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?

One aspect of my work that has been particularly striking to me since I came in January is something that I don’t do.
I have spent very little time involved in Wonn Refleksyon, the project that brought me to Haiti in 1997. Wonn Refleksyon is an adaptation, for Haiti, of the Touchstones Discussion Project. It’s a method of working with a group, using a certain kind of text and a combination of individual, small group, and large group work that aims at helping people to take over responsibility for their own education, to collaborate more effectively, and to develop a healthy relation to authority – both the authority of a group leader and the authority of a text.

In all the years since I first came here, Wonn Refleksyon had remained the main focus of my work, so much so that my colleagues here have really come to identify me with it. When I’m explaining one or another of the activities I’m involved in right now, they generally want to know how it relates to Wonn Refleksyon. How is it the same? How is it different? They even tend to think of the teaching I do at Shimer College as a spin-off or an adaptation of the techniques that they know as part Wonn Refleksyon.

And Wonn Refleksyon is alive and well in Haiti. There are groups using the activity in primary schools, adult literacy centers, and other places where adults or children meet. A few of those groups are led by people who were introduced to the activity by me and my first colleagues, but many of them are not. There are second and third and fourth generation discussion leaders who are flourishing.

So I’ve been going about my work, quietly smiling about how little use Wonn Refleksyon really has for me these days. But I suddenly had the chance to watch a couple of colleagues introduce a group of teachers to Wonn Refleksyon for the first time, and I jumped at it.

I had been planning a trip to Lagonav since I first arrived here. I needed to go to Matenwa, because the teachers at the school there and I wanted to read a book together – a short one by the French psychologist Jean Piaget – and planning really needed to happen face-to-face. In addition, I have many friends there, collected over years of visits. Finally, my newest godchild had been born in Matenwa in August, and I had yet to meet him.

In any case, I wanted to go.

But getting to Matenwa is a nuissance. Just to get to Karyès, where you catch the boat that takes you from the mainland to the island, is complicated these days. The combination of busses and pick-up trucks you need to take can vary depending on which neighborhoods the drivers believe are safer on a given day. After those rides, there’s a sometimes-rough ride on a boat and an always-rough pick-up truck that winds from the port city of Ansagale up the mountain to Matenwa. So when Johna offered me a lift to Karyès in a comfortable SUV, I was very grateful. I stayed at her office in Delma Friday night, because she wanted to leave by 5:00 AM Saturday morning.
Johna is a missionary in Haiti, and she supports, among other things, a small school in a desolate area outside of Ansagale. She had heard about Wonn Refleksyon and decided to offer the teachers at her school training in it. So she hired an experienced team from the school in Matenwa, and started a six-month training at the beginning of February. She was going to attend the training session on Saturday – she goes every week – so my ride turned into a way for me to attend as well.

The training was led by Abner Sauveur, the founding director and a teacher at the Matenwa school, with assistance from another teacher, Benaja Antoine. It was the group’s fourth meeting, and Abner led it following the guidebook that a group of us that included Abner had written for the first volume of discussion texts that we use.

The guidebook suggests that the fourth meeting be devoted to helping participants start to think about the kinds of questions that they ask. They are asked to work in groups to articulate short questions about the passages in the text that strike them most. After sharing all their questions with the whole class, the class then spends twenty minutes or so discussing whatever points about the text or about the reflections the text evokes move them.

Abner directed them through the series of the day’s activities with short and clear instructions. Generally, he let them work on their own, prefering not to say very much, but he made a point of circulating through the class when small group work was going on to make ceratin that everyone knew what they needed to do, and he intervened in the larger discussion to give it focus, explore ideas the participants introduced, and make space for quiet people to get into the flow.

After the meeting, he invited me to join a question-and-answer session that went almost an hour past the time they had been scheduled to end. It was hot and dusty, and we were outdoors, so the fact that people wanted to stay and talk says a lot, especially since Abner made a point of inviting all those who needed to to leave.
The main topic of this concluding conversation was leadership. The main question was whether anything – Wonn Refleksyon, a classroom, a school, or anything else – can function without someone who’s the boss. Surely the question was moved in part by Abner’s very understated leadership of the group. He is a quiet man anyway, but he also chooses in his Wonn Refleksyon groups to let others speak more and speak first. It was also surely moved by the situation at the school: Johna had just fired its principal, and showed no signs that she planned to replace him with someone else.

