The expression “student-centered education” seems redundant to me. I don’t see how education could be anything but student-centered.

The educational process doesn’t take place inside a teacher who leads a class. Much less does it take place inside the books or the information that a class is using. It takes place inside students. Whether I am working with an individual or a group, I can only define my success as a teacher in terms of the progress they make. And their progress is something they do, not something I do for them.

And this simple point has implications that can lead a long way. In the classroom, it means letting students’ questions and opinions serve as the starting point of inquiry. And in working with groups, it means being guided by the groups’ process of shared discovery.

My most recent trip to the Matènwa Community Learning Center offered an interesting example. (See: http://www.matenwa.org.) The school has a growing reputation for providing non-violent, active-learning-based education. It is increasingly being asked to host small groups of teachers from schools in other parts of Haiti, who spend a week or several weeks watching and apprenticing with its staff.

When the school has visitors while I am there, they are always encouraged to participate in the work we do together, and this time was no different. There were about ten teachers from Answouj, a small coastal city northeast of Gonayiv. The Matènwa teachers and I had planned to spend two two-hour meetings discussing a short essay by the Swiss psychologist Jean Piaget, called “Education for Peace: Is it Possible?” The visitors joined us.

The essay was chosen for study by the Learning Center’s Haitian Principal, Abner Sauveur, whose original motivation for founding a school was very much tied to his dream of providing a non-violent alternative to traditional Haitian education. He found it in a book of essays by Piaget that I had lent him with a view to following up the very successful workshop on the psychology of learning that he, his teachers, and I led for other Lagonav teachers this past summer. (See: Lekol Nomal Matenwa.) Its title appealed to him before he even read it.

It’s a short piece that Piaget wrote between the 20th century’s two great European wars. He was watching from his home in Switzerland as nationalism and conflicting ideologies were growing throughout the so-called “developed” world. In the context, the question that gave the essay its title must have had a ring of despair.

The thrust of the answer that Piaget offers is against fluffy moralizing. He writes that education for peace cannot succeed as a sermon. It means, rather, designing classrooms in which children develop the skill of getting along with others. He argues that children need to learn to recognize the real interests other children have that oppose their own.

The Matènwa teachers were excited by the piece, because they saw in it a confirmation of things they already knew. And not only knew, but were implementing in all aspects of their work. They recognized that Piaget was calling for practices like small-group work among students and student/teacher dialogue, which already are the cornerstones of much that the Matènwa teachers do. So, for them, it was an encouraging piece to read.

What was more interesting than how they reacted, however, was how their guests did. These guests had just arrived in Matènwa. They hadn’t yet seen very much. Or, rather, they hadn’t yet looked very deeply. They were experienced teachers. Several of them had risen to become principals. But they were experienced at running the text-centered and teacher-centered classes that are traditional in Haiti and in a lot of other places as well. And what was worse: They were accustomed to being in such classes. So when we sat down to discuss the essay as a group, some of the results were predictable.

They sorted themselves into two subgroups. Two of them spoke directly to me, at great length, about the importance of speaking in class about peace issues. They spoke of making peace a part of the morality they preach to their students, of raising their students’ consciousness regarding the issue. The other teachers from Answouj sat in silence.

This demonstrated poor skills on two levels: poor reading skills and a poor sense of dialogue. On one hand, the speakers showed that they misunderstood the text. What they were reacting to was the words of the title. They knew that we were to talk about education for peace. But they hadn’t really followed the little that Piaget tried to say about the subject. They failed to notice that the strategy they were proposing for raising it – preaching sermons – was directly contrary to what he was arguing for.

On the other hand, their rush to speak directly, and a great length, to the person present who most appeared to them to be an authority figure, ignoring their fellow participants in order to hear what I, their discussion leader, had to say, showed that they weren’t thinking in terms of collaboration. They weren’t thinking in terms of real dialogue. They weren’t thinking in terms of understanding the diverse perspectives in the room.

Under the circumstances, I was faced with a choice. I could simply explain to them my reasons for thinking they had misunderstood the text and why, therefore, the approach they were proposing seemed to me likely to be counterproductive. But doing so would have risked reinforcing two misunderstandings. First, it would have confirmed in practice the habit I was hoping to help them overcome. It would position me as the authority in the room, the one who provides the right answers. Second, it would have confirmed that what we were meeting to talk about was Piaget’s ideas, that the class was appropriately centered on the text, rather than on their thoughts about classroom teaching.

