I was half an hour early, but I felt as though I was a least that late.

This in itself was striking. I’ve worked in Haiti with perfectly successful groups, groups that met consistently over months or even years, and have had to adapt myself to the fact that half the participants or more would often arrive for a two-hour meeting as much as one hour late. Lots of Haitians live without watches. Transportation is unreliable. Things can take a lot of time. And punctuality, while respected, isn’t generally viewed as all that important. I’ve never seen a Haitian here start to panic because they’re going to be late.

But when I got to the 10:00 General Assembly at 9:30 on Saturday morning, everyone was already there and busy. The singing and dancing and talking were in full swing.

The General Assembly is the annual meeting of Fonkoze members from all over Haiti. Fonkoze’s core activity is what is called “solidarity group” credit. A Solidarity Group is five close friends who organize themselves to take out their loans as a group. Responsibility for repayment is shared. They agree in advance that if one of them has trouble meeting a repayment deadline, the others will come to her aid. Solidarity Groups are then organized into Credit Centers of six-eight groups. These Centers are designed to be permanent associations of women committed to improving their lives. Through these centers, Fonkoze organizes loan disbursements and repayments and educational services.

For the General Assembly, members from all of Fonkoze’s branches choose representatives that they send to Pòtoprens. That they send their representatives is true quite literally. Fonkoze does not pay the expensive transportation costs, nor does it cover lodging. The women themselves and the others whom they represent are left to make their own arrangements. For women who joined Fonkoze because they are on the edge of poverty but are ready to fight to improve their situations, these expenses are considerable. The round trip from Wanament, for example, might be as much as $50. And this is in a country in which much of the population lives on less than $1 a day.

But 175 women came to the meeting, representing all 28 of Fonkoze’s branches. They heard reports from Fonkoze staff and a presentation from an expert in decentralization. Interspersed through these presentations were songs and a short play about the importance of Fonkoze services. The play was created and performed by the group of women from Wanament. I later learned that they had been asked to perform something only that same morning. They created the play and learned the lines within a couple of hours.

The most important phase of the meeting began when the women were invited to step forward and ask questions or offer comments about Fonkoze. One way of describing what happened at that moment would be to say that chaos broke out. Women stood up from all through the auditorium and rushed forward to take the microphone. Multiple women tried to speak at once. When Fonkoze staff tried to suggest that questions be written out, a large portion of the women refused. They had not traveled to Pòtoprens in order to leave someone a note. They wanted their voices to be heard. Fonkoze’s staff had to abandon its carefully-planned agenda and go with the flow.

There is, however, a deeper and, therefore, truer way to interpret the apparent chaos. Fonkoze’s core objective is to help poor Haitian women take greater control of their lives. One way it does so is to offer well-structured credit programs. Women cannot have control of their lives unless they have their own sources of income. But credit is not enough. Another way Fonkoze helps women take increased control of their lives is by offering educational programs, like Basic Literacy. Fonkoze feels that it should be helping women develop the tools they need to manage their affairs well.

When Fonkoze’s members took control of the General Assembly, when they forced the organization to give up its plans and respond to their need for space and time to speak up, they were showing a willingness to assert themselves that Fonkoze’s leadership could only welcome. The chaos was a clear sign of progress Fonkoze has made.

The challenge that remains for Fonkoze will be to find new ways to respond to its members’ assertiveness. Already there are plans to create a newsletter in which Fonkoze staff will respond to questions and comments that members send. The dialogue will have to be ongoing, but Saturday’s meeting was a very promising point from which to depart.

Here are some photos of the meeting: PhotosoftheGeneralAssembly.

It’s taken a couple of weeks, but I’m myself again. For what that’s worth. I could feel it especially as I walked uphill to get home last night with a rather full backpack. The hike felt easy, though it was hot. There were none of the struggles or the perceived need to pace myself that I had been feeling of late. This morning I tore down the mountain at the pace that some neighbors tease me about.

I’ve been very lucky about my health in Haiti. I’m not very careful about what I eat or drink, and I spend lots of time in the sometimes-chaotic traffic that fills Port au Prince streets and getting whacked around on the none-too-smooth roads across the haiitan countryside. But, on the whole, my health has been excellent. I’m rarely under the weather, even for a day. My most serious injuries have been cuts on the top of my head – from foolishly jumping onto a moving tap-tap – and on my shin – I fell backwards off a rock I was climbing. Both healed promptly without further consequences. As I say, I’ve been lucky.

So when fever hit a couple of weeks ago, I felt not only miserable, but a little dumbfounded. I was in Mibale, at the tail end of a long, varied, and busy trip through the Central Plateau. And by midway through a Wednesday morning, I could think of nothing but lying in bed. I had a high fever, with all the associated aches in all parts of my body, and a deep cough to boot.

It had been a hard few days. Part of the trip had involved long rides on the back of a motorcycle along roads made extra dusty by a prolonged draught. I can tend to be a little asthmatic here in Haiti, but normally an inhaler is perfectly adequate as treatment. But the dust on the Central Plateau affected me badly. The inhaler stopped helping. There’s a very effective, Haitian-made pill to treat asthma, and I started taking one each day. It has insomnia as a side-effect, though, so I started to lose a lot of sleep. Tuesday night I couldn’t get any sleep at all. By midnight, I gave into the wakefulness. I decided I could make use of it to finish a large piece of editorial work I had hanging over me. Mibale is quite different from most of Haiti in at least one respect: It has electricity all the time, 24/7. So I finished the work around 7:30, and e-mailed it off by 8:00 or so. Then I went straight back to bed. I felt miserable.

I was in Mibale for a couple of reasons. It had been a base from which I could visit Fonkoze’s newest branch in Beladè, a small city near the Dominican border. There I was scheduled to meet with representatives of the Dominican office of an important funder of Fonkoze’s literacy projects, Plan International. Plan’s team wanted to bring a representative from Fonkoze to their new office in Elias Piña, the Dominican city across from Beladè, to talk with Dominican microfinance institutions. Plan likes Fonkoze’s approach, and was wondering whether we could help them push their potential Dominican partners closer to it.

