The other day I found myself walking home up the mountain at an hour much later than I usually would. It was raining and too dark for me to see, but I am getting to know the path well. I wasn’t really worried. The dark, lonely walk came after a couple of hours of hard riding around, so I spent some time thinking about transportation here and in the States. I’ve written tangentially about transportation before: how crowded public transportation is, how badly one ride bloodied me. I mentioned a motorcycle taxi. But it’s
worth speaking about transportation more generally, and I can do so by talking of an afternoon’s traveling.

It was a Wednesday, so I had a class to lead at the offices of an organization called Pwofod, off Rue Christ Roi. It’s down the hill towards Pòtoprens from our own office, on the other side of Rue Delmas. John, Erik and I left at 1:00 for a 2:00 meeting, and found a tap-tap to head down the hill.

A tap-tap is usually a pick-up truck. The back is covered, and there are benches along its sides. I suppose that they get their name because people knock at the window of the truck’s cab to tell the driver to stop to let them out. The ride down the hill to Kafou Ayewopò can’t be more than a couple of miles, but the midday traffic is rotten, and it can take 30-40 minutes if your luck is bad. Ours was. We were on the verge of getting out to walk – a miserable prospect in the heat of the day on dirty, crowded, polluted Delmas – when we arrived. We paid the driver seven and a half gouds, about 40 cents, for the three of us, and looked for our next ride.

We crossed the intersection to looked for a taxi. We had been using taxis to get to these weekly meetings. But someone called us over to another tap-tap, and he convinced us that his driver would stop at our street. The man was not a driver, nor had he any connection to the driver. He is, for lack of a better word, a tap-tap packer. Men and boys – a lot of seeming street children – hang around various tap-tap stations waiting for a truck or bus to arrive. They jump on before it stops, and begin to yell out its destination: “Lavil, lavil, lavil. Ann ale” (Downtown, downtown, downtown, downtown. Let’s go.) If the driver is satisfied that his truck is filled quickly enough, he might give the packer a couple of gouds. There seems to be no guarantee.

We decided to give the new ride a try. It worked fine. It brought us to within a quarter mile of our destination, though we needed directions to find it. We were so unsure whether we were headed in the right direction that we got out of the truck early, and the driver’s assistant had to tell us to get back on. When he decided we should get off, he stopped the truck himself, and pointed us the way. Our meeting went well from two to four.

The way back was harder. Four is rush hour. When we walked back to find a tap-tap headed the other way, we saw one after another pass us by already packed with people. As over-full as they are willing to get, there are limits, and a driver will not stop if he believes he has no space. There were four of us now. Tito, the Haitian high school student who is Erik’s Creole teacher, was with us. He is part of the Wednesday group. After some minutes waiting, we decide our chances of finding a truck with room for four were very slight, and turn to looking for a cab.

Now, there isn’t much here that sets a cab apart, except that they generally have a red ribbon hanging from their rear-view mirror. They are mostly small, four-door sedans that will take up to six passengers. They are generally about double the cost of a tap-tap, but tap-tap prices are quite fixed, whereas a taxi driver might try to get double or triple his usual fare out of a white person – of course, that’s still less than a dollar. When a
driver stops, you tell him where you want to go, and he quickly decides whether the destination suits him. If he’s willing to pick you up, you get on and are off. But if the cab is less than full, he will continue to stop for more passengers. Each time a potential rider names a destination, he will quickly calculate whether there is a sensible way to add it to his route and either let him or her in or drive off.

We took this cab back to Kafou Ayewopò, and looked for a tap-tap up the hill. It was futile. Everything was packed. We were a little pressed, because John and I wanted to get all the way up the mountain out of the city before dark, so we found another cab. The driver agreed to 75 gouds for the four of us. It was a ridiculously high price, but we felt we had little choice. Of course, it still amounted to very little dough.

Unfortunately, the fares are so low that drivers have little money for maintenance. Many of the taxis are in bad shape. Such was ours. It gasped along up the hill in bumber-to-bumper, stop-and-go traffic until the driver turned to enter a gas station. He was out of gas. He bought a couple of dollars worth, and we were ready to go.

Fortunately, the station was on a steep hill, because the taxi itself was not so ready. The driver had to let it roll out of the station and about fifty feet down a side street to get it started. Then he turned it around and headed back up to Delmas. And we sat there. At this point, the traffic was more “stop” than “go.” We crawled forward for awhile, but then we stalled. The driver didn’t quite know what to do. He was headed straight uphill, with
cars and trucks of all sorts packed in behind him. Angry horns and shouts told him nothing but that he had to get moving fast. The four of us piled out of the car and started pushing.

