Like a lot of people, I think I’m reasonably smart about some things and a little stupid about others.

One of the things I’ve consistently proven stupid about is dentists. Though I have very fond memories of the man who was our family dentist when I was child, I can’t think of going to a dentist without feeling myself starting to panic. That wouldn’t be so bad. We don’t control our emotional responses to things.

But it becomes stupidity when one allows the panic to be the decision maker. In spring 2004, I spent what seemed like weeks without sleeping with a toothache, rather than risk sitting in a dentist’s chair, until I finally had to go and have it yanked. While sitting in the chair, through what turned out to be an entirely painless procedure, I got so frightened that I stopped breathing. The dentist had to remind me to inhale. I remember his words: “Now Steve, I’m going have to ask you to take a breath or two.”

I hadn’t gone to a dentist for any kind of routine examination in longer than I remember – it had been over ten years at least – until Tuesday. I was visiting my parents, and we used the visit to arrange a check-up. It turned out to be a two-day affair. I had cavities to be filled. The dentist also spoke of possible future root canals and of wisdom teeth that she may eventually want to remove. But, all in all, the damage from those years of negligence was pretty minimal. I certainly deserved much worse.

One of the people that I had to be thinking about as I sat in her chair was Haril. He’s an eighteen-year-old friend of mine from Cité Soleil, a member of the group I work with there. A few weeks ago, I had begun to be concerned as I noticed his normally cheerful, lively disposition turn sleepy and sullen. I know that things have been very stressful for him at home – he’s caught in the crossfire between parents that are unable to get along – and I know that life in Cité Soleil starts out hard enough without extra problems. I had seen Haril change like this once before, and it turned out that he had an urgent problem, so I decided to ask him what was up.

It turned out that he had a toothache. It was his first. He didn’t know anything about going to a dentist, and didn’t think he had the money to do so. He was spending pocket change buying aspirin from street vendors, but it wasn’t getting him through the night. He wasn’t getting any sleep.

It also turned out that the problem was easy enough to resolve: I gave some money to a motorcycle driver who works at the station in from of my apartment. He’s a big, fatherly fellow they call “Pastè”. He knew of a dentist he trusted, and was willing to sacrifice his morning. He would take Haril, wait with him, pay the dentist, and bring him home. Though there might be a long line, the time in the chair would certainly be short. Haril would get a shot of Novocain, and then the tooth would come out.

I went back to Cité Soleil that same afternoon, and Haril was sore. Within a day or so, however, the problem was gone. The procedure cost fifty Haitian dollars. That’s 250 gourds or about $7.15. By Haitian standards, it was quite expensive. In the countryside, the usual price is more like thirty to fifty gourds, a hundred gourds at most.

My two days with my parents’ dentist, however, cost more than $7.15, more than a hundred times that. Even in 2004, when I simply had a tooth pulled, it cost more than $300. It always elicits shudders in Haiti when I reveal that price.

Haril’s use of dentistry seems pretty typical for Haiti. He had never been to a dentist in his eighteen years because he had never had a problem. I should admit that my own use was no different from his until this past week. Though I had been to the dentist often enough in my youth, I don’t know that I had been to one for a routine check up in Haril’s lifetime. I can’t remember. The problem that sends a Haitian to a dentist – whether to a formally trained one or to an informal practitioner – is a severe toothache. The solution to a toothache is to have the offending tooth pulled. Cosmetic dentistry and routine preventative maintenance visits to a dentist are rare in Haiti, almost unheard of, though Haitians devotedly brush their teeth with cheap Chinese toothbrushes and toothpastes every day.

All this may be changing in Haiti, especially in the capital and in other areas where the presence of development organizations and of Haitians who’ve spent time abroad can contribute to rising expectations. But very many Haitians have never been to a dentist at all, and it’s not so surprising that Haril, facing dental pain for the first time, was a little at a loss as to what to do. He didn’t know where to go, or how much it would cost, or where he would get the money he would need.

Things are so different back home. They are, at least, if I define “home” as the socio-economic environment within the US that I grew up in. One visits the dentist twice a year, one gets braces to correct any misshapenness, and bad teeth are filled or otherwise repaired before the damage goes too far. My own long negligence makes me, I think, the exception, not the rule, and nothing about my dental history relates to my not knowing what to do or where to turn. And it doesn’t relate to finances. Though I haven’t had dental insurance, I could always have set my financial priorities in ways that would have made preventative attention affordable. Simple stupidity: That’s all it has been.

I won’t presume to say what relationship to dentistry Haitians should have. It’s not so different from other medicine: should they aim for the situation we have in the States, where there are excellent services, well integrated into the habits people develop from childhood, which are expensive as hell? It’s easy to say that the miserable nights Haril spent sleeplessly are a sign that something is wrong. But how much investment would be necessary to transform Haiti from a place where dentists principally pull damaged or ailing teeth to a place where they can help keep teeth healthy? How would one make more preventive dentistry available? And how would one nurture a culture in which Haitians – unlike me – are inclined to make good use of it?

