some math, such work is not what I normally choose to do. I’d much rather be in and around the classroom.

But the prospect of sitting around a table with NGO decision-makers intrigued me. It’s a class of people I’ve had little contact with – except for Anne herself – and I’m learning so much by watching her work that the chance to see her meet with her equals was too intriguing to miss.

The meeting was short, but pointed. We had a detailed agenda of specific questions that Fonkoze had for PLAN, and Anne stuck to it closely. I spoke when called on, but not really otherwise. The other assistant that Anne brought with her didn’t speak at all. It was the farthest thing from the kind of fluid and creative environment that Open Space nurtures, and that seemed just perfect. The meeting’s focus allowed us to achieve our very particular objectives in very little time.

When I got back to Ormiso early afternoon, I was just in time to meet as part of a group that has gotten together to discuss the guidebook that several of us had created for the first volume of Wonn Refleksyon texts. They were mainly primary school teachers, and they wanted to talk about what they could do to better adapt the guidebook for use with children. (See: GuideBooks.)

I enjoyed the session and I profited from it. I think that a couple of us gained a clearer sense of how we want to proceed to write a new guide. I also learned from the clear contrast between the style of this small meeting and the style of the one I had attended in the morning. In the talk about guidebooks, everyone spoke. We were all there because we had contributions to make, and since there was nothing that distinguished who among us had the power to make decisions, nothing that distinguished whose words would really count, we all had our say.

The contrast struck me at first as a trade off. We had given up something of the narrow, efficient focus on needed results that governed the Fonkoze/PLAN meeting and had traded it for a broad involvement that opened us up to the possibility that we might be pushed in any direction that persuaded us. But as I thought more about it, that analysis came to seem too shallow. The focus of the Fonkoze/PLAN meeting was not available to us because we were a group coming together without a designated leader to guide us. No one had the right or the power to stipulate a rigid agenda in advance. We could not trade off something that was not available to us in the first place. What was remarkable was the way that, even without that tight focus, we were able to talk ourselves towards a relatively clear plan of action. Our conversation took on a life of its own, in a very literal sense. It organized itself, which is to say that it became something organic.

Saturday morning, I left early together with Frémy and Abner Sauveur, the founder and principal of the Matenwa Community Learning Center. We had been invited to visit the Peasant Association in Fondwa, a small town between Léogane and Jacmel (See: http://haitiforever.com/fondwa/fondwa.htm.) The founder of the association, Father Joseph, asked us to come to talk to him about some concerns he has both with the association’s school and its university.

Father Joseph, who also founded Fonkoze, explained that both the school and the university had been created with a view towards preparing young people to live in the rural areas that they come from, but he also explained that, in just this respect, both institutions were falling short. The school is hampered in two ways. On one hand, the importance of the national exam system pushes teachers towards a traditional academic program that has little relationship with the lives the students actually lead. On the other, the teachers’ own experience in the classroom has offered them little in the way of alternative models to learn from and explore.
The issues at the university level are slightly different. Though the curriculum at that level does, he think, respond to the real needs of rural communities – it offers such majors as veterinary medicine and agronomy, areas of expertise that rural communities badly need to develop – there is something about the university’s culture that fails to integrate its faculty and students with the people that live around them.

As Father Joseph detailed the kind of training he wanted us to provide the faculties of both institutions, we could only sit and listen. He had a lot to say. He had already developed a very detailed notion as to how our work with them should go. He’s been a stunningly effective leader, at the heart of a movement that’s produced some of the most interesting, most compelling organizations I know of.

At the same time, we simply do not take the approach that he suggested we take. We call ourselves apprentices, and we mean it seriously. We cannot enter a relationship with even the outlines of a prefabricated solution in hand. We are delighted to sit together with colleagues that have a problem they want to address and to help them decided how they want to address it, but more we cannot do. We proposed to Father Joseph that we organize an Open Space meeting for both school and university leadership. The theme of the meeting could be the problem Father Joseph was trying to pose: namely, how can both institutions better succeed at preparing their students for life in rural communities?

