I was thinking of my aunt. I think of her often enough. I’ve only ever had one true aunt. She’s an important part of my life, and she always has been.

But this time she was on my mind for two specific reasons. First of all, we had just arrived at Robert’s aunt’s house. It was well after dark, and we had hiked up from Pwentarakèt, where we had spent a few minutes with that very aunt of his. We had decided to walk to her house in Lapalmis because Robert needed to get back to Matenwa for school by 8:00 AM – he was giving his first graders their first-term exams – and we would be hard pressed to get there that early from Pwentarakèt. Lapalmis is within three hours of Matènwa by foot. If we got up by 4:00 AM, we’d have no trouble getting to school on time. The aunt herself would be staying in Pwentarakèt, where her husband and nephew were sharing a hospital room.

The day before, Robert had received a phone call. His younger brother Kenson was very sick, suddenly and inexplicably. Various a symptoms were described. Kenson hadn’t seen a doctor yet, Robert was told, because the problem was supernatural. He was sick because someone had cast some kind of spell on him. He was being consumed by a distant relative, a man who was in the process of becoming a vodoun practitioner.

Robert doesn’t put much stock in such explanations. So he was concerned that, because the disease was being attributed to magic, no doctor’s advice was being sought. He determined to go himself to see Kenson at the first possible moment to make sure he got to a doctor. Their parents are both dead, so Robert feels a strong sense of responsibility towards his younger siblings. He offers them all sorts of support, including financial, though his own means are limited and though he has three beautiful kids of his own to worry about as well.

The next day, even before he was able to get away from his work, he learned that Kenson was still very sick but that he had been moved to the hospital in Pwentarakèt. There his problem was diagnosed and was being treated. So Robert relaxed a little, and prepared to walk across the island of Lagonav to visit to see the younger man.

We left after school on Wednesday. I had asked Robert whether I could join him, in part because I met Kenson over the summer, liked him, and wanted to visit. Even more important was my admiration and fondness for Robert. He’s a really good first-grade teacher at the Matènwa Community Learning Center, a very enthusiastic participant in all the activities I’m involved in there, and a warm and charming person. The chance to spend an afternoon and evening walking and talking with him was too good to pass up. Finally, I was interested in the hike. I don’t get to walk around as much as I’d like to in Haiti. I just don’t have time. And I’ve seen very little of Lagonav, though I’ve been there often enough over the course of several years.

So we headed off early in the afternoon. It took awhile for us to get started, because first Robert needed to go to Nankafe. There’s a little grocery store there, and the store changes money. Robert had a some dollars that he needed to change into Haitian gourds so that he’d have some money to give Kenson for food. Hospitals in Haiti are different from those in the States. The sick person and her or his family has much more responsibility during a stay. The hospital does not provide meals or medications or sheets. The family has these responsibilities, and normally will have one of its members actually staying at the hospital as long as the patient is there. So Robert needed to make sure Kenson had food money, and he took care of that first, before we really were on our way.

It turned out to be lucky for us that we had to go through Nankafe, because there we bumped into some high school kids that were on their way home, up into the mountains between Nankafe and Pwentarakèt. They heard where we were going, and how we planned to get there, and told us they could show us a shortcut that would enable us to arrive well before dark.

The mountains outside of Nankafe are lovely. Much of the region is still thick with trees – something that sets it apart from the mostly deforested Lagonav – and after weeks of heavy rainfall, things were intensely green. We brought a thermos of coffee and some bread, so we had a snack. We got some water to drink from a house we passed at the top of a ridge. Looking across the trees and the plots of corn and sorghum, over the dark blue Caribbean, to the mountains of southern Haiti in the distance, I really felt as though I was in the midst of a tropical island vacation. It’s a sense I rarely have as I wander around the country in various forms of cramped, uncomfortable public transportation. Strolling with Robert was something different.

When we got to Pwentarakèt, we found Kenson in one of the three beds in the only room the hospital – really just a little health clinic – has. Their uncle was in another of the beds with complications from a broken foot that had not been well-set. Kenson was weak – nothing like the lively teenager I met over the summer – but he was improving. His fever was way down, the nausea was gone, and though he complained of a headache, he seemed to be mainly out of the woods. We didn’t stay long, because it was already getting dark, but Robert had time to speak both to Kenson and to their aunt and uncle. When we left, he felt confident that things were being handled well.