It is not easy for me to convey what a spectacle this made: three white men and a Haitian schoolboy pushing a beat-up taxi through rush hour traffic. Heads turned on every side. We were lucky: The car quickly started again, and we were off. Soon the driver was able to turn off Delmas to head up the hill via a back way. This went well for awhile, but – almost inevitably – we eventually found a spot in the road were the street was narrowed to one lane by a parked car. The series of full-size dump trucks headed straight toward
us convinced our driver that, all rules of the road aside, they had the right of way. We stopped and waited. The driver kept revving the engine in neutral to keep it from stalling again.

By now we were sitting in three-four inches of grimy, oily, putrid muck. Erik turned and said he didn’t want to have to push again. Not just here, anyway. The laugh helped, I think. After 45 minutes, we made it to the office. It was a long ride.

At this point, John and I wanted to head up the hill, but it was getting dark and beginning to rain. We caught a tap-tap to Petyonvil – not hard to get from the area near our office – and there we looked for a motorcycle.

The most convenient way to get around here is on the back of a motorcycle. Drivers wait at certain central locations to pick up fares. They are more expensive than tap-taps or ordinary taxis, but they have no set routes, and they do a lot of weaving, so they’re not much affected by traffic. Whether they are safe is a hard question. But I don’t feel
especially safer getting around in any of the other ways available to me here. Traffic here is dangerous. Period. But we can’t decide not to get around.

In any case, the cycle took us both, and got us almost as far as John’s place. He lives about a 20-minute walk down the mountain from me. At that point, the road is so steep that the driver couldn’t get his cycle up in the rain. He started to slide back. So we got off, and walked.

I’m not sure that rush hour here is worse than it is in Chicago or Washington or New York. It’s certainly more eventful.

On a recent Sunday, I was in the Catholic church on our mountain. The occasion was a happy one. Frenel, my next door neighbor and Mèt Anténor’s youngest brother, asked me to take some pictures at the baptism of his infant son. I was delighted. I like Frenel, and I had never been to a baptism nor – at the time when Frenel asked – to a Haitian religious service at all. The chance to do someone a favor and see something new had quite a draw.

My preparations were a little complicated. I had a shirt, a tie, and some slacks, but no shoes. Haitians really dress up for church – they dress up for almost everything – so neither sandals nor dirty sneakers seemed quite right. I eventually borrowed snappy dress loafers from Richard, a fast-growing teen who lives down the road. They were a size too large for me, and two for him, but he can’t buy dress shoes every year. He seemed pleased to be doing me the favor, and by early Sunday morning he had shined the shoes to stunning brightness and had delivered them to my room. My clothes looked decent enough, I thought, but the trip up the mountain in my book bag left them looking less than freshly pressed. Not so unusual for me. But as soon as I had them on, the whole neighborhood affirmed that I would have to iron them.

Those who know me well would surely doubt it, but I actually can iron. I learned how in Junior High School. We all took “Home Economics ” in 8th grade. When I was in 7th grade, H.E. was for girls and Shop was for boys, but my 8th grade year was when Massachusetts decided that separating classrooms by gender in public schools was not ok. We all took both. So when the neighborhood said that I must iron, I asked for the coal-filled iron, spread a sheet on the kitchen table, and got ready to start. Neighbors gathered in stunned silence to watch. As soon as I started on the shirt, Casnel decided I
wasn’t doing it right. He shooed me away, and did it himself. When he finished, he assigned Toto to do the pants. I got dressed then, but Madanm Anténor wasn’t quite satisfied. She thought I needed a belt, so she called Toto over and sent him to get his. I put it on, she looked me over, nodded and said I would do.

I walked down the road to the church together with Frenel himself. It’s a pretty little building, with a high-peaked roof and a small steeple. Its pale yellow walls and concrete floor are kept as clean as the sometimes-dusty, sometimes-muddy mountain will allow. It sits up on a slope overlooking the road, with a spectacular view of the plain below. On a clear day, you can see the Caribbean and the island of Lagonav to the west, and the Dominican Republic to the east.

The service was chaotic. The priest only visits once a month or so, and the baptism had to be planned well in advance. About ten children were registered to take part. That itself would have meant ten children, ten pairs of parents, and ten pairs of godparents gathered around the priest on the small platform in front of the congregation. But the population on the mountain is growing quickly. Maybe too quickly. More than twenty infants showed up. There was paperwork to been done. The qualifications of more than ten extra sets of godparents had to be checked. The president of the congregation and his teenage assistant worked furiously – the former almost ferociously – to get forms filled out. They themselves had lots of writing to do, and they had to help the many illiterate parents as well.

Despite their frenzy, we were well more than an hour late. The congregation and the choir chanted prayers responsively while we were waiting. It was terribly hot, there were young children crying and older ones fidgeting all over the place, and time seemed to pass slowly.