So instead of trying to refute their particular interpretations, I pushed the group away from interpreting by asking them to talk about things they were already doing in the classroom that they felt could contribute towards peace. The teachers from Matènwa spoke up quickly. One talked about Reflection Circles, another about Open Space. These are pervasive practices at the school. They also spoke of the importance place they gave to dialogue in managing behavior issues that arise and of the use of small-group work in most of their classes. They had, in other words, lots of experience to share, and most of them were good at sharing it.

As the Matènwa teachers spoke about specific experiences, those of the Answouj teachers who had been silent began to speak up. Whereas they had been shy about speaking about a short, difficult text in French in front of professional colleagues they scarcely knew, they were interested to hear the teachers talk about the very practices they had been observing in the days since they arrived from Answouj. They asked questions, and compared the Matènwa practices to their own more traditional way of doing things. They could see that, insofar as the goal of an education is peace, they could learn a lot from the teachers of Matènwa.

I could have told them that, but it wouldn’t have meant very much. Letting it emerge in a dialogue that pushed them to compare their own experience with new observations gave the discovery a power it could not otherwise have had.

Fonkoze’s standard solidarity-group microcredit has been proven to be an effective tool to help poor women help themselves out of poverty. Groups of five women organize themselves to receive and reimburse their loans together. They act as guarantees for one another, eliminating the need for collateral and for someone to cosign.

Loans start at about $85 and can increase to more than $1400, and the success women have at managing increasing loan amount is only one small sign of the progress they make. Fonkoze has a battery of data that demonstrates clients’ progress out of poverty by showing how their standard of living improves: better houses, more children in school, and better nutrition are typical results.

But microcredit is not the answer for all of Haiti’s poor. Over 50% of Haitian households function on less that $1 a day, and some of these are so poor that they would not be able to absorb and make good use of a sum as large as $85. For some of these, Fonkoze has created a special program of mini-microcredit, with even smaller loans – they start at less than $30 – shorten repayment periods, and closer accompaniment from specially trained credit agents. It’s a six-month program that prepares a woman to enter standard microcredit by giving her some additional structure.

Even this program, however, can’t reach the poorest of the poor. It depends, after all, on a woman’s capacity to take $30 and invest it immediately into a business that will enable her to make repayments and generate profit. But if a woman has no business, has never had a business, then she can hardly invest money in one. If her children are consistently hungry, she cannot even be expected to invest money that comes her way. She needs to buy food.

Fonkoze is now experimenting with a program designed to help these poorest of the poor, It’s called “CLM” or Chemen Lavi Miyò, which is Creole for “the Road to a Better Life.” It features education, close supervision, some subsidies, and the transfer of income-generating assets. At the end of 18 months, participants have sustainable incomes, small bank accounts, and can move into regular microcredit without need of further subsidies. It’s based on a program that has been developed of the course of ten years of research and practical experience in the field by BRAC, one of Bangladesh’s large NGOs. Fonkoze is piloting the program with 150 participants in Haiti, spread out through three locations: Lagonav, Boukan Kare, and Twoudinò.

I spent the day yesterday on horseback, slogging through the deep, black mud of Boukan Kare, meeting program participants. It was stunning.

Anyone who’s spent even a little time in Haiti has seen poverty of a sort that we in the United States are unaccustomed to. But CLM participants endure poverty that is even harsher that what one generally sees in Haiti. They have no income-generating assets of any kind. They own no animals. They own no farming land. If they own a home, it’s one room, with a mud floor, walls of woven sticks packed with mud, and a straw roof. They might go a day, even two days, without eating. They tend to have large families, but none of their children can go to school. What little they have comes from begging. They are, of course, sick all the time.

Adeline can serve as an example. Her mother was chosen through an exhaustive, three-step selection process to be a program beneficiary. First, Fonkoze organized a meeting in her neighborhood at which community members identified the poorest households in their area. Then, Fonkoze field workers visited the homes of the families the community had identified as its poorest to complete detailed surveys of each household and create a preliminary list of recommended participants. Finally, Fonkoze’s CLM Program Manager visited each recommended household to confirm that it qualified for the program.

