Saül and I have known each other since my activities in Haiti first began in 1997. He’s my //monkonpè//, which is to say that his son is my godchild. So our relation is very much like family. I’ve mentioned him often in my writing, and that reflects his very large presence in my life. In addition to my friendship with him, his wife Jidit, and their children – I rarely enter Pòtoprens without seeing them first or leave it without seeing them last – I’m also close to various other members of his family. His younger brother Job especially, but his other siblings as well.

For the last month, Jidit and the boys have been in the countryside, visiting her family, so Saül has been staying alone in the small, one-room, concrete house where he lives as the custodian of the office of a Christian NGO. While his family is away, I’ve been spending more time there. I’ve even slept there a couple of times. I joke that I’m there to keep an eye on him for Jidit.

Saül’s job as a custodian doesn’t pay much. Though he and his family have free housing, electricity, and water, and though this is no small matter in the Pòtoprens area, the salary is nonetheless low. With two boys in school, things are tight.

But it’s harder than that. He’s the oldest of his parents’ seven children, and the last three are still in school. They depend heavily on him and on Felix, the third of the five brothers, to put them through school and keep them fed, clothed, and housed. This involves a lot of expense. And this past year has been especially difficult, emotionally and financially. His mother’s long illness was very expensive, and her funeral was as well. It’s a little hard to imagine how he could make it on his salary alone.

But Saül is very good with money. He’s known among family and friends for his financial smarts. It’s a running joke. The intelligence he shows handling money is all the more striking because that same intelligence did him no good at all when he was a boy in school. After spending several unsuccessful years in third grade, he convinced his parents to let him drop out and go into business instead. It must have been a hard decision for them. One need only consider how far the other siblings have been able to go in school to understand how dedicated the family has been to education. Four of the seven have made it to university, and two others made it to the last few years of high school. This, in a country in which only 60% of the population is literate and less than half of school age children are enrolled in primary school.

One of Saül’s godchildren is a boy named Serafen, who lives in Ench. The boy’s father, Rosemond, is not only Saül’s //monkonpè//, but they are cousins as well. Saül’s father was raised by Rosemond’s grandparents, having been adopted by them when his own mother died in childbirth. His father had died just a few weeks before that. So Saül feels close to Rosemond, and listens to his advice carefully. Rosemond has done very well for himself selling gasoline, ice, and soft drinks in Ench, and he advised Saül to make a go of selling gasoline as well.

This is not to say that Saül was to open a gas station in the sense that we know them. Even Rosemond, who has a large and flourishing gas trade, is a long way from anything like that. Rosemond has a small shop at the side of the road in downtown Ench. It’s filled with barrels of gas, which he empties into gallon jugs to sell. Rosemond was advising Saül to buy a couple of barrels. He gave Saül a connection to someone who sells gasoline wholesale. Saül decided to buy some gas and get to work.

Here’s Saül’s warehouse:

But it’s not that simple. Saül could not afford to simply give up his job to become a gasoline merchant. The steady, if small, salary it provides is important to him, and the housing is more important still. So he hired a young salesman. He paid him a very small salary to sit by the gasoline all day and sell it to passing drivers.

It didn’t work well. The guy was lax, unreliable, too inclined to sell on credit without keeping close track of who owed what. So Saül had to fire him. Saül was thus left at something of a loss. He had a supply of gas, but no consistent way to sell it. He would not be able to move it quickly enough working the streets only in the hours when his job didn’t require him.

Then one day another young man came by looking for Saül. At the time, the young man was running his own small business at the tap-tap station at which Saül had been trying to sell his gas. When one of the drivers asked him where the gas was, he ran to get Saül, and made the sale for him. That young man was Kenòl.

Kenòl is from Okay, Haiti’s most important city in the south. He had been living in Pòtoprens on his own for sometime, putting himself through high school. He had recently made it all the way to the end of high school, but hadn’t been able to pass the national graduation examination. Few Haitians get as far as taking the exam, and very few pass it. I’m not sure how he scraped together tuition to go to high school, but as much as he would have liked to continue his education by enrolling in a professional school, he just didn’t have the money. Rather than sitting around, feeling sorry for himself, he began selling the phone cards that cellular phone users in Haiti need to make calls. Soon after that, he started renting a phone from someone so he could sell telephone calls, too, operating a kind of payphone. Neither of the businesses brings in much income, but by working the streets seven days a week, from sunrise to dark, he was keeping himself fed.

