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.”

I’ve never much liked the story of the Lion and the Mouse. It’s about a mouse that falls into the clutches of a lion. The Great King of Beasts then releases the mouse because he’s amused by the mouse’s claim that he’ll return the favor some day. That day comes when the lion is caught in a hunter’s net and the mouse chews through the rope to set him free. I suppose they all live happily ever after.

What I haven’t liked about it is that I don’t really have questions about it, at least none that seem worth asking a Wonn Refleksyon group. I don’t want to feign interest. I’ve never been good at feigning anything. So the challenge for me every time I use the text is to find a way to engage myself in the possibilities for conversation that it offers.

I had to smile to myself when Frémy met before I left for my trip to the States to figure which of us would be responsible for which text in our work with the women of Kofaviv. He would be going to Guadeloupe to see his wife and son, and our trips would be slightly out of sync, so each of us would have meetings to manage with the group alone. The text that fell to me was the story of the Lion and the Mouse. It seemed all the funnier since in the sequence we use it falls right between two texts I like very much.

Kofaviv is the Komisyon Fanm Viktim pou Viktim which is to say the Commission of Women Victims for Victims. It was established by women who suffered rape and other forms of violence during the coup d’état years of the early 90s. They offer health and counseling services to women in the poorest neighborhoods of Pòtoprens, particularly women who are victims of violence. They also work towards organizing those women. Their leaders asked Frémy and me to prepare about twenty of the women to run Wonn Refleksyon groups in the various neighborhoods, and we’ve been working together for about a month and a half. Each week we do two things: First, we lead a discussion using the guidebook for leading discussions that a group of us created a couple of years ago; then we read the day’s lesson plan together and reflect on how Frémy and I used it to lead the discussion. Our goal is for the women to feel ready to use the guidebook to lead discussions on their own.

I hadn’t seen the women for a couple of weeks, so I was excited on my way to see them. I got to their inconspicuous Pòtoprens office and was pleased to see that they had acquired chairs. Our first meetings had been held sitting in a circle on the floor. There was nothing wrong with meeting that way and, in fact, it established an ease among us that might have otherwise been hard to achieve, but the fact that they had been able to find the money to buy chairs was a good sign. When they started our session by distributing nametags, including one marked “Steeve” for me, this seemed like an even better sign. Neither Frémy nor I had suggested nametags. Frémy’s great at picking up names, and I never think of it. So this was entirely their own idea, and showed they feel ownership of the work we’re doing together.

And the meeting went really well. Their sense of ownership extended to ownership of the objectives we share. Things took a more serious turn than they had in our previous meetings. When it came time to discuss they ways I had used the day’s guide to lead our class, they had lots of questions and comments. They noticed places where I had followed the guide exactly and places where I hadn’t. They asked for detailed explanations, and suggested reasonings of their own. Questions started to emerge that showed they are starting to image themselves as discussion leaders, questions that begin “What should a discussion leader do if . . .?”

My answers led to further questions. They asked about the importance of keeping track of time, about the role that small group work plays, and about the role of a leader during small group work. They are particularly concerned with learning how they can work with participants who are generally silent: though they are dynamic and articulate, the women they work with can tend to be shy. That they are already imagining the problem is a very good sign.

But this was not the only serious turn that our conversation took.

The main question the group wanted to discuss as we spoke of the story was whether people who are small really can help people who are bigger than they are. In a sense it is a silly, uninteresting question. Any sensible person would immediately answer “yes.” We’ve surely all experienced the question from both sides. Since one of the principles that we teach when we talk about developing good questions is that we should only ask questions when we don’t know what they right answer is, the question about small people helping larger stronger ones seems as though it could not be good.

It turns out, however, that our principle doesn’t quite apply in this instance, because the question is less direct than it seems. Though it appears to be a straightforward yes-or-no question, what it in fact does is invite participants to share examples that occur to them. Many of those examples will be distant – how political leaders could learn if they would listen to citizens, how parents could learn if they listen to their kids – but some participants share particular stories either of times when they’ve been useful to someone older or more important than they were or of times when a child has helped them. Most of these stories are charming.