Haiti is a place that needs to change in all sorts of ways. In this one respect, it probably resembles the United States more closely than Americans often admit to themselves. The rotted teeth and toothless mouths one sees, the toothaches that interfere with Haitians’ lives, are all emblematic of that need. But they are only problems. They do not really point towards the solutions Haitians need.

Yoyo Piman is dead. He was shot on Tuesday by UN forces attempting to arrest him. The guys I know in Belekou shared the news on Thursday.

When I got up to Kaglo Saturday afternoon, I heard the same news from Breny, Mèt Anténor’s eleven-year-old nephew. Yoyo Piman was well known in Haiti. Though perhaps “notorious” would be a better word. He was the second-in-command of the gang that ruled Belekou until the UN overran all of Cité Soleil in February of this year.

He went into hiding, but didn’t go far. He stayed in Belekou, in a small, one-room shack in the midst of one of the neighborhood’s many narrow, unpaved corridors. On Tuesday, someone told the UN forces where they would find him, and they moved in Tuesday night. He tried to flee, and was shot. The guys I know were especially struck by how he died: running barefoot, half-naked, in the middle of the night, through the putrid Cité Soleil mud after four months of hiding in the cramped darkness. A miserable way to end.

I want to be very careful how I write about Yoyo. The most certain fact is that he died accused, but not convicted. When Breny spoke to me about it, he expressed excitement at the death of a terrible criminal. He also enjoyed making fun of Yoyo’s name, which was really a nickname. “Piman” means “pepper”. I don’t know how he came to be called Yoyo Piman. His real name was Junior.

But Breny is a child, and one who lives far away from the reality of Cité Soleil. The guys from Belekou lived their whole lives around Yoyo Piman, and never spoke or speak of him in anything but positive terms. He was someone they knew they could count on: for advice, protection, and a few dollars now and then when they were in need. I’m told that during December he would walk the streets in his neighborhood loaded down with cash. No one in the area would go without a gift to celebrate the coming New Year.

I met him in December, I think. I don’t remember exactly when. I had just rented my room in his neighborhood, and he came for a visit. We had a long and interesting chat. Before even I had begun working in Cité Soleil, the young men who wanted me to come had spoken with Yoyo and Amaral, the real boss. They asked the two to give their blessing to my visits. The guys wanted to do what they could to ensure I could come and go safely. Amaral said I was welcome. But when the collaboration with the guys started to deepen, we wanted to talk with them directly to make sure they were really on board.

The guys chose to ask Yoyo to come by to speak with me. They were never comfortable with Amaral. They neither said nor say anything bad about him. They never really speak of him at all. As much as I can tell, it’s partly in the old “If you can’t say something nice . . .” sense. Except that there’s a difference: Amaral wielded enormous power in the neighborhood. It might have been dangerous to speak ill of him.

So one day, Yoyo came by, and we talked for almost an hour: about the English class Héguel and I were teaching, about the progress of the group, about my impressions of Cité Soleil. He was glad I was working with young people he grew up with. At the time, some of his men were attending the class, and he was glad of that too, though as the battle began to heat up in January, they gradually dropped out. He seemed to feel a leader’s responsibility for them. He assured me I’d have no trouble with him or his people. He had discussed the matter with Amaral, and could speak for them both.

He also spoke of the struggle that he and his gang were embroiled in. Amaral and he felt trapped in an armed struggle with the UN. Amaral’s brother-in-law, Evans, who was the head of the gang in Boston, the neighborhood bordering Belekou on its northern edge, believed, Yoyo said, “in a military solution.” The Belekou did not feel as though it was in a position to separate itself off from the other gangs in Cité Soleil. When the UN finally moved in with all the force at its disposal, blood flowed in Boston, where Evans insisted that his people fight it out. Amaral and Yoyo, on the other hand, had their people lay down their arms. It’s not known how many died in Boston, but in Belekou the UN moved in without opposition and, therefore, without violence.

And Yoyo talked about his life. He had been wanted by the police for several years, so though he could circulate freely within Cité Soleil – the Haitian police still do not enter the neighborhood – he was unable to leave.

Except once. One evening after dark, a longing to see Champs de Mars, the renovated public park in the middle of Port au Prince, overcame him. He hopped on his little motor scooter and gave himself a downtown tour. He said he enjoyed the outing, but could not feel safe outside of his home turf, so he never repeated the experiment.

I try not to kid myself about him. The money he freely gave to neighbors – to all who asked for it and to some who didn’t – did not grow on a tree and it didn’t fall from the skies. I don’t know what business he was in; I doubt he was selling popsicles. But I have to say I liked him and was grateful for his openness to letting me work with the guys. My neighbors in Belekou, who knew him all much better than I, evidently liked him too.

His death provides an obvious moment for looking at how things stand in the Cité. After several months of what can only be called warfare between the gangs and the UN, with guns going off almost constantly, the neighborhood has now been quiet since February. There is a new sense of security, even if it’s rooted in the presence of the tanks that pass by my gate almost hourly throughout the day and night. The tanks and the heavily armed men they carry.