Saül and Kenòl began to talk about how they could run the gas business together. They didn’t know each other very well, so they weren’t sure what to expect. Rather than Saül just paying Kenòl, they decided to try something different. They would become partners. Saül would buy the gas and pay the expenses to transport it to the tap-tap station where Kenòl has his other businesses. Kenòl would sell it. They would split profits 60/40. Saül would get a hardworking, motivated salesman, and Kenòl would get a piece of a business larger than anything he could afford to establish himself.

Kenòl at the station:

Here you can see his phone business, too:

The business appears to be going quite well. They sell about a barrel of gas each week, plus smaller quantities of diesel and kerosene on the side. I asked Saül why sales were so good. There are, after all, several modern gas stations with pumps and convenience stores nearby. He explained things in two ways. On one hand, though the gas stations are nearby, he sells right at the station, so tap-taps lose no time filling up. They can buy a couple of gallons while they wait for passengers. This much I had guessed. But he said that what is more important is the fact that they sell the gas in gallon jugs. Drivers like the assurance that they are getting a gallon when they pay for a gallon, and Saül’s system allows them to feel sure. They do not trust gas station pumps.

Along with their partnership, a friendship is taking shape as well. They are very different people, from different parts of Haiti, with very different stories to tell. But Saül trusts Kenòl more and more, and likes him for both his seriousness and his wit. He appreciates the casual respect that Kenòl shows him. Kenòl respects Saül’s business acumen and enjoys his easygoing ways. While Jidit and the boys are in the countryside, Kenòl and his girlfriend, Rosena, have been Saül’s main companions. They’ve been eating together two-three times every day. They both celebrated birthdays in July, and made a point of celebrating them both together.

One thing that they have in common is that, though there is no comparison between their respective educations – Saül is only marginally literate, while Kenòl reads both Creole and French with ease – as bright as they both are and as hard as they both work, neither was able to make formal education a road to a better life. This they have in common with far too many Haitians. For the majority, the primary barrier is economic, as it was for Kenòl. But for many, like Saül, it is the quality of the school experience itself: the rote learning, the primacy of French, the violent and overcrowded classrooms, the poor teaching.

It leaves one pleased to know that there’s such a place as the school in Matenwa (See: www.matenwa.org or EducationInMatenwa), and relieved to see that at least some people are finding ways to make their living nonetheless.

Here they are on the evening of Saül’s birthday dinner. That’s Rosena, Kenòl’s girlfriend, on Saül’s left.

I posted an essay about Fonkoze’s General Assembly earlier this week (See: TheGeneralAssembly), but I wanted to share a few photos that I took there.

When I arrived, songs already filled the room. Here’s a photos of Fonkoze members singing about Fonkoze. They tend to be very loyal and very fond of the institution.

Fonkoze’s founder is a Catholic priest named Father Joseph Philippe. He played a large role at the gathering: leading songs, offering explanations, encouraging participation.

Throughout the early part of the meeting, there were speeches by Fonkoze staff and by a visiting expert, but Fonkoze’s members always had the chance to ask questions and offer comments.

The most important phase of the meeting, however, was when the staff really opened up the floor, inviting the members who wanted to come forward to raise any issues they felt were important. Women streamed forward to take the microphone.

Like most meetings in Haiti, the General Assembly ended with a prayer.

The trip to Twoulwi was a great way for me to see some more of Lagonav, understand the water issues better, and see a different kind of work in the field.

Benaja is the fourth-grade teacher in Matenwa, but he’s also a member of Lagonav’s association of community organizers, AAPLAG.

As we crossed the island, we saw how dry the treeless landscape becomes. It hasn’t rained since September.

Farmers have to drive their animals to the few wells to let them drink. The wells are scattered, so it can take a lot of time. They might not be able to get their animals to water more than once of twice each week. This well is in Sous Filip.

This is the center of Twoulwi, a small port on the southern coast of the island.

Here are some of the boats that make the trips to the mainland. They go between Twoulwi and cities like Miwogwann and Tigwav.

And here are fishermen at work drawing in a net. They didn’t catch much.

The meeting took place in a wall-less covered space right at the water.