But at one quiet moment of the conversation, one of the women spoke of one of the women in her group. She said that the other woman had been beaten by her husband. At the time, that woman’s oldest child, whom she had had with another man, was five. Her husband must have been beating her horribly, because she said she was lying helplessly on the ground as he was approaching to continue his attack. The five year old boy picked up a knife, stood in front of his stepfather, and told him that if he struck his mother again he would stab him. It’s difficult to imagine what went through the husband’s mind, whether he feared the armed little boy or was shocked to his senses by the sight, but for whatever reason he broke off the attack.

For a moment, we sat in stunned silence. But then floodgates opened, and story after story came of children somehow helping their mothers at difficult times. None of them matched the story of the boy with the knife, but each was able to involve one or more of the participants in the now-very-serious exchange.

I had always known that my fondest or lack of fondness for a text is unimportant. What matters is how a text works for a group. It’s hard, though, to really bear that in mind. It’s easy for me to slip into thinking that my own curiosity is the engine that will drive a group. In my classes at Shimer, where students are required to read hard books that they sometimes approach thinking that they won’t be interested, my curiosity has had an important role to play. It can tend to infect the other in a class.

But working with the Kofaviv women has been an important reminder that, at least right here and right now, my own engagement in a question is not at all the main thing. It certainly can help, but it’s less important for me to lead an inquiry than it is for me to help open a space in which serious conversation can begin. They’ll be plenty of time for inquiry once the habit of conversation is in place.

I have to admit that I was a little disappointed to see American peanut butter on the table for breakfast in the priest’s guesthouse in Cerca Carvajal.

Disappointed and a little surprised. It must be a nuisance to keep a supply. I didn’t see anything in Cerca that could be called a store, much less anything that sells standard American groceries. Even in Ench, which is a hard ninety minutes away by truck, such an item might be difficult to come by. It’s likely enough that the large plastic jars of Jif are bought in Okap or Pòtoprens, hours away in one direction or the other.

And it’s strange that anyone would make that effort, because Haitians produce such wonderful peanut butter. It’s made, as far as I can tell, all over the country. And since Cerca is an area where lots of peanuts are grown, I figured that acquiring a delicious, locally-produced supply would be easy.

The church group I was in Cerca with had been there many times, so I asked them whether they had tasted Haitian peanut butter, or manba. When they said that hadn’t, I thought I would get to work.

The next morning, I went to the market early to have coffee, and asked the coffee merchant whether I would find someone selling jars of manba in the market later that day. She said that I would not, but the merchant next to her immediately chimed in: If I wanted to buy manba, she’d be happy to make it for me. I could come back to pick it up later in the day. And as we continued talking, I learned something.

I love manba. I really do. I think I could pretty much live on the stuff. I especially like it when it’s made with the very hot peppers that many Haitians grind right into it. It’s a surprising taste for someone who grew up with Skippy and the like, but I think it’s wonderful.

So I asked the woman to be sure to add peppers, and she answered, “We don’t make it that way in Cerca.” She went on to explain that, in Cerca Carvajal, manba is typically made with a little sugar, some cinnamon, and ginger. I had never heard of such a thing, but I was very happy to give it a try. It turns out, it’s great.

The experience reminded me that even within Haiti, a small enough country, there are cultural differences. When I tell my friends in Ka Glo, for example, that the folks around Twoudinò snack on fried horse meat they stare in gaping-mouthed wonder. When they hear that, in parts of the central plateau, people saddle and ride bulls instead of horses, donkeys, and mules, they are just as surprised.

The cultural differences between a group of Americans who come to visit a community in rural Haiti and the Haitians they’re visiting can, of course, be much greater. Those differences were what brought Frémy and me to Cerca Carvajal.

We were invited there by parishioners of a Catholic church in the Richmond, Virginia, area that has had a partnership with the parish in Cerca for a number of years. Groups from the Richmond church visit annually. They come with medical workers to run a two-day clinic. They also provide financial support to help run the parochial school and the church itself. Over the years, they’ve found their ties to the Haitian community that they visit abundantly rewarding, but frustrating as well. Father Ketnet, the priest who hosts them speaks English well, but other members of the Cerca community do not. All communication has had to be through Father Ketnet. The folks from Richmond have had little chance to actually speak with other people from Cerca Carvajal.