In the end, though, it was a beautiful afternoon – an afternoon of lovely prayers and happy people. Our whole neighborhood returned as one to our lakou for a great feast that Madanm Anténor and Toto’s mother, Madanm Boby, had been preparing at Frenel’s house.

Unfortunately, Sunday’s mass was my second in two days. The first trip was not a happy one. The Saturday before the baptism, I went to the cathedral in downtown Prtoprens for a funeral. The brother of a close friend here had died after a long illness. He was a young man, slightly younger than I am. All the usual things you would say about a funeral were true. The man’s family was miserable. Friends converged on them with attempts at consolation. My friend stood in the middle of it all, taking it courageously upon himself
to offer his mother such support as he could. Such support as is possible under the circumstances.

But what struck me most of all was that it was not one funeral, but four. I know nothing of the other three deaths. The four stories were entirely unrelated. But just as too many infants are born here, too many people die here, too. The cathedral cannot handle each funeral separately. Four coffins were before us; four unrelated families had to grieve together.

That’s not all. My friend John and I were at the funeral together. We got there by motorcycle taxi. After the funeral, as the driver drove us up the hill out of Pòtoprens, he told us the following story: While we were in the cathedral, a six-year-old girl had been found dead nearby. It seems she had been sent by her family to fetch water from the local cistern. She lost her balance, fell in, and drowned. Nobody was around to see her fall, no one to hear her cry. I don’t know how many families will be grieving together with hers.

I had already decide to write this week about my work here-in fact, I had already done the writing-when I had an adventure that I thought I’d add. It’s not really a story about life in Haiti so much as one about Steven’s life, but it seems worth sharing. Things did, eventually, turn out fine-well enough, anyway-even though it didn’t seem as though they would. For example: the torrential downpour that caught me as I went up the mountain washed most of the blood out of my hair. Things do, generally, work out.

My parents, grandmother, and aunt will see this sketch, so I should add right away that, though the blood was, indeed, mine, I am fine and was fine at every point in this story. It only seemed otherwise.

My trip home usually starts at the corner of Rue Delmas and Delmas 75. There I wait for public transportation to take me to the top of Rue Delmas in Petyonvil. From there I either take another public ride to Bwa Moket, or I walk the rest of the way. “Public transportation” is a misnomer here. The vehicles are privately owned, and they are of all sorts. One typical kind is a pick-up truck. Twelve to fifteen people climb onto two opposing benches in the back. Another one or two people might stand on the rear bumper and hang on tight. At best, it’s pretty uncomfortable.

Wednesday, I saw one approaching that was almost empty. I had to hurry to catch it, but it seemed worth the rush for a more spacious ride. It was already clear that rain would come, so I was in a hurry to get home, too. The driver must not have seen me rushing across the street toward him, because he started to pull away. I jumped onto the back without trouble, though. Except that I bumped my head.

Now, few whites ride regular public transportation here, so I am used to being stared at and talked about. I try not to notice. I start little conversations or I join the ones they start. As if nothing strange were happening at all. The two sitting with me Wednesday were indeed staring. And I could understand it. I hit my head pretty hard, noticeably so. I start out here as a public spectacle, just by being white, but my little hop into the back of their ride certainly didn’t help.

But soon they were pointing, and when I wiped what I thought was sweat out of my face, I knew why. Blood was pouring into my eyes.

Remember, Mom, I really was in no danger at any time during this story.

I am reading Deutoronomy these days, so I immediately remembered that Moses emphasizes that we are not to eat the blood, “because the blood is the life.” I got back off the truck, headed back towards my office, and watched descending sheets of my life turn my eyeglasses opaque.

As I walked back to the office, not a head failed to turn. People pointed. They told those who were with them to turn and look.. They asked me what had happened, whether I was ok, where I was going. When Sayil, the housemaster at our office, saw me walk up he yelled and asked whether some indeterminate “they” had shot me. “No,” I said, “I bumped my head.”

Within a few minutes, the bleeding had stopped. I was able to wash up, change clothes, and try again to head home. Now I really was in a hurry both because the rain was clear about to start and because the family I stay with does not yet approve of the notion of my arriving at night. They are worried that the unlit walk up the mountain would be dangerous for me. And indeed it might be.

My rushing, though, was futile. The rain poured down on me most of the last 45 minutes of my walk. But, as I said, it washed a lot of the blood away.

People here are telling me to be more careful. I really do try.

They love soccer on the mountain. I should say, the boys love soccer. The Mia Hamm phenomenon hasn’t reached here yet. Little girls play with the littlest boys, but by the time they’re teens, it’s an all-boy sport.

They especially love Brazilian soccer. They feel some connection to the Brazilians. Haitians have their own nicknames for many of the Brazilian stars, and each Haitian boy has one whom he tries to emulate: Ronaldo, Rivaldo, Bebeto, Roberto Carlos. They tell me I play like Dunga, but what they’re really looking at is his short, graying hair. Brazil’s loss to France in the finals of the last World Cup was a double tragedy: French victory
combined with Brazilian defeat.