Abner, Benaja, and I each argued in different ways that bosses are not necessary – at least not always. The conversation grew interesting as the group talked their Wonn Refleksyon group itself. Though Abner was by no means bossy, he had chosen the text the group would read and every step of the procedure they would follow. He had led the group.There could be no denying that.

The discussion ended without a real conclusion – it didn’t really need one – and we all went about our ways. I followed Anber and Benaja as they did errands in Ansagale, then the three of us went up the mountain together.
As I reflected through the afternoon and through the night that followed one thing struck me strongly: Abner had been so committed to limiting his own talking, to making his instructions as unobtrusive as he possibly could, that he had given them without any explanation. In a sense, that was okay. It worked. The instructions and the steps that they asked participants to follow were simple enough that they could be accomplished without much explanation.

At the same time, the group left the meeting not knowing why it was important to work on asking questions, nor why good questions could emerge from the process he asked them to use. What’s more, without explanation, the instructions really were just commands. As gentle and unassuming as his manner was, Abner had set himself apart from the group, reinforcing whatever sense they had that he is, in the end, a boss. A nice boss, but a boss nonetheless.

Abner and I discussed this issue the next morning, as we drew rainwater for bathing from the cistern at his home. I think he understood my concern.

Watching a long-time colleague work can be a little like looking at a mirror. In most of the Wonn Refleksyon groups that Abner has seen me lead over the years, I’ve said little more than he said in his. Much of the difference between how much we each talk reflects my relative incompetence in Kreyol. It takes me longer than Abner to say almost anything. I’ve tried to minimize my speaking to make space so others can talk.

I think that there’s a lot to be said for teaching that doesn’t involve talking very much, but I’ve grown to think that a teacher can say too little, too. If I am to lead a class, I must sometimes tell its members what to do. But I should take the time to explain my reasons as well. Participants in groups I lead cannot begin to share authority or responsibility – or they cannot share either well – if they do not understand the reasonings that it follows. As quiet and encouraging and inviting as I might be, I do not begin to bring those I work with into leadership unless I tell them what I, their leader, think.

The other day, I was at a community group’s meeting in a village outside of Dabòn. The meeting was led by the friend of mine who brought me there because the local man who was supposed to lead it was called to the biggest city in the area, Leyogann, on community business. The main topic of the meeting was a relatively large project the group was managing. They were building outhouses for over twenty of the group’s members. People in the area generally use the bushes or a quiet spot along the road or the river to do what they need to do, but thanks to the group’s work and to resources made available to the small network of community groups they are part of, they are building good outhouses. It’s a big deal.

The particular issue under discussion was the following: The outhouses are really pretty nice. So nice, in fact, that folks don’t use them. At least some don’t. So a lot of time was spent going over the very real health issues connected with not having or not using latrines.

I had to laugh. Not at the Haitians who were sharing their thoughts in front of me. Nor at the visitors or potential visitors from the States I had spoken to since I began coming to Haiti who expressed concerns about needing to use an outhouse while here.

But there’s a Haitian proverb that goes “woch nan dlo pa konnen doule woch nan soley.” It means that a rock in water doesn’t know the pain felt by a rock in the sun. We can have a hard time imagining the concerns of someone in a situation very different from our own. The very different views of an outhouse seemed a funny example.

A more disturbing example occurred this past weekend. A complex set of circumstances brought me to Pòdepe, an important coastal city in the far north of Haiti. My father and I were there with his temple’s Haitian-American caretaker, delivering goods that were collected for two villages that were struck by the hurricane that did so much harm to Haiti last fall. For lots of reasons, I would normally avoid such a project, but it was my father’s temple and his trip. It would mean a rare chance to spend a few days with my dad and to visit a little bit of a part of Haiti that I had never seen.

I missed the actual distribution of the goods — hundreds of pounds of flour, some medical supplies, clothes, and shoes. Half were locked into a health clinic in the affected town. The clinic’s doctors agreed to get it into needy hands. The other half were to goto the other town the next day. My father reported that by the time he and the temple caretaker left the first town’s clinic in the emptied truck, several hundred people were waiting in line, struggling with one another for a little flour.

I was reminded of a scene my grandmother described to me years ago. She used to volunteer at her local Hadassah store. Hadassah is a Jewish charity that runs thrift stores. Her help was especially welcome because she spoke Yiddish and, so, could communicate well with recent Jewish immigrants — something hard for the store’s paid staff.