It’s not that they distrust Father Ketnet. Far from it. They seem to have a very good relationship with him. But they want something broader and richer, something that would allow them to learn from and respond to the whole community that they feel so attached to and that would allow the people in Cerca, whose lives so touch theirs, to feel a little more connected to them, too.

Frémy was asked to facilitate a large gathering at which members of the two groups would speak to one another without priestly intervention. I would be his lead translator. He would be introducing a method called Open Space. It’s a way to run a meeting without fixing its agenda in advance. Participants are invited to propose a series of topics at the start of the meeting. Each topic becomes the theme for a small group discussion. Multiple such discussions are then held as the same time. Participants choose the one whose topic interests them.

Or they don’t. A good deal of what makes Open Space work is the freedom it offers to participants. They come and go as they please. They’re not even encouraged to stay put once they enter a group. Someone might wander into one small group discussion ten minutes late, get up after five minutes of listening, and that walk off to join another. Or even just hang around without entering into any of the small groups at all. In the language of Open Space, it’s called the Law of Two Feet: If you’re not gaining from or contributing to a conversation, use your two feet to take you someplace else. It creates an ambiance that’s as unfamiliar to many of us as peanut butter with hot pepper mixed in. No one is in charge. Folks wander around. It can look and feel chaotic.

But the seeming-disorderliness of the ambiance is just the point. Because it is the loosening of the framework that a fixed agenda, clear leadership, and regimented procedures normally provide that opens up a free space where people can organize themselves to pursue the questions and tasks that really interest them. Open Space works because it invites people who are together because they are interested in something to exploit their own interest, their own passion, so that they can take responsibility for addressing the issues and solving the problems that they see as facing them.

The folks from Richmond were hoping that a meeting that broke up into separate little working groups would create an opportunity for more direct dialogue with their counterparts from Cerca Carvajal because Father Ketnet would be able to be in one small group at most. Also, paying attention to the topics that folks from Cerca propose might help them understand better what their Haitians friends were hoping for. The only things limiting what people could talk about would be their interest and their imagination.

But there would be problems. First of all, I could not do all the translating. We would have to hire a group of translators, and English speakers don’t grow on trees out in the Haitian countryside. We addressed this by inviting strong English speakers from Ench to join me as translators. I would translate Frémy’s facilitation from Creole to English, and help with other parts of the translating as well, but when participants divided into small groups, the translation team would divide with them, assuring that there would be one of us in as many different places as could be.

Using translators in the small groups, however, is tricky. Spontaneity and free flow are important parts of the atmosphere that makes Open Space work, and a translator, even a pretty good one, is almost bound to interfere with both. It is too easy for a translator to become the center of attention, making decisions about who speaks when. When translators are inexperienced and participants are also unused to speaking through translators, things are much harder. People can tend say more in each speech than the translator can remember, so things need to be repeated if they are not to be lost and that can further clog things up.

We had what appeared to be a bigger problem, however. When we got to Cerca on Wednesday afternoon, we learned that no one had yet been invited to the meeting scheduled for Friday morning. So when Father Ketnet asked at dinner that night what the maximum number of participants was, and explained that he thought 80-100 would come – if that was ok with us – I thought he was nuts.

But it turns out he can mobilize his people. There might well have been almost a hundred people – including Frémy, thirteen Virginians, and me – packed into the parish meeting house by the time things got going. Just going through introductions took a lot of time.

There’s not much to be said about what might seem like the important question: Namely, How did it go? Open Space always goes well in a way, almost by definition. As long as the person or group convening it has the ability to put things in the participants’ hands, the process can’t fail.

I don’t say this lightly. It’s certainly possible that an Open Space meeting could fail to lead to the specific consequences that those organizing it envision. But bringing about a predetermined effect is not what the process is designed for. It’s designed, rather, to free those who participate to pursue what they want.

And what these people wanted was, mostly, just to talk. The participants from Cerca wanted to share their problems and their hopes with their visitors and to feel heard by them. They also had specific questions about some of the activities that the Virginian parish sponsors. The visitors, for their part, wanted to express their interest and their appreciation to a community that has been sharing its life with them for a number of years, and to take some first steps towards understanding that community better. The small group conversation I translated was certainly lively and seemed pretty frank.

