Earlier that day, I had made a mental note to have a talk with Toto. He had made a silly mistake, and I had suffered its consequences.

It started in the morning. My neighbors and I were scheduled to spend much of the day – a Sunday – working on the church they are building. It is long, slow project. They’ve been at it for several years, and are very far from finishing. They do a little bit of work any time they collect enough money to buy building materials. We were very glad to be able to spend even just a day taking a small step forward. We would be pouring a concrete cover over the large rainwater cistern that had been built into the foundation under what will be the entrance to the church. A local mason had spent two days the previous week assembling and connecting the wire supports for the concrete.

My neighbors clearly like it when I pitch in with this sort of work. My willingness to help with the church in particular may take some of the sting out of the hurt I believe that I inflict by avoiding their church services. I also think it helps them see me as a real member of the community rather than as a mere visitor. Almost as soon as the day began, I started carrying water, bucket by five-gallon bucket. It was a short walk from our water source to the spot where the teenagers would be mixing concrete. The young people like it especially when I carry things on my head. I must make quite a spectacle. So as I filled the drums they had put at the construction site, I drew a small but animated crowd of onlookers. We were having a grand time.

Toto asked a couple of the larger teenage boys to go get the sacks of cement, and that’s when he did something foolish. When I started to follow them to help with the job, he stopped me and told me not to. He said that I would not be able.

Big mistake. I insisted that I certainly could and would carry a sack or two, that I had carried cement for them in the past. I took a sack from the group’s storage shed, which is the house in which Mèt Anténor’s parents once lived, and lugged it to the construction site. I was very sore for the several days that followed. All the more so because I had seen how very easily the young boys whom I was helping did the same job.

As I scolded Toto that evening, telling him that he should never tell me that I can’t do something, especially when he’s right, we all had a good laugh. I explained that he needed to be more diplomatic, and he gravely pretended to recognize his error. Though Byton’s sisters made an appropriate show of apparent sympathy, they were evidently as amused as everyone else. It was all a a part of the evening ambiance.

One of the unfortunate aspects of the way that my work is developing is that I am rarely at home. I spend little more than one day at home each week. This, despite how comfortable I am in the house Byton built me, and despite how at ease I feel among my neighbors there. The house has a large and comfortable living room, and when I’m in Ka Glo on a Sunday evening it’s common for a crowd to gather. Though I rarely cook in Haiti – the food my neighbors still send in quantities makes it unnecessary – I do make popcorn. Byton makes limeade, and these snacks are more than enough to satisfy a gathering.

On the Sunday in question, we had a muskmelon and a couple of avocados as well, so the atmosphere was festive. Toto was there, as were Byton’s sisters: Yanick, Andrelita and Myrtane.

Their cousin and neighbor, Eli, was there as usual. For Eli it was a nervous moment. He had taken the first part of the high school graduation exam in July. Passing that first part qualifies a student for the final year of high school. It is a road block that keeps many Haitian young people from ever finishing. The previous year, Eli had narrowly failed, but he took courage and returned to try again. This year his result had been better. Though he hadn’t passed outright, he did qualify for the make-up exam in August. He had taken that make-up, and was expecting the results any day. We would learn later that week that he passed decisively, but as we sat that evening, he could not be sure of his result.

It is a strange and wonderful privilege for me to be part of these gatherings. Almost everyone sitting in the room grew up within fifty feet of my house. Only Eli arrived more recently: He moved to his Uncle’s house in Ka Glo in 1998, when his mother died. But even he grew up in Metivier, only about a half-hur’s walk away. These are people who have been together, living the same shared realities, for all of their 25 or 30 years. They know each other very, very well. I am the single stranger, the one person who does not seem to belong.

And yet I do belong. Younger than I am by a decade or more, and separated from me by a whole set of experiences that we do not share, my friends have nevertheless made me part of their crowd. They engage themselves in the goings on of my work and my life, and they accept my engagement in theirs. They know about my friends and family in the States, and about my friends and colleagues in Haiti. They tease me as they tease one another, and they casually accept the little hospitality I can offer as their due. This last point is especially important, because it gives me a comforting sense of the comfort that they feel.