But I recently read a journalist’s interview with a man who lives in the area. The man said that he was pleased with the new security situation. “But,” he added, “You can’t eat security.” Security is not enough. Without the economic opportunities that allow someone to eat and to feed their family, the peace that tanks currently enforce can’t last.

I think that the man’s view of Cité Soleil can be generalized to apply to all of Haiti. A lot of progress is being made these days. There’s a lot of complaining, too. There’s so much work to be done, that the accomplishments to date can be hard to notice. But the local currency is stable, after years of losing value against the dollar. It’s even gained some of its old value. Some roads have been built or repaired. The capital is cleaner because of squads that have been hired to sweep and clear the streets of trash.

And finally there’s the security situation. Streets in Port au Prince that were utterly empty after dark just a year or so ago are now bustling well into the evening: with pedestrians, cars, and street vendors. Adding a couple of hours of street life every day in a country where the vast majority of all economic activity is in the informal sector has to help.

But the progress seems fragile. Prices are starting to rise again as the price of gas goes up all over the world. And there’s still very little work here. As long as the economy fails to provide opportunities for most Haitians to earn their livelihoods, as long as most Haitians live in poverty, political instability is only the next disaster away.

And economic development will not be easy. To paraphrase something Fonkoze’s leadership likes to say in another context: You can’t simply furnish someone with resources and expect them to move forward. You have to accompany them. People need to learn how to plan, how to organize themselves, how to keep track of their own work. Creating economic activity in Haiti will take money, but also lots of labor-intensive, attention-intensive effort.

The complexity of the challenge is before me all the time. I recently watched as a major non-for-profit took the first steps in their plan to create a business for 20 residents of Belekou. Before they had even selected participants, their coordinator in the field had run off with money he collected by charging hundreds of people a substantial fee for submitting their résumés. As far as I can tell, the plan has been postponed. Meanwhile, a woman I know was unable to send her boy to take the national sixth-grade graduation exam because she didn’t have the money to pay the owner of the boy’s school what she owes him. She owes less than half of what she paid the not-for-profit’s coordinator.

My own work with the guys in Belekou has been increasingly focused on our attempt to establish an income-generating activity. A first plan, to build and sell cheap solar chargers for telephones, seems to have run aground. The guys’ new plan is to open a very small bakery. It seems like a good idea. We’ve found someone willing to lend them the capital they need to get started. The local demand is evident. The very-small scale that they want to start with should be manageable.

“Should be” and “seems like” are not, however, the same as done. It will be a challenge for the guys to organize themselves, to share both the work and the rewards in ways that seem equitable to all. It will be hard for them to keep the earnings in the business, working for them, in a world that’s full of things they want to buy. They are hungry, both for consumer goods and, some of them at least sometimes, for food. Surely there are other challenges that I don’t foresee. And if violence returns, it could easily swallow up whatever progress they have made.

But we have to be optimistic, even if even we can tend to fear what lies ahead. There’s simply no other option. Some of the guys have parents that support them, but not all of them do. And even those who have parents are unlikely to get all the help that a young person needs. Many of them had to drop of school before finishing primary school. A few got somewhat farther, and a few still attend. None have any reasonable prospects of getting a good job. Self-employment is probably their only reasonable hope. For people as poor as they are, there is no real alternative to success.

I wanted to say something more about the ways the texts we are creating for topic-focused Wonn Refleksyon activities are working. What I wrote most recently (What Conversations are About) seemed to be too unclear. A second opportunity for reflection came this week, as I traveled to Belladere, on the Dominican border, to work with Fonkoze credit agents there.

I’ve been to the Belladere area a couple of times now, both before the new Fonkoze branch there opened and since. (See : Almost Belade.) It’s a lovely part of the country: green and mountainous, a primary coffee-growing region. Trade between Belladere and Elias Pina combines with poor roads between Belladere and Lascahobas, the nearest larger Haitian city, to make Belladere a little bit isolated from the rest of Haiti. There’s very little phone service there, no electricity, and no cybercafe.

I spent two days and visited four credit centers, but the conversation we held in the first of those centers, a relatively new one in a place called Do Batis, or Baptiste’s Back, has a lot to say about what we are achieving and what, perhaps, we can achieve. The center is almost two hours by motorcycle up a deteriorating mountain road from Belladere. Delva, the credit agent responsible for recruiting and serving clients in the area makes the trip several times a week. When his business involves loan disbursing loans or collecting repayments, he must make the trip with a substantial amount of cash. A center might have 30 members of more. A single reimbursement for an entire center might require him to return to his office with over $1000 dollars in cash. A disbursement would involve several times that. He travels unarmed through a region with no law enforcement presence to speak of.

The topic of the first story in the collection we are creating is, therefore, credit center security. 100% of a center’s security depends on the prudence and discretion of the members it serves and of the Fonkoze staff members who visit it. It is thus important to make security a topic of reflection.

The story I wrote is easy to summarize: a credit center member named Mariz is frustrated because she has to come to meetings. She complains to a friend, and he agrees to go in her place. The center’s members accept him without questioning his presence, as does the Fonkoze credit agent. After attending several of the meetings for Mariz, he comes to understand how the center works and he arranges for the credit agent to be robbed after collecting a reimbursement.