In Mibale itself, I was scheduled to visit a workshop for Fonkoze members who would be leading meetings of other women from their credit centers as they studied Fonkoze’s very popular, four-month unit on Sexual and Reproductive Health. The week-long workshop was being led by Freda Catheus, Fonkoze’s main trainer of discussion leaders for the unit. She was also working with another woman who is apprenticing with her as a trainer of discussion leaders, so investing a day of so in observing their work seemed like a great idea.

But when I returned to my hotel room after sending off my e-mail, a hotel room in the very same center that was hosting the workshop, there was no question of observing anything. Everything ached, I couldn’t think of eating, and I felt as though I was burning up. Mystal, the Fonkoze staff member who had made the trip to Beladè with me, immediately got to work. He went out and bought several bottles of very cold drinking water, and delivered it from downtown Mibale to the room we were sharing. When Emile, the Fonkoze education coordinator who had organized the workshop, arrived, he took action as well. By then, Mystal had been forced to leave. He had a day’s work to do in the branch in nearby Boukan Kare. Emile got the workshop started, and then went back downtown in search of pills.

He came back with ibuprofen in a wide range of strengths and with chloroquin. The latter is the standard treatment in Haiti for malaria, which is often the assumed cause of a high fever. I think that, at that point, one could have done whatever one wanted with me.

But the one thing I couldn’t do was eat, and the one thing I wanted was to get back to Kaglo. A Fonkoze truck was scheduled to return to Pòtoprens from Beladè via Mibale, and I prepared myself to make the trip with them. Meanwhile Emile, Freda, and Malya, who was her assistant for the workshop, took turns sitting with me as we waited. The workshop continued on the other side of a thin concrete wall from me. It seemed to go well.

Late in the day, it became clear that my hoped-for ride from Fonkoze would not materialize. The truck had gone to Beladè to bring a team that was helping with the opening of the new branch, and they had a lot of work to do. They didn’t get back to Mibale until after dark, but by late afternoon it was clear that they wouldn’t be back in time to return to Pòtoprens. The next day, Thursday, the team took the truck back to Beladè. They had more work to do. They said they would pick me up on their way back to Pòtoprens. They promised they would be going that day.

That evening, Emile and Mystal talked seriously about taking me to the hospital. If they had had a car available, I might have let them do it, but I couldn’t imagine mounting the back of Emile’s motorcycle. The hospital they had in mind was in Laskawobas, and though the road from Mibale to Laskawobas is excellent, the ride seemed like it would be much too much. Freda sent off to buy key limes. Lime juice was the only thing that appealed to me. In fact, I craved it terribly.

When I got up the next morning, I felt a little better, and when I thought of waiting most of the day to return to Pòtoprens with Fonkoze, I blanched. I decided instead to pack my things and walk downtown to take a midmorning bus. I took a seat on the bus, and waited as it started to fill up. A bus won’t normally leave until it is full, and filling up a big bus can take time. By the time this bus was ready to go, I couldn’t not imagine what could have convinced me that I’d be able to make the rough three-hour trip alone, in the large bus, with its blaring music. Still worse, on arrival in Pòtoprens, I’d have to walk through the crowded market in Kwadeboukèt to get a tap-tap to Delma, from which I could get another to Petyonvil. It would be a lot of moving around with a backpack that held ten days worth of clothes, books and a laptop, and I was starting to feel weak and feverish again. I got down of the bus, and went back to bed.

Mid-afternoon, the truck returned from Beladè, and we headed back to Pòtoprens. When we got to the city, we dropped off the other Fonkoze staff members at their homes, and then Rodrigue, the driver, took me to my godson’s house off of Delma 75. There we picked up my godson’s Uncle Job, a fourth-year med student, and Rodrigue took us both all the way up to Kaglo.

Job came up with all his medical equipment. He took my temperature, listened to my heart and lungs, poked and probed, looked in my eyes and ears. He even took a bit of blood, and tested it for something. He voiced a couple of suspicions, but immediately added that, if I was up to it, he would take me to a lab in Petyonvil the next morning for tests. By then, I was already feeling much better, just a little weak. That weakness, both physical and mental, lasted over a week.

The lab tests didn’t show much: no malaria, no parasites. Lots of white blood cells, suggesting they were fighting some kind of invasive presence, and low protein, suggesting bad eating habits. Job suggested paying more attention to making sure I eat decently and taking vitamins. He also said I should get more rest. Meanwhile, my neighbor Madanm Boby, who knows a lot about medicinal teas, starting producing them in quantity for me every day. Between rest, the teas, and forcing myself to eat even when I had no appetite, things eventually go back to normal.

It was a hard couple of days. Being sick is never fun, but it’s probably a little harder when you’re out of your native element. At the same time, I was struck by the extent to which the things that make it easier to be sick at home were true for me here in Haiti. I have my own doctor, Job, and a striking array of colleagues and friends who immediately huddled around me when they heard that I was unwell. Madanm Boby turned into a tea factory, and the only thing that get Madanm Anténor out of the action was that she was off visiting her sister in the Dominican Republic. When she learned I had been sick behind her back, she was horrified. My colleagues at Fonkoze could not have huddled around me more closely than they did.

Having been down for a couple of days only served to reaffirm the very great degree to which I am now at home in Haiti.

When we decided to call our project an apprenticeship, Frémy and I were choosing to emphasize our status as learners, and not just teachers. We felt, and continue to feel, that it’s important. We are not masters working to accumulate and train disciples. We do not presume to talk very much about services we provide. We view ourselves as apprentices, constantly discovering more about the kind of work we do.

At the same time, the word “apprenticeship” suggests a teacher/learner relationship that’s a far as possible from what we seek to promote. In English, at least, it suggests learning at a teacher’s side, internalizing the principles of a craft under the watchful eye of an authority who has already mastered them. Neither Frémy nor I think of ourselves as master teachers, and we don’t see our partners as apprentices learning under our watchful eye. But we don’t think of the folks we work with as masters either. We don’t feel as though we’re absorbing a craft that they already know. We believe that we learn together with our partners, so we like to speak of a “shared apprenticeship.” We want to emphasize the way a group can make progress when its members work together. Meetings I attended over the past couple of weeks with two very different groups illustrate this point well.