Father Joseph seemed open to our idea, only adding that it was crucial that clear and concrete plans emerge from whatever we do. It was hard to tell, however, whether he was really open or simply unwilling to get too involved in the matter, preferring to leave it in other people’s hands. For now, the difference doesn’t matter to us very much. What we need is for his strong leadership to allow for space in which the people working under him can reflect, make plans, and act. We would be pleased if the space opened up because he was convinced of its importance. We can be satisfied initially if it opens up because he is too busy to keep it closed.
The ride to Fondwa and back took us through heavy Kafou traffic both on the way there and on our way back, so it was early evening by the time we returned. We had missed the day’s activities, and so were left to read about them in the notes that were taken.

We spent the evening, however, hearing about various conversations that had been held that day and watching a theatrical piece presented by a group of women who were attended the meeting from Lagonav. The group, //Fanm Kouraj//, or “Courageous Women,” creates and performs pieces presenting problems that rural Haitian women face. The women then lead their audience in discussions of the pieces. (See: http://www.womens-rights.org/pdf/PopularTheater.pdf.) They had performed a similar piece Friday night as well.

Sunday morning there were more small group discussions, and then we met at 11:00 for final reflections and goodbyes. There were several visitors from the States who had planned to attend the meeting but couldn’t because of the unstable situation here, but our Haitian colleagues accepted no such inconvenience. Though those from the countryside fear entering Pòtoprens, and though those from Pòtoprens might be reluctant to circulate, the meeting at Ormiso was their best chance to get together and further their own work. And the work of conversation and of the practices that nurture it could hardly be more important here in Haiti than they are right now.

I suppose I should always have suspected that life goes on even under what might appear to be dire circumstances. Some of my very dearest friends are Colombians, who have been raising their beautiful children and living their interesting and varied lives all these last years while a violent and complicated civil war is being fought around them.

Then, a few months ago, I myself had the experience of crossing what was then something like the front line in a war of attrition between the forces of the UN in Haiti and those of what was then being called the “former military”, irregular thugs who had put themselves in charge in a couple of parts of the country. They claimed to be former members of the Haitian military that President Aristide disbanded when he returned from exile in 1994. At the time, I was on the way to Hinch with Saül, my godson’s dad, and Saül’s younger brother Job. As we crossed that line, it was striking how little it affected us. The war – if it was a war – was being fought on a level that didn’t touch us; our little visit to the countryside went on as if there was nothing strange about our crossing a market town occupied by a half-organized band of heavily armed men. (See: ToEnch)
Lately as things seem to be spinning out of control in the Port au Prince area it is both striking and instructive to watch, to experience, how life simply continues in all of the good and bad ways in which it goes on all the time.

I have carefully avoided changing names and hiding identities in what I’ve written so far about Haiti. Partly it’s been out of a sense that I have not been writing about people who are guilty or innocent; I have not been writing about people whose true identity needs protecting. Partly too it’s been that I haven’t wanted to turn anyone’s life into something like fiction. What I’ll write right now is different, and I will hide the identities of all those involved. The reasons will be obvious enough.

Several months ago, on a Sunday afternoon, a front yard not too far from where I live erupted in the sound of angry people arguing. It was the unveiling of a great scandal. A man had entered the yard with his three oldest daughters – his wife is deceased – to announce that the third of the daughters, a lovely seventeen-year-old girl, was pregnant by his neighbor’s fifteen-year-old son. He had brought her to his neighbor’s yard with her married older sisters to put the case before the unsuspecting parents. He was demanding an immediate marriage.
The girl insisted that she had been together with a boy only once, and, so, that the question of paternity was clear. There was no suggestion of rape. The boy, for his part, corroborated his part of her story. They had been together. He would not deny it. He too said it had been just once. Though he and his parents strongly suspected that the girl had been with other boys as well, they did not feel that they could simply shut the girl’s claims out of their lives. They are very decent people.

At the same time, they would not consider marriage. The boy is a child. He’s a long way from finishing school, a long way from finishing growing up or even growing. Apart from all the practical issues marriage would Fce him with that he is in no position to address, there is the damage marriage would do to his prospects for the future. And marriage for someone his age isn’t even legal in Haiti.