After listening to the story, credit center members are asked to meet in small groups. One is asked to talk about Mariz’s responsibility, others are asked to talk about the centers’ officers and their responsibility, and one is asked to consider the credit agent’s responsibility. After about ten minutes of small group reflection, the groups come together to report their thoughts to one another. After that, there is a short general conversation about related issues.

In Do Batis, the conversation went much as one might have expected it might. Attendance at the meeting was small – only ten women – but those who were there got right to the point about their security. They spoke both about Mariz was wrong to send someone to the meeting in her place and how the center’s officials, its members, and its credit agent were all wrong to accept her replacement when he arrived. With respect to the content-based objectives, the meeting got off the ground quickly, and the conversation raised the issues we hoped it would raise.

But the conversation really became interesting when I asked the women whether they had security experiences they wanted to share. One older women, who had been quiet so far, took the floor right away. She explained that a man had attempted to rob her just about a week before the meeting. She lives in an isolated house with only a young boy. The man broke into the house late one night, and tied her up. The boy fled. The man demanded the money she had made for selling a substantial amount of coffee that day.

She immediately realized that he had been following her. He saw that she had left that morning with a large load of coffee beans, and knew she had returned having sold them. What he did not know is that she stopped on her way home and left her cash in the hands of a small savings cooperative she participates in. She had no cash on hand, so she offered the thief the large stock of dried beans she had prepared for sale that week. He wasn’t interested. By this time, the boy had contacted her son-in-law, and his had arrived raising a racket. The thief fled.

She spoke to the center about how worrisome it is that the man had been keeping track of her that way, and how important it was to make sure she had only minimal cash on hand. After hearing this story another woman, I’ll call her Janoz, spoke up. She reported that her older sister had just recently heard through a neighbor that Janoz had been spoken about by a group of young men. The young men referred to Janoz as a important businesswoman. They had, apparently, been noticing her progress. This, Janoz said, could not bode well. She would need to take more care to conceal her efforts.

Another women soon spoke up, explaining how she never sells all the merchandise she leaves her house with. She doesn’t want anyone to think she might have a large amount of cash on her. In addition, she’s given up traveling to the market in one nearby town where she doesn’t trust the residents.

At this point, the conversation was among the center’s members. They were sharing their experiences and offering one another advice. Their credit agent and I had nothing to say. Though I cannot know whether the women in the center in Do Batis, or in other Fonkoze centers where we establish our work, will improve the way they speak with one another – the Fonkoze version of Wonn Refleksyon lacks our usual emphasis on group evaluation and the texts it uses may be too closely related to members’ lives – it is a promising approach if it can create opportunity of conversations like the one in Do Batis. Such conversations will serve the credit centers well.

A guiding principle that Wonn Refleksyon inherited from its US-based parent, the Touchstones Discussion Project (www.touchstones.org), concerns the role that texts play in the activity. For Touchstones, and generally for Wonn Refleksyon as well, texts have been mere tools, useful in the development of a discussion groups’ skills and, so, in the development of individual members, but they have not had further importance.

This may not sound very dramatic, but it distinguishes Touchstones and Wonn Refleksyon from most of the ways we generally use texts. In most circumstances, we choose the texts to read in a group because we want to learn something that we think the text can teach us. We study textbooks in school to learn science or social studies or math. We read newspaper articles or biblical verses because we want to reflect on the issues they raise.

Although Wonn Refleksyon texts raise issues that are familiar and important to members of a discussion group – in fact, they wouldn’t work as texts if they did not – we are not usually that interested in figuring out what the texts have to say. Skill at textual interpretation is rarely a central goal for a group, as much as it tends to improve as a group moves forward, and if a group more or less ignores a text in order to take a conversation in its own direction, we don’t generally worry about that too much.

The usefulness of the approach became clear once again over this past winter and spring as we were working with a group of staff members at the Petyonvil office of Concern Worldwide, an international NGO quite active in Haiti. After several weeks of working with Wonn Refleksyon texts, the group’s members decided during an evaluation that conversations would be more meaningful if they were centered on texts more directly related to their work. So for three weeks, members of the group brought short texts that directly treated the realities they face. There was one about the phenomenon of kidnapping that was too common in Haiti at the time, the second was about reforestation, and the third was about the UN’s role in Haiti.

The texts led to spirited discussions, but after three weeks, the group was very anxious to return to the Wonn Refleksyon collection of folktales and short philosophical reflections. They had come to see that the little bit of distance that Wonn Refleksyon texts allow them from the subjects they were treating made it easier for more of them to participate in the conversations more meaningfully. They realized that they were too inclined to come to discussions about more seemingly relevant topics with their minds made up and, therefore, inclined to argue or shut up.

So Wonn Refleksyon has continued to use texts that are not directly related to lessons that participants need to learn or to issues that groups must face, even as we have added new kinds of texts – images and proverbs – that Touchstones has used either to a lesser extent or not at all.

Until now. In the last months, various opportunities have emerged that have called us to develop programs that invite group participants to face issues of particular importance to them. Concern itself has asked us to develop a Wonn Refleksyon program especially focused on public health issues We are writing very short stories – less than a page long – using information that Concern provides that raise issues around healthy childbirth, family planning, and sanitation.