I was particularly impressed by their aunt. She was juggling a lot, with her husband and nephew both bedridden. Her husband has, it turns out, been disabled for some time, so just running their household without his ability to work on their farm or to do much in the way of carpentry must be a challenge. But she was cheerful and seemed to be concerned, as much as anything, that we receive a proper welcome for our unannounced visit to her home that night, even though she wouldn’t be there.

Robert told me that, since his mother had passed away, this aunt had done everything she could do to be a mother to him, and I believe it. A few minutes after we left the hospital, she caught up to us from behind. It turns out that, as soon as we had left, she had gone to buy a box of matches. She was worried we’d arrived in a dark house and be unable to find the sheets and towels we’d need for the night.

The path up to Lapalmis from Pwentarakèt was hard going because it was steep, narrow, rough, and it was getting dark. It must have been 9:00 PM or so when we arrived, dirty, hungry and tired.

The second reason my aunt came to mind is that what we ate when we arrived in Lapalmis was boiled pumpkin. Aselon, one of Robert’s young cousins, and the younger kids who were staying in the aunt’s house were already in bed, but they had boiled a pumpkin before turning in, and were happy to share it. My one and only aunt has a deep affection for pumpkin and other winter squashes so she comes straight to mind whenever I come across one.

It was delicious. Haitian pumpkins generally are. This one was no longer hot, but was still warm. It had been boiled in slightly salty water. As simple as that. There were grapefruit on trees in the yard, and Aselon got up and made some juice. Robert pulled a big avocado and some bread out of his backpack. It turns out that his aunt had slipped them to him at the hospital that afternoon. All in all, it was a great meal.

For a couple of months, Madanm Mèt, Mèt Anténor, and I had been discussing what we might do for Papouch. We felt badly for him. For a series of reasons, he’s suddenly found himself without friends. It’s a little weird. He has none of the typical qualities of a loner. He’s general exuberant, chatty, witty, and social. But though he’s now sixteen, he’s stuck spending most of his time with his wonderful little cousins, Kristo and Breny, who are 11 and 9. It just isn’t good. We had been talking a lot about how much he needs friends his own age and about how we’d like to cheer him up. But we hadn’t done anything.

We thought of sending him to a week of summer camp. Seventh Day Adventists run one that would have enough supervision to satisfy his parents. But it didn’t work out because Mèt Anténor ended up spending a month in the States at just the wrong moment. Madanm Mèt was unwilling to be left at home with her two daughters without a man in the house. Papouch may be young, but he is a young man. There are aspects of running the house that belong to him and his father. So the beginning of the school year came, and we realized that we had let his summer vacation slip away without taking any action.

Then I had an idea. He would have a long weekend October 15-17. If his parents would be willing to let him miss an extra day of school, he and I could easily take a short trip together. I thought about different places where we could fly inexpensively, figuring that he would very much enjoy a first chance to ride in a plane. My godson’s father, Saül, is from Hinche, the largest city in Haiti’s Central Plateau, and that’s where his family lives. If Papouch and I flew to Hinche, we would have an easy place to stay, ready-made friends to show us around, and a great chance at having a good time.

I looked forward to the trip. I’ve been fond of Papouch since I joined his family on my first extended stay in Haiti in 1997. He’s always been a sweet and joyous little guy. He’s not so little any more, and he’s a little bit sad, but I was glad we would have the chance to spend a couple of days together. His family liked the idea. They’ve gotten to know several members of Saül’s family, so they were confident we’d be in good hands.

Papouch liked the idea as well, so I booked us one-way tickets for Friday morning on the six-seat prop plane that makes the twenty-minute flight to Hinche. I figured that we’d take the six-hour ride back in a truck on Monday. He’d miss school on Friday, but be back in class Tuesday morning.

It was a great trip. Saül’s sisters, Nannan and Vivi, were visiting their mother’s house waiting for their schools to open in November, and they took to Papouch and took care of him, feeding him lavishly. Their brothers, Ronal and Felix, spent a good deal of time showing us around. Their mother, Madanm Marinot, was not well, but was pleased that her kids could receive us. Papouch was able to attend church Saturday morning and tour Hinche with Ronal that same day. After Ronal returned from church on Sunday, the four of us rode bikes to Bassin Zim, a waterfall outside of Hinche, where we spent the afternoon swimming.