In a very real sense, I’m still an outsider in our small village, set permanently apart from my friends by everything from my cultural background, to my work and my interests, to the color of my skin. And yet it’s not that simple. Perhaps it would be best to say that I am a outsider who belongs very much to the village as an outsider, as its outsider.

One of the pleasures of my life in Haiti has been to live there more and more as a foreigner who is not quite foreign. The foreign-ness that I carry around with me everywhere in Haiti gives me a sense of freedom that cultural expectations might otherwise diminish, but the comfort I have found as I’ve grown to be part of the world I live in there enables me to enjoy that freedom in ways that someone who felt more alien could not.

Penya giggled when I asked him whether he knew his right hand from his left. He’s my six-year-old neighbor. He graduated in the spring from a three-year pre-school program, and is ready to start first grade in the fall. Madanm Mèt, who is his aunt, laughed and said that the question was beneath him.

In a sense she was right. When I asked him to show me his right hand, he had no trouble doing so. But he was standing directly opposite me, and when I asked him to point to my right hand, he immediately indicated my left.

It was just what Swiss psychologist Jean Piaget said he would do. In the book I had been studying with a group in Dabòn, Piaget claims that young children are egocentric. He means it literally. They view themselves, he says, as the center of everything, and are unable to see things from a perspective other than their own. By asking Penya to identify my right hand, I was reproducing one of the examples that Piaget cites to make his case.

The discussion group was organized by a group called “Rasin Lespwa.” The name means “Roots of Hope.” Rasin Lespwa is a cultural organization that has been advancing education and cultural life in Dabòn for almost fifteen years. They run a small library – the only one anywhere near Dabòn – and arrange various kinds of seminars, lectures, concerts, contests, cultural exchanges, and other events.

This was the third consecutive year they have invited me to lead a two-week short course during the summer vacation. The first year, we read Descartes’ Discourse on the Method. Last year, we read Paulo Freire’s Education as the Practice of Freedom. This year, we chose a collection of essays by Piaget called On Pedagogy. We spent two weeks talking about various aspects of his approach to the psychology of learning. The largest number of participants were primary school teachers. The most active, however, were a high school teacher, a librarian, and a couple of recent high school grads.

For most of the first week, and into the beginning of the second, we were working hard to understand, at least in outline, Piaget’s view of how a child’s intellect grows. He is very much convinced of at least two things: First, that knowledge is something each of us creates in ourselves. It’s not, in other words, something that a teacher can simply transmit to a passive student, but must be constructed by an active learner. Second, that clarity, sophistication, and rigor of thought only develop as we interact within a group. In other words, our intellectual development and our social development go hand-in-hand, so that it is, in his view, tremendously important that schools be built around collaboration rather than individual achievement.

It was towards that middle of the second week that this second point really hit home. The group came to the realization that Piaget was not just saying that group collaboration was an interesting classroom technique that a teacher might employ to help students learn more effectively, but that he was really insisting that students could only grow as thinkers to the degree that they worked together with one another. In effect, they began to see that, if Piaget is right, they are not really teaching their students anything at all.

This was easy for the recent graduates to accept. They even liked it. They were excited by the chance it offered them to bemoan the education they had been subjected to, to criticize the teachers they had had and the schools they had attended. It was an easy pill for the high school teacher to swallow as well. For a number of years he had been carefully choosing the schools he worked in, selecting only those in which the classes would be small so that he could run them in the ways he wanted to run them. He was already emphasizing teamwork among his students.

But when the enthusiasm for Piaget’s argument had gathered real momentum, something surprising happened: Two of the primary school teachers, who were sitting next to each other, started laughing. At first they made efforts to cover up their laughter. But they couldn’t, and soon enough their laughter was perfectly clear.