The most interesting part of the meeting for me was when the participants took magic markers in hand and drew a map of the local water sources.

There was a parallel meeting with kids.

Here’s a final photo of Benaja.

Ansagale is the major city on Lagonav. It’s the port that I use to go back and forth from the Haitian mainland for work in Matènwa, up in the mountains of the small island.

Abner Sauveur, one of the directors of the Matènwa Community Learning Center, and I spent a week leading a workshop for two small primary schools in the outskirts of Ansagale. Here’s a picture of Abner as we were preparing to get started on one of the days.

The activity we used as the workshop’s centerpiece was an introduction to Wonn Refleksyon, the discussion activity we have been working on since I first came to Haiti in 1997. Here, one of the teachers is making a point about the principles the activity is based on:

The first text in the book discusses groundrules and objectives for discussions. One of the activities underlying principles is that the more participants know about and talk about what they are doing and why, the more productive the activity can be. For that reason, the first meeting offers groundrules and objectives, not as lessons to be accepted, but as topics to be discussed. Here the conversation continues in small group work:

One of our goals for the week was to encourage conversations between the school’s leadership and its teachers. The American woman in the photo above is a Christian missionary who founded the two schools. She joined in some of the conversations. The photo below shows the first grade teacher and Director of Academics at the larger of the two schools.

Here he is with Abner:

The week was made somewhat easier because we were able to borrow a motorcycle to make the daily trips up and down the mountain. Here’s Abner, getting ready to drive us up:

Abner’s younger son, Bidyori, enjoyed the new helmet:

This photo of Abner and me was taken by Johna Blockman.

About a month and a half ago, the literacy teachers whom Fremy and I had been working with in Fayette decided to take on an additional challenge. They each made a commitment to establishing Wonn Refleksyon groups in local primary schools. Today I visited Dorlys, who started meeting with sixth-graders in the school he teaches at in Jan-Jan just up the river from Fayette.

Here’s the school:

Dorlys had invited me to come visit the class, and I was very anxious to do so. The main reason was that he was not himself leading the class. His students were taking turns doing so. Today’s leader was Estephanie.

Apparently, after the very first meeting that he led, the kids said that they wanted to take over. He convinced them to let him lead the second meeting, but they’ve been in control ever since. When I asked them what made them want take over, they gave all sorts of reasons: from a desire to learn how to lead discussions to a desire to make Dorlys, whom they are very attached to, proud.

After reminding her classmates of the groundrules of discussions, and reading and then having them read the day’s text, Estaphanie sent them to work together in groups of three or four to establish what they wanted the group to discuss.

Small group work is helpful as a way both to teach those who do not listen well in a large group to listen better and to help those who are shy about speaking up to gain confidence. Estephanie did what any good leader does during the small-group phase: She circulated in the class, assuring that her classmates were clear about her expectations and that all small groups were functioning well. Here, she’s working closely with one of the small groups.

Dorlys spent the class as a participant. Here he is working with the small group he was assigned to.

After the small group work, each group presents its thoughts to the class as a whole. These reports are important. They give the small groups the sense that they have a real responsibility, and they give the class a way to get the large-group discussion started. Here’s one boy reporting.

At this point, Estephanie’s hardest job began. She was ready to lead the large group discussion.

This is Dorlys. I was just stunned by the rapport that allos him to turn over control of his class this way.

One of the most successful of Fonkoze’s branches is the one in Wanament. Wanament is a major city in northeastern Haiti. It sits right on the Dominican border, across from Dajabòn, an important market town. So it’s a city of commerce, much of it the small commerce that Fonkoze is so good at nurturing. Just last year the branch moved from small, cramped quarters on a side street to a larger building right on the main drag.

The branch’s education coordinator explained to me that it’s important for Fonkoze to have impressive offices. “It’s good for clients to see that they are part of something large and successful,” he said. “It helps them feel confident to accept the risk of taking out a loan.” Here’s the Coordinator, Edmond, in front of the office.

Fonkoze’s credit program is organized around credit centers, groups of women that take their loans and make their repayments together. The groups may have anywhere from 25-50 women, organized into tighter groups of five friends who accept shared responsibility for the loans they take. Fonkoze’s new office has enough space that the centers based in downtown Wanament can meet inside.