Adeline’s mother was selected. She had Adeline and six other children to support with a husband who wasn’t helping her. She had no income except what she could beg. She would go, as Adeline told me, for a week at a time without lighting a cooking fire.

And then she died. Adeline was the oldest surviving child. A couple of older siblings had died. Her father was ready to send her away to live in domestic servitude in Mirebalais, the nearest city. Instead, Fonkoze offered her the chance to participate in the program in her mother’s place. She would have to become the de facto head of her household at the age of only 14, but she would get to stay with her little brothers and sisters and have the means to help them to a better life.

So she received extensive training in the care of goats and chickens. Those are the two businesses she chose to enter. Then she received seven chickens and three goats. Her weekly visits from her Fonkoze Case Manager include coaching directly focused on her businesses, but also lessons in nutrition, hygiene, and health. They also include literacy training – Adeline’s never been to school – and lots and lots of encouragement. Fonkoze is helping her repair the dilapidated shack her family lives in, and is partnering with Paul Farmer’s Partners in Health to guarantee them free access to essential health care. Finally, she receives a stipend of just under $1 a day to free her from begging to support her siblings so that she has the time she needs to take care of her animals and go to school. She’s starting first grade this fall.

Adeline is excited to be part of the program. Her goats are doing well: There are four of them now, and one of them is pregnant. She’s been managing to save almost $1.50 per week of the stipend she receives. That will be important down the line as she prepares to enter microcredit. And she and her siblings now eat every day.

She still has problems. One is her father. He’s been unwilling to help her at all, even by just building a simple coop to protect her chickens. Several have died. And it must be awkward for both of them as he watches her assume responsibility for her own and his other children’s lives. And make no mistake: She is still very, very poor.

But already her life is very much better than it was. That’s what she says. The question for Fonkoze is whether that improvement will sustain itself beyond the program’s 18 months. Is CLM a short-term relief from hunger, or truly the road to a better life? If the experience in Bangladesh is any indicator, it will be very much the latter. BRAC has been able to help a high percentage of participating families there remove themselves from extreme poverty. But Haiti is Haiti. It should work here as well, but only time and experience will tell.

I was educated in a tradition that sometimes calls itself “liberal”. The word, in this instance, does not refer to the fact that my parents and grandparents were Kennedy and FDR democrats. It refers to my formal education, which was in the liberal arts. I studied some philosophy and some literature, but also some math, some political theory, some experimental science, and even some music. I insist tiresomely on prefacing each piece of my education with “some” to point to the fact that the education was not designed to make me a specialist in any particular area.

In fact, it was designed to make me free. That’s why it’s sometimes referred to as a “liberal” education: because it was designed to liberate me. The motto of St. John’s College, my //alma mater//, is “I make free men from boys by means of books and a balance.” The motto comes from a time before the school admitted women, and sounds better in Latin than in English.

When I ask myself what it was designed to liberate me from, I’m left saying something like “from the shackles of ignorance.” It’s an answer that sounds dated, perhaps, but I think it holds up pretty well to closer examination.

Most of the people I work with in Haiti seem to have more urgent problems than those shackles. Not only that, but the leisure that the sort of education I received – and am very grateful for – requires is almost entirely unknown. The sort of work we undertake here together is very far removed from the seminars I attended all those years ago. But I want to say nonetheless that it’s often liberal in the very same sense that my own education was: It makes those of us engaged in it free.

Here some examples might help.

It’s back-to-school season in Haiti, as it is in the States. The most important difference is, perhaps, that many Haitian children are sitting at home waiting for their families to organize the tuition money they’ll need to send their kids to school, or the money to buy uniforms, or for some other necessity. Some children are already in school, but others will wait until October, November, or even January to get started. About 50% won’t go at all.

Ti Kèl and Mackenson started last week at the public school in Mariaman, so we got back to work on Sunday. The two of them are my neighbors, now 16. We spend Sunday mornings whenever I’m available doing math together on the blackboard on my front patio. They’re good students, but only in sixth grade. For various reasons, they both started late. We’re a little worried, because there’s a rumor going around that public high schools will no longer accept students over 15 into the seventh grade. They’re pretty confident that they’ll be able to pass the national primary school graduation exam next June, but if they can’t get into the public high school in Pétion-Ville, it may be the end of their education. Neither is in any position to pay for seven years of secondary education at a private school.