She described for me the scene of two women fighting over a coat. I was a young boy at the time, but I had already developed upper-middle-class sensibilities. I must have expressed contempt for people who would fight over such a thing.

She chewed me out, pointing out that I had no right to speak, that the two women really needed the coat. I was a rock in the cool, clear water, and had very little reason for thinking I could understand, and therefore judge, rocks that were battered by the sun.

The proverb expresses pretty well one side of the reservation I feel about this kind of work. The people I was with had a weekend to enter Haiti and distribute handouts to those who really need them. But evaluating someone’s needs is very tricky business. It’s hard in a community that one is part of, harder in one that one knows as a stranger but knows pretty well, hardest of all when one has no fixed relation to the people involved. It’s one thing to go somewhere as a visitor, hoping to build a long-term friendship that will be helpful and pleasant to everyone involved. To seek to make a dramatic, positive difference in the lives of people who live in a community one doesn’t know, however, seems a long shot to me. So, while I am impressed by the generosity of those who undertake such work, and I believe that the gifts they sent will make someone’s lives better for awhile, I myself would rather leave aid work in other people’s hands.

My luxury, the water that keeps me cool in Haiti, is the time I have and have had to develop friendships and partnerships from which I continue to learn.

Giving is complicated, especially across cultures. Questions as to who is giving what to whom seem to me eminently worthy of reflection. I invite anyone with questions or comments about the issue to append them to this piece.

It’s huge. Much larger than I thought it would be. And that’s saying something, because by the time I arrived last summer it was already clear that it would be much bigger than what I had planned.

Almost a year and a half ago, I decided I was ready to build a house in Ka Glo. I have been living there on and off since 1997. After spending a first summer in a small room in an abandoned house, I had been in Madanm Anténor’s dining room since 1998. The room, with its little cot, became a real home to me – a place where I could eat and sleep and read and chat with friends. With a couple of additional mattresses on the floor, it’s served plenty of guests, both Haitian and American, as well. I have no regrets and no complaints about the years I’ve spent in its comfortable confines. At the same time, as I’ve come to see myself more and more as a long-term member of the community in Ka Glo, I’ve thought about having my own place.

When I first spoke with Mèt Anténor and Madanm Mèt about this, they were pleased. Though they’ve always shown that they were happy to have me in their home, they recognized at least two things in my desire: first, that it was an expression of my long-term interest in Ka Glo and, second, that it was part of the natural transition a Haitian young adult would make towards independence. If I had decided to leave their house to enter someone else’s, I think they might have been hurt, but the idea that I would move into my own house in their own neighborhood pleased them greatly.

The first thing to decide was where to build the house. Mèt Anténor’s initial suggestion was that I speak with his middle brother, Mesenn. He’s a successful carpenter, who lives with his wife and kids in Pétion-Ville. He has his share of the family’s land in Ka Glo, and he’s not using it.

I didn’t want to buy land. First of all, it would be expensive. Second of all, though it could be done, it would violate Haiti’s 1987 constitution because I am neither citizen nor permanent resident. I hoped to get permission to build a house on someone else’s land. I would live in the house rent-free – perhaps for a contractually fixed number of years – and then the house would belong to the landowner.

Mesenn was happy to offer me a piece of his land, and it was a beautiful spot, with a nice view of the plain below. At the same time, it was steeply inclined, and leveling it off would have been a big expense, even before building could get started, so Mèt Anténor and I looked for another option.

And so we spoke to Castera. He’s Mèt Anténor’s next-door neighbor and his first cousin. His house is one that I spend a lot of time in because of my close friendship with his five children, especially the youngest three: Andrelita, Byton, and Myrtane. I love Madanm Anténor’s three children, but they really are young kids. They spend their evenings memorizing their school work. Castera kids are older by a decade, much closer to my age, so I tend to pass free evenings chatting with them instead.

Especially Byton, their younger of their two surviving sons. He in particular was excited about the prospect of my building a house in his father’s yard, so he took the lead. He helped with conversations with his father and his older brother Casnel. Casnel is 40, but he still lives at home. His own house isn’t finished. He’s a second important authority in the household.

The idea seemed good to everyone. There was a very small square of free land, right behind Castera’s kitchen. He would have to cut down a couple of trees, but they were ones he had already planned to remove because they were getting tall and starting to threaten Mèt Anténor’s house.