Papouch liked being in a town where he could get around by bike. He had a great time riding to Bassin Zim and swimming there. He clearly enjoyed the attention that Nannan and Vivi lavished on him, too. They are beautiful young women, and he’s an adolescent boy.

So I was pleased with the time we spent in Hinche together. In retrospect, it seems as though it was a good thing to do.

At the same time, throughout the weekend I was repeatedly struck by how extravagant the gesture really was, how charged it was with a degree of privilege that I, and indeed even Papouch, enjoy here in Haiti.

From its very conception, the trip was marked by privilege. Most of the Haitians I live around do not take trips unless work or family circumstances require them to. They don’t just decide to spend a long weekend having some fun. They are, first of all, too busy. There’s a considerable amount of labor involved in running a Haitian household. That work begins as soon as the work of earning a living pauses for the day or for the week. Secondly, they do not have the extra money that such a trip requires. Though my neighbors are relatively well-off by Haitian standards – Madanm Mèt is fond of remarking that they are, thank God, no worse – they do not spend money on luxuries. Anything they have in excess of their daily expenses needs to be squirreled away, whether it’s for an emergency or just for their children’s next school bill. I was certainly the only one in our area who was going to do something silly like throwing down $30 each for two plane tickets to Hinche just for fun.

But that’s just one way that my sense of privilege presented itself to me over the weekend. I went with Papouch, Madanm Mèt’s son, not with her daughters, Kasann or Valouloun. On one hand, there was a good reason for that: It was, after all, Papouch that we were all worried about. On the other hand, the trip could not help but reinforce the sense of privilege Papouch must feel, and the sense of privilege his sisters must lack, because he is a male and they are females.

All three of Madanm Mèt’s children have chores to do around the house, lots of them. But there is simply no comparison between what’s expected of Papouch and what’s expected of his sisters. And theirs is not the only family that works that way. When Ronal Felix, Papouch, and I left Sunday afternoon to bike to a waterfall for some swimming, Ronal and Felix’s two sisters did not come along. They were at home making food that we would later eat and generally keeping house.

In this context, it might be worth sharing a short anecdote about the beginning of my time in Haiti. When an American friend first spoke to Mèt Anténor about whether he would be willing to host an American, me, who was to spend eight weeks in Haiti, Mèt Anténor immediately said, “Talk to my wife. It’s her house.” He was expressing the very different relationships that he and his wife have with their home. He built the house on his parents land, but once his wife moved in it became hers. She has lead responsibility for everything that goes on in it. Though he pitches in much more than a lot of married men I know – here or elsewhere – housework is neverending for her, and for him it is a matter of a few typically male tasks and a willingness tosometimes help his wife out with the tasks that are hers.

So not only in my running off for a weekend with Papouch, but also in the activities we shared during the weekend, Papouh and I reinforced the privilege we get to feel because we were born as males. For Madanm Mèt and Mèt Anténor, there could have been little question of Kasann and Valouloun going off with us – even if I had felt up to going off with all three kids. They are reluctant to let either slip too far out of their direct supervision.

But even that’s only the beginning of the privilege we experienced. There was another young boy at Madanm Marinot’s house while we were visiting. In fact, he lives there. His name is Jacquelene and he is a restavek. I’ve written of restaveks before. They are children who live in domestic servitude. Their parents turn them over to wealthier relatives or to others because they cannot afford to raise them or because they hope their kids will have greater access to education, to a future, than they can offer.

Jacquelene is Marinot’s godson and he has lived with Madanm Marinot since he was quite young. He rises early and goes to bed late. He works constantly.

I want to be careful: He lives in a house full of people who are fond of him. They call him “Jakito” for short or “the boss” or “ADM”, which stands for “the Administrator”. They joke with him and speak to him gently. He is sent to school. Madanm Marinot and her family are, one and all, good people, and they look at Jacquelene, in a sense, as one of them. Although I’m told that Felix, who lives with his wife and small children next door to his mother, gave Jacquelene a thorough whipping last year, the reason was that Jacquelene’s grades were very low. He was failing. Many Haitian fathers would whip their kids for the very same reason. And I should add that Jacquelene’s grades improved dramatically. He and I spent some time over the weekend doing math together, and he struck me as very bright. He seemed to like the attention, too.