It’s hard to tell where things will go next. The Virginian group appears committed to Cerca Carvajal for the long term. Ideally, that would mean that they’ll have lots of opportunities for many more conversations.

Also ideally, it will mean that they’ll get to eat years of Cerca’s wonderful manba as well.

I have several memories of Madanm Marino that will, I think, endure. My strongest impression is of her energy. It was apparent the first time I met her, when she was visiting Pòtoprens with her fourth son. Though a fully-grown young man, he was quite sick, seriously anemic. He had been a promising student, but had been forced to drop out of school. He just didn’t have the strength for it. She was tireless, leading Ronal around, hovering over him, ensuring that he got the attention he needed. He’s fine now.

It was apparent, too, the first time I visited her at her home in Ench. She was a cyclone, working and making an array of other people work to ensure that I, as her guest, had everything I wanted, needed, or could be imagined to want or need.

The memory of that first visit made my visit in October with Papouch especially striking. She was in tears as we said our goodbyes because her failing health had not, in her eyes, permitted her to receive us – this although the son still at home, her two visiting daughters, her son and daughter-in-law next door, another daughter-in-law around the block, and the young boy that lives in her house were all minutely attentive to us, very lavishly hospitable. She was nonetheless unhappy because she herself hadn’t been the one.

But I think that the single image of her that I will always carry with me will be of the last time I saw her. She was in a hospital bed and had known for over a month that she was dying. She was in a lot of pain. The various medications that her family was buying for her when they were able were becoming less and less effective.

It was early evening, just after dark, and a friend and I had come to the medium-sized hospital ward she was in for a last visit before we would head back from Ench to Pòtoprens. As we stood, awkwardly trying to make some kind of conversation, a group of well-dressed women filed into the ward. Most of them were in their 50s, I suppose. They were members of a church choir that she had been part of. The group began to sing slow, soft gospel music, and Madanm Marino, who had been lying down, wanted to sit.

But she didn’t have the strength to hold herself up, so she called her daughter-in-law, Anna, over, and asked her to sit on her bed. Anna very gently raised Madanm Marino and sat directly behind her so Madanm Marino could lean on her. Madanm Marino closed her eyes as she listened to her group’s song, her full weight propped up by Anna’s side. The combination of the grace she exhibited as she faced death and of Anna’s devoted service as her support will be with me always.

That was in January. Madanm Marino passed away on March 3rd. Ronal, the son she had fought so hard to save, was the one who found her in her room, where she had returned from the hospital to spend her last weeks.

The funeral was on the 6th. I didn’t hear about her death until the 4th, so it was something of a rush to get to Ench for it, but I couldn’t be happier that I decided to go. I went with a group of Saül’s Pòtoprens friends. Saül is Madanm Marino’s oldest son, the father of my first Haitian godchild. He’s the live-in custodian in the office of an NGO. Two other of the NGO’s Haitian employees were part of the group: Eklann, who is the housekeeper, and Joseph, who runs errands. Daniel, the custodian for a wealthy doctor who lives next door to the NGO’s office, went with us as well. We slept at the NGO’s office on Saturday night so we could get an early start Sunday morning. We would be going to Ench on the 5th, attending the funeral on the morning of the 6th, and trying to return to Pòtoprens that same day. Ench is a hard five-ten hour journey from Pòtoprens, but I’ve written enough recently about traveling in Haiti, so I’ll leave out those details.

When we arrived in Ench, we were led directly to Rosemond’s house. Rosemond is Saül’s cousin, but he’s also much more. He is Marino’s – that’s Saül’s father – godson, he’s Saul’s godfather, and Saül is godfather to one of his son’s. The two families have thus made a series of decisions over the years that weave them together as closely as could be.

Rosemond is a successful gasoline merchant. Ench doesn’t have a functioning gas station, so gas is sold in gallon jugs by merchants that bring barrels full of it in trucks from Pòtoprens. He has a large house, just around the corner from Madanm Marino’s, and for the days around the funeral, that house became a simple extension of Madanm Marino’s home. It’s where her children put the four of us that came together from Pòtoprens up, and its where not only we four but also where all her immediate family and an array of other guests took their meals.