Byton agreed to work as the general contractor, with his father, a stonemason, as consultant. I asked another friend, Micanol, who’s a student in a school for contractors, to do a blueprint. He surveyed the little square of land and talked to me about what I wanted: two small rooms with a patio in front and an enclosed bathing area in the back. He did the drawing within a couple of days. It’s beautiful. He really worked hard on it. I still have it somewhere.

Byton said he liked the drawing, and I left it in his hands with some money to get started when I returned to the States after a short visit in January 2004. Through the spring he sent me occasional e-mail updates, and I sent money as I could. As I prepared to return at the beginning of the summer, I was excited to see how far he had gotten.

I was surprised. He had nearly finished laying down the foundation, and it was almost twice what I had asked for. His father had decided that he was willing to cut down and extra tree, and upon doing so he found the extra space to make the house larger as well. Whether I wanted a larger house was not an issue – I did not, and tried to say so at every opportunity. They were committed to building the house that they’d imagine I would like, and the things I said about my own wishes seemed to them less decisive evidence than their own thoughts about what my real desires must be.

So I swallowed hard and adjusted myself to the developing reality. I had some concerns about the amount of money the larger house would take, but Byton was being as frugal with my money as he knew how to be and I resigned myself to hoping for the best. I was able to squash a couple of expensive ideas. One was to build a water cistern under the floor of the house. (There are enough cisterns in Ka Glo. Mine would only attract mosquitos.) Another was to hollow out part of the filled foundation to make a basement room or two. (I already had enough rooms, and couldn’t see what a windowless underground space would add.) By the time I returned to the States in August, the foundation had been filled with gravel that Byton had personally collected by wheelbarrow from the road leading to Ka Glo, and most of the cinder blocks that would be needed to build the walls had been made in Castera’s front yard and were ready to be set into place.

Through the fall, I got a few more updates from Byton and I sent more money. By early January, I was ready to move to Haiti. I could hardly wait to see the house. I arrived January 19th, and crossed from Mèt Anténor’s yard to Castera’s as soon as I could do so without feeling rude.

The house was almost finished. Walls and roof were in place. Only windows and doors remained.

And the house was much larger than the space that the large foundation they had build had promised. Byton explained that, in starting to put up walls, he had noticed a way to extend the front room and the front patio, so he added another piece to the foundation and he kept building. Obviously, he supposed, I would want as much house as he could give me. He told me that it would be ready soon. Doors and windows are part of his own speciality, so he would build them each himself, and it wouldn’t take long. In the meantime, I would continue to live with Madanm Anténor. She made it clear that I would always be welcome in her home.

January became February, and the work proceeded slowly. Byton himself had not reckoned with the amount he had left to do. Every door and window had to be measured and built by hand. The frames had to be made, as well as the doors and windows themselves. The house has four doors – it will have a fifth – and six windows. That might not sound like much, but each door involves at least thirteen pieces of wood and each window at least two or three times that. And each piece of wood had to be measured, cut, and finished separately by hand. They the pieces had to be assembled and set carefully into place. Byton has no access to prepared lumber. He also has no power tools. So he worked and worked and worked. Day after day, I would see him there by 7:00 AM. He would be there by candlelight when I went to my own room at 7:00 PM. I have long known that he was a disciplined hard worker, but I had never seen anything quite like this.

But Saturday I moved in, with a couple of small beds, a table, some chairs, and assorted small necessities as well. I have two bedrooms, one large and one small, a large living room, a smaller bathroom – this is just a room with a drain in the floor that one can bathe in – and two patios. I am especially excited by the back patio. It’s a small balcony overlooking a plantain grove. It’s designed as a quiet, private place for me to read and write.

It will take me some time to learn to live in this house, to really live in it. I’ve made coffee in it, but am not yet cooking. There are some more pieces of furniture and other sundries I could use. In the meantime, I am pleased to have a space I can call my own.

My Haitian neighbors see something larger in this. Most Haitian young men I know stay with their parents until they finish their house. When the house is ready they marry, often after having waited for a very long time. So when I showed Bòs Philippe that I now have a key to a house, he answered that I now had to find the one who’ll hold the other key.

I told him that we’d see about that. For now, it’s just me.

There’s a Haitian proverb that goes, “Two prese pa fè jou louvri.” A literal translation might be something like, “Rushing too fast won’t make the sun rise.” The meaning is clear enough. Things take time. There are processes that no amount of hurrying can accelerate. One wants to get right to work, but some things just take time.