We began reviewing some of the stuff we worked on in May and June. Arithmetic with fractions, for example. We worked on all four operations. I thought it would be a good place to start because they were starting to get good with fractions last spring when we stopped. Ti Kèl aced them on his final. I saw his corrected exam. It helped him shock his entire school by coming in fourth in his class, much higher than he ever had. Mackenson, who is generally first in their class, did almost as well. He did better than Ti Kèl on other parts of the final, and so came in first once again.

But I added a twist, and it exposed the fragility of what they knew. I gave them some problems with mixed fractions, and Mackenson in particular was put off. It turned out that he, quite literally, did not know what he was doing. He remembered, for example, that to multiply fractions he need only multiply numerators and then multiply denominators, and that to divide them he need only flip the second of two fractions upside-down and then multiply, but he wasn’t clear enough about what a fraction is to be able to convert mixed fractions into simple ones – like 3 2/7 into 23/7 – much less to add, subtract, multiply, or divide them.

He was frozen, imprisoned, by a certain lack of understanding. He was able to manage well enough when he was on familiar ground, but he lacked the flexibility, the freedom, that real understanding could give him to attack problems that are partly new.

So we spent some time just talking about what fractions are, and he seem to make progress. I’ll know more about how real that progress was in the coming weeks.

I spent part of last week in Pointe des Lataniers. It’s a small fishing village on the very western corner of Lagonav, the large island across a small bay from Port au Prince. I have friends from Lataniers, and we had decided together to organize an experimental literacy center in the town.

As in most parts of Haiti, where official literacy rates are usually given at around 50%, illiteracy is a problem in Lataniers. But, also like other parts of Haiti, Lataniers has various other problems as well: access to safe drinking water, loss of fertile land to erosion and salinization, lack of schools, and more. Our goal was to help organize a literacy center that would also become an engine for community action.

The approach the center would use would be built around REFLECT, a method I’ve written about before. REFLECT is designed to help participants organize knowledge they already possess in a manner that helps them face it, and so make use of it. (See: Learning to REFLECT)

That’s exactly what I saw on Thursday. Participants spent most of class tracing a calendar on the ground as they stood in a circle. The calendar was a listing of each of the ways they make money. For each of their income-generating activities, they went month-by-month, noting when the activity in question would bring in more money, and when it would bring in less.

They made several discoveries, but one that was especially striking. They all agreed that goats bring in much more money in December than in any other month. A very well educated Haitian was with me, and he explained that the demand is higher in December because of the New Year holiday, when lots of people like to eat goat.

But the participants countered that he was missing the real point. Goats are more expensive in December because there are none to be bought. People don’t sell them. And then they explained: They sell goats when they need money. In December, they don’t need money because that’s when they sell their peanut crop. So they don’t sell goats.

As soon as they explained this, they were ready to say that it was silly. They might not need the money right at that moment, but they would be able to make much more money by selling their goats in December anyway. They said they’d do so starting this year.

It’s important to note that every one of them already knew perfectly well before the meeting that they would get more for their goats if they sold them in December. But they had never faced that knowledge in a way that enabled them to make use of it. Talking about the fact with one another, in a conversation about the problems they have earning the money they need to get by, put their own knowledge in front of them. It liberated them from the ways they habitually look at things, and so made them freer than they had been.

Haitian dogs understand standard Creole. To convince one to leave a house it has entered, or generally to get lost, one need only say “sòti chen!” Creole for “Dog, leave!” My Lilly only appears to be an exception. She ignores what I say to her, but immediately obeys anyone else in the neighborhood. If I really want her to get lost, all I have to do is ask Valouloun, Madan Anténor’s 14-year-old girl, to speak to her.

Cats here are, as they are in the States, a little different. People don’t much bother to tell them to go away, but when they want to call them, they say “Mimi, Mimi.” In a sense, that is their name. They all are called “Mimi”. It’s also a Creole word for “cat.” Haitians sometimes use the word Creole borrowed from French, “chat,” but they just as often use “mimi” instead.

The word’s source is obvious enough. It’s just an imitation of the sound a cat makes.

Things get interesting after dogs and cats. To tell a chicken to get lost, a Haitian says “shee!” Apparently, the word means “go away” in the language of Haitian chickens. It works for other species of domestic fowl as well: ducks, turkeys, and guinea fowl.