Space to play in is hard to come by on our steep, rocky, densely populated mountain, but any small clearing is likely enough to host a game of whatever size it will bear. On some of the smallest spots-short, relatively flat stretches of our narrow, unpaved road, for example-you’ll find games of two-on-two. Anything relatively round will serve as a ball. Very often, little boys will use unripe grapefruit. As the zest scrapes against their rock-strewn field, the smell of the citrus wafts teasingly through the air.

Since I arrived in August, the older boys in Ka Glo have had a first-rate leather ball, courtesy of Leo Pickens, the Director of Athletics at St. John’s College. There are regular games of 4-on-4 in the 30 by 50 foot clearing that opens beneath the giant mapou tree outside my gate. The games consist of a lot of shooting and a tremendous amount of shouting. The whole neighborhood gathers to watch. There’s singing and encouragement and ridicule of all sorts.

The field they play on is about as bad for the ball as one can imagine. It’s thickly strewn with jagged rocks ranging from marble-size to baseball-size and larger. The first few weeks I was constantly filling the ball up for the boys with the small pump that Leo sent with their ball. One day, they weren’t playing, and I asked why. It turns out that the ball was already torn and wouldn’t hold air at all. I figured it was back to grapefruit.

A few days later, the ball made a new appearance. Eli and Jinyò had taken it to the market in Bwa Moket, a 45 minute walk down the mountain, where they found someone to repair it. Jinyò is one of the younger teens. At 15, he’s smaller and weaker than the older boys he plays with. On our small, restrictive field, it’s hard for him to compete. But Jinyò can play. Beautifully. Dribbling, faking, shooting from all angles. Like most of the
boys, he plays in flip-flops or barefoot. He’ll put a sneaker one of his feet if he can find one. I’ve rarely seen him with two. Everyone loves watching him. He thinks nothing of kicking the ball backwards over his head, even though falling on his back means landing painfully on the rocky ground.

When Eli and Jinyò returned from Bwa Moket, the ball was back in action, good as new. For a few weeks, anyway.

But this is where things get interesting. One day I saw Jinyò with the ball. It was obviously torn again. I looked it over, and noticed that in the course of trying to pump the torn ball up, the kids had displaced the valve that the needle enters. I figured the ball was finished. I asked Jinyò what he planned to do with it, and he said that he was leaving things to Eli.

Now, Eli is a very short, asthmatic 16-year-old boy. He is much smaller than the other boys, and he is convinced his asthma will prevent him from ever growing much. It amuses him that I call him “Big Eli” to distinguish him from the other Eli, a little boy of six or seven, in our village. He rarely plays because of his asthma, but he watches. He watches everything, and he really pays attention. I followed Jinyò to find him, and I sat down to do some watching myself.

It turns out that Eli didn’t go with Jinyò to Bwa Moket for nothing. He had carefully observed the man they took their ball to, and was now prepared to try to repair the ball himself. He had a knife, a needle, and some thick thread. He worked slowly, with extraordinary patience. He cut the ball open, repaired a couple of new leaks, re-attached the valve, and sewed the ball up again. A couple of hours later, the boys were playing again and Eli was watching.

The other day, when I got home, Eli was sitting on one of the benches in front of my porch. Once again, he had needle and thread in hand. But this time, instead of the ball that Leo gave us, he had a pile of small, carefully cut-out hexagons and pentagons in worn brown leather. Somewhere, his friends had found him a small, black rubber bladder and an old leather book bag that he had already cut up. Big Eli was making a ball from scratch. It took a lot of doing. He had to sew things together and tear them apart again several times through the afternoon. By early evening, he was finished. Once again, he had to sit and watch others enjoy his work. I didn’t hear anyone thank him, or even speak well of the work he had done. But they do talk to him and of him with genuine respect. And so do I.

Recently, I participated in my first soccer riot. My own role was mercifully small. Richard and Nikson, the boys who brought me to the game, whisked me away at the first sign of trouble. But it was an adventure nonetheless.

It turns out that there is something of a soccer field on our mountain, and an organized team that uses it as home. The field is a 30 minute, uphill hike from Ka Glo, where I live. The hike leads away from the main road, along a narrow, narrow path, that rises almost straight up. The field is something to behold. It’s about the size of an ice hockey rink. The men play 6-on-6, plus goalies. If the field had any straight lines, it would be an irregular
trapezoid, but it has none. It’s bordered on one length by the path which continues up the mountain towards Fò Jak; on the other, there’s a barbed-wire fence nominally protecting a bean field.

The play was exciting. Our home team, “Argentina,” fell behind early on a lovely goal – a chip from right midfield that reached a striker darting down the left sideline towards the goal, and the game stayed 1-0 for quite awhile.