We asked them what they were laughing about, and though they didn’t want to say so clearly, it became evident that they were laughing at the rest of us. We just didn’t get it. How in the world were they supposed to use student-centered education or teamwork in the classes they actually were teaching. They both worked, they explained, for a school supported by a Christain mission, where the cost of the education is very much subsidized. Parents pay almost nothing to send their children, and the kids get free school uniforms and free hot lunches to boot. As a consequence, there is an enormous and insistent demand from parents for the school to accept their kids. Maximum class size is supposed to be 35, but that maximum is largely ignored, and classes can have 40 or 50 or more. Try to imagine working with a class of 60-70 first-graders. We need not even get into the inadequacies of the classroom spaces they are assigned.

Our group had failed to consider the perspective of someone actually working in a Haitian schoolroom, so our insistence that education in Haiti take a new shape, though we believed it to be based on compelling arguments, failed to account for the reality that these teachers face every day. And it wasn’t just that I, as a foreigner, was guilty of this. The high school grads had been much worse than I had been, beginning many of their comments with phrases like “I hope the teachers who are here will . . .”

The teachers themselves would be willing to try new approaches, but not until someone can help them imagine just how to move forward. The two weeks we had spent reading together had been useful. Reading a book together, and talking about what its author said, helped all of us develop an initial picture of the kind of classroom we would like to see. At the same time, such a conversation can at best serve as a beginning for change. Actually changing the way classrooms work will take more time and energy. We’ll need to talk through specific strategies that enable teachers to imagine how they are to implement the classroom that we all hope for. And implementation is certain to be hard: Continued dialague through the whole process will be necessary if real changes are to take root. The follow-up of our seminar is in the group’s hands. We have scheduled a meeting for the end of September to discuss our plans.

In the meantime, I want to say one more thing about Piaget. The question I asked Penya is only one of the simple questions that Piaget suggests to make his point. I had already asked Penya the other one. I asked him whether he has brothers. He told me he has two, Christopher and Breny. I then asked him how many brothers Christopher has, and he said one. Then he thought for a minute and corrected himself. Christopher has two, he said, Breny and himself. At six years old, Penya was doing what Piaget says is first done at eight or nine. He was looking at the question of brotherhood from his brother’s perspective.

Now, Penya is a very bright child, and the ages Piaget gives are only averages, so I wasn’t really surprised. But I decided to try another experiment. I asked Givens, my godson, whether he has a brother. He told me that he does, Cedrick. I then asked him whether Cedrick has a brother. Givens smiled, hid his face in my lap, and said “Givens.”

Givens is not yet three, so I had to wonder whether there was something wrong with Piaget’s view. Is the perspective that he speaks from limited by the time and place of his experiments and by the population of children he interviewed?

It’s a little hard to imagine that he’s entirely mistaken. So much of what he describes seems right on. But he himself strongly emphasizes the role that our social life plays in developing our intellectual capacities. Maybe the great difference between Givens’ life and the lives of the children of Geneva lead them to develop in very different ways as well. Just how different would be hard to say, but it would be a very appropriate matter for further investigation.

There are two kinds of bad handwriting. I’ve had friends and students over the years who write in ways that I find hardly legible. I think, for example, of a wonderful student I worked with at Shimer. His name was Larry. When it came time to type the evaluations of his teachers that he would fill out by hand each semester, a team of three of us would gather in the registrar’s office to interpret what he wrote. One member of the team was a scholar with experience deciphering old manuscripts. Reading Larry’s writing was challenging.

At the same time, no one would have confused his handwriting with a child’s. It was very much developed, even elegant in places. The lines were smooth, the shapes showed Larry’s nice sense of proportions.

The poor handwriting I had when I was learning to write Chinese was quite a different matter. It lacked clarity because it lacked proportion. Its lines were wavering, as if unsure. It resembled nothing so much as the first efforts of a five-year-old child. It was the work of an unpracticed hand.

