Elijen has been the gardening assistant at the Matènwa Community Learning Center for over a year. Last year, he completed 9th grade at the Center’s junior high school, which is the last grade school goes to right now. Rather than continuing his formal education, he’s chosen to go to work as a gardener/teacher in Matènwa and as an agricultural advisor in his own neighborhood of Bwa Nwa, about a 50-minute walk from Matènwa.

His garden sits on a slope of Bwa Nwa, protected by mango trees. Here he is in the middle of his garden with Erik Badger, my long-time colleague in my work in Haiti and at Shimer College.

Elijen had to work hard just to create the space on his land that he farms. It’s extremely rocky soil. His first step was to remove the rocks. He’s used them to build a series of walls that hold the soil in place when it rains.

He cut channels that run down the slope to keep excess water from washing away his soil.

He chose some crops, like these sweet potatoes, that provide good ground cover.

And he uses plantain trees as supports for vines that can then be used to cover the soil.

He grows some vegetables that an American would immediately recognize, like these peppers. The first photo is a hot pepper plant, the second is sweet peppers.

He grows parsley.

And Pumpkin.

And spinach.

Nothing is wasted. He just finished harvesting his coffee, and he is now letting the outer shells of the coffee beans rot. They make great compost.

He grows grasses, like this elephant grass. The various grasses help retain soil and they can be used as animal feed.

And the straw that they leave can be used as cover for the beds in which seedlings are planted. Here they cover a bed of tomato plants.

The soil is hard, so Elijen has been experimenting with different ways to soften it. He’s covered this bed of cabbage with local clay.

He plants a lot of trees, just as they do in Matènwa. Here’s a small avocado plant.

He also does a lot of grafting. Here he has grafted lemon branches onto an orange tree.

This old mago tree has been prepared for grafting. It’s a “mango fil” meaning “stringy mango”. Its fruit isn’t very much liked. So the big branches have been cut off so that thin new growth can emerge.

“Mango fransik” branches will then be grafted onto the old mango fil tree. Fransik is a great eating mango.

As seen at the Matènwa Community Learning Center, he’s even created a great outer meeting space where he gets together with the other young gardeners that he works with.

The Matenwa Community Learning Center has been making a schoolyard garden an important part of its work for years. The garden reflects the school’s philosophy in a number of ways. First, the school aims to educate children to appreciate the place where they are growing up and to be able to live well there. This is enormously important because the great tendancy in all of rural Haiti is for those children who get to go to school to move away to cities where their families think they will have more opportunities.

Second, the school aims at sustainable development for Matènwa and for the island of Lagonav, where Matènwa is located. Teaching organic vegetable gardening is a way to develop a food source for an area where food can be scarce. Teaching techniques that are good for the soil and for the environment in general is an important way to fight the environmental degradation that hurts the island — and all of Haiti — so badly.

Third, raising and distributing trees directly combats the deforestation that has pushed much of Lagonav to the environmental edge.

The school calls the garden its treasure, or its treasury.

Everyday, Abner Sauveur, the school’s principal, spends an hour in the garden with one of the classes. They start by sitting in a circle and going over the work they’ll need to do that day. Here he’s talking with the fourth grade class.

He assigned two of the children to take inventory of newly-planted beds of cabbage. As it turns out, they counted almost twice the number of plants that he had recorded in his journal. He himself had failed to count plants in one of the new beds. The kids enjoyed correcting him, and he was pleased to be corrected.

One boy was assigned to water plants. Though the school uses some drip irrigation, they are not yet equipped to use it throughout the garden. And they’re not sure they want to. They like the way a person carrying a watering can interacts with the garden closely.

The day’s major work was in the tree nursery. The school has distributed over 7000 trees to students, teachers, and neighbors this year. One group was assigned to fill the bags they plant seedings in with soil.

The fourth-grade teacher, Benaja, joined in.

Another group was removing saplings from bags that had become too small.

Not all the students are children. This year, several adult women decided to return to school. It’s a credit to them that they would have the courage to do so, but it also speaks well of the school, which creates an environment in which they feel comfortable joining in a class of children.

One group of children joined Elijen, the school’s gardening assistant, as he organized newly-filled bags of soil in the tree nursery.

It’s hard work on a hot day.

The kids get some help from an neighbor.