So there was a scandal and, for awhile, an impasse. The boy’s parents agreed immediately that they would financially support the girl through the pregnancy and then support both the girl and her child for the first weeks or months of its life. They would then pay for a paternity test – an enormous expense for a Haitian family, costing more than twice the average Haitian annual income.

They were able to finance the test by borrowing money from a family friend, but they are far from believing that the test will resolve the problem. If the result is positive, the girl’s family is likely to return to its original demand, marriage. If it’s negative, they are likely to believe the test was a fraud that their relatively-to-them wealthy neighbors were able to buy. The boy’s parents nevertheless decided to have the test done for their own peace of mind. They feel they need to know.

A lovely little boy was born in May and the families now await the results of the test. DNA tests aren’t performed in Haiti. The samples are sent to the States. So they take some time. If the baby is indeed their boy’s child, they will take him in. If he is not, they will not. I don’t know the girl’s family, so I can’t report what they are thinking about.

I am close to another such case right now, though the second isn’t as far advanced as the first. It is, however, in some way much sadder. It involves two restavek children, a boy and a girl, both in their late teens. A restavek is a child who lives outside her or his parents’ home. The word comes from the French for “stay with,” and restavek children stay in homes as domestic servants. Generally they are from families that cannot afford to raise them. Jean Robert Cadet’s book Restavek is a moving account of a way of growing up that is probably hard for most Americans to even imagine. The children’s parents give them up hoping they will find better circumstances than they themselves can provide, but often enough they receive the worst treatment imaginable.

This is not quite the case for these two children. They are treated decently in the houses where they live. The boy lives with his aunt, her daughter, and his grandmother in a one-room shack in a small slum in Delmas, one of Port au Prince’s large suburbs. The girl was living with a woman, no relation to her, whom she calls her aunt and the woman’s two young girls when the woman lost her housing. She asked the boy’s aunt whether the girl and her two daughters could stay temporarily in the boy’s aunt’s house. So, for awhile, the house’s one small room was home to the boy and six girls and women, ages six to seventy.

Somehow, in those crowded conditions, the girl and the boy found a way to share an intimate moment. I have heard not the slightest suggestion that he forced her. But now she is very much pregnant, and it’s hard to imagine what she, the woman responsible for her, the boy, and his aunt will do. Their circumstances were already very difficult.

So, one of the ordinary parts of life that just goes on during a political crisis is, unfortunately, unprotected sex among minors who are unprepared for its possible consequences.

The current “crisis” – whatever we really mean by that word – may make things harder for them in various ways. Prices continue to rise. Jobs become scarcer. The visitors, both foreign and expatriate-Haitian, who would normally be bringing dollars and demands for services into the country, especially during the summer, are staying away.

But the real problem is not this particular difficult moment in Haiti’s history. It’s the fact that children grow up here, as they do in many places, unprepared to deal with the temptation that sexual maturity presents them with and unprepared to deal with the consequences of their poor preparation. It is the world’s oldest form of recreation, but surely the world’s oldest problem as well.

As far as I can remember, Saturday was the first time I’ve had to take off my pants in order to get to a class. I must have made quite a spectacle: a lone blan, crossing the river in his underwear, with his pants in one hand and his sandals in the other.

Since the demise of my chakos, I depend on sandals that are less resilient than my feet, so I took the sandals off in order to ford the river barefoot. I took off my pants because the water was high enough in places to muddy them, shorts though they were, and I didn’t want to sit through the class in shorts caked with the mud that the water was carrying with it.

Frémy and I normally drive to our Saturday morning workshops in Fayette in his small four-wheel-drive, but there’s been quite a bit of rain, so the river between Nan Mapou and Fayette was too high for the car. We thought about missing the class and sending our apologies. The group would understand. Rain is a common and acceptable excuse for all sorts of absences in Haiti. But Frémy had missed the previous week because of work elsewhere, leaving me to meet with the group alone, and it seemed important to keep up the group’s momentum. So we took off our clothes, and waded across.

The real difficulty I encountered as I crossed was not the feeling that I was making a spectacle of myself. Not only were all the Haitians, in whichever direction they were crossing, in the very same boat as I was, but I simply could not live here in Haiti as I do if I was too sensitive about the attention I draw to myself. I’m used to it. The real difficulty was that the water was so muddy that I could not see where I was putting my feet. I was stepping from underwater rock to underwater rock, and my unaccustomed feet were having a hard time of it. They are too soft, and many of the rocks simply hurt. Feeling my way little-by-little was slow and painful work.