The night before the funeral, there was a wake. It began with a service at Madanm Marino’s church, a memorial of sorts. It involved lots of singing, both by a choir and by those in attendance, a fair amount on prayer, and a sermon. It wasn’t much more than two hours long – a short service by Haitian standards – and it was well-attended. After the service, everyone went back to Madanm Marino’s home, where her husband and children and daughters-in-law and a few other near relations received them as best as they could. They put out chairs, and offered drinks and snacks.

I went around the corner to Rosemond’s house at about 10:00. I was ready for bed. Madanm Marino’s fifth son, a medical student named Job, snuck away with me. He just couldn’t manage any longer. Sleeping space was limited, so the two of us squeezed into the same small bed. I don’t know where the bed’s usual occupant slept.

Job wanted to talk. There was so much on his mind. But he was also exhausted, and knew he had a hard day ahead of him. So he drifted off to sleep soon enough.

The funeral would start with a viewing of the corpse in the church at 7:00 on Monday morning. The service itself would begin at 8:00. So we had to get up and get ourselves ready rather quickly. I felt fortunate that things were starting early, however, because the trip back to Pòtoprens would be long, and I am not accustomed to arriving late.

I wish I had words that could really do the funeral justice. A couple of things seem especially worth mentioning:

First, the yelling. Haitian funerals include a way of displaying grief that is very far from my experience. Mourners, especially women, scream about their loss. They shake. They go into convulsions. They can fall to the floor if unsupported. They shout to the one whom they’ve lost. They shout to other loved ones. They shout to god. They cry. I’ve read about such grieving, but only in Haiti have I seen it. And the sight of it and the sound of it grab every bit of one’s attention.

Second, the ceremony’s length. In my experience, very little of what Haitian’s do in church is brief. Madanm Marino’s funeral was almost four hours long. There was every very long sermon. There were several long, seemingly free-form prayers. But what really made the service long was the third thing I want to mention.

The choirs. By all accounts, Madanm Marino was an enthusiastic member of several churches in her lifetime, from the time she was growing up and then first raising her children in the countryside, to when she moved into the city so her kids could go to secondary school, she was always an active member. She especially loved to be part of her churches’ choirs, and several different churches sent a choir or two to perform in her honor. I think there were seven. Each sang two or three long pieces, and they added up.

The most stunning performances were by her last church’s choir. It was a large group, with maybe 50 members. Not only did they sing beautifully, wonderful pieces in four-six voices. It turned out that their conductor and musical director is her younger brother. He and his wife live next door to her house in Ench, so the brother and sister must have spent very nearly all of his 50-odd years together. She herself was 58 when she died.

His performances were beautiful. He held the choir’s attention without drawing excessive attention to himself. He had been spending much of the funeral walking on and off the stage. Between the choir’s numbers he would walk down to be with his nieces, Madanm Marino’s two daughters, comforting them as best he could. He took a break to give the most unassuming eulogy I have ever heard. It consisted mostly of a short biography of his sister and then a long list of the many loved ones she left behind. At the end of the eulogy he too was overcome but that didn’t keep him from returning a few minutes later to conduct another piece.

We walked from the church to the cemetery, where what had been Madanm Marino was placed in a tomb. From there, Joseph, Daniel, and I ran to get out of our suits and into traveling clothes. We needed to be off. Madanm Rosemond wouldn’t let us go before we had a bite, but we boarded a truck and were on our way to Pòtoprens by 2:00. I was home by 9:00 that night.

Saül contacted me through Job mid-week to ask whether I could return the following weekend to travel back to Pòtoprens wife his wife and their boys. They needed to get back to school – they’d already missed a week – and traveling with both of them was a lot for even Jidit to manage. It was, as always, a long hard ride back from Ench. We left on Monday at about 3:00 AM. The hardest thing for me was not making the trip with Cedrick on my lap. What was hardest was the realization that while I winced and grunted with each painful bump in the road, Cedrick was having a grand time. He seemed to take it as something like a carnival ride.

Here are Madanm Marino’s six grandchildren. The second from the right is my godson, Givens. The second from the left is his brother, Cedrick. I took the photo during my second visit to Ench after her death, when I was there to bring my makomé and her two boys back to Pòtoprens.