Though both teams had guys that could really play, they didn’t have the space to make things happen. One player whom I know well – his name is Alen – can serve to explain. He is about 6’2″, and probably weighs almost 200 lbs. In other words, he’s a big man. He played defense, and was shooting threateningly on goal from well inside his own team’s proportionately small penalty area. He was easily able to cover enough space to make setting up a play cleanly almost impossible. Other players were smaller than Alen, but they were all so closely packed that it was hard for anything interesting to develop. There just was no room.

Space here always seems to me short. The pick-up trucks I ride to the top of Rue Delmas will hold 15 people or more stuffed into the back. The rides I sometimes get from there to Bwa Moket are very small, four door sedans – Honda Civics, Toyota Tercels, and the like. They regularly carry six passengers and a driver, plus assorted luggage, produce, and small children. My friend Jowel, his wife, and 9 kids live with occasional guests in a 15 by 25 foot house with two rooms. Each room has a small bed. There are too many people here in Haiti, and there’s too little habitable room.

The problem’s not just aesthetic. Some of the steepest hillsides on our mountain are heavily farmed, and the consequent soil erosion is everywhere to see. The eternally regenerating rockiness of the road up the hill is only the most obvious sign. In a rainstorm, it can be positively hazardous with all the soil and stone that the torrents of unabsorbed water wash across it. The hillsides are farmed, because that’s the land that the folks on the mountain have, but the long term problem that’s created is clear enough. I can’t guess whether there’s a solution.

Back to the game. Late in the second half, Argentina scored to tie the score. It was a corner kick, from a corner so far in front of the goal it should have been in line with that the ball didn’t have to hook even a bit to sneak in. At this point, players and fans grew tense. Even so, it all seemed friendly enough to me, and when Nikson walked casually over and said, “If there’s a fight, we’ll run right away.”

I was taken aback. I saw no sign of trouble. Within two or three minutes, though, a hard foul led to pushing on the field, which led in turn to pushing among opposing fans. The penultimate sound I heard was the crack of a homemade wooden goalpost, splitting as a fan was thrown through it. The last thing I heard was the sound of the friends of Nikson and Richard shouting that they were “//kapon//”, or cowards, for leaving the
game so quickly.

It was a good thing we left when we did. For me, at least. It was growing dark, and if we had been on the road any later, the boys would have had to physically guide me, slow step by slow step, down the steep and rocky unlit path. They weren’t happy about the name-calling they suffered, and which they continued to suffer for several days, but they were pretty sure that my presence left them no choice. People will look after you when you let them.

Last week, I began to write about a question that emerges in the very center of the work we are trying to do here. The question is: What does it mean to take responsibility for one’s education. This question does indeed reach the heart of what we’re trying to do, and I said last week that my letter would be about the theory behind it. Even so, I tried to raise that theoretical question in a concrete, and therefore dramatic, way. This week,
I’m going straight theory. There are no compelling characters or specific events in what I have to say, but I hope it will be worth reading nonetheless.

Though there are many ways in which we do or don’t take or accept responsibility, I defined taking responsibility as taking a share of control. We are responsible for our own education in a very special way when we are in a position to push our own questions and to encourage those of our peers, when we are in a position to search together with them for answers to our questions and theirs.

But the notion of helping people take control is a complex one. It can be well expressed as a logical problem, though it is also much more than that. In logical terms, the problem is this: If I, as a teacher, give my students control our class, haven’t I already kept control for myself? The act of giving is my act, my decision, my initiative. My students, in taking control, would be doing what I am telling them to do. I myself am no logician, but I smell a contradiction in there somewhere. How do we give up control without retaining it at another level?

The simplest answer might be that we don’t. There are aspects of the Touchstones process, the process we are working with here, that a discussion group leader is likely to manage for as long as his or her group works together. These aspects may shift as a group’s work progresses, but a teacher is never likely to give up all control permanently.

The trick is to understand responsibility, or control, as an issue richer than the logic of yes and no, black and white. Rather than viewing myself, as a discussion leader, as someone who gives control to my students, I try to think of myself as helping to open empty spaces in which student initiative, or student control, might emerge. This weird-sounding claim can be reduced to something more straight forward: I focus on nurturing the possibility of silence.

Even this – maybe this most of all – needs explaining, along at least two lines. First, how is silence a way to help students take control? Second, how do I nurture the possibility of silence?

The first question is relatively easy to talk about. Most of us are uncomfortable with prolonged silence in our conversations, let alone in a discussion class in a school. We fidget. We start to wonder what is happening and what should be happening. Often enough someone will break the silence with a joke, “Don’t everyone talk at once.”