The group in Fayette is the part of our collaboration that Frémy and I are sharing most closely these days, and so we value it for that. In addition, the work is interesting in itself. We were invited to collaborate with the group of adult literacy teachers and community organizers in February, and we began soon after that. This is the second year that the teachers are holding literacy classes in centers supported directly by Shimer College. Our collaboration with them is the most extensive Wonn Refleksyon training that we’ve ever undertaken. We have a longterm commitment to weekly two-hour meetings with bi-monthly day-long workshops as well. The size of the time commitment is especially welcome because we’ve had the sense that the shorter, more limited workshops we’ve generally undertaken have been shallower than we would like.

But there’s yet another reason we’re so interested in the collaboration: The group in Fayette is the one currently experimenting most seriously with the book that we created for non-readers. That book is called Annou Reflechi Ansanm. In English that means “Let’s Ponder Together.” The book uses pictures and Haitian proverbs as topics of conversation, rather than the texts that our other books have been based on. Each of the literacy teachers is committed to leading weekly meetings with his or her group, and so their work and the time we spend with them combine to offer us the chance to learn a lot about how the book functions in a classroom and about how to help teachers use it most effectively. Our core strategy has thus far been to lead the group through the creation of weekly lesson plans, to create a kind of teachers’ edition, or guidebook, in collaboration with them. A weekly lesson plan can give them a clear sense of how to lead their classes, and the process of creating it each week pushes them to think in specific, concrete terms about the challenges that their groups are facing, the particular objectives that those challenges imply, and the strategies they might employ towards attaining those objectives.

Our team in Haiti began working towards creating guidebooks in 2000. Erik Badger pushed us in that direction, the same direction that the Touchstones Project, our parent in the States, had begun taking more than ten years earlier (www.touchstones.org). Erik was working closely with inexperienced discussion leaders – some of them very inexperienced – who were leading lieracy classes on the island of Lagonav. He felt that the leaders’ understanding of Wonn Refleksyon was marginal at best and that they often seemed lost in fundamental ways as they tried to lead their groups. He suggested that we created a guidebook that would do two separate things. On one hand, it would break down the complicated array of goals that discussion leaders can have for their groups into distinct pieces so that over the course of eighteen to twenty weeks the leaders would have the chance to read about and better understand the various goals. At the same time, each lesson plan would set out a simple procedure that a leader could choose to follow closely. These procedures would give even very inexperienced discussion leaders a way to enter a classroom with a certain degree of confidence in their sense of what they were going to do.

Erik and I wrote an initial draft of the guidebook for our first volume of discussion texts with help from various colleagues over the course of a couple of months. As our network became more and more familiar with it – with its strengths and its weaknesses – we invested time in revising and rewriting it. A large group of us met over the course of several days a few years back to thoroughly rewrite it. Finally, this year Frémy oversaw the publication of a polished version of the revised work. Its roots are still traceable to the work Erik and I originally did, but it has passed through many other hands as well and is much the better for it.

The experience in Fayette is quite different and more interesting than that original one was because, though Frémy and I lead the weekly meetings where the lesson plans are created, the plans are being created nonetheless by the same emerging discussion leaders who’ll take them into the classroom as well. We’re three lesson plans into the process, and I’m impressed both with the plans themselves and the conversations about challenges and objectives that the plans are built upon.

The question of objectives is important. That should be obvious enough, but I’ve also begun to see how critical setting the right objective can be as I’ve observed a friend who tried to use the original guidebook this year with his own group. His name is Benaja Antoine, and he’s the fourth-grade teacher at the Matenwa Community Learning Center, the community school on Lagonav that has become one of my homes here in Haiti. He has been leading weekly discussions with his students over the course of the school year, and has discovered that the guidebook that should have been helping him is more-or-less useless.

And it’s no wonder. All through its early development, the people mainly, most seriously involved were using it to lead groups for adults. And even though we have considerable experience that shows that the same discussion texts can work well with both adults and kids, there’s little reason to suspect that they would work in the very same ways.