At the end of the class, the group returns to the circle to talk about what they’ve accomplished.

The school is very much committed to creating a positive, respectful, encouraging environment. As each group of children tells the class about the work it did, Abner has the class give them a round of applause.

The school in Matènwa depends in part on support from donors in the States and elsewhere. If you want to learn more about supporting the school, contact Chris Low, at [email protected].

Vana is the third grade teacher ay the Matenwa Community Learning Center. She’s one of the longest-serving teachers at the school. She’s also a member of the executive committee and the schools treasurer. So she doesn’t have much time to farm. She believes in the school’s garden, however, and so has taken the time to establish a small garden of her own.

I don’t know anything about soil, but the soil on her land seems pretty unpromising. I’m not sure whether the photo really conveys how gray it is.

She tries to work with the soil by planting in beds that she covers with leaves and straw. It holds the soil down and captures moisture.

She is working on a couple of different crops. One is tomatoes.

Here’s a young eggplant.

Cabbage seems to grow pretty well in the Matenwa area.

And here’s a young sweet pepper.

And here’s a picture of Vana herself.

For the last few weeks, Jethro and Wisly have been at my house in Ka Glo, working to re-establish their crafts workshop. They do a number of different sorts of work but lovely cards with banana-bark designs have always been the core of their business.

They do a lot of their work on our front patio. It’s free these days, because school kids are on vacation.

But the house really wasn’t designed to house a workshop, so they need to find space where they can. Jethro has figured out how to make use use of a free corner.

Wisly folds and sorts cards on Byton’s bed.

It’s been interesting for my neighbors and me. Here, Breny watches the work.

They generally keep busy well into the night. Jethro draws and writes poetry by the light of one of lamps.

They both are very devout. Wisly here reads his Bible.

We don’t know how long they’ll stay in Ka Glo. The fact that we have a space we can welcome them into has done a lot to make our house feel more like a home.

To read more about them, click AnotherKindofWorkshop.

I spent a second week with Care, participating in the follow-up to the workshop Fonkoze was hired by them to provide in October. This time we were in Gonaives. Though the beach hotel in Mont Rouis was nice, there have lately been reports of very serious malaria in that part of the country, so we couldn’t go.

Gonaives is the major city that was destroyed by hurricane Jeanne two years ago. The first two photos show why.

The city is surrounded by completely bare mountains. The deforestation is total. There’s nothing on the hills to hold any water.

My week, however, was not spent studying the city. It was spent meeting with the Care staff that will be running literacy programs. The workshop was led by Emile, Fonkoze’s literacy supervisor for Baptiste.

He’s got a lot of experience as a Fonkoze literacy teacher. He’s one of the few supervisors that began with Fonkoze as a literacy teacher.

The workshop emphasized two points: Fonkoze’s Business Skills course and the parts of its basic literacy curriculum that aims directly at developing business skills. Care has thought it important to accelerate the progress ofthe participants in its programs towards business development, even at the cost of time spent carefully working on basic skills.

The heart of Fonkoze’s program — whether for Care or otherwise — is the literacy game called “Jwet Korelit” or “the game that supports the struggle”. The doctors and nurses that will teacher literacy in Care’s program loved learning the game and loved playing it.

I only wish the little camera I used to make these quicktime videos had sound. It’s hard to capture the excitement without it.

Perhaps Fonkoze’s strongest literacy program right now is one in Baptiste, a coffee-growing region in the mountains along the border in central Haiti. The program serves a collective of five agricultural cooperatives that emphasize coffee farming.

I went to Baptiste recently to talk with program participants, literacy teachers, and the program’s coordinator, Emile Mesidor. It was a quick trip, a single day of conversation sandwiched between two full days of travel from Ka Glo to Baptiste and back, but it was well worth the trouble.

Most Americans have probably never seen coffee grow. I was in Baptiste during the early part of the coffee harvest, so the beans were everywhere. Here are photos of the beans on the bush.

Here is a merchant’s display of unprocessed coffee beans. When they’re ripe, their outer shell is red.

The cooperatives buy the beans directly from farmers. The beans are stored in a largest concrete tank until they are ready to undergo a fermentation process that prepares them for shelling.

Here’s a handcrank apparatus that removes the outer shell.

The shelled beans are set in the sun to dry.