Kofaviv is the Commission of Women Victims for Victims. Its members are rape victims who have organized themselves to provide a range of support services to other women who’ve suffered rape or violence of other kinds. Frémy and I have been meeting with them weekly since February, using Reflection Circles to help them develop the skills they need both to work together more effectively and, eventually, to lead their own Reflection Circle groups.

Reflection Circles are structured discussions of texts or images or topics. Their nominal subject is chosen to help the group develop skills. Members work on speaking clearly, on listening actively, on learning from one another. In this sense, though the choice of a subject can be enormously important, it nevertheless remains less important than the process used. Choosing a subject is choosing a means, a tool, that will help the group develop its skills. Nothing more.

The process always includes at least three steps: individual work, small-group work, and work by the group as a whole. We had been focusing for a couple of weeks on improving our individual and small-group work. Working on these two aspects is in some ways more urgent than working on the large group discussions is. But last week we turned to the work we do when we’re meeting in the group as a whole. Though this is the part of the work that one might normally think of first when one imagines a group discussion, it’s also the hardest part to master. It requires more patience, more attentive listening, and more of a commitment to encouraging others to speak.

And it’s more than just a question of making the large-group discussions somehow succeed. The point is to help a group learn to nurture its own best tendencies and to correct the problems that it sees. The point is to help a group take substantial responsibility for its own learning. So whereas one might otherwise, as a group leader, just tell a group what it’s doing wrong and then act to set the ship on course, we much prefer to create activities that invite participants to look at one another and at themselves and to speak together about the progress and problems that they see.

Last week, for example, we held two successive large-group conversations, each involving half the group. While one half discussed, the other half observed their work. After the two discussions, we brought the two half-groups together for a third discussion, one in which we all talked about our perceptions.

The first thing that emerged from that third discussion is that the group was pleased with itself – rightly, I think. Participants had only positive things to say: They were good about speaking one at a time, without interrupting; about speaking their mind to the whole group, rather than whispering to neighbors; and about encouraging one another to speak. On an impulse, I asked them to grade themselves on a scale of ten, and a couple of them awarded the group ten out of ten. When I said that I had been hoping they would give themselves no more than seven or eight, they called me a cheapskate and we all laughed.

So I backtracked a little. I told them that I was as impressed with them as they were, but I added that, as I see it, there is no such thing as a perfect group, that the point is always to improve. I said that the reason I hoped that they would give themselves only seven or eight was that I wanted to ask them what they thought they should do to earn eight or nine or ten.

And that’s when the real conversation started. I admitted that they were very good about letting each other speak, that they were not interrupting one another as they regularly had when we began our work. But I added that there is a difference between letting someone speak and listening to what they say. I was struck that, though they patiently waited their turn to make a contribution to the dialogue, they rarely responded to one another directly. They rarely challenged one another or even asked one another a follow-up question.

Suzette immediately responded that she was glad that I raised the point because she had been thinking of raising the same point as a criticism of Frémy, who had led the activity that morning. Suzette is an imposing figure, a large and forceful woman who organizes other women around her very poor neighborhood in Cité Soleil. I don’t know what her history as a victim is. We haven’t really spoken with any of the women about their histories, though parts of their stories occasionally arise in our meetings. But when I look at her and listen to her, I find it hard to think of her as a victim. She seems so strong. I know this is naïve of me.

Suzette had noticed that, often enough, Frémy would respond to a participant directly, questioning or even challenging what she said. She had understood, however, that everyone had a right to express their opinion, so she thought that Frémy’s direct questions were somehow violating our rules.

Frémy responded that, in the weeks when the group was just starting, our highest priority had been to encourage participation. We wanted to hear as many voices as possible, so we were reluctant to engage participants too earnestly. It would have been too easy to intimidate, to turn someone off. As the group progressed, however, and the women were speaking with more confidence, it was becoming increasingly important that we look at our own and one another’s opinions carefully. The group will only really give us a way to learn from one another when it begins to help us evaluate and, sometimes, change what we think. This requires not just that we make good use of all the opinions that are expressed in the group but also that fellow participants help us look at the opinions that are our own. And neither of the steps is possible until we learn to challenge and criticize one another and to accept the criticism our own views might receive.

Time ran out a few minutes after Suzette’s question. But I returned a week later to continue the work. At that meeting, we decided to begin the activity by talking about the importance of a group’s establishing the habit of evaluating itself and of proposing the direction it wants to move in, and the women formed small groups to do just that. I asked the small groups to answer two questions: what progress they would like to see their group make together and what steps they could take towards that progress. They jumped right into the work, and came up with a number of answers to each question. To the first, however, two answers stood out. Several groups said that they wanted their discussion to be livelier and several said that they wanted to see more reliable solidarity within the group.

And they also proposed solutions. The suggested two steps they could take to make the activity livelier. One would be to add singing or other warm-up activities. The other would be to respond more directly to the things that each of them said. To increase their sense of solidarity, they could make a name and address list so that, whenever one of them is absent, someone can take responsibility for getting in touch with her to make sure everything is ok.

And when we left the evaluative phase of the activity to enter into the conversation about the text, that conversation was indeed somewhat different than the previous two or three meetings had been. It was less orderly. There were more interruptions. Participants returned to their tendency to whisper to their neighbor rather than to speak up to the whole group. In a sense, it could have appeared as though the group had taken a step backwards.

But this appearance was hiding a more important truth. They were interrupting one another with direct responses. Their side conversations were giving them needed space in which to voice judgments about what was being said. We spent the last few minutes of the meeting discussing how things had gone and they pointed out both the improvement and the work they had ahead of them. They then got to work on the name and address list. As I was leaving, they began to sing a song.