I was thinking of the different sorts of bad handwriting as I looked at the blackboard in the literacy center we were observing in the countryside outside of Twoudinò, a small city in the northeast of Haiti. It took the teacher about ten minutes to write two short sentences – they were common Haitian proverbs – on the board, and she did it with an evidently unpracticed hand.

Watching her struggle to write, and seeing the results of her struggle, brought to focus the interesting and difficult problem we’re trying to help Fonkoze solve. I’ve written about Fonkoze before. It’s a bank that offers financial services to the rural poor. (See www.fonkoze.org.) It’s also committed to offering its borrowers – nearly 100% of whom are market women – education, starting with basic literacy when necessary. Not just that, but it is committed to developing the very same market women as their own teachers.

Fonkoze helps its clients organize themselves into “credit centers” of 30-40 borrowers. The dream it is pursuing is for those credit centers to become long-term solidarity groups in which, among other things, members are regularly pursuing educational opportunities that they then share with one another. At different moments in a center’s history, different women will step forward to terach the group.

The problem is that there are plenty of credit centers that don’t have members with strong educational backgrounds. Often enough, the best candidates that Fonkoze can find within the centers to serve as literacy teachers are not all that literate themselves. They are, at least, without strong reading and writing skills.

It is in this context that Frémy and I were invited to help Fonkoze develop its program. It’s not that Frémy and I are literacy experts. Fonkoze has a number of people on its staff who have much more experience in literacy that he and I do. What Frémy and I bring is experience at preparing and coaching inexperienced teachers and at organizing simple lesson plans in Creole. We spent the spring working with Fonkoze’s most experienced literacy teacher to do four things. First, we divided the existing Fonkoze basic literacy program into twenty-four weekly units that could be taught over a six-month period. Second, we integrated a discussion component, based on an adaptation of Wonn Refleksyon, into the units. Third, we developed twenty-four simple lesson plans that would help an inexperienced teacher stay on-schedule. Finally, we help devise a way to present the whole package to new teachers of literacy in a five-day introductory workshop.

The problem is that there is no way to know whether the teachers have been able to benefit from the workshops or whether they are able to make good use of the lesson plans without observing them in the classroom. And if there was ever an example of an observer whose presence greatly effects the results of the events under observation then that example is me, sitting in a classroom in the middle of the Haitian countryside, attempting to unobtrusively watch a teacher at work.

I try not to kid myself. For all my efforts to be quiet, to be undemanding of attention, I always stick out here like the proverbial sore thumb.

The classroom outside of Twoudinò was a great example. The activity the literacy teacher was leading the women in her class through involved inviting them to divide into small groups of three-four to answer a simple and important question: How had their work in the literacy center gone so far? What had they accomplished in the six weeks they had been working together? What had they failed to do?

In the presence of the white man whom they knew to have been sent by Fonkoze, all three small groups instead answered the following question: How would you express the gratitude you feel toward Fonkoze for all it is doing for you? No one had asked that question, but it was as though my presence required the women to address it.

So what happened in front of me was not necessarily what generally might have happened had I not been there. At the same time, I gained some useful information from the visit, enough to suggest ways that our preparations are working and ways that they’re not.

For one thing, the teacher did not have the women organize the benches they were seated at into a circle. They made something between a half-circle and a straight line, facing the blackboard, instead. Our insistence that classes should meet in circles if at all possible had not been clear and convincing enough. One the other hand, the teacher behaved very much like one of the participants of the group. Though she spent a good deal of time making sure that members of each of the small groups new just what they were supposed to be working on, she eventually joined one of the small groups, becoming one of its members. She had understood, in other words, the importance we place on a teacher’s viewing herselfas a member of the group.

What struck me most, however, was what happened after the various small groups presented the large group with the answers they had agreed on. What happened was this: Nothing. Or almost nothing. Normally, the work in small groups is intended to serve as preparation for a larger discussion by the group as a whole. In Twoudinò that larger discussion never got off the ground. The teacher didn’t have a sense of how to get it moving.