And for Fonkoze, we are producing stories that raise issues around the way that credit centers are supposed to function. The purpose of the texts is to help its loan officers do their work. These officers are supposed to meet with the credit centers – groups of 30-50 borrowers who take their loans and make their repayments together – twice each month, once for disbursement or repayment and once for discussion. The problem has been that the loan officers don’t know how to lead discussion and they don’t have lots of varied ideas as to what to talk about. So we decided to try to create a series of short stories that raise issues that might be important for the businesswomen who are members of the centers to face. I went to Pòmago to spend a week with loan officers there, helping them learn to use the texts and hoping myself to learn something about how they might work for Fonkoze.

Fonkoze’s branch in Pòmago is in the middle of one of the prettiest parts of Haiti. The mountains that stretch southwest of Okap, in the far north of Haiti, still have a good number of trees. So in the midst of this wet rainy season, they are lushly green. The town, Pòmago, is a little bit out of the way. It’s off the main road, National Highway #1, that runs from Pòtoprens, through Gonayiv, to Okap. The road through Pòmago branches off that highway at Lenbe, just before Okap, and winds along a riverbed that reaches the northern coast near Oboy. It then crosses the river and continues to Pòdpe.

I spent three days working with seven loan officers, leading discussions that they could watch and then watching them lead discussions on their own. We visited six credit centers. After each day’s work, we spent time sitting in the back of the pick-up truck as it made its way back to Pòmago, talking about the way the conversations had gone.

The meetings are designed to have a simple structure: The loan officer first reads the short story aloud – each less than ¾ of a page long, then he invites the women to divide themselves into groups of four-five, and he asks each group to address a question. Finally, he invites each group to report its reflections to the whole credit center, and poses a question for further reflection. He also asks the women whether they have additional questions or comments that they would like the group to address.

The subjects of the stories we’ve created are somewhat varied, but they all center on one of three things: a business issue, like selling for credit, a center organization issue, like how to work with members who are having trouble making repayments, or an issue of general concern, like maternal or infant health.

The initial experience with the texts was quite positive. The loan officers were happy, because the simplicity of the instructions they had to follow left them with the sense that they knew what they were supposed to do. Center members took to the activity right away. Once they were in small groups, their discussions were lively. At each center, a short discussion followed the group reports. Women commented on the reports and on other related questions.

When they were invited to pose their own question, however, something interesting happened. Rather than continuing the conversation along the lines on which it had been traveling, the women presented a wide range of questions and requests that concerned their relation to Fonkoze. The presence of not one, but two representatives of Fonkoze’s central office was an opportunity too good to miss. The women pressed us with a range of requests from lower interest rates, to accelerated access to new credit, to possible new locations for branch offices. These questions, though off the topic in a certain narrow sense, served well to show that the women we were talking with were willing and able to take control of the conversation to steer it where they needed it to go.

We will need more experience, with more loan officers at more branches, before we’ll be able to say how effective the texts are. If they give the officers and the women they work with the sense that they have a useful way to spend time together, then attendance at the monthly discussions may improve. The consequence would be both a building of the solidarity that the centers depend upon and a better sense on the part of the loan officers of the clients that they serve.

Guifobert’s suggestion conveyed a lot. He is a fifth-grader at the Matènwa Community Learning Center (www.matenwa.org), and he and his class were working with me to make a map of the property his school sits on. It was our second day of work.

We had measured the back border of the property to be 98 students long by lining one after another, spreading our arms out as wide as we could. We decided to ignore the differences in size that are predictable in a fifth grade class, no to mention the way Enel and I skewed the numbers. We had already traced the front wall on the blackboard using a scale of three centimeters to one student. We had fixed the angles at the corners of the property by using a pair of pencils, opening them as though they were a compass and copying the angle they formed. We had then traced one side of the property and were prepared to trace the back.

That’s when we ran out of space. We needed enough space to trace a line 294 centimeters long, but ran into the edge of the blackboard just before we reached 200. I asked the class what we should do, and Guifobert suggested that we bend the line inward so that it would fit on the board.

Enel, who is the school’s fifth-grade teacher, and I had been planning the class for about a month. He and I had spoken about how struck he had been when he visited the States by the use Americans make of maps. He was surprised to see how Americans he knows can find their ways around unfamiliar areas by looking at maps and reading signs. I had talked about the vague memories I still have of the importance that was given to map reading when I was in elementary school. We had started discussing whether there was something we could do with his students that would help them learn to use maps as I do.

This is what we came up with: We would spend a class sitting outside in the schoolyard, scratching a map of the school into the ground with a stick. We would trace it as we sat on benches in a circle around it. Everyone would have a chance to take the stick, erase previous work, and trace out new suggestions. Enel and I would push the students to argue through their disagreements so that the class would reach rough consensus on every point: the size and position of each school building, and of everything important in the schoolyard, as well as the outline of the schoolyard itself. After that, every student would copy the map onto a piece of paper. They would thus each have a map of their own. We then sent them home with an assignment to draw a map showing the route they take from home to school.