Again, I need to be careful: To say that Jacquelene is a slave – a word that often seems like just the one to describe restavek children – and that the family he lives with are like slaveholders would be worse than inaccurate. It would be terribly unjust. I don’t know what Jacquelene’s home situation was like. Maybe it was worse. I’m told that he doesn’t like to go home, but I didn’t get to talk to him about this.

In any case, when I asked whether Jacquelene might want to go swimming with us Sunday afternoon, I was told that he could not. I suppose he had too much work to do. Not everyone can simply take off and have some fun.

When Papouch, Ronal, Felix, and I got back from our swim, we were beat. We had something to eat, but did very little else before evening. I did some writing and some more math with Jacquelene, but when it came time for bed we were more than ready for it. We set an alarm for 3:45 AM, because the truck back to Pòtoprens was scheduled to pick us up at 4:00.

The truck’s horn sounded outside the front gate just before 3:00, and we were surprised. But we were out the door within five minutes and on our way. It was mid-morning by the time we got to Saül’s house. I wanted to stop to tell him how his mother was doing and to see my makomè and the two kids before heading home. Papouch and I then had a bite to eat in a restaurant in Petyonvil. I told him that he wasn’t hungry when his mother turned him over to me, so I couldn’t return him hungry into her hands. We got on a pick-up truck headed to Malik just as it was starting to rain. The walk home from Malik left us pretty drenched.

I’m glad we took the trip, even though I know that by working within the set of privileges that are customary here, we reinforced them. I’ll have to think of something to do with Kasann and Valouloun.

For some photos of our trip, click PapouchInHinch.

Three Unrelated Examples

Yesterday I returned to Ka Glo from a night at Frémy’s house in Darbonne. The trip involves a lot of public transportation. It takes three pick-up trucks, a large bus, and a minivan. As I was riding on the large bus that would take me from the city of Léogane to Pòtoprens, I got to thinking about how what we like to call the “free market” was affecting the character of my experience that day.

It all started because I got a window seat on what had once been an American school bus. Generally speaking, I have a choice to make when I step onto one of the large busses: I can get either a decent seat or a quick departure. Good seats usually disappear quickly, and the wait can be a half hour, 45 minutes, or even longer as the conductors fill up the rest of the bus before it finally leaves. I was in luck, however. Though my seat was excellent – not just a window seat, but near the front of the bus – we took off almost immediately. This driver had apparently decided to hope that he could fill up the bus by picking up passengers on the way.

Things on the bus were tight, as always, because the busses carry three adults on each of the benches – plus small to medium-size children, poultry, and other baggage. (I vaguely remember sitting two to a bank in such busses as a child.) My window was the emergency exit, and it was broken. The bottom edge of the frame was unattached, so the whole window was flapping up and down in the wind all the way into town. Because of the crush, I needed to stick my elbow part way out just to be comfortable, but I had to be careful to avoid getting it whacked by the window as it jumped up and down.

The broken emergency exit was just one sign that the bus was in disrepair. Many of the benches were split, torn, or falling apart, and some of the windows were cracked as well. The bus rattled and wheezed as it bounded swiftly down the highway, and every time it hit a larger bump there was a loud whack from under the frame. It was in sorry shape, and that’s what got me thinking.

The trip was costing me twenty gouds. That’s a little less than fifty cents. Most public transportation seems remarkably cheap to me here in Haiti, so much so that it strikes me that it may be a problem. One rarely sees a vehicle used for public transportation here that is in good condition. They are not public in our sense of “public transportation” because each is owned by an entrepreneur, often but not always the vehicle’s driver. Their poor condition is surely connected in part to the terrible condition of most Haitian roads and to chaotic traffic patterns that make accidents, at least minor ones, a near certainty. But I wonder too whether their condition is related to the low price of transportation, whether their owners have the money to keep them in good repair.

This is where things get hard for me. I took economics in high school but I vaguely remember getting a “D”, and frankly, at the time, I couldn’t have been bothered with such things. Frisbee, ping-pong, and re-runs of 60’s and 70’s sitcoms seemed much more important.

As far as I can figure, though, the problem with the price structure here is that the fare is determined only indirectly by the vehicle operators’ cost of doing business. It is determined more immediately by what people are willing and able to pay. Of course, if what the drivers are getting for a given route falls too low, they can choose not to work that route. But their short-term need for cash may very well trump long-term considerations like whether their business is sustainable at the price they are charging.