I think what makes us uncomfortable is a sense that the orderliness of what we’re doing is dissipating. The pleasant feeling that we know what we’re doing and, very roughly at least, what will happen next starts to fade. What’s being lost is the directed-ness of the conversation. As that directed-ness dissolves, a couple of things could happen. Often, students will look to me, their discussion-leader, to get the conversation back “on track,” whether by refocusing us on whatever we have been discussing or by proposing a new
question. I often could get things going again, and sometimes I do, but that is not my first choice. Another possibility is that a student will get us back on track, or will offer a new track.

This is more what I am hoping for, but consider what’s happening in either case. A student, whether asking for my help or charting a new course without me, has decided that the conversation needs direction and is acting to remedy the situation. This is already the first step towards taking control. Even if he or she is only asking for my help, that is a step. If the student re-focuses our work without me, then his or her assumption of
responsibility is that much greater. In neither case am I handing control to anyone. In both cases, I am merely watching my own control die a slow death.

The more difficult question is how I can, as a discussion leader, nurture such silence. It’s rarely adequate, or even desirable, for me to simply watch a conversation die. Interest in our shared activity can easily die with it. My own sense is that I best nurture silence when I am working to make the comfortable flow of the conversation hard. I believe it is my job to challenge all the easy aspects of the conversations I lead.

That means first and foremost challenging to-my-mind easy understandings or assumptions about the subjects we’re discussing, most especially when those easy ways of talking involve too-easily dismissing a class’s most useful tool: the book or text it is reading. It is part of my job to help authors speak to us forcefully. Much of what I do in a class involves helping students to see how hard I find the most important questions, whether questions of interpetation or questions of much larger scope. But it can also involve challenging the comfortable ways the process sometimes moves: our comfortably reducing some participants to silence, whether by the force of our own personality or our lack of interest in their voice; our comfortably talking without listening – really listening – to what others have to say; our comfortably banishing difficult questions from discussion; our comfortably ignoring any of the difficult aspects of our shared task.

It would be a mistake for me to push to make working together impossible – we all need to feel as though we’re getting somewhere. But neither should conversations ever be too easy. Is it somewhere in Aeschylus that there’s mention of the beauty of difficult things?

I’ve said before that our work’s central mission is to teach a process that helps people take over responsibility for their own education. This is a complicated claim, requiring some explanation. I thought I would attempt the beginning of one.

The claim carries a harsh implication: that someone or other is, currently, not taking responsibility for his or her education. And when I think about the lengths many Haitians I know go to for an education, the charge seems terribly, patently unfair.

Let me give some examples. I met a boy – somewhere in his late teens – going down the mountain the other day. It turns out he already knew me. He lives about 200 yards farther than I do up the main road that leads from Bwa Moket past Ka Glo. The lakou, or cluster of houses, that he lives in is significantly poorer than my own, but somehow they had been sending him to school, and he appeared to be an excellent student. He spoke a few words of English with me, and they were fluid and correct. I wondered where the folks
where he lives could have gotten the money to send him to a decent school.

As we walked down the mountain, we talked, and he asked if we could make a little detour. I looked to Toto, who was walking with me, and we quickly agreed. It turned out that he had to make a stop at Malik, the first larger town down the mountain from me. It’s where good electricity and phone service end, so there are a number of wealthier Haitians who live there to get out of the Pòtoprens heat.

One of these wealthier Haitians, or boujwa, is a former minister in the national government, and he did very well for himself during his time in office. He was, as Toto told me quietly, a “gran manjè,” or “big eater.” That’s idiomatic Kreyol for a corrupt official. Toto began to explain. The gran manjè is related to them both. The boy that was going to see him, though, depends on his help. His own family somehow scrapes together a chunk of the money he needs for school, but the boy needs more. For reasons I don’t yet understand, he needs a “patwon,” too. The boy was humbly visiting a nasty man he does not like to beg for a favor – a letter of reference, I think. Though schools have been open for a week or two, and though the man had agreed to write for the boy, the boy was still waiting. As he told me later, his patwon is not “prese.” He’s in no hurry. For a few minutes as the three of us continued down the mountain, the boy tried to explain that the man isn’t so bad. In the end, he admitted to us that it was nasty business.

But what choice does he have? By the time we reached Petyonvil, he was explaining to me how I could arrange to teach at a Haitian university next year. That would connect me to the university system. And that, he didn’t quite say, would connect him. He only has one more year of high school. He’s thinking ahead.

Another example: Now that school has started, one sees young people studying almost everywhere one looks. At night, in Pòtoprens, where electricity in homes is spotty, you see them sitting or pacing under streetlights, chanting texts in French, in an exercise of usually uncomprehending memorization. Where I live, where there are no streetlights,
children get up with the sun to chant before they have to leave for school, usually by six in the morning. At night, they gather around kerosene lamps, squinting as they chant.