But if I’m not talking to a bird, I can’t say “shee”. Goats, for example, respond to “sa!” Donkeys respond to “weed!” Cattle respond to “wach”. It is as though each type of animal has its own language, and Haitians speak them all.

It’s a little curious.

I can’t figure out why, say, goats and donkeys are addressed in different ways. In the case of cats, things are clear. Haitians make a sound like a cat makes. And often enough they do the same thing when calling other animals, such as when they call chickens to feed, as opposed to when they’re driving the away.

But goats do not say “sa.”

One could try to argue that that is how Haitians hear them. It might not seem plausible to someone who’s heard a goat, but, after all, we English speakers somehow think that roosters say “cock-a-doodle-doo”. Nothing could really be farther from the case. So it shouldn’t surprise us too much if Haitians hear goat noises differently from the way we hear them.

But the argument starts to crumble when one hears young Haitians yelling “meh, meh,” when they see UN peacekeepers. Haitians say that the peacekeepers steal and eat their goats, and accuse them by making goat sounds when they pass by. If nothing else, that shows that Haitians think of goats as saying “meh.”

And the same argument can’t even get started in the case of donkeys. The odd noise they make sounds nothing like “weed.”

So I’ve been wondering where these various animal words come from. Why can’t I say “sa” to a Haitian chicken or a dog? Why can’t I say “sa” to a cow?

Surely I could. And the animal I was addressing would just as surely get the message well enough if I used the right tone of voice. No one has ever suggested that the reason Lilly fails to obey me and me alone is that my Creole pronunciation is poor.

Haitians, however, don’t mix these words. Or they don’t very much. And I just can’t figure it out.

I can tend to think of my ignorance about “sa” as contrasting sharply with my good understanding of “sòti”. I might know nothing about “sa”, but I know that “sòti” comes from the French verb “sortir*”, and can trace this latter word even farther to its Latin roots. There are people who can trace the word back farther still.

But I shouldn’t kid myself. I know nothing at all about how a sound like “sòti” came to mean “leave”. Tracing the word backwards through history might push the question into the remote past, but it doesn’t suggest an answer.

Such an unanswered question is surely less important than others, like how to fund Fonkoze’s education programs or how a poor Haitian family will pull together its next meal.

It’s trivial, but that doesn’t make it any less of a question. Enough of a question, at least, for a quiet Saturday morn

Actually, there is no “Lekòl Nòmal Matènwa”. At least, not yet. A “lekòl nòmal” is a school of education, and Matènwa doesn’t have one. What it has is a successful community school, the Matènwa Community Learning Center (www.matenwa.org), which I’ve written about quite a number of times.

That school is at the center of a seven-school network of rural primary schools that have banded together to change education on their island, Lagonav. They have chosen to stand behind certain principles: active, student-centered learning, without beatings and without humiliations; education that’s appropriate to the rural region the schools and, more importantly, their students are in; and education in Creole, the language that’s native to all residents of Lagonav and the only language that students and, indeed, most teachers, speak and understand well. It’s a small start, in a way, but the network is only in its second year. Several other schools are interested in joining.

One of the most important things that the network can do for its member schools is organize faculty development seminars. Though the schools’ principals consistently name raising financial resources as their first need – Who can blame them? They are private schools located in communities of families that cannot really afford to pay – they just as consistently list teacher training as their second. The network’s ambitious goals for the kind of education it aspires to offer must remain nothing but goals unless teachers understand them well and have the skills they need to bring them about. So this past week, the Matènwa school has been hosting a summer workshop for about 25 teachers from member schools – and from some schools that are not members.

The workshop’s subject is the psychology of learning. How we chose the subject is itself a story. About two years ago, I spent a week with the Matènwa teachers studying psychology (See: HardQuestions). Even at the time, we had heard that the same Haitian university that had produced the textbook on psychology generally was producing a second on the educational psychology in particular. We knew right away that we’d want to study it. So we began asking the publisher for the book. For a while I was going to their bookstore every few weeks, expecting that it would finally be there. But over a year later, it was still pending.