Not only that: My experience with Fonkoze is starting to show me that small business people here in Haiti may not even be very clear even about as important a question as whether they are succeeding or failing. Market woman who participate in Fonkoze’s basic business skills course regularly report that before they took the course they had no real control over what they were spending and what they were bringing in. That means they had no good way to evaluate whether their businesses were profitable. I suspect that drivers here are in much the same boat.

And all that doesn’t even take into account the way external factors – like regular or irregular gifts from relatives living abroad – complicate things. It might, for example, be or seem to be in the best interests of a vehicle owner to run a vehicle into the ground, maximizing immediate gains as he hopes to get a replacement from Miami when the vehicle dies. He would thus save the maintenance and repair expenses that good upkeep would entail.

Shortly after I got into my seat, a woman got on with a large basket. She quietly said “gen kasav dous pou vann” and sat down. It seems as though only the man sitting next to me and I heard her, because only we sprang into action. Kasav is the Haitian flatbread made of grated manioc. It comes in two styles, regular and sweet. It’s hard to find, but this woman was saying that she had sweet kasav for sale. As much as many of the Haitians I know like kasav, it’s a real pain to make so they don’t often produce it at home.

Nevertheless, when you can find it, it’s generally quite cheap. The woman on the bus was selling the sweet kind that my neighbors in Ka Glo and I prefer. Since it’s almost impossible to find in our area, I rifled through my pockets for change and bought all that I could. The man next to me bought almost as much. We exchanged pleasantries about how happy our people would be with us when we got home. We wondered why no one else was buying, but we joked that we had already made the woman’s trip worthwhile.

As we entered Kafou, the suburb we had to get through on the way to Pòtoprens, a man climbed into the bus. Measured in distance, our trip was almost over. Measured in time, however, we were less than halfway there. The traffic in Kafou is terrible, so we would have a long way to ride before the trip would end.

That’s what this man was counting on. He was a travelling salesperson, selling personal care products: medications of various sorts, soaps, cremes, lotions, toothpaste. Such merchants are common on mid-distance bus routes like the one from Léogane to Pòtoprens. He stood next to where the //kasav// merchant was sitting, and began to sell. He had a big, attractive voice, and soon everyone on the bus was listening. Plenty of them were buying, too.

Before long someone in the back asked the driver to stop. She wanted to get off. Generally here there are no fixed bus stops. Someone who is ready to get off yells “mesi”, or thank you, and the driver stops at the first place he finds where he can pull over. As the woman was getting off, she saw the kasav. She berated the woman loudly for not proclaiming her wares, and then held up the bus while she made a purchase. At this point, chaos broke out. People were suddenly aware of the chance to buy kasav, and they started yelling out their orders, sending their money to her at the front of the bus, and demanding their change. The salesman grimaced as he saw that his own work could not continue.

But then he smiled. With his voice booming over the cacophony, he started calling out instructions to those who were buying kasav. In effect, he joined the kasav merchant as her sales clerk. Within a few minutes, her basket was nearly empty. She was aglow with her success. When people asked her why she hadn’t advertised her wares more firmly, she answered simply that she had announced them when she got on the bus. It was as though she saw it as her customers’ problem if they had not heard her.

Having finished his work as a volunteer assistant, the salesman returned to his own business, but by then we were very nearly at the end of our route. People were getting off at every intersection and between intersections as well. He had lost his best opportunity to make his own sales through his willingness to go with the flow.

When I finally reached downtown Pètyonvil later that day, I walked to the Malik station. That’s where I would get a pick-up truck to Malik, the last town before Ka Glo. From there, it’s a half-hour uphill walk home. When I got to the station, I was surprised by the absence of pick-up trucks. Normally there would be three or four waiting for their turn to load up with passengers for the short trip. I asked someone and got the following explanation: Recent heavy rains had made the road to Malik impassible. It had cut the road in half in Bwa Mokèt. Pick-up trucks could not cross the temporary river that had been created in the ravine there.