I was surprised that the group of fifth-graders in Jan-Jan started their meeting with a game that resembled Simon Says. I’ve written about this group before. They are the ones who told their teacher, Dorlys, that they wanted to lead the meetings themselves. To his credit, Dorlys encouraged them in this, and members of the class have been using the teacher’s guide we produced several years ago to take turns leading their weekly discussions ever since.

A couple of weeks ago, they had come to Dorlys with a problem. They had counted out the number of weeks remaining in the school year and had realized that they wouldn’t all get a turn to lead. They wondered whether it would be ok to lead the discussions in groups of three. I happened to be in Jan-Jan that day, visiting an adult literacy center, so Dorlys had the children call me over to ask me what I thought. I told them that I think it can be much better when two or three discussion leaders work as a team, but that, in order for it to really succeed, the team should meet a day or two before the discussion to discuss their objectives for the week and divvy out the roles that they would play. At the end of that conversation the children asked me to be sure to come by to watch their again before the end of the school year, and I said I’d try.

I went yesterday. It was quickly clear that the children had taken my advice. Three of them took turns leading the various steps in the process, starting with Simon Says and ending with a short evaluation of how the day’s work had gone. The transitions went seamlessly, without discussion. The three of them had, in this respect, a clear plan, and they were able to follow it without prompting of any kind.

When they were finished I asked whether I might ask them some questions, and they agreed. The first thing I wanted to know had to do with their use of Simon says. I wondered why they chose to start that way. I mentioned that I had never seen a group do anything like it before. They said that they hold their discussions at the end of the school day, and that they find that some of them have a hard time concentrating. They thought that a little physical game at the start of class would liven things up and get everyone tuned it. It was the first time they had tried it, and we all had to agree it worked well.

I could hardly believe what I was seeing and hearing. The level of self-understanding and self-mastery that they were showing was entirely new to me. In some respects, they know what they are doing more than any group I’ve seen.

The children then asked me whether I had seen anything about the group that wasn’t good, and I started to think of the women of Kofaviv. These kids, in their little uniforms, could hardly appear any more different from the Kofaviv women than they do. But there was something fundamentally similar in the way they understand what Reflection Circles are about. Like the Kofaviv women, they have mastered procedural aspects of the activity. If anything, they are even more advanced than the very strong Kofaviv women in this respect. These kids never interrupt one another. They address everything they say to the whole class, never turning to a neighbor to whisper a few words. Participation is really general, even if there are a few of them who talk much more than others.

But they will not argue with one another. Their conversations have become well-disciplined events at which they all patiently wait their turn, but little real dialogue is emerging from all this because they studiously avoid reacting to each other directly. They are so entirely focused on procedures that they have no time for questions like whether the conversation they holding is teaching them anything. This is explicit when they evaluate themselves: The only criterion that’s even mentioned is whether the rules of discussion were respected.

So I told them that as much as I admire what they’ve accomplished, I would like to see them argue a little more. Even if it means that they break one of their rules now and again. They would like to continue to meet next school year. I know, though they don’t yet, that Dorlys will not be with them. But I’ll have to see whether there’s any way for me to arrange an occasional visit.

The two groups go a long way towards defining the limits of formal mastery of group discussion. Each is rightly pleased with the way that they’ve been able to internalize patience, respect, and a willingness to speak out as principles they scrupulously observe. But that progress has come with a cost: It’s taken them away from the kind of engagement with ideas that is, in large part, what conversations are really for. My ongoing commitment to Kofaviv will enable to learn with them how to bring their mastery of principles to bear on achieving deeper goals. I hope I can find time to accompany the children of Jan-Jan as they try to move forward in the same way.

One of the things that makes Haiti an exciting place for an educator to work is the way Haitians value education. People here regularly make real sacrifices to go to school. I can offer all sorts of examples: from the kids who live in Bawosiya and Blancha, ten and twenty minutes up the hill from where I live in Ka Glo, who walk an hour or more to schools in Petyonvil, Delma, and Pòtoprens every day in freshly washed and ironed uniforms only to have to hike back up the hill that afternoon; to the kids from farther up the mountain who leave home every Sunday afternoon to live with relatives during the week, only to return home Friday; to families struggling to get by who invest money they don’t really have in their children’s education; to young people who will sign up for class after class at vocational schools hoping that this or that training will give them a way to earn a living down the road.

I used to ask children whether they like school. These are children who attend schools where they are asked to turn off their minds in order to memorize passages in a language they don’t know, schools at which customary discipline includes beatings and humiliation. They would invariably answer, with enthusiasm, that indeed they do.

But that enthusiasm for education can take surprising forms. One of those forms is the seriousness of graduations. And as yesterday’s graduation reached and passed the three-hour mark – after beginning two hours late – and as I saw through the hot, dank auditorium’s very small window that the rains had started, and as I realized that, from where I was in deep downtown Pòtoprens it would take at least two hours to get home, the Haitian enthusiasm for education seemed, briefly, less attractive than it normally would.

It was Titi’s graduation. He’s a young man, in his early twenties, but he has long been living by his own resources. His parents have never really been in a position to support him. He works in a wealthier neighbor’s home, does errands for me and for a couple of other foreigners who visit our mountain now and again, and raises a couple of goats.

Titi had completed a nine-month class in videography in downtown Pòtoprens. And the whole thing was striking to me in a number of ways. First, he was one of a class of 19 students, and it was stunning that his school – which is, by the way, relatively inexpensive – would invest in rental of a large auditorium and organize a three-and-a-half hour graduation for nineteen young people who had taken a nine-month course. Second, I wondered how one could spend nine months learning to use a video camera. This was not, after all, a school of filmmaking, but just a class for those who want to know how to use a video camera. This second point was especially perplexing because I know that Titi has no video camera, and I doubt that he’s any different from most of his classmates in this respect. I also know that the school’s video camera was stolen mid-way through the class, so the course must have mainly covered videography’s theoretical aspects. And I have a hard time imagining what those theoretical aspects might be.