Drawing the original map in the dirt went well. Though it took a few minutes for students to get involved, soon they were grabbing for the stick each time one of them finished with it, jumping to make a correction or add a new detail. There was a lot of discussion of the shape of the schoolyard, and lots more about how to represent the school’s principle building.

The latter point was especially striking. Most of them wanted to represent the building with a drawing that showed it as they see it when standing in front, as though one were to draw a map of Manhattan with pictures of the front of each skyscraper showing where it stands. I asked them to consider what the building would look like if they were looking at it from the air, where they would have to be to see the schoolyard the way we had drawn it. One or two were able to trace a bird’s eye view of the school, and others were willing to agree with them, but it was clear enough that this wasn’t how they saw things.

Things started to get really interesting when they began to copy the map onto their own sheets of paper. The schoolyard has an odd shape. The front wall is much shorter than the back fence. As you face the school, the left-hand boundary slants inward making an acute angle with the front of the property. Its short – only about fifteen students long – and then makes an obtuse angle with the back of the property, which extends well off towards the right. The right-hand boundary then curves inward to meet the front border.

Most of the kids, however, traced the property as a rectangle, drawing its boundary a quarter- to a half-inch inside the edge of the paper they used. A few introduced a slight irregularity in the shape, pinching the boundaries on the back right-hand side to leave a little bulge. But those bulges were nothing like the way the property extends. It was as though neither the shape of the property nor the shape of the map they had already drawn together had anything to do with their choice. It was the shape of the paper that was guiding them.

The maps they drew of their routes from home to school were just as telling. They showed roads curving gracefully, positioning the houses evenly around the page. So when Guifobert suggested that we simply bend the back boundary inward to fit on the blackboard, he was neither kidding nor trying to take an easy way out of the problem we found ourselves facing. He was expressing the way he and most of his classmates were approaching the task. They were thinking like artists, arranging objects on a canvas.

Enel and I had originally planned to move quickly from what we naively expected to be simple maps of the students’ routes to school to a writing assignment: We would ask the students to write out directions. But it turns out that things will need to move forward more slowly than that.

Two things are clear. On one hand, we need to keep them working together, whether in small groups or as a single large class. The chance to argue with one another, to correct one another and be corrected, took them much farther as mapmakers than any was able to travel by themselves.

One the other hand, we need to help the students think more clearly about the difference between drawings and maps. We need to help them draw more from observation, and less from the constraints that the paper in front of them provides. Taking the trouble to measure out the schoolyard with their bodies might have been a first step. As they work to infuse their maps with more information about distances, sizes, and shapes, they may become more inclined to impose their vision on the paper they use.

If nothing else, stretching ourselves hand-to-hand around the schoolyard was lots of fun.

Discussion groups should never stop learning. Or maybe it would be better to say that, if they feel that they have no more to learn together, they probably no longer need to be a group.

I had been working with the women from Kofaviv – the Commission of Women Victims for Victims – for about a year, and I had begun to feel that they had reached a plateau, that they were no longer moving forward. They are an accomplished group, both in our work together and otherwise. We could simply have decided to continue enjoying the pleasant meetings that we have, or to end our collaboration, but neither of those options seemed right.

They have learned to follow Wonn Refleksyon procedures more than competently. They are fearless in the face of texts that other groups in Haiti have thought to be too hard. For example, whereas Haitian university students and others have doubted whether one can even discuss Newton’s laws of motion, or at least whether someone without a fair amount of education is qualified to talk about such things, the women of Kofaviv, who range from high school graduates to women without any formal education at all, have simply done it. They listen to one another and encourage one another to speak. Each of them seems to recognize that she has something to say. As a result, any one of them might be the next one to speak at any time. This is true when I’m the one leading their conversations, but it’s just as true when one of them is playing that role. We take turns leading, and they respond well to one another just as they respond very, very well to me. It’s wonderful.

At the same time, I can’t get away from my sense that there are steps the group hasn’t taken. While they are really good at helping one another share their thoughts, I don’t see much evidence that their thoughts are changing, or developing. One of Wonn Refleksyon’s core objectives is to make our opinions visible to us in a manner that invites us to challenge them, and I have to admit to myself that the Kofaviv women do not seem to me to be challenging their own thoughts.

So we decided to try a couple of experiments in an effort to shake things up a bit. One was intended to help them make better use of texts, the other to help them rethink what it means for them to lead discussions.

I wanted to help them look at texts differently because I thought the texts they have been using could be much more useful than they’ve been so far. Some of them express puzzling, surprising thoughts. We include a text in which Herodotus quotes the Athenian lawmaker Solon as saying that he can judge no man happy until he’s dead. Some of the texts we use make ordinary thoughts seem surprising. Newton’s explanation of the laws of motion includes the claim that, if a horse pulls a rock, the rock pulls the horse just as much. The example has the power to create more intense and varied discussion than one might imagine.

But the women of Kofaviv rarely find that the texts challenge their thinking because the way they use the texts doesn’t draw that sort of help out of them. They let the texts suggest issues to discuss, but once the texts suggest what we’ll be talking about, more or less, the women don’t much return to them.