So I started to hike up the hill. I was carrying two heavy bags, partly because I had been away for a week but partly because I had stocked up on fruit, kasav, and other groceries for the Sunday I would be spending at home. Before I got very far, I heard someone yelling “Malik” from a large flatbed truck. It seems that in the couple of hours that it had taken to determine that pick-up trucks could no longer cross the ravine in Bwa Mokèt, a man with a bigger truck, an entrepreneur, had stepped into the void. This is, I suppose, how the free market is supposed to work.

In some ways, the economy here seems much freer than the economy in the United States is. The Haitian government is incapable of the sorts of massive subsidies the American government pays – to agribusinesses, for example. I don’t know of laws restricting people’s right to organize into unions – not that there are many powerful unions here. There seems to be little government control in areas like environmental protection or worker safety, little government control of anything. Given all that, the economy seems, in a sense, free to a significant degree. At the same time, the influence that outside forces – like donor nations and multinational corporations – exert here makes it hard to feel that freedom as something serious.

I suppose that I’ve lost any sense I might once have had as to what a free market actually would be. It’s not as though I am or have ever been an economist. But it doesn’t take long here to doubt the otherwise tempting hypothesis that prices and, generally, economic circumstances are being controlled by something like an invisible hand. The hand or hands at work in Haiti leave perfectly visible fingerprints all around me. The difficulty comes in understanding to whom each fingerprint belongs.

I just spent a week in a luxury hotel along a beautiful stretch of the Haitian coast, but it wasn’t my fault. The hotel had all the trimmings, or at least most of them. The hot running water in our room’s clean, spacious bathroom was the least of it. There were manicured lawns; a well-kept koi pond with its own small flock of fat geese; a beautiful outdoor dining room, with clean tableclothes and place settings and great views of Lagonav across the bay; elegant food; a playground with a small basketball court, volleyball court, swing set, jungle gym, and mini-golf; a private beach; a swimming pool full of clear water; a scrupulously polite and attentive staff; and more air-conditioning than a soul could know what to do with.

It took me by surprise. I had been expecting to spend the week in Gonayiv, the coastal city north of Pòtoprens that was hit hardest by last year’s hurricane. Thousands of people were killed. Many more lost their homes and everything else. I’d heard that the engagement of larger aid organizations there had been ressembling nothing more than a feeding-frenzy.

I had been through Gonayiv several times on my way to the northeast, and was struck by the number of large signs advertising that this or that NGO was hard at work, helping the city and its residents rebuild. But I had also been struck by the clear evidence of the hurricane’s destructive path. There’s a new inland lake in an area just outside the city that was once inhabited. People even fish in it. There are remnants of walls and houses both in the city and around it. Some buildings in the city still show their high-water marks.

One of the organizations very active in Gonayiv is Care, and Care contacted Fonkoze for help organizing a literacy program. It had undertaken to find foster homes for children who had been orphaned by AIDS or the hurricane or otherwise. Care was providing a good deal of financial support to these homes, but was looking for ways to help them build the capacity to support themselves. Helping them do so would involve educational programs, and the educational programs would be hard to organize because many of those who need them are unable to read. Care had heard of Fonkoze’s literacy curriculum, which is built around a board game called “Korelit”, and had asked Fonkoze to send someone to teach a group of ten how to use Korelit. Fonkoze had, in turn, asked me to organize and run the workshop together with one of its literacy field workers, a young man named Elysée.

The two of us arrived at Care’s Petyonvil office Monday morning at 7:00. We were supposed to leave at 7:30. I had been surprised by the planning, because I knew that the workshop was supposed run for five days and that unless we arrived in Gonayiv Sunday night we would lose most of, if not all of, Monday. Gonayiv is a good four-hour drive from the Pòtoprens area. I had also read the contract between Care and Fonkoze and knew that we were to return from Gonayiv Friday. The would mean losing much of Friday as well, especially since few people or organizations would plan to arrive in Pòtoprens after midafternoon. To do so would mean risking arrival after dark, and that’s not prudent.

So I was unclear as to just how much time Elysée and I would have with the Care team, and this complicated our planning. Fonkoze had sent Care its standard schedule for a five-day introductory workshop. That it do so was stipulated in the contract it signed with Care. But Elysée and I wouldn’t be able to count on following it because we didn’t know how many days we would actually have: Four seemed like a best-case scenario, but we would need to know what we would do if we only had three. To complicate matters further: Elysée had been providing technical support to Fonkoze literacy teachers for almost a year, and he had done the logistical work to organize a workshop, he had never actually taught literacy using Korelit nor led a workshop.