I had been invited to the graduation as Titi’s godfather. This requires explanation. I was not, previously, Titi’s godfather. All my Haitian godchildren are less than four years old, acquired after I had been coming to Haiti for a number of years. And my oldest godchild, a wonderful Colombian girl named Catalina, is still a ways from entering her teens. Titi was baptized long before I got into the godfather trade. When I write, therefore, that he had invited me as his godfather, I am referring to one of several Haitian extensions of the most traditional meaning of that word.

Haitians acquire godparents at a range of occasions. Baptisms may be the most important one, but weddings and graduations require godparents as well. I’ve been around very few weddings here, but as far as I can tell Haitians don’t speak of having a “maid of honor” or a “best man.” They speak of having a godmother and a godfather, and each title comes with a range of duties that traditions here more-or-less fix. Graduations have godparents in two respects: A graduating class will have its godfather and its godmother, and each graduate will acquire a new set as well.

I had once been the godfather of a graduating class at an elementary school. This involved donning as suit, making a speech, and buying a couple of gifts for students who had earned special rewards. This would be, however, my first chance to acquire a new graduate as a godchild individually, and I had no real idea what my duties were. I asked Mèt Anténor, and he made the picture very clear: I was to attend the graduation, dressed suitably for the occasion, buy Titi a gift, and offer him such help and advice as I could down the road.

So I appeared at Titi’s house at 11:30. He wanted to leave by 12:00 for the 1:00 ceremony. Getting down the mountain, if we were very lucky, would only take 90 minutes, so we wouldn’t be more than a half-hour late. There was no chance that the activity would actually begin on time.

We waited in a courtyard in front of the auditorium until 3:00. Apparently, the auditorium is popular: Titi’s was the day’s second graduation, and the first was running late. We used the time to take photos and to talk. Titi told me that he had chosen the videography course because he had long been attracted to the role that camera people play at weddings, graduations, funerals, and the other occasions at which Haitians like to hire them. He had initially purchased an old, used video camera, but it had never worked properly. He eventually brought it to his school, hoping that it could be repaired, but when robbers hit the school his camera disappeared with the school’s own.

Nevertheless, he was pleased with the class and hoped that, eventually, he would be able to make use of what he learned. He was satisfied enough with the school that he had already signed up for its summer class in Driver’s Ed.

The graduation seemed endless: songs, sketch comedy, poetry, and speech after speech. These speeches were all in French, a language few Haitians speak really well, so they were stilted, formulaic. They did nothing to express the unique thoughts and passions of those who gave them. There was plenty of loud, piped-in background music, and an emcee who talked almost constantly, in French, through the entire event. About ten or fifteen minutes were reserved for handing out the diplomas. As each student stepped forward, the announcer read the school’s comments about her or him. We learned who had been punctual, who respectful; who had been quiet, who comical. One young woman was even described as perpetually tardy and difficult. It seemed an odd thing to say at her graduation.

It was past 6:30 by the time we were ready for the long trek home. The rains had stopped, and we had surprisingly little trouble finding a bus headed for Petyonvil. There, however, we got stuck, because the drivers for Malik had, apparently, called it a day. We headed home on foot, just as everyone from Malik, Mariaman, and Ka Glo had done before the road to Malik was built in 1999. The rains returned as we arrived in Malik, and I was pretty wet by the time I got home, but Titi had clearly been pleased by the day.

Part of me wanted to talk with him about the many more useful ways he and his school could have invested the resources that they put into the graduation. His case isn’t the only one that’s been on my mind. Another godson, Givens, has an older brother who’ll graduate from kindergarten this month. His parents will pay a graduation fee of over $150.00, over and above the steep tuition they already paid, and they’ll spend a fair amount on the reception they’ll hold for the little guy after that. It will, of course, be a very happy occasion, but his parents work hard for the little money they have. His father’s monthly salary is much less than the graduation will cost, so one has to wonder whether it really makes sense.

It does for the schools. These ceremonies are advertisements. The emcee at Titi’s graduation, for example, could hardly have said more than he did in praise of the school. And it must make sense to the Haitians who choose to participate. Something about achieving a milestone, any kind of milestone, must feel worth celebrating.

I recently received a letter from one of my high school teachers, a man named Ray Karras, whom I very much liked and admired. He’s retired, and it might be almost 20 years since I had been in touch with him, but a couple of circumstances had brought him to mind, and the internet made it possible to find a mailing address. I sent him a note that included a description of some of my work here, and he responded shortly thereafter. He’s not electronic. His letter was typed on the kind of non-electric machine that I remember seeming antiquated when he typed notes to me in the 70’s.

He wrote two things that struck me. First, that he liked the sound of my work and was pleased by his sense that I really like being a teacher. (I do.) Second, that he suspected I had discovered that we teachers learn much more from our students than they ever learn from us.

His second comment not only seems right to me. It seems like something I should always have in mind. I think of myself, and believe I ought to think of myself, as a learner first, and as a teacher second. That fact has a lot to do with the name of the project I’m a part of: the Apprenticeship in Alternative Education. Although it can be important, when talking with people about my work, especially with those who help me with their support, to be able to explain what I am offering to the Haitians I collaborate with, my own emphasis should always be on what the work offers to me.

Bearing that in mind is not a struggle.

I spent last Friday morning in Tonmgato. Tonmgato is on the road between Léogane and Jakmèl. The road is a beautiful, twisting ride through the mountains, one of the best-made roads in the country. Tonmgato is the location of Fonkoze’s Fondwa branch. I was meeting with Rony Mery, Fonkoze’s education coordinator for that branch and the neighboring one in Twen. He and I have a little project we’re working on together, and we needed the morning to push the project forward.

The project began to take shape in February, when I attended part of a week-long workshop he gave for credit center members who were to become teachers of a four-month class that Fonkoze offers in Business Skills. The class is designed for the market women who are Fonkoze’s core members, and it helps them develop a sense of control over their own businesses. They learn to calculate their investment in the business, their expenses, their income, and their profit or loss. Though many of them have been running their own businesses for years, they often have a surprisingly vague sense of how the business is doing. After the four-month class, however, many report that they feel they know what they are doing for the very first time.