The objectives that the current guidebook sets out are a poor fit for Benaja’s students in two respects. On one hand, the guidebook very heavily emphasizes handing leadership of the group over to participants rather quickly. This makes a lot of sense for adults. It is reasonable to hope that they can, relatively quickly, get a sense of the activity and choose to take control of it. With children, things are more complicated. Though it is important for them to feel ownership of the activity, and though they need to be drawn into a share of the responsibility, they also need space to just be kids. Pushing them too hard too fast to lead themselves in conversations that are serious and sustained makes no sense.

On the other hand, the guidebook fails to sufficiently emphasize improving their reading or their ability to consider critically what they read. The kids in Benaja’s fourth-grade class are generally much better readers than are the participants in literacy centers that the guidebook was written for, and so the guidebook doesn’t help a teacher push them as readers nearly as far as it could.

So Benaja and I have decided to work on another guidebook, one especially for use with kids. I’m not yet sure what shape that will take. I don’t know what a new guidebook will look like nor exactly what the process or the timeline for creating it will be. But I have been very impressed with the way creating a guidebook in Fayette is working out, so I look forward to a similar experience in Matenwa.

There are projects that are best, or even necessarily, undertaken step-by-improvised-step. An example is fording a stony river bed barefoot. Each step is a new experiment. There’s not much thinking you can do two or three steps ahead. Leading discussions can be like that too, but it doesn’t need to be. Guidebooks can give discussion leaders a way to look forward to the route their groups might take. More importantly, the process of creating a guidebook can force us all to think through what we are trying to achieve and how we are going about our work. The understandings that emerge are not just deep, but detailed.

Okay. I admit it. Tarantulas scare the hell out of me. For awhile a few years ago I was thinking of buying one to keep in an aquarium in my office at school. At the time, I was preparing to teach a class in Observational Biology, and I wanted to make animal motion a focus. I imagined students profitably enjoying tracing the movements of a big, hairy spider. I never intended, however, for the tarantula and me to be on the same side of the aquarium. It would stay on the inside. I would stay on the outside.

Tuesday night in Matenwa, however, Anita told me to keep an eye out for the critters. Since the spring rains have started, they show up often enough. By early Wednesday evening, I had seen three of them, inside the house I was staying in. In other words, we were on the same side of the house. One of them was sitting comfortably on one of the beds. Though it had chosen the one that I was not using, I immediately deduced with certainty that it would surely choose to spend some time on the other one that night. I didn’t sleep well.

I should be more serious about the dangers in Haiti, though, so I’ll share another anecdote.

Thursday, Edouard and I were stopped at a blockade by heavily armed police. They were dressed in the all-black uniforms that are worn by what is called SIMO, the rough equivalent of an American SWAT team. They were not, in other words, traffic cops. Being in close proximity to automatic rifles and large handguns would give me the creeps under the best of circumstances – if there are good circumstances to see them in. But I recently read a report asserting that Haitian police have been entering certain parts of Pòtoprens and carrying out summary executions – I can neither confirm nor contradict the assertion – so running into a crowd of large uniformed men carrying big weapons made me nervous.

It turned out to be a very professionally-run operation. They were checking everyone’s ID, looking over the drivers’ various paperwork, and searching for weapons. They were forceful, but reasonably polite. They looked through my bag, but showed no interest in either the laptop or the cash it contained.

Edouard’s papers were not in order, not even close, and they held us for awhile. He himself knew perfectly well that they were in the right. They listened to his explanation, which was reasonable. It was mainly based on how hard it is to get official paperwork organized in Haiti. It was not the sort of explanation they were bound to accept, but though they made us wait awhile, and though they told him in no uncertain terms that his explanation was unacceptable, eventually they let him – and, so, us – go. The gave him nothing but a firm scolding. Frankly, they impressed me.

This is a strange time to be in Haiti. The news I read of Haiti on the internet is, without exception, bad. This would not be, in itself, so unusual. The world press, when it’s willing to show any interest in Haiti at all, generally seems quite fixated on misery.