Because I just had a day to spend in Baptiste, Emile decided to invite all the literacy teachers to a single meeting, a question and answer session that would enable me to hear their views and to learn what questions they had for the Port au Prince literacy team.

Then in the afternoon Emile and I went hiking around the area to visit centers. This can involve a lot of walking, even just to visit some of the closer centers. We decided to first visit one that was about 25 minutes away along paths through the coffee groves. It was a beautiful walk.

This is Emile, walking ahead of me.

Visits can be frustrating. When we got to the center, we discovered that they had changed their meeting schedule. We had just missed that day’s meeting. We returned to the center of Baptiste and found a working center in a Baptist church.

We watched for awhile. The center was unusual because, characteristically for Fonkoze but not for its program in Baptiste, all its members are women. The center offers a post-literacy class in basic business skills. The class so appeals to those who hear about it that a number of non-participants decided to sit in. We were told that they attend faithfully and participate well. All of the additional participants are men.

The photo that did not turn out well is the one I took of the other working center I visited. I’m sorry about that, because it’s striking. It’s a center that offers a basic literacy class, and all of its members are children, young teenagers who attend the literacy center because their families were not able to send them to school.

The site left me at once happy and very sad. It pleased me to know that I am part of a program that offers such children a chance to learn to read. It’s awful to realize that the minimal education that the center can offer them is taking the place of what should be a childhood spent in school.

Fremy and I have been working closely with a team of literacy teachers in Fayette, a rural area outside of Darbonne, since April. For the first few months, we met with the teachers every week for two hours to help them learn to plan and lead discussions using the Wonn Refleksyon book for non-readers. They have now developed lesson plans for most of the images and proverbs that are in the book.

With the planned end of this particular literacy cycle approaching, we all thought it would be important to spend some time together, discussing what we had accomplished so far and where we want to go from here.

Here are some images from the first half of our planning and review workshop. They were taken Saturday, October 22. Tomorrow, which is Saturday the 29 we will complete our review.

First, a short film. If anyone thought I was exagerating when I said that Fremy and I can have to take off our pants to cross a river on our way to meet with our colleagues in Fayette, here’s the evidence:

After we ford the torrent, we have a ten minute walk down a dirt road. The area is variously populated.

Then there’s another ten minute hike uphill through a series of thickly treed yards to get to the porch where we hold our meetings.

To open, we separated into pairs. In each little group, the partners interviewed each other with a view to identifying what had pleased them most in their work thus far, what had been most frustrating, and how they were addressing the issue that was frustrating them. Here, Dorlys and Renia exchange notes.

Gerald is the group’s coordinator. Here he’s taking notes as he questions Marjorie.

Toma and Innocent work in the shade provided by a banana-leaf shed.

Each of the group’s members then reported what her or his partner had said. By organizing the activity that way, we were assured that we would be establishing a listening-based ambience right from the start. Not only that, but the aspects of the group’s experience that had been most striking would be fresh on our minds.

Next, we led the group through a discussion of one of the Wonn Refleksyon texts. The one that Fremy chose is an excerpt from __The Pessimist’s Handbook__, by Arthur Schopenhauer. It makes a strong claim that our happiness is based on illusion. We chose to use a Wonn Refleksyon discussion because we wanted to put a spotlight on the way the group works together as a group: How well do we listen to one another? How dependably to we speak our minds? The discussion of a challenging text gave us an examle of our collaboration to talk about.

We also wanted to work some on the hardest part of leading group discussions: The time that the group spends in relatively free exchange. We have had a hard time helping teachers here learn to take genuine intellectual leadership of the sort that helps their groups make discoveries through conversation. The thought spending time taking about the sorts of questions that can be most profitably investigated through free discourse would be helpful.

Here Innocent, Marjorie, and Renia talk about possible questions.

Toma and Gerald do the same.

We shared various thoughts about good questions, and then talked seriously about the text. It was good work. No one wanted to stop.

Tomorrow, we’ll start talking about planning. It’s hard to know for certain what directions things will take.

But I know one thing: The teachers have regularly expressed their frustration over the fact that they each have some children in their class.

It’s not that they have anything against children. It’s just that they are teaching what are supposed to be crash courses in reading in writing for adults who never got to go to school. Children are not supposed to be in such classes. They are supposed to be in school.