But as helpful as the class is for many of our members, we’ve been unhappy with it nonetheless. Observing Business Skills classes in the field made it clear that they were turning into conventional, teacher-led courses. Many of the teachers were standing in the front of the classroom, leading group reading and repetition. They were behaving, understandably, like most of the teachers whom they had seen in Haiti, where teachers typically dictate to students or write texts on a blackboard that students then copy down and memorize. They lead recitations of the texts to help students get them down.

This was not at all what we were looking for. Like all of Fonkoze’s education programs, the Business Skills class has, as its overarching goal, reinforcing our members’ leadership and initiative, their sense of control. We are working to help them increasingly think of themselves as actors, as people capable of changing their own situation and of serving their communities as agents of change.

In one sense, the class was succeeding. It was helping them gain better control over their businesses, their sources of income, and, so, helping them develop the tools they need to make good decisions in that sphere.

In another sense, though, the classes were undermining themselves. Participants were turning passive as their teachers stood filling them with the contents of a book. They were not developing initiative. They were not developing the habit of looking to themselves and to one another for answers. They were not figuring things out.

I spoke to Rony about the problem following a visit to a Business Skills class that occurred shortly after his workshop. We agreed that the problem was largely our team’s fault. Much of what the team has generally done during the workshop for prospective teachers has modeled the very behaviors we want teachers avoid. The team had mainly been using the week to summarize the contents of the workbook that the course depends on. Under the pressure for time that summarizing four months of work in a single week inevitably creates, they were finding themselves talking a lot. And so, when the teachers finished following our team’s explanations for a week, they were going into their classrooms and offering their students the very same explanations.

Worst of all, it seemed entirely unnecessary for them to do so. The Business Skills class uses a workbook, with explanations that are simple and relevant and plenty of practice exercises. If we could just get teachers into the habit of pushing their students to use the book as a tool, a real study guide, that might be enough to draw participants into the action. And we might be able to get teachers to work that way with their participants if we work that way during the week we spend with them.

So Rony and I decided to redesign the workshop for prospective Business Skills teachers. I say “we”, but he’s really doing the main work. We met last Friday so that we could go over a draft schedule that he had created. We talked about each part of the workshop, about how we could maximize the amount of activity it would demand on the part of workshop participants, how it could move away from simple explanations of the book’s contents towards helping them learn to use the books we have as tools. It was a great way to spend a few hours with a colleague. The schedule will need a little more revision, but we hope to have tested in one or two places by the end of June. The real proof will come in July and August, when we visit Business Skills classes. Only then will we begin to learn whether changing our workshop can push us in a new direction.

Move changes for the class are in the works. Even if we can succeed in making it a participative, active experience that helps our members take charge of their businesses, it will still fall short of what it needs to become. It will never be enough to help our member ensure that their businesses are profitable. We want them to be able to lift themselves out of poverty, and they can only do so if the learn to use their profits well.

The class’s emphasis needs to broaden so that it helps them learn to use their businesses to accumulate wealth – if “wealth” is the word for the kind of accumulation we hope for. In August, Rony and I will have the chance to spend a couple of weeks with a real expert. We hope that, with his help, we will be able to make the changes we need to make.

We have a lot to learn if we’re to move forward. And as we do move forward, we’re certain to learn even more.

It turns out that not everything in Haiti is improving.

I was headed back from Lagonav this morning. It was in a good trip, because I had had a decent night’s sleep. Rather than getting up in Matenwa at 2:00 AM, I had left Matenwa Sunday afternoon, and slept at a friend’s in Ansagale, the port that boats for the mainland leave from. This meant that I could sleep until 5:00 or later and still get the 6:00 boat. It also meant I got to spend a very pleasant evening with Freda and her three kids.

When I got to the wharf, I bumped into some friends who were heading in the same direction as I was. We got onto the boat together, and then got the same bus to Pòtoprens.

One of the annoyances of these bus rides used to be that you were likely to have someone stand up and deliver a long, loud sermon. You’d be expected to keep quiet so that he – it was almost invariably a man – could give a version of the same old talk about putting oneself in Jesus’ hands.

Now, I don’t object to people having strong religious beliefs. On the whole, however, I’d rather not hear about them. I’m much more impressed by the wonderful things that many of the people around me do for one another every day than I am by a speech about convictions I’m supposed to hold.

For awhile, though, these sermons were replaced. Especially on mid-length bus routes like the one from Karyès, the port of entry from Lagonav, to Pòtoprens, what you would hear is pharmaceutical salesmen – or, rarely, saleswomen. They would stand up and try to generate interest in their various Haitian and foreign wares: a wide range of pills, liquids, and creams ranging from Haitian cough syrup to Chinese pain ointment to Indian or Indonesian antibiotics. You could never be certain what you might come across. They might have various Haitian herbal or folk remedies, and, like American drugstores, they would sell soaps, lotions, and toothpastes as well. I was never that interested in the items, but the sales chatter was easier to listen to than the sermons had been. And, like the sermons, they meant that the driver would not be blasting loud music over the radio.

In the last couple of weeks, however, things have taken a serious turn. Now before starting their sales pitch, the hawkers deliver a long sermon. I’m not sure who it was at Abdai, the company that employs many of them, who decided that sermons would increase sales, but I hope it’s not true, because now I have to listen to a whole lot of both.

Of course, that’s not much to complain of. There are more serious problems in Haiti. I was thinking about all this as I walked through putrid mud, two inches deep, along the road that leads between the Okap bus station and the base of Route Delmas, where I would get a tap-tap up the hill. It’s been raining regularly in the Pòtoprens area for the last couple of weeks, and the water descends from above Petyonvil, through Delmas, to this road. It doesn’t drain well, so the area can be quite a mess.

Even this used to be much worse, however. When I first starting visiting Haiti, the road was only spottily paved. Ditches and puddles of mud a foot deep or more were common. And “mud” fails to express how nasty the goop really was. And last year at this time, the road was more-or-less impassible on foot because it was such a dangerous part of town.