But these days it’s different. The news is not about poverty and suffering. It’s about violence and crime. Some news sources will report that supporters of former president Aristide are fomenting violence to interfere with elections. Others will insist that Haiti’s in-their-view-illegal government, virtually imposed by the United States since the 2004 coup d’état, is carrying out an campaign of violence and terror against those same supporters of Aristide. I am not a journalist and I have a poor understanding of Haitian politics, so I won’t presume to say what the truth is. I suspect that there’s some truth in what both sides our saying, but that there’s plenty of old-fashioned crime-for-profit as well. Even a recent State Department comment admitted that things here are “more complicated” than its usual anti-Aristide proclamations would have one believe. And they admit this even though the American government simply loathes Jean-Bertrand Aristide.

What is clear is that there is, both here and in whatever corners there are abroad that care about Haiti, a rapidly escalating perception that the county is dominated by violence and crime. Not only are Americans I know — even ones who have years of experience in Haiti – choosing to postpone or cancel trips here, but Haitians I know in the countryside are thinking seriously of canceling trips to Pòtoprens.

And it’s not as though they have no reason to feel concerned. Kidnapping-for-profit rings seem to be increasingly active and effective. Heavy gunfire is a part of daily life in certain corners of Pòtoprens. The combination of Haitian police and UN peacekeepers who are nominally responsible for security here seem hard-pressed to help. If that’s what they are honestly trying to do. There are about seven thousand peacekeepers and about five thousand police, and Haiti is a nation of eight million people. Even if you only consider the population of Pòtoprens, the number is something like two million. The numerical odds seem very much against law and order.

So one might easily wonder why I choose to remain here at a moment like this, and my answer might come as a surprise. The truth is that I do not feel as though I am in danger. I could be wrong about this, of course, but I have not yet felt that I have something here to fear. I devoutly avoid those parts of Pòtoprens where the violence is occurring, just as I am careful about where I would go in Chicago, Waukegan, or New York. I likewise avoid the trappings of wealth that both draw kidnappers’ attention and make their work easy to do. I don’t travel in a fancy SUV and I don’t make regular trips to a fancy office. I use public transportation or Edouard’s motorcycle to get in and out of, and to get around in, Pòtoprens. I’ve yet to read stories of kidnappers pulling victims off the back of random pick-up trucks, and Edouard works with an attentiveness and a level of skill that avoids trouble. There has yet to be any sign of political or criminal violence in Darbonne or Matenwa, much less in Ka Glo, and these are the places I live. I might very well leave if I felt concerned for my own safety, but so far I see no reason to be afraid.

But fear is a funny thing. It has as much or more to do with impressions and semblances than with facts. Our imagination plays an important role as well. For example, when I think carefully about my fear of tarantulas I must admit that it has little or nothing to do with the tarantula’s painful and, perhaps, dangerous bite. What I fear is the feeling that one might crawl on me or touch me as I try to sleep at night. My fear is, in other words, of something that I have no reason to be concerned about. And my fear is perfectly real nonetheless.

Now the very last thing that I would want to suggest is that those who fear Haiti right now are as irrational as I am about tarantulas. There is violence here right now. There are dangers. Just as there are, by the way, in lots of places. But assessing danger is complicated, and different people can have very different reactions to similar things. I think of the way I imagine that my young American friend Alexa Dolinko would walk up to tarantulas ready to be fascinated by the lovely creatures that they are.

And other people who live and work here, or who come here to visit, may see something that looks very different from what I see. I recently told my parents to cancel a planned visited because I feel as though they would likely draw the kind of attention that I do not think I draw. Those here who work more regular schedules than I do, those who depend on attractive private transportation, and those whose life or work takes them to offices or homes in lower Delma or downtown Pòtoprens surely have something very real to fear.

But none of this is true of me. In fact, as the school year draws to a close, and my new laptop battery makes it easier for me to work without electric power, I am likely to circulate less and less. My life should only get even safer than it has been.

So for now I see no reason to leave, no reason to be too concerned. Friends and family might find too little comfort in my sense of safety, especially those who are used to watching the way their absentminded philosophy professor crosses the street. But I get a lot of advice from those around me here, and I listen to it. Other than that, I don’t know what I can reasonably do.

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.