One of the central activities I had planned for my first semester here is having a hard time getting started. My partner, Frémy César, and I had been planning to teach a course on a book by Paulo Freire at a rural university outside of Léogane. The University of Fondwa is a fascinating institution. It was established as a private university by a very strong peasant association that saw the need to create higher-level professional training for rural young people that would keep them from migrating to Port-au-Prince. It’s faculty is mainly Cuban, and it focuses on training in three professions that can be especially useful in rural Haiti: agronomy, administration, and veterinary medicine.

In discussions between Frémy and the Dean of the university, it seemed interesting to invite the students to think about how best to employ the expertise they are gaining. Expertise is a funny thing. It can very easily turn into a kind of leadership that silences the voices and the thinking of those it should be serve. Rather than unlocking and developing the capacities of those around it, it can shut them down. Freire’s work, with its emphasis on the liberating power of learning, might give such young people a lot to consider, especially if they confront it in a classroom where conversation among equals is the rule. Frémy and I were excited to get started, so we made an appointment to talk with the Dean soon after my arrival.

We made our way up the road from Léogane. Fondwa is right on the main highway that crosses the mountains towards Jacmel in the south. It’s one of Haiti’s really good roads, and it’s a good thing. As it is, it winds narrowly, steeply and frighteningly through a tight pass. The large busses and trucks that go between Port-au-Prince and Jacmel barrel along threateningly in both directions. The battered girders along the hairpin turns speak eloquently.

Our meeting with the Dean was short and helpful. I was a little surprised because I thought that the planning was fairly advanced. In fact, whatever discussions Frémy had had with her already – and I know for a fact that there had been several – hadn’t accomplished much. She had been excited about the prospect of her students reading Freire, but she hadn’t considered very much how it could fit into their rather full program of studies and she hadn’t yet spoken with either her students or her colleagues.

A few days later, she sent word that she and her colleagues had decided in favor of the course, but also that she wasn’t yet sure when it could take place. And so we wait, which is fine.
Another activity we have planned is a reading group for members of the faculty at the Matenwa Community Learning Center and the network of primary schools they’re a part of . The Learning Center is a community institution in a very rural mountain village on the island of La Gonave. We have been working together with the school for some years. The school was one of the first places in Haiti that implemented Wonn Refleksyon, the Haitian version of Touchstones. Wonn Refleksyon is the discussion activity we began developing when I first came to Haiti in 1997. Since then, I have occasionally spent a few days at a time in Matenwa working with the teachers. We spent a couple of days once translating a few short pieces from the French they learned in school to the Kreyol in which they are at home. Another time we studied the first few pages of Euclid’s Elements, the classic text in geometry. They wanted to see how math could be discussible.

I had spoken with the faculty last summer about my plans to return to Haiti this year for a longer stay, and we decided to try to do something more extended together. I proposed that we try reading some longer things, things that might be of mutual interest, and they agreed. I thought that some books about children and teaching would be interesting. They’d have a chance to reflect on how they do what they do, and I could learn from their reflections. So I ordered some copies of a book by Jean Piaget, the French psychologist. I gave one to the school’s director, Abner Sauveur, and he liked it, so we’ll start as soon as we can.

But Matenwa is a long way from my home in Ka Glo, and it’s still a little hard to imagine how it will all work. Getting there involves a two hour bus ride from downtown Port au Prince, which is already at least and hour and a half from where I live. After that, there’s an hour on a boat, and then a ride that seems endless on the back of a pick-up truck. The return trip is worse, because you pretty much have to leave by 2:00 AM. My first opportunity to visit Matenwa will be the end of this month, and we’ll have some hard thinking to do. The ideal thing would be if I could spend a solid month in Matenwa, but my current activities won’t really permit that any time soon, and the teachers and I are anxious to get started. I could try to go once-a-week. I even know someone who does that. But I question my stamina for that much travel. It will probably have to be something like every two or three weeks, for a couple of days at a time, but developing the kind of continuity a group needs will be hard, especially since the practice of reading together in a group will be new to some of them at least.
The third plan I made before I arrived in January was really two plans with one partner. I’ve wanted to work more closely together with Johny St. Louis for a long time. He’s an important teacher, school principal, and community leader in Darbonne. We’ve been involved together in discussion groups over the years, and he has played a leading role in hosting groups of my students and colleagues who’ve come to visit from the States. In addition, through him I came to know Erold St. Louis, his younger brother, who is now a student at Shimer College.