But one serious problem that just seems to be getting worse is the water situation on Lagonav. I spent much of Sunday in Twoulwi, a seaside village in lower Lagonav with Benaja, a Matenwa teacher and community activist who’s involved in trying to address the water situation, and it was an experience worth sharing.

Benaja invited me on Saturday. He hadn’t known that I would be on Lagonav that weekend, but neither had I. It had been a last-minute decision that Abner, his principal, and I had made to take advantage of time freed up by another plan that fell through. Benaja would be getting a ride in a truck belonging to an NGO called Concern Worldwide, and the truck would return all the way to Ansagale, so it would be very convenient for me. I had only been to lower Lagonav once, when I walked there with Benaja’s colleague Robert to visit his sick brother, and I had not been nearly as far as Twoulwi. So I was glad to have the chance to see more of the island.

The truck got to Matenwa at about 8:30, only ninety minutes late. I knew that the plan was to hold a community meeting about water problems with Twoulwi residents after they left church. Benaja had hoped that we would get to Twoulwi before church was over so he would be able to announce the meeting to a captive audience, but the late start had killed that idea. He and his colleague from Concern would have to do their best to collect folks when we arrived mid-morning.

The ride to Twoulwi is long and hard. Twoulwi is on the island’s south coast, only about 20 kilometers from Matenwa through the Lagonav hills, but the road is so bad that, even in a very rugged-seeming Landrover, it’s almost a three-hour trip. It’s hard to describe just how bad the road is: narrow, winding, rock-strewn, steeply-rising-and-falling. Under the best of circumstances – and riding in the back of the Landrover were pretty much the best circumstances – you take a beating as you bump along the way.

It can be much worse. Later that night, Freda told me about the trip she made there with her older son, Egens. Their motorcycle broke down on the way home, and they had a six-hour hike just to get as far as their rural home in Ti Palmis. There’s very little shade along much of the road, and water is extremely scarce, so it must have been a miserable walk. Egens is 20, and he was a boy at the time, but he remembers the trip well.

On the way, we passed through mountain communities like Ti Palmis and Plezans, and Benaja began to tell me about the water problem they were trying to address. It has been a wet spring in Petyonvil and Pòtoprens, but lower Lagonav has seen no rain since September. In Plezans, he said that folks might have to walk two hours each way to find potable water. When I joked that I hoped they all had donkeys to help carry their load, Benaja simply replied that, during the dry season, donkeys die in route. They don’t eat enough to carry their burdens.

The water situation in Twoulwi isn’t quite as bad as Plezans. There are a couple of small springs in the area. But the water quality is poor: It’s salty and none too clean. Benaja’s organization, the Association of Peasants and Activitists of Lagonav (AAPLAG) and Concern were thinking of investing resources in helping to solve the problem, but they needed to get a good sense of the situation first. Not only do they need to know as exactly as possible what the water situation is, they also need to understand the community well. They need to know who its leaders are, who might be counted on to take an important role in managing a local water project. If outside organizations don’t do a good job of linking up with well-respected members of a community where they want to work, their efforts can end up doing as much or more harm than good.

When we got to Twoulwi, Benaja spent a few minutes generating interest in the meeting he wanted to call. He spoke to a half-dozen or so young people who were just hanging out, and waited. Within a half-hour, there were two meetings running. One was led by the colleague from Concern. It involved about forty adults. Benaja himself led the other, for almost as many kids. Both groups met in circles, and both meetings were focus groups, or group interviews. They were attempts to gather information about the community in general and the water situation in particular.

I spent most of the time in the group with adults, watching and listening. It was clear that they weren’t used to meeting for discussions in such large groups. At various times, I counted as many as 14-17 speakers either trying to talk over one another or talking to those closest to them rather than listening to what was being said.

The most interesting part of the meeting was when the group stopped simply talking and got to work. We had brought large sheets of paper with us, and the man from Concern put them in the middle of the circle, with a bunch of colored markers, and asked the group to draw a map of their area showing all the sources of drinking water and the paths to those sources. About a third of the group crowded around three or four men who picked up magic markers and started to draw. The discussion that ensued was lively – just as the argument had been up to then – but now it was very much focused. All the various questions of detail that are involved in mapping came to the fore, and within about fifteen minutes the group had produced a complex map which had the support of nearly the everyone there.

Benaja was finishing with the kids at about the same time. He had been asking them to talk about the sorts of difficulties they have because of the water situation, and they had a lot to say. Before we left, he spoke to the group. He talked to them about AAPLAG, and explained that the reason he was there with them is that the organization had no members in the area. AAPLAG members are dynamic community organizers, scattered all over Lagonav. The absence of an AAPLAG organizer in the Twoulwi area makes it something of an exception. Benaja explained how one qualifies to become an AAPLAG member, and let the group know that he hoped, in the not-too-distant future, they would have an AAPLAG organizer of their own.

It’s not yet clear what, if anything, the Concern/AAPLAG partnership will do about the water situation in Twoulwi or in other areas of lower Lagonav. Freda, who was my host that evening, is a former AAPLAG president, and she assured me that there are parts of the island much worse off than Twoulwi.

One gets so accustomed to simply turning on a faucet. Even in Ka Glo, where there are no faucets, safe, cool, good-tasting drinking water is never more than a few feet away. It’s a little hard to imagine how my life would change if securing drinking water became a major part of it. Much less if such drinking water as I could secure was never very good.

The strongest impression you have standing at the wharf in the midst of Cité Soleil is of the many children swimming. There did not happen to be any boats being loaded or unloaded. There were no boats at the wharf at all. But there must have been a couple of dozen kids, running off one end of the dock or the other splashing, playing. It’s probably not what most of us think of when we imagine a place like Cité Soleil, the sprawling slum on the edge of Port au Prince.

Cité Soleil made up only one large piece of the day I spent with Geto today. We walked around a number of what have been the most dangerous parts of Port au Prince, and it’s very hard to avoid concluding that things are very much looking up.