For example, one of the postulates that Euclid’s geometry is based on, that a straight line can be drawn from any point to any other point, occasioned a wide-ranging discussion about how they find their various ways around Port au Prince, about how the best route is not always straight. There’s nothing wrong with using the text in that way. We are not a math class. The fact that the text invites them to share their experiences is a good thing. But once they start talking about how to get around Port au Prince, the text can’t help them anymore. They are on their own, and the degree to which they can challenge one another and themselves will simply depend on the habits they’ve already established.

We tried to address the group’s use of the text by spending two weeks working through the Euclid slowly. We all agreed we would temporarily try a different style of work, one that was more focused on figuring out what that text can tell us. We went through it together, almost line-by-line. In order to emphasize that what we were doing was not a standard part of Wonn Refleksyon, we even gave it a different name. We said we would be working in something called a “study group”.

And with the exception of the very interesting discussion of getting around Port au Prince, it seemed to work. The women patiently pieced together different ways of understanding Euclid’s definition of right angles, for example. More importantly, it seemed to help them in the weeks that followed when we returned to our usual style. Shortly afterwards I led them in a discussion of a short excerpt from one of Darwin’s books, and they were willing to let it puzzle them and raise questions about some of their own thoughts.

The second experiment was very different, and it’s far too early to hazard a guess as to its results. It took shape in a conversation with Kerline, a lab technician who does blood tests for the rape victims that come in a too-constant stream to the Kofaviv office. Kerline is a strong member of the group, and has begun working with Frémy and me on other Wonn Refleksyon projects. She and I were talking about a discussion we led together at the office of a large international NGO in Pétion-Ville. Kerline said that what she felt she was learning as she worked with Frémy and me – and a third experienced leader named Abélard – was how to intervene in the discussions she leads with confidence.

This requires some explanation. The first thing that generally strikes Haitians about the way Frémy and I lead discussions is how relatively silent we are. Group leaders in Haiti generally dominate. Haiti is not unique in this respect. They do most of the talking, they respond to almost everything that others say, and they always have the last word. Compared to what the Haitians we work with are accustomed to, Frémy and I really are quiet. We push people to talk directly with one another, to set the course of their own conversation, and to do without a leader’s final word. Most of this we try to accomplish by simply leaving them the space to take these responsibilities on. In other words, by shutting our own mouths long enough so that others can talk.

One consequence of this is that many of the people who learn the process from us are reticent about asserting themselves. They can tend to think that shutting up is their role. When they do speak, it’s generally in one of two simple ways: Either they’re reminding participants of the rules that Wonn Refleksyon asks them to follow, or they’re expressing an opinion about the topic being discussed much as any participant might.

Kerline said that she thought that the members of the Kofaviv group needed to think more about what real leadership requires. They are good at encouraging participation and at energizing their groups, at monitoring rules, and at entering the groups they lead as one participant among equals. But they weren’t actively helping one another deepen their collaboration or their thinking. They were, rather, just letting things happen.

So we decided to spend a meeting focusing on what discussion leadership requires. We proceeded in four steps. First, we asked the women to separate into groups of five-six. Each group was to make three short lists: one of the three qualities of a good traditional classroom teacher, one of the three qualities of a good community organizer, and a third of the qualities of a good discussion leader. Neither Kerline nor I were very interested in the first two lists, but we thought that creating the three lists together would help the women concentrate on the most essential, unique qualities of a discussion leader.

Second, we brought the small groups back together and made a list of all the qualities of a discussion leader they had proposed. There were eight in all, including things like the ability to be on time, the abilities to motivate participants to come to meetings and encouraging them to participate actively once they come, and the ability to explain procedures clearly.

The third step was for the group to grade itself on each of the eight qualities. We decided to keep things simple. For each quality, they would say they are good, weak, or between the two.

There was a lot of consensus about these grades, and they graded themselves much as Kerline and I would have. There were only two points on which they gave themselves the lowest grade: One was for them not to be shy, and the other was to know when to intervene.

It turned out that these amounted to the same thing. The shyness that some of them were worried about was precisely a shyness about when to intervene strongly in a conversation. And a little talk was able to make this more precise. They don’t feel they’re timid about intervening to enforce the rules or that they’re timid about jumping in as participants with their own contributions. They feel they’re too timid, however, about jumping in to a conversation to change its direction: to suggest paths that might be more fruitful that the one a group is taking, to push a group to stick to a topic so they can deepen their reflections, to keep things from merely jumping from one opinion to another.

The fourth step we took was to return to small groups so that they could think about how to work on their ability to intervene decisively and well. Though the groups worked independently, they answered as if with one voice. They said that they don’t think they’re good at preparing for a discussion they are to lead. They think that if they had a clearer sense, from the outset, as to where a discussion might profitably go, if they were better able to formulate clear objectives before a group meets, it would be easier for them to feel as though they know what they’re doing.

It was an obvious point, but one neither Kerline nor I had considered. So we decided that we would all think about what we can do to learn how to better prepare for the discussions we are to lead. It will be a couple of weeks before I see the group again, and we all agreed we would come with ideas.