Then we heard this spring that it was finally available. The university in question had opened a satellite campus in Lagonav’s one large town, and one of our colleagues had signed up for classes. There he discovered that the book was in use. He suggested that we arrange a workshop on the book because he felt that, even for him, the participatory methods we use would help him get more out of it than the lectures the university offers him. For most of the teachers we work with, who cannot go to college, a workshop would be the only chance they’d have.

When I began planning the workshop with the Matènwa teachers, we decided that a two-part approach would be best: I would spend one week meeting with them, going through the book as carefully as we could in such a short time. We’d then spend a second week with the larger group of teachers. During that second week, the Matènwa teachers would divide themselves into teams of two and three. Each team would be responsible for leading the workshop for a group of six to ten other teachers. For the Matènwa teachers, this would mean that they would not only get a second chance to study the book but also that they would gain experience as workshop leaders.

The first week we spent together was hard. We had seven chapters to get through, and five days to do it in. And we had to spend time the first day establishing a work plan, and reserve time on the last day for establishing a second work plan for the second week.

Fortunately, most of the teachers had read through the whole book by the beginning of the week, so we worked through the first chapter on Monday, and then two chapters a day for the next three days. Friday we finished Chapter Seven and had our planning meeting.

The biggest challenge we felt ourselves facing looking towards the second week was that the other teachers would not have the chance to read the book in advance. They would get the book on Monday, and would have to read its chapters during the workshop week itself. Since some of them would have long walks to join us every day, and plenty of chores to do on returning each afternoon to their rural homes, we knew that reading time would be limited. We therefore decided to build quiet reading time right into the daily schedule. We’d serve a very light breakfast at 8:00, but then wouldn’t start talking until just after 9:00. We announced that the interim was time for reading or reading the day’s assignment.

From 9:00 until noon we studied chapters in groups of eight to ten, each led by a couple of Matènwa teachers. The groups would spend the first couple of hours discussing any chapter subjects that participants had questions about. Together they would try to get the clarity they sought. After that, even these small groups would divide into small ones, with three or four members at most. These smaller groups would answer the questions that the textbook’s author put at the end of each chapter.

We had lunch at noon, and got back to work at 1:00. We spend about 15 minutes addressing whatever questions lingered after the morning’s work.

After that, we tried something we had never tried before. To explain, I need to go back and touch upon something that initially puzzled us: We wanted to cover seven chapters, but we knew that we couldn’t ask participants to read more than one chapter each day. Since we wanted to reserve Friday for a different activity, we had four days, or time for four chapters at most. The Matènwa teachers chose Chapters One-Three, which are general treatments of the subject, and chapter seven, an introduction to Piaget. That left Chapters Four and Five, each on a different aspect of behaviorism, and Chapter Six, on //Gestalt// theory.

We decided that on Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday afternoon, we would have a short lecture and discussion. One of the Matènwa teachers would present a fifteen-twenty minute talk, and then open the floor for questions.

This was very new ground for them all. In the first place, the habits they have been cultivating at Matènwa have been running precisely contrary to the traditional lecture format. Everything we’ve been working on has been discussion-based. And the Matènwa teachers aren’t much inclined to the lecture mode, especially in front of colleagues. They don’t usually view themselves as experts. So while they speak well and comfortably about their experiences at the school, presenting a more academic topic would be entirely new.

But these presentations went well. The teachers didn’t over-reach. They were brief enough that they were able to stay clearly focused, but long enough that their listeners were able to start ask meaningful questions.

Thursday afternoon was a general review of the four days’ work. We drew a tree on a blackboard and filled the tree with fruit. Each piece of fruits had a topic we had covered written on it. If everyone felt they understood the topic, the fruit was ripe and we harvested it with an eraser. If anyone had questions, we left the fruit on the tree until the questions were addressed.

Friday is an Open Space meeting. We used that very flexible format to invite teachers to talk about how they will be able to apply the week’s learning in the classes that they teach. The teachers themselves proposed a list of topics that they fitted into a previously blank agenda for the morning that we had drawn on a board. There would be two sessions, and six-eight topics were proposed for each. Once the agenda was filled, the teachers scattered, going to participate in whatever discussion of whatever topic interested them most.

At the end of Friday’s meeting, Abner Sauveur, Principal of the Matènwa school, summed things up beautifully. “When you told us that we ourselves would lead a workshop on psychology for the other teachers,” he said, “I was pretty skeptical. It was wonderful to discover what we were able to do.”