Elysée and I had spent the preceding Friday afternoon organizing the minimally necessary topics into six half-day modules that we could present in order, whether we started Monday afternoon or Tuesday morning. An extra half-day or two with the Care team would give us the important chance to have them practice what we had done together.

When we were still sitting in care’s office at almost ten, I figured that all of Monday had been lost, but Elysée and I had done our planning, so we were calm. When we finally set out, I learned that we’d be going only as far as Monri. That’s where the workshop would be held. Monri is much closer to Pòtoprens than Gonayiv is, so it became clear that an extra half-day or two would be possible after all.

My guess was that four days would be enough to present a five-day workshop if we managed our time well – a big “if”. As much as Fonkoze tries to emphasize participatory learning, its literacy staff tends to do so through long speeches. The staff tends to model just what it wants its literacy teachers to avoid. This is a very general problem in the alternative education that I’ve seen. In any case, I felt that if we could reduce our talking time, increase the focus on putting the Care team to work, we could get more done in less time.

What I didn’t know was what the members of the team we’d be working with would be like. I’ve been very reluctant to push Fonkoze to shrink its workshops because the women that Fonkoze is preparing to work as teachers aren’t, for the most part, very educated themselves. It can take a lot of time to explain things like what a vowel is.

The Care team was something quite different, though. It too, like the Fonkoze groups we had been working with, was all women. But these women were university graduates: nurses, public health experts, administrators, and even medical doctors. They are flawlessly literate and fluent in French, but some had problems writing Creole correctly at first. Though it is their native language, some of them had never really learned to read and write it well. Nevertheless they are used to sitting in a classroom, working to master something new, so getting them up to speed was quick and easy. My own part of the workshop was easy as well: None lacked the confidence to speak in a group. And though they weren’t always the most patient of listeners, they were more than astute enough to recognize that as a problem they would need to work on.

So they workshop went smoothly. There will be problems in the coming three or four months as Care implements its program. It turns out that Fonkoze and Care were not at all clear with one another as to Care’s goals for the project, so adapting what we at Fonkoze planned so that it meets Care’s needs will take some work. But it’s work that can be done. Care understands better now what it wants from Fonkoze and is prepared to work with us to see that its goals can be met.

I myself have to wonder about the decision to put the workshop in such a luxurious setting. Fonkoze would not have chosen to do so. First and foremost because of the expense. Lacking the funds to offer even basic literacy to all its clients, Fonkoze could not justify the extra money that holding the workshop at Moulin Sur Mer entails.

But it is not only a question of money. One of the problems we struggle with is the tendency for a distance to appear between the literacy teachers we prepare and the students they are teaching. The person who’s serving as teacher may be a market woman with a busines right next to those belonging to the other market women in her class. But having been identified as a teacher, she will often tend to slip into a traditonal authority role.

We try to combat this tendency both in word and in deed. In our words, we encourage our literacy teachers to consider themselves, first and foremost, as participants working with other participants in their classes. In our actions, we try to model equality between teachers and students by organizing workshops that are as informal and as participatory as possible. So it would make little sense for Fonkoze to whisk its literacy teachers away to a luxury resort, someplace none of them would otherwise go. It would send the wrong sort of message.

But Care’s situation is different. Its highly educated staff members already belong to a class quite different from the one the families they’ll be working with belong to. There’s no denying that. They are preparing to take on a new responsibility in an area where they have no expertise. Hosting them in a comfortable space while they prepare themselves makes a certain amount of sense: They need to get started with as positive a sense of the project as possible.

When I asked Elysée what he thought of the workshop’s setting, he said that the type of person that Care is using has certain expectations. Failing to host them in comfort would only cause problems. When I asked him whether what he meant was that they are already spoiled and that we have to accept that, he smiled and said “yes.”

Whether it’s worth the extra money is a question I can not answer. I must admit that the clean bathroom was nice.

Telling people that I’m not really a doctor normally feels like a joke. Of course I’m not a real doctor, and I couldn’t be one. I’m too squeamish.

But when I got to the school that Tuesday afternoon, I knew I had to act. A small boy was sitting on a stone wall, bleeding badly from the back of his head. The teachers had known how to clean and dress his wound, and they had done what was, as far as I could tell, a good job of it. But blood was still pouring down his face. I guess they didn’t know about applying direct pressure.