One more: Kasann – I’ll write more about her sometime – is the oldest child in the home I stay in. A beautiful little 12-year-old girl. She finished elementary school last year, and is now starting secondary school. A few weeks ago, I came home to find her bawling in our pantry. She had just learned that though she had graduated, and though she had been admitted into the school she now attends, she would not be receiving her diploma. She had missed passing the national exam by the slimmest of margins. She was
inconsolable.

The question is this: In a place where proud young people humble themselves, where they seek out any source of light than can permit them a few extra minutes of studying, where a young girl can be heartbroken because she hasn’t quite captured her diploma, in such a place, what does it mean to suggest that people are not taking responsibility for their own education?

People here could hardly care about and value their education any more than they do, it seems. Clearly they are taking responsibility, accepting responsibility, in a very deep way, in a way that reaches to their hearts. And I have not even begun to mention the sacrifices people make to put together the money they need.

Taking responsibility is a complex notion. Many of the young people I know here are indeed taking responsibility. They’re taking responsibility for entering into an educational process that they do not, however, own. They struggle to get themselves a place in a classroom where they do not pursue their own questions, a classroom in which all initiative is outside themselves, where they are passive respondents – copying, reciting, sitting in silence.

When I say that we are introducing people to a process that can help students take increasing responsibility for their own education, I mean that it is a process which invites students to take initiative. The Touchstones process, which we here call Wonn Refleksyon, encourages students to develop the habits of forming and pushing their own questions and of working together towards answers. They gradually assume not only responsibility for taking their places in their classroom, but for taking control of the classroom as well.

I’ll write more about this next week.

Route Delmas, the street that runs from Petionville down to Port au Prince, is hideous. Trucks, busses, cars, motorcycles, and motorized vehicles of all descriptions screech, roll, and zip up and down it, pouring black smoke and other less visible toxins out of their exhaust pipes. They fill the street with all manner of rattles and roars. All drivers insistantly beep their horns. It seems almost constant, as if the horn-and not leaded gasoline-was what made their engines run.

And yet thousands and thousands and thousands of people walk along this street most of every day showered by its terrible racket. It is the most important route to and from work for Haitians that live in Petionville and the villages above and around it. Hundreds of street venders line its narrow sidewalks selling produce and batteries and motor oil and shoes and choking in its noxious fumes. And yet here I am sitting in a booth on the sidewalk with Erik and Michelet sipping Haitian coffee, strong and sweet, out of old,
enamel-covered tin cups.

The booth is four bent wooden posts, holding up a simple frame, covered by a torn cloth that its owner and we implicitly agree to pretend will protect from the street’s infinite dust. She ladels the coffee out of a large kettle that we has been cooking all morning. It’s already after eight, more than an hour after her busiest time. Erik is Erik Badger, Shimer class of 1997. He is here in Haiti to work with me. I don’t know Michelet’s last name. I met him last year when I was here, and I liked him. He tells great stories, and he
smiles a lot.

Michelet came early this morning to the office/guest house that Erik and I have been staying in because he is sick and he does not know where to go for help. The house is about a block from Rue Delmas. He asks me to look closely at his eyes, and they are a pale, sickly yellow. He tells me that it’s his liver. Strangely enough, I understand him because the Creole word for liver is the “fois” of “paté de fois gras.” Last time he came by he found someone willing to give him the little money he would need to see a doctor. Today he has a prescription-at least that’s what he says it is-but no money to buy the
medicine.

I give him a couple of bucks-he says it’s more than he needs-without wondering very much whether the gift is the right thing for him or for me. It’s an easy gesture, and I feel good about it. I just don’t think about it very hard. I could describe the range of reservations I might have about it if I were to reflect, but I’ll save that for another time.

Tomorrow, I’ll move to my home in a village on the mountain above Petionville. I’ll be a long way from Delmas. In Ka Glo, it’s cool and quiet. There are trees everywhere. The house I live in is nestled in a mango grove.
Of course, when I go to work, I’ll be walking down Rue Delmas. Like everyone else.

Think of the anatomy of a pig, a big, fat one in this case. The legs are short and stumpy. The body is huge: both in girth and in length. It’s not a body made for sit-ups. Or “crunches.” Just think of the physics of it. Now hang the live, angry, frightened pig up by its hind legs.

I’m going to have to ask you to hold that thought for just a minute.

I am feeling more and more at home in Ka Glo, the mountain village where I live. My sense of being at home includes a desire to participate in, to share, as much of the life of the community as I can. A lot of their life is their work.