A few weeks after the visit to Twoudinò, I was in the middle of a field outside the southern town of Twen observing a very different group. The group was much larger because the literacy monitor had convinced all the members of the credit center, even the ones not participating in the basic literacy class, to participate in the class’s discussion. He was an experienced literacy teacher – a primary school teacher, in fact – one of the few men who have been retained from Fonkoze’s last literacy cycle, which took place before the decision to engage members of the credit centers to teach the classes.

He gave the group’s members good clear instructions, and he worked hard but quietly through the individual and small-group work to ensure that the market women understood each aspect of the class’s task. He eventually joined one of the small groups and participated in it actively, but without dominating.

When the small groups were finished, and they had reported the results of their reflections, and it was time to encourage a broader discussion among the group as a whole, nothing happened. Just as had been the case in Twoudinò, the literacy teacher lacked a sense of what he was to do.

I’m not in a panic about this, because I believe that much of what the discussions we’ve integrated into the literacy program are designed to accomplish can happen in the small groups. If the two classes I saw are good examples, these seem to be going well. But it seems clear that the step of the process we still need very much to struggle with is its heart: helping teacher’s learn to sit in a circle with their students and lead a conversation. We need to help them listen closely and to respond in lively and creative ways to what their students say.

In one sense, we’re asking nothing more than for them to reliably serve as good partners in dialogue. And one could easily imagine that that would be the most natural thing in the world.

Clearly it’s not, and we have a lot more work to do.

Fito must be in his mid-teens. He was sitting next to me at my desk at home, very nearly crying. I had my laptop in Ka Glo, and we were writing an e-mail to an American colleague of mine who had lived in Haiti for several years. That colleague was in contact with another American who had lived here, and this other American had, for a long time, paid the rent that Fito’s mother annually owes for the small room where she lives with her children in Bois Moquette.

This year, something in the communication had broken down. Either their American friend had decided not to pay the rent, or had forgotten about it, or had been stymied by the various difficulties one can encounter sending money here. Fito and his family didn’t know. In any case, the rent was two months late, and the landlord had begun moving the family’s things into the street. It was Thursday, and he had told them to make no mistake: “Saturday will not find you in the room,” he had said, “unless the rent is paid.”

Among the basic aspects of life as a foreigner living in Haiti are the webs of financial dependencies that grow up around one. We create little micro-economies, peopled with those whom we hire to do various kinds of work and those we simply support for one reason or another. I’ll offer several examples.

I don’t do my own laundry here. I certainly could learn to wash everything by hand as Haitians do, and I could decide to build the time to do it into my schedule. I’ve never really wanted to, however. It would take a lot of time, and I’d rather use that time to read and write and do the various kinds of work I do. Or just to relax at home.

That choice is available to me. My neighbor, Rosemarie, does my laundry instead. She earns a little less than four dollars every time she does a load. This is a significant amount of money for her. Her husband, Awol, is a day laborer who has little land of his own. He farms other people’s land, raises a cow, and appears with a shovel or a trowel or a machete or an ax when there’s heavy manual labor to be done. He might get a little over two dollars a day for his efforts. They have three children. The oldest lives in Pòtoprens, with Awol’s sister. The two little ones live at home. Because of the two small children, Rosemarie can’t do much to earn money herself. She has to stay at home. The money she gets from me two or three times a month is probably making a big difference.

But, perhaps more importantly, it has connected her to me in a way that has nurtured a certain hope. Her second daughter, Sofonie is old enough to start preschool, and there is a private preschool just down the hill from the local public elementary school in Mariaman. Rosemarie would like to send Sofonie to school this fall, but she can’t afford to – not even with the laundry money that she earns. So she has already asked whether I would simply pay for the school. This would include various expenses – like shoes, a uniform, and a little backpack as well. The connection we have because of the work she does for me creates an expectation that I’ll accept a certain degree of responsibility in her life. I become the person she decides to depend on. In Creole, I become the patwon.