I haven’t come up with anything yet, but it’s a great question. If we are able to come up with a really good approach, it could quickly become an important part of teaching Wonn Refleksyon all over Haiti.

“On March 24th, 2007, we met at 8:00 AM, at Steven’s house in Kaglo in order to finish writing the statutes for IDEAL . . .”

The last week or so has been important for the group in Cité Soleil and for me.

The first thing that happened was trivial in a way, but very much telling. I arrived in Cité Soleil on a Friday afternoon, having spent the day at the Fonkoze office after arriving from Wanament in the far northeast corner of Haiti. When the guys saw me, they invited me to hurry up and change clothes so that I could go play basketball with them. The unimportant side of this is that I used to really enjoy playing basketball, but hadn’t played in several years. So though I was a little nervous about playing with a bunch of spritely young men, I was very pleased to be back on a court. The important side of this is that the basketball court is several blocks from my room in Belekou, in the very heart of the neighborhood.

Here’s why that’s interesting: Since I started going to Belekou, I have spent all of my time either inside my room or on the street right in front of it. The room is on the second floor of a building at the intersection that leads into the neighborhood. When we started meeting together back in October, the guys I work with asked the gang leader who controlled the area whether my presence would be alright with him, and he said he had no objections. Even so, the guys always thought I should avoid raising questions about my presence in anyone’s mind, so they more or less insisted that I stay right where we work together and not stroll around other parts of the area.

But things have changed since UN forces took over the area about a month ago without firing a shot. It’s quite calm. And though residents resent the presence of the occupying force and though they shout curses and slogans when armored personnel carriers make their regular, heavily-armed rounds, they also seem happy about the peace. When the guys invited me to play ball, it required that I walk deeper in Belekou than they had ever allowed me to go, and they did so very casually. This was a clear indication of the improved safety that they feel.

The importance of the second thing that happened is hard to judge with certainty, but it’s very promising at least: The guys spent the last two days writing out a formal charter for their organization and electing its officers. The name the chose is “IDEAL,” which stand for “Independence, Development, Education, Association, and Lawfulness.”

It was nevertheless important in at least a couple of respects. For one thing, it’s something that they’ve wanted. From my very first meeting with them, they spoke of their sense that they needed to be organized. They have felt, rightly or wrongly, that their being part of a recognized organization, with an official charter, letterhead, and membership cards will give them an identity that they’ve lacked. Though I tried to convince them that they should link their identity to what they accomplish together rather than to pieces of paper, they have found my reasoning to be only very partially satisfying. Though several of them are rightly proud of the progress they’ve made through the English lessons that Héguel and I provide, it’s been clear enough that they want something more. And they think that they now have what they were looking for. In addition, their willingness to stay focused over the course of two days on the tedious work of formulating their charter is a testimony to how ready they are to invest themselves in moving themselves forward.

In writing down their charter, they got help from my long-time colleague Gerald Lumarque, a community organizer and literacy teacher from Fayette, a rural area outside of Léogâne. He’s helped numerous grassroots organizations establish themselves. He came to Cité Soleil and met with them in our room there for a day. It was his first trip to Cité Soleil, and he was very nervous. In fact, midway through the week he contacted me to say that he had been advised not to go there, that it was too dangerous. Only when I told him that I would be sleeping there the night before he came to work, did he change his mind.

At the end of that first day, we all went up to my house in Kaglo. The twenty-six of us spent the night, and then worked through the next day until the statutes were completed.

The photos below are from the evening and the following day in Kaglo.

I went up a little early on Friday to help get the house ready. Neither Byton nor I are good about doing dishes or keeping things clean, so there was some work to do. As always, Ti Kel and Mackenson came to help.

Lilly very quickly made new friends. Here she is with Haril. He’s an eighth-grader, his parents’ second child. He earns what he can by collecting rainwater in an otherwise-unused basin and washing motorcycles.

Here she is with Daniel. Daniel is less fortunate than Haril. He isn’t able to go to school, though he went long enough that he can read and write. He earns a living fixing the flat tires that are so common among the motorcycles and bicycles that work in and around Cité Soleil.

Once Gerald and the whole team got to my house, they had a long discussion about what they had achieved through their first day of work and how they would organize themselves for the second day.

The house wasn’t really designed to sleep twenty-six, but we managed well enough.

When they got up Saturday morning, we had a small breakfast of coffee with bread and butter. Here are some of the guys, ready to get to work.

In the front are Papito, Jasmin, Frantzeau, Guynold, and Raynold. In the back are Hugens, Rissa, Osnel, and Picard.

The group spent most of the day following Gerald at the blackboard on the front patio, working out the rules they would set for themselves. He would write down proposed formulations. They would then debate them, tinkering until they came to agreement. Their newly-elected Secretary General would then write them down. The rules covered everything for admission to the group, to its governance, to its name and objectives.

At the end of the day, before they left Kaglo, the group asked me to take a picture of all of them, standing under the great Mapou.

It will take more to make the group into something important than it took to write out the statutes and elect the officers, but everything has to start somewhere.