When Abner and I were in the United States through much of April, it was striking and frustrating to be confronted with the persistent impressions that people we encountered have of Haiti. Haiti was in the news a little bit during the hard days before the election, and a little bit in the days during and after it as well. But since then, apparently, there’s been mostly silence. It’s a little hard to bear that in mind when you’re here in Haiti. My main access to American news is the internet, and by entering “Haiti” on Google’s news page I am able to keep up with much that’s written. What’s written is something of a mixed bag, but there is always something. So it’s easy to forget that someone back in the States, someone not intentionally seeking out stories about Haiti, might hear very little of what’s going on at all. The vast majority of folks we spoke to were aware that things before and around the election had been hard, but had lost track of things in the ensuing weeks, as things have turned calm, as optimism has increasingly ruled. The good news, news of the ways things here are improving, has not spread.

Geto and I started the day by hiking down from Ka Glo to my godson, Givens’, house. Job, Givens’ uncle, had spent the night with us in Glo. He came up because he hadn’t seen me since I left for the States at the end of March. He’s a fourth-year medical student, and had been at a week-long seminar. He had received a certificate of participation, and it was made out to Dr. Job Antoine. It was the first time that anything official-looking referred to him as Dr. Antoine, and he was beaming. His excitement had made for a pleasant evening.

We left him at Givens’ house in Delmas and then headed down to Cité Soleil. We had to make a short stop at a cybercafé at the entrance to Nazon, a neighborhood between Delmas and downtown Port au Prince, but we were soon on our way. We got off a tap-tap at an intersection that had been a notorious place for kidnappings, and strolled from there into Cité Soleil, winding through narrow passageways until we got to Geto’s grandmother’s house.

She was there with the one son who lives with her, and was very happy to see us. She sat us down on the edge of the bed that takes up most of her one-room, corrugated-tin shack and served us bread and coffee, very sweet and very strong, with evaporated milk. We sat and chatted for awhile and then I talked to her son. Like Geto, he’s an artist. He makes colorful tin wall hangings, birds and lizards, and trees and flowers. They’re beautiful. He sells them to a man who has a shop in Labadie, the cruise ship destination in the very north of Haiti. He was pleased because he’s been getting orders and he expects to start getting more. People are starting to come to Haiti, foreigners and Haitians who live abroad, and they want to buy “Creole stuff,” he said.

When Geto and I left the house, we took a tap-tap to the Cité Soleil market and walked from there to the wharf. It was a hot, sunny day, and people were out in the streets going about their business or just hanging out. Geto bumped into friends with almost every step. Some hadn’t seen him since he had been forced to flee, and they were only now discovering that he is well, so these were happy encounters. When we got to the wharf, we stood for a few minutes trying to take it all in: the folks in the street, the kids in the water, the burned-out government buildings, the beat-up shacks. It is an area of great poverty, but its liveliness is more striking than anything else to me.

We walked back to the market, and hopped on a tap-tap to Belaire. Belaire was a place of constant violence over the last year. Shootings, beatings, kidnappings of all sorts. It’s also an area where UN and government forces were especially violent. The first block or so that we walked through bore clear marks of the conflict. Whole chunks were missing from concrete buildings that were standing, and some buildings weren’t really standing at all. But as we walked into and through the neighborhood, it seemed cheerful, even peaceful.

The high-light of the day was waiting for us at Champ Mars, the park just uphill of downtown Port au Prince, above the presidential palace and the national museum. Today, May 1st, was the last day of a week-end-long exposition of Haitian agricultural products and handcrafts. It was a big fair. People were strolling around the various stands eating the food and looking at the beautiful range of crafts: jewelry, wall hangings, clothing, and other sorts of stuff as well. The last thing we saw was a gallery of photos that had been taken of René Préval during the recent presidential campaign. His inauguration is scheduled for the 14th, and preparations are well underway. We saw where new palm trees are being planted on one of the Champ Mars lawns.

This is a good time to be in Haiti. All sorts of people feel optimistic, though perhaps cautiously optimistic, about the months to come. There is genuine excitement about Préval’s presidency. The violence that was plaguing this place stopped abruptly when his victory was announced. There is a sense that things here might just be able to begin to change and, just maybe, that they will.

Most of the walk we took today would have been very, very unwise as recently as January. I found myself wishing that Abner and I had come upon more of an awareness of that side of the story when we were in the States, but “Haiti” has become such a watchword for violence, sickness, and misery – at least in American English – that more positive impressions are hard to establish. And American media outlets don’t seem very interested in trying.

I’d like to end my essay there, but I shouldn’t. I can begin to explain why by going back to the image of the kids playing on the Cité Soleil wharf. There were, as I said, a couple of dozen of them. And every one of them was a boy. Not a single girl was enjoying herself in the late morning sun. I asked Geto about it, and he said that girls sometimes swim there too, but in the face of the facts before me, the claim was unconvincing. My guess – and, of course, it’s only a guess – is that the boys I was watching have sisters enough, both younger and older, but that many of those girls are at home, doing housework, while their brothers play.

My point is not that Haiti is a sexist society. It is. But I’m not sure whether it’s any more or less sexist than other societies are. I want, rather, to let the deep sexism here serve as an emblem, a reminder. I wouldn’t want anyone to confuse my claims that things are much better right now in Haiti than Americans are accustomed to imagining with a claim that everything’s ok. And the very first one who should practice avoiding that confusion is me.

Things are looking up in Haiti right now. It’s a good time to be here. But there’s still lots of work to be done. I enjoyed my walk with Geto through Cité Soleil, but it’s not a place I’d want to live or even to visit every day. There’s terrible poverty, and if the criminal-political gang violence has stopped, there’s enough violence of other sorts. Domestic violence, racist and classist oppression, and economic exploitation are examples. So as important as it might be for be to communicate my enthusiasm for the turn that Haiti’s taking, it’s just as important for me to communicate a good-sized grain of salt.

As John Paul II said when he came towards the end of the Duvalier dictatorship: “Things must change.”