A patwon is someone who has wealth or power or connections that enable him to do favors for others. They include employers, whom employees depend upon for extra considerations when unexpected expenses arise, and relatives or neighbors with either wealth or connections that enable them to confer favors. They get young people places in schools, they pay for needed medicines, they help in other moments of need. They generally have a social position much highly than the person who comes to depend of them.

Another example: This afternoon, I’ll be visited by a young man from down in Mariaman, close to the school. I like him and respect him. Though he can’t be much more than twenty years old, he’s been living by his own wits and work for awhile. His parents can’t support him. He’s been earning the money that he needs to get through school by raising a couple of goats and by carrying water and doing errands for a couple of my American friends who live just down the hill. As is very common, they went beyond a mere work-for-money relationship. They became patwon. When he needed serious dental work done, they undertook to pay for it.

But the current situation in Haiti, together with changes in their lives, made them decide to leave, and that decision left gaps in the lives of people who had grown to depend on them. The young man who told me he’d be coming to see me is one of those people. Not only does he have a relatively small portion of the dental bill left to pay – something his American friends couldn’t have known about – but he is now trying to figure out how to afford school next year without the little bit of income that working for them earned him. He will speak to me today about those two matters: the last dental expense and school in the coming year. He hopes, I think, that I will be willing and able to take over the role of patwon from the American friends who left.

It’s awkward to be treated as a patwon. I sometimes think of the comment Lloyd Bentsen once made as chair of the U.S. Senate Finance Committee: “A billion here, a billion there, and pretty soon you’re talking about real money.” The money that the people around me ask me for is not a lot. The portion of the dental bill I am being asking to help with is less than ten dollars, but that’s money the young man doesn’t have. Sending Sofonie to school might cost forty or fifty dollars – I don’t know – but Rosemarie has no way of earning such a sum. Fito and his mother needed about $175 for their annual rent, but their current family income is, approximately, zero.

At the same time, these sums add up. Though by any reasonable standard I am paid quite well to do the work I do, I have a lot of the same concerns about covering my various expenses that anyone might have. Some of these concerns are real, and some are probably imagined, but both sorts feel like concerns nonetheless. The truth is that my resources are limited and that they feel even more limited than they are.

But what’s worse is that the people who come to me are generally asking for help with things that they have fundamental rights to. Why am I deciding whether someone can get dental care or an education or a roof over his or her head? I feel both as though my right to refuse them is limited and as though what seem to them as gifts from me are not the answer at all.

It would be easy to be theoretical about this – in one sense of that word. On one hand, if my willingness to share a little of what I have makes those who ask me find it easier to accept my privileged social and economic position, then I am doing them a disservice. Their acceptance of the privileges that people like me have is surely part of the larger problem. On the other hand, if my giving nurtures dependence, then the disservice is even more clear.

Even so, in the immediacy of the moment and of the need that’s presented to me, such thoughts of what would really be best can seem pretty distant, pretty abstract. If a toothache keeps an acquaintance from sleeping, should I be asking myself whether paying for dental treatment will undermine his or her larger progress? When asked by someone whether I will help them with some money, I rarely feel as though I know what I should do.

I would be finished with these reflections, but I sense that something’s missing. I need to add at least three notes.

First, the picture is too one-sided. I’ve emphasized fiscal – I won’t even say “economic” – dependence over dependence of other kinds. It is important for me to be continuously aware of my very great dependence on many of those who ask me for monetary help. Cases like Rosemarie’s, who does my laundry, are only the most straightforward ones. The people who feel they need money that I can give them have a lot that they can and do teach me about how to live in Haiti. I depend on them for advice and more. A friend to whom I just gave roughly sixty dollars was effusively grateful, but I think he’s come to know perfectly well how difficult it would be for me to get by without his regular help. And I’m grateful for his awareness.

Second, it would be a mistake to think that only foreigners create such webs of dependencies as the one I’m part of. Steady income is a rare thing in Haiti, and anyone who has one is certain to find plenty of people that need her or his help. The fact that “patwon” is so common a word here testifies to that.