Fonkoze’s particular mission, however, is to bring its services into the countryside, farther than bricks-and-mortar establishments can reach. It depends very much on staff members that work from motorcycles. They make it possible to organize credit centers as much as two hours or more from the nearest branch. This credit center, only about 30 minutes outside of Wanament, was meeting on the day we visited. Its members were making make savings account deposits.

The next day, Edmond and I rode 45 minutes in another direction to administer the final evaluation to members of a credit center who had just participated in a four-month basic literacy course. The course was offered as a regular part of credit center activities.

Edmond and the group’s own literacy teacher worked closely with participants to evaluate their reading skills.

Most participants don’t get very far in an initial four-month cycle, but they get a start. This group had just been working on vowels.

When I speak with them about their hopes for their centers, participants regularly ask for the class to be extended. They want more. So, starting in July, Fonkoze will be working with an eight-month basic literacy sequence, consisting of two four-month classes.

This little girl likes to come to watch the literacy class. She’s a third-grader, who goes to school in the very same building that her mother attends class in. The spaces that Fonkoze credit centers and their educational programs use are always donated. Often they’re in local schools and churches, whose leaders see the importance of Fonkoze’s work.

The girl told me that she enjoys seeing her mother learning to read. They like to do some of their homework together.

It’s a little bit misleading to say that Fonkoze runs literacy programs for its clients. You get much closer to the truth by saying that it offers a range of educational programs that complement its banking services.

To be even more precise: Fonkoze is in the business of helping its credit clients organize themselves into permanent solidarity groups that have live-long learning at their core. One of learning modules that Fonkoze offers is basic literacy, but it also offers modules that develop business skills and awareness of health issues. Modules focusing on human rights and on environmental protection are forthcoming.

I spent much of the first part of the week in Fondwa, a rural area in the mountains between Léogane and Jacmel. It was my first chance to participate in a workshop to prepare teachers for the business skills module.

Fonkoze runs its educational programs as cheaply as it can. So, for example, it doesn’t pay to rent space for workshops or, for that matter, space for credit centers or study groups to meet in. Rony, the Fonkoze field educator responsible for organizing the workshop borrowed a front porch for a week.

It was cramped, but perfectly serviceable. Here is Rony getting his notes together early Monday morning. He started with Fonkoze as a credit client in the mid-’90s. He then jumped at the chance to teach basic literacy when Fonkoze offered it in his area. Eventually, he was hired to train other teachers and to support and supervize their work.

The principle that guides both the workshops and the modules is that education should always begin with what learners know. This is always true, but may be especially important when the learners are adults. Rony started the week, therefore, by asking participants to meet in small groups to discuss there own understandings of business. They were asked what a business is, what businesses are for, and what sorts of businesses there are. Here one group is hard at work. The teachers-to-be in this group are talking with Nelson Cyprien. He’s Fonkoze’s administrator for education. His previous experience at Fonkoze was strictly administrative, so he was excited to have the chance to finally see something of what the work in the field is like.

Here, one of the small groups reports its answers to the group as a whole.

Such reports are important for at least three reasons. First, they are a chance to exchange thoughts. Second, they provide some participants with the chance to speak in front of others. Third, they give each group the sense that it is not speaking in a vacuum, that there is an audience that will listen to what it has to say.

There are times during the workshop when Rony simply had to explain something. He’s good at the blackboard: clear, yet soft-spoken.

The participants listened attentively.

And they were comfortable, even animated, in asking their questions and making their points.

There is a real emphasis on teamwork, however. So after Rony offered an explanation he always set participants to work in small groups to figure out problems from the book that they’d be using with their own students.

It was only Wednesday when I left the group, and participants were already eagerly volunteering to go to the blackboard to share their answers.

The module they will lead lasts four months, so we’ll know by the end of June how effective they were at working with their fellow credit center members. But the eagerness they showed in these first days of their preparation speaks well for their future as teachers.

I spent a long day on Tuesday accompanying a group of voters from Matènwa as they went to cast their ballots at the voting place they had been assigned to in Zetwa, a two-hour walk away.

We gathered across from the Matènwa school at 4:00AM. Everyone was anxious to get in line in time for the scheduled opening of the voting at 6:00 AM. On the right in this first photo is Benaja, the fourth-grade teacher at the Matènwa Community Learning Center. On the left is Beguens, a candidate for depite, the Haitan equivalent of a congressperson.