So there is, as yet, no School of Education in Matènwa. But there’s lots of teacher education going on there nonetheless.

A source of minor confusion for someone who’s in Haiti for the first time is the dollar. Prices are usually given in dollars, Haitian dollars. This is confusing because no such currency exists.

Haiti’s currency is the gourd. Right now, a buck buys about 35 of them. When I started coming to Haiti in the 90s, they were worth twice as much. A couple of years ago, they were worth 20% less. The value they have recently gained against the dollar both reflects and argues for cautious optimism, I suppose.

When Haitians speak of dollars, what they usually mean is five gourds. American dollars are called “dola US” or “dola vèt”. The latter expression means “green dollars.” Talk of Haitian dollars has its roots, I’m told, in a time under the Duvalier dictatorships when the exchange rate was held at five gourds.

So when Haril told me on Tuesday night that he had made sixteen dollars the Sunday before last, I knew he meant 80 gourds, or about $2.30. He had washed four motorcycles using the rainwater he collects in a basin next to my apartment in Belekou. He takes the water in a battered five-gallon bucket, and then splashes it onto a motorcycle every which way, scrubbing as he does. He used to get more business, but pressurized-water car and motorcycle washes are close by, on the main road, and they are, if not necessarily better, certainly faster.

It’s been a hard summer for Haril. I wrote of his dental problem. I also wrote of the fact that he got caught between his parents as their relationship deteriorated. His mother left their household some weeks ago. His father finally moved out of the neighborhood with Haril’s four younger siblings. Haril was left behind. He moved in with a couple of other young, parent-less men who share a room that opens onto one of the narrow corridors behind where I live. It’s a small, dark, hot, and airless space, but for now it’s home.

So Haril’s now fending for himself. He has a small business selling prepaid telephone cards. Someone helped him buy a first set of 25, and now every time he turns them over he earns 20 Haitians dollars, or about $2.85. He gives that money to an older neighbor whom he trusts to hold it for him. She keeps him from spending it. This is important because he’s counting on that money to buy the things he’ll need for school in the fall. He also assumes that he could need to help one or more of his siblings with school expenses, too. He’s especially concerned about the youngest two, a girl named Lovely and a little boy they call Pipi, because they’re really much too young to help themselves.

But if he’s to keep from eating his phone card money, he needs another way to live. So he tries hard to find motorcycles to wash, especially on the weekends. The Belekou intersection where we live is a major motorcycle taxi station, and the drivers seem to like him, so he can usually get a job or two. When he told me that he had made sixteen dollars by washing four motorcycles, I was pleased for him, but not surprised. What surprised me was hearing him explain how he had been able to make it through the week, Monday through Friday, on that money, $2.30.

He explained. Every morning he bought coffee and a little bit of bread for breakfast. It cost one Haitian dollar a day, less than fifteen cents. At lunch, he would go to lower Belekou, where there is a community restaurant, something like a soup kitchen, run by a Roman Catholic priest. There he can get a plate of beans and rice for another dollar. In the evening he buys a roll spread with peanut butter from a street vendor for the same price. It’s not much, but it’s three small meals each day for only fifteen gourds, or 43 cents.

And he does a little better than that because the older boys he now lives with are really kind. They like Haril, and they understand his situation. Guynold is in his mid-twenties, and he’s unemployed right now, but he had a job for a while in a factory. There, he earned 70 gourds a day, working six days a week. He’s now living mainly off savings, but if Haril’s at the corner when Guynold comes out in the morning, he’s more than likely to buy Haril breakfast: ten gourds of beans and rice or fifteen of spaghetti. They then share five gourds worth of juice. Daniel isn’t much older than Haril, but he’s been supporting himself by fixing flat tires for some time. He shares what he has with Haril as well. I’m not sure what Jonas lives on, but I’ve seen him share it, too.

So Haril is scraping by, thanks in part to friends who have taken the place of family, and he can probably continue to do so for the next weeks. As long as nothing goes wrong. Any unexpected expense will use up the money he’s saving for school, and even that won’t go very far.

When school starts in September, things will be quite different. Whether he can go to school, do his homework, and earn the money he needs to support himself and help his siblings is hard to guess. I want to say “no”, but it’s the same “no” I would have offered to someone asking me whether he could live on fifteen gourds a day.