Last summer, Johny and I met for two weeks with a group of primary school teachers from a couple of different schools. Together we read Freire’s book, Education as the Practice of Freedom. The group decided that it wanted to continue working together once I returned. Meeting in December before I returned to Haiti, the group chose Rousseau’s book on education, Emile, as the text to study. We had our first meeting, an organizational one, on Tuesday and we’ll start next Friday.

Johny himself is, among other things, a high school teacher, and we decided that we would like to try an experiment with high school kids, too. They are required here to have a certain familiarity with classical French literature. It is an important part of their national high school graduation exam. But often their direct experience with the works is limited. They have text books that tell them about the plays of Racine, Corneille, and Molière, for example, but they might not read the plays. They might not get hold of them.

We decided to see what it would be like to read one of the plays with real care. We would try to translate it from French into Kreyol. The discipline of translation would force close reading, improve the students’ understanding of French, and make them better writers of Kreyol as well. For Johny and me, it represents the chance to extend some of the practices of discussion we’ve been working with here to the more standard educational environment. Our first meeting with school administrators was Tuesday, and we meet with the students – a class of 10th graders and a class of 11th graders – today.
So the work my colleagues and I have been planning is starting, if only slowly. At the same time, we’ve been presented with an opportunity we hadn’t counted on. It’s work that’s shown me another side of the proverb.

A few weeks ago, I was invited to meet with Anne Hastings, the Director of Fonkoze. Fonkoze is a popular bank. It makes banking services, especially small loans, available to many poor Haitians who would otherwise have no such access. I was excited about the meeting, because I admire the institution enormously. Fonkoze’s credit program includes ongoing education for its borrowers, who are almost exclusively market women. They are offered basic literacy courses and classes in such areas as small business administration, reproductive health, and human rights. Almost 30,000 borrowers are involved in all corners of Haiti.

But there are problems with the educational programs. Fonkoze has set itself a remarkable ideal. They want to avoid the standard practice here, which would be to hire teachers, very predominantly men, to teach the various classes. Instead, they want to find women who are already participants in the credit programs, women willing and able to step forward to teach the classes. The long-term goal is to have solidarity groups continually educating themselves, groups whose members take turns accepting the leading role.

It’s an ideal very hard to achieve. Anne explained that as soon as many of the market women feels themselves labeled “teacher”, they turn into the same authoritarian creatures that they’ve seen in the educational institutions around them. They stand in front of their classes and do all the talking. Since conversation and the shared reflection on experiences that it nurtures is fundamental to the curricula Fonkoze would like to implement, the authoritarian model won’t work. The problem for Fonkoze is to figure out how to cultivate a different kind of teaching in an environment where only minimal preparation of teachers is possible.

And it’s harder than that. As liberatory as its educational goals are, Fonkoze is a very authoritarian, hierarchical organization. It may be that, in order to develop as a bank, with all the detailed accountability that a financial institution requires, it’s had to be. But that puts the institution is a difficult position. Its institutional character may tend to reinforce the tendencies it’s trying to eliminate.

This problem is evident in the way we have been asked to attack the problem. Frémy and I were asked to work together with two of Fonkoze’s field supervisors for literacy and two members of the Port-au-Prince administration to begin to create a guidebook, a series of lesson plans that literacy teachers could be taught to use. The lesson plans would, presumably, encourage them in various ways to work more collaboratively with their students, to make conversation the fundamental mode in the classroom. But it is somewhat ironic that the means we are asked to use to nurture egalitarian practices is a top-down directive.

I doubt it will work very well. The habits that lead market-women-teachers to behave in a certain way with their market-women-students run deep here in Haiti as in many other places as well. It’s hard for me to imagine meaningful change without more intense collaboration, collaboration of the sort that models the practices we would like to build.

And we’re just not sure how to do this. There are difficulties at many levels. So we should probably start slowly, study the problem, begin with some experimentation. But instead we’re plowing ahead. We are, I think, two prese, in too much of a hurry.

There is, however, another Haitian proverb that also applies. It is “pye kout pran devann.” Short legs take the lead. The idea is that because someone with short legs walks more slowly they better get started right away.

It’s probably fair to say that, with respect to the educational goals my Haitian colleagues and I are trying to attain, we all have pretty short legs. So we might as well just get started.