So I sat down with the boy, and took his head firmly in my hands. Meanwhile, one of the teachers borrowed a donkey on which to take the boy the half-hour or so to Masikren. That’s where they would find the nearest health clinic. When the donkey arrived, they grabbed an older boy to take over for me – either to protect me from having to mount the donkey or to protect the donkey from having to carry my weight, I don’t know which. From that point on, the matter was out of my hands.

I mention the incident because it reminded me how difficult the Matènwa Community Learning Center’s situation is. I rarely think of the problems the school faces, because it generally functions so beautifully, but the school’s staff struggles hard to make it what it is.

I don’t want to say that the school is remote, because that word would imply that those of us who live miles or hours from Matènwa are where one ought to be, that the residents of Matènwa are removed from the center and that the center is us. Pòtoprens and Chicago are just as remote from Matènwa as Matènwa is from them.

But there are things that Matènwa lacks. There are two primary schools – the Community Learning Center and another – but a couple of additional ones might be needed before it will be possible for all children to go to school. And the additional schools will need to be cheap. They would have be organized so that they do not make demands that exceed the financial resources of the families they are to serve.

Matènwa has a store, but many purchases require a trip, in the best case, to one of the markets in Masikren or Nankafe. These are only 30-45 minutes by foot. In cases enough, however, one needs to go to Ansagale, the island’s major city, which is an expensive and uncomfortable hour-and-a-half’s ride on the back of a pick-up truck, or even to Pòtoprens, across the bay.

Health care is a major problem. Even for basic first aid, the closest places are Masikren and Nankafe, and the clinics there aren’t open all the time. More serious issues, anything requiring a doctor, means a trip to Ansagale. That’s where the one or two doctors that serve the island’s 100,000 or so residents are to be found.

And yet the Learning Center is a wonderful place. I’m particularly excited about it this year. I have visited regularly over the years and have been there frequently since I moved to Haiti in January.

I entered the country with twenty copies of a short book by Swiss psychologist Jean Piaget. The Learning Center is already unique among the schools I visit in Haiti in the way it creates a non-violent, student-centered learning environment for the children who attend it. Reading Piaget, however, gave the teachers a deeper sense of some of the reasoning behind a child-centered approach. They began to understand why Piaget thinks that only a child-centered approach could make sense for schools.

When we finished the book in April, the teachers wanted to start a more general study of psychology. We found a Haitian psychology textbook, and we used the teachers’ summer vacation to organize two one-week sessions that enabled us to get most of the way through it. We’ll need two more meetings to get us the rest of the way. The same Haitian publisher is right now coming out with an educational psychology textbook that will be a fitting sequel. Meeting together every two or three weeks through the school year should be more than enough to study that book as well.

When we met during their first week of school they decided that they will take leadership of the group from me. I’ll meet with one of the teachers a couple of days before each of our meetings, and plan with that teacher how he or she will lead the group. I’ll then attend the meetings as one of their participants.

But the most remarkable thing about the school has nothing to do with me or my work. It is, instead, a direct consequence of the wonderful, welcoming learning environment that the Learning Center’s staff has created. Over the last four-five years many of us who visit the Center regularly have noticed a change in the student population. The kids are getting younger and younger. Back when the school opened, Matènwa was full of young people who wanted to be in school but hadn’t had the chance. It was not unusual to have kids eleven or twelve or older starting in the first grade. By the time classes made there way to the sixth grade, they were peopled with young adults. Over time, that stopped. Kids were starting school earlier – first grade at five or six – and so finishing as children of eleven or twelve. We were all very pleased.

This fall, however, the average age has shifted again, in a surprising way. The are ten adult women, most of them mothers of students attending the school, who have decided to return to school themselves. They sit in the classes with their own children, or with kids who could easily be theirs, and learn to read and to write and to do simple math.

Of course none of us knows how this new development will turn out. It could easily become hard for the women to find themselves, day after day, sitting and learning with little kids. For the teachers and the school, the presence of students who are adults could create dynamics that are hard to predict.

At the same time, right now one can not help but be very pleased. The women’s decision demonstrates both an inspiring enthusiasm for education and an encouraging confidence in the school and the teachers they’ve chosen to make their own.