We sent off on the long walk down the mountain well before dawn.

As we reached the outskirts of Zetwa, we were overtaken by a larger group of men and women from Nankafe, which is nearly as far up the hill as Matènwa. For some reason, they were running.

When we arrived at 6:15 lines were already long.

UN troups made an early appearence. This heavily armed group of Argentineans stopped by, dropped off one of their number, and left. The man they left in Zetwa just stood around. I suppose that that’s roughly what you’d want someone heavily armed to do. It wasn’t until mid-day that the UN seemed briefly useful. (For details, click AnElectionAfterall.)

By mid-morning, the lines had only grown.

But they were patient, peaceful, and determined. A couple of times the crowd started chanting “//vle pa vle, n ap vote//.” This means, “like it or not, we’re gonna vote”, and it expressed a lot about the day. As many have already noted, the Haitian masses — urban and rural — seemed to decide that they would show their leaders — mostly self-proclaimed — and the world that they will not be denied their right to determine who will govern them.

 

Last spring I visited the Matenwa Community Learning Center with Toma, an activist, educator, and veterinary worker from the mountains outside of Léogane. Since spending those days with him, I have wanted to visit the discussion group that he leads in the yard in front of his home. I was able to do so last week.

Getting to Toma’s house involves a two-hour hike from the riverbed in Fayette, close to where he and his fellow literacy teachers meet on Saturday mornings. As you walk up, one of the first things you notice is the way the houses are built. Rocks, cement, and sand are hard to transport. Without a road that motorized vehicles can climb, one would have to depend on mules. So houses are built with wood or other more available materials.

Here’s a house woven from strips of coconut wood.

Here’s a school building made out of metal roofing material.

This woven palm leaf building serves as both a church and a school.

And here’s a typical house. It belongs to Toma’s father-in-law. Palm wood is the most common material in the area.

The view from Toma’s back yard is stunning. You can see all the way to the bay in the distance.

But Haitians say “//Dèyè mòn gen mòn//.” That means “Beyond mountains there are mountains,” and in Toma’s area this is literally true. This view is taken from his father-in-law’s house, a short, steep hike uphill from his own. The small cluster of houses you can barely see on the peak in the foreground is Toma’s yard.

Here’s Toma himself.

The group is working with the Wonn Refleksyon book that was created for non-readers. Rather than offering texts for discussion, it offers images and Haitin proverbs. The participants start by individually studying the image or the proverb for the day. Toma’s group has grown because of the activity’s popularity, so they are short of books, but participants don’t seem to mind sharing.

Participants then organize themselves into small groups to begin talking about their thoughts. The day I visited Toma’s class was talking about a Haitian proverb, “It’s when the snake is dead that you see its length.” In their small groups, participants shared experiences they’d had that related to the proverb.

After the small group work, they return to the circle. The small groups provide reports about their conversations, and a general discussion ensues.

I spent the night at Toma’s place so I gotto meet his daughters too. Nana’s on the left, and Zanda’s on the right.

I recently travelled to Hinche, where I was able to visit one of Fonkoze’s Basic Literacy classes meeting in a back room of the Fonkoze branch. The women were playing Jwèt Korelit la. It’s a game that teaches recognition of letters and words, and then the solution to simple business math problems, by challenging players to find a letter, word, or solution in a pile of cards spread out on a table.

This group in Hinche was without a table, but they were cheerfully making due with a chair and a piece of cardboard.

Here, one of the participants has found the letter that her teacher called out.

Fonkoze teachers emphasize the positive. One of the institution’s educational mantras is that adult learners are fragile. The first and perhaps, most important job for a teacher is to create a positive, encouraging environment. This literacy teacher could hardly be more enthusiastic.

After the game was over I asked participants whether they would be willing to write something on the blackboard for me. They all jumped at the chance, and almost all of them wrote their own names. This might not seem like much, but after a life without school of any kind and then only three months of weekly meetings its an accomplishment thewomen are extremely proud of.

When the last woman went to the board, I expected another name. I was stunned when she carefully wrote “M kontan wè vizitè yo.” That means, “I’m glad to see the visitors.” Here’s a short film of her writing.

The games name means “the game that supports the struggle”, and it’s exciting to watch the players use it as they struggle to improve their lives.

The pictures and the video were taken by Erik Badger.