It was the end of the corn harvest when I arrived. There’s a good deal of corn grown on the steep slopes of our mountain. Almost everyone seems to have at least a small patch. When the ears have been collected and husked, the next job is to rub the kernels off the cobs and throw the cobs away. It’s laborious work. People were at it pretty constantly when I first arrived. They sit in front of their houses and rub the hard kernels off with their thumbs. Anyone who comes by will sit for a while at least and pitch in. When I first joined in, I was the source of much laughter. Not surprisingly, I was slow and awkward. Soon there were warnings, too: The corn would tear up my unaccustomed hands. (It did.) Nevertheless, I took my time, kept at it, and I am glad I did.

Most of the corn eaten in Ka Glo is eaten as cornmeal, so any day that we want it, it must be ground. We use a clumsy, two-handled hand mill, a real test of upper body strength and cardio-vascular endurance. I have pitched in several times so far, taking one handle while one of the young men takes the other. It wears me out thoroughly, and leaves blisters across the palms of my hands. My friends seem surprised at my interest, but happy for the help.

I wonder if they feel like Tom Sawyer, selling hard work as play with the right sort of marketing. They do not charge me to join them the way Tom charged boys to let them whitewash a fence, but I wonder what they think. What kind of rich man’s caprice do they see in my desire to share with them work that is not mine?

This brings me to the pig. Sunday morning, I saw a group of them leading a large hog by a thick rope to a big tree. They wound the rope around its hind legs, threw the rope over a strong branch, and lifted the pig until it was hanging in the air. It took about six of them to lift it. It turns out that a pig that has been hung up like that is pretty much immobile. They are too heavy to move themselves.

By this point I had disappeared into the house, chased away by the pig’s wild squealing. They quickly neutered the pig, let it down, and led it back to its sty.

Later that day, I spoke with Casnell about the chore. He’s my next-door neighbor, a thirty-five year old man who still lives with his parents and four younger siblings because he can’t yet afford to get married. He noticed that I had not wanted to share in the work. I told him that I like being a part of community work, but that cutting up the pig was more than I could do. He said that he doesn’t like it either, but since other pig farmers do it he
feels he must. It’s hard to sell the meat if the operation is not performed.

He well understood my own aversion to the chore. He and I have talked a lot about the fact that I do not eat meat. But the meaning of such aversion is what interests me here: It seems to me to mark strongly one aspect of my rich man’s privilege: the freedom to indulge such an inclination, to choose the work I am willing to do.

“Words matter”. That’s how a hero of mine once began a lecture on Bach. I think she was right, but I also think that context matters a lot, too.

I have a very particular example in mind. It’s a Creole phrase, “Vin m pale w.” It means, roughly, “Come here. I want to talk to you.” But it can mean much more. I’m thinking of Madanm Anténor.

Madanm Anténor is married to Mèt Anténor. She is master of the house I live in. She and her husband divide their responsibilities pretty clearly for the most part, and at home she is the boss. Her name is Bernadette, but I have never, ever heard a Haitian use it. They call her Madanm Anténor or Madanm Mèt. Her husband has real status here on the mountain. Some call her “Makomè,” a way to address a woman which indicates something like a collegiality among adult members of a community.

She has her own job outside the home. She works as a health extension worker,
hiking with our neighbor, Casnell, all over the mountain, vaccinating children and talking to mothers about care of their infants. It’s exhausting work, and the pay is bad, but the little bit of extra cash is helpful with three children in school and land that does not produce all the food the family needs-even if the work she does requires her to hire help to do some of the work around the house.

When Madanm Anténor says “Vin m pale w” one of several different things can happen. If she says it to one of her own children-Cassandra, Cyprien, and Valerie-he or she will quickly try to find a place to hide or a plausible explanation for not having heard her. Because when she speaks to them the phrase can have two meanings, neither of which appeals to them very much. It could mean, “Come here, I have a chore for you to do” It could mean, “You’ve done something you shouldn’t have done. I’m angry, and you’re going to know it.”

On the other hand, she often says it to local teens, usually teenage boys. Then they run like the wind to her. When she says it to them it can have only one meaning, “I have food for you.” There is, uncharacteristically for Haiti, no real food shortage here in Ka Glo, but Madanm is a great cook. Acknowledged by all here as the best. And teenagers everywhere love to eat. When she calls, they come, and they think nothing of doing chores for her when she asks. And she does ask, because her kids are still too small for
heavy work.

I like and respect her enormously. But there is one last thing I should say about her. When I say that she’s telling her kids “You’re going to know that I’m angry,” that is a euphemism. What it means is that she’s stripped a fresh branch from the ornamental bush near her door, and she’s preparing to whip her child. It’s a lovely shrub, with thin green leaves on its younger branches and stunning reddish orange ones on some of its older ones. It’s flowers are a delicate pink. When I look closely at the bush, I can see the
various places where young twigs have been torn away from it, and I know what each of those places means. How do I reconcile the horror I feel when I see and, even worse, hear the whipping with my fondness for her? I don’t. I know she loves her children, and that the world is full of contradictions.