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.

http://youtu.be/wzNgrAMM1uQ

http://youtu.be/zWEJfouEPdE