The group has begun collecting detailed information about the number of kids in the area who are not in school. We all hope to think of a way to make these children an important part of our plans.

I took the camera with me to Hinche for the weekend trip I took there with Papouch. Here are a few photos.

The first thing on Papouch’s mind when we arrived in Hinche on Friday was to find out where he could attend church on Saturday. He is a devout Seventh Day Adventist, so Saturday is the Sabbath for him. Here he is in from of the Adventist Temple. Later, we returned because he wanted me to take a picture of him inside the Temple as well.

Later that day Ronal took us on a tour of Hinche. On of the most striking buildings is the new cathedral, with its high domed ceiling. Here Papouch reaches for it. The paintings on the ceiling depict traditional religious scenes such as one might find in any Catholic church. In the Hinche cathedral, however the figures are dark-skinned.

The tour included a quick trip to the airfield as well. This is where our plane landed. The shack you can see in the background is the closest thing to any sort of shelter. It’s a place to wait for an arriving plane, protected from the sun.

Sunday afternoon we were off on bicycles, headed for the waterfall at Bassin Zim. Papouch was delighted with the chance to ride around. He has a bicycle in Ka Glo, but there’s little he can do with it except ride in small circles around the yard.

Here Papouch is in front ofthe waterfall. We were told to keep a safe distance and we did. It is said that the falls occasionally take someone under.

Our guides were Felix and Ronal, two of Saul’s younger brothers. Felix, on the left works for World Vision. Ronal is a tailor looking for work. He’d really like to study theology and become a pastor.

In the midst of our fun the falls were visited by a large contingent of UN peacekeepers fom Nepal. They came as sightseers, heavily armed one.

When Papouch joked that he’d like to have his picture taken with one of them, I went ahead and asked. The guy was very nice about it. Soon Ronal decided to follow Papouch’s example.

Oddly enough, before they left the peacekeepers passed out dozens of fresh loaves of sliced white bread to all the Haitians that were at the falls.

When we got back to Madanm Marinot’s house, Papouch was pretty beat. But he was very pleased with the day’s events. He gave his loaf of bread to Nannan and Vivi, Madanm Marinot’s two daughters who had been spoiling him with food and attention all weekend.

To read more about the trip, click PriviLege

Here are photos that I took during a workshop for a literacy program funded by Care. Care hired Fonkoze to train its literacy teachers and to help them plan the overall approach.

For an essay about the workshop, click here.

This is the entrance to the house. We put up the blackboard at the beginning of the school year. Now kids from the neighborhood are there most afternoons, working away.

As you enter, you step into the largest room. It’s a living area and a dining area. It’s where we spend most of our time. That’s Lilly, our new kitten, in the front.

To your left coming in is the dining area. We put up the map of Haiti when I returned from a visit to the States in September. It’s drawing a lot of interest.

On your right is the kitchen, such as it is. It’s two propane tanks. I don’t do much cooking beyond coffee and popcorn. Neighbors are still sending more food than I can eat.

The window is worth a few words of explanation. Each of the house’s windows was handmade from scratch by Byton. “From scratch” means that he had no prepared lumber to work with. He would take what looked like planks of firewood and measure, shape, and finish each one by hand. Windows like the one shown here are assemblages of more than 90 pieces of wood. Each window took more than a day to make.

Byton also made the bookcase.

My room. It’s not a mess. Fortunately, I don’t yet have much stuff in Haiti. It surely will be a mess eventually.

This is the bathroom. That’s all it is: A place to bathe. We use an outhouse. There is a drain in the floor that lets bath water empty. It’s much larger than it would have needed to be, but it ends up being a place to throw diry laundry and store things as well.

The source of water in the bathroom is the buckets you see here. There’s no running water. We carry it in from one of two large cisterns. These cisterns collect spring water that is sent down the hill from a spring that was tapped in the 60’s.

If one of the house’s great features is its big, light, high-ceilinged front room the other is the back patio. It overlooks a plantain grove. It’s a wonderful place to read, to drink coffee, or to talk privately. This is Byton, the carpenter responsible for building the house. It’s on his parents’ land, and when he’s ready the house will probably be his.

My neighbors were not willing to have me living alone. Haitians do not like to live by themselves. So Byton and I live in the house together.