Third, a note about Fito: The people I contacted on his family’s behalf decided not to help out this year. As I prepared to give Fito the news, I tried to think whether the was something I was willing to do. I didn’t want to take on responsibility for a whole household, but I didn’t like the thought of their being cast out into the street. So I imagined a compromise, one that I thought would be both helpful to them and easy for me. I gave Fito a substantial portion of the coming year’s rent but told him that I would not give more. I thought that would be the end of it.

Of course it wasn’t. He is in no position to simply accept me word that I won’t give them more money. Within a couple of days he was back at my house with a long story explaining his need for an addition sum. It’s pretty clear that he’ll be coming regularly now.

In the spring of 1989, I led a classroom discussion that nearly erupted into a fist fight. The members of the class were students with what were described as “learning disabilities.” They were seventh, eighth, and ninth graders at Riverside Junior High School, in Northport, Alabama. I had been working for the University of Alabama for almost two years, and had come across the opportunity to work with these students once-a-week. We were experimenting with materials prepared by the Touchstones Discussion Project (www.touchstones.org), the group that provided much of the advice and support we needed as we were starting our work here.

The near-fight had a perhaps-surprising source. The students were reading a passage taken from Isaac Newton’s laws of motion. In the passage, Newton is explaining what it means to say that an action has an equal and opposite reaction when he says that if a horse is pulling a rock, the rock is pulling the horse just as much. Several of the students thought this was simply dumb: Rocks are not living things; they cannot pull. Others agreed with Newton.

I was surprised at the time at how important this seemingly-remote question was for the students. Not only did they nearly fight over it the first time it came up, but for weeks afterwards, anytime there was a lull in our dialogue – no matter what I might have thought we were talking about – the students would start arguing angrily about the rock and the horse all over again.

Groups sometimes come across issues that they find they cannot talk about. The example from Riverside Junior High School was extreme and, at the time, perplexing. But it’s nonetheless an example of something that comes up often enough. Something about a question touches a group’s members so closely that they are unable to listen to one another. They can’t speak with the openness to letting their opinions be affected that real conversation requires. They are defensive. They argue. Or they are unwilling to speak at all.

When Roseline shouted “anmwe!” at the mention of the word “eredite,” I was reminded of the Riverside group. In Haiti, yelling “anmwe” is a little like shouting for help. And she was yelling for some sort of help because the question of heredity – in Creole, “eredite” – had come up once again.

Roseline is a teacher at the Matenwa Community Learning Center, in Matenwa, Lagonav (http://matenwa.tripod.com). We were in the first week of a two-week seminar on psychology. Through the spring, I had been meeting with the teachers a couple of times each month, discussing a book by Swiss psychologist Jean Piaget. At the end of the semester, we met to evaluate the time we had spent together and to decide how we wanted to continue. The teachers had become interested in psychology and asked whether we could spend some time studying it together. We found a textbook that had been published by a Haitian press. It’s partly in French, partly in Creole. We figured that reading it all would take a little over two weeks of meetings. We scheduled a first week for early July and a second for early August.

These teachers have been working together for sometime, working together more closely than any other teaching staff I know of. Though the school has a principal, Abner Sauveur, he is the farthest thing from a tyrant. His opinions carry a lot of weight in staff decision making, but for that very reason he’s slow to express them, preferring to listen closely to his colleagues first. And even after he expresses them, they feel free to disagree and to express their disagreements strongly. And in the end, the group decides together.

It would be an exaggeration for any outsider to take credit for the way they talk with one another, but they themselves point to the difference that Wonn Refleksyon made. In the States, Touchstones Discussions have been most often and most importantly used in classes of school children. But the example of Matenwa has shown that, in Haiti, Wonn Refleksyon might be even more important among groups of teachers. When Erik was here as part of our team in 1999-2001, he invested a lot of time leading and participating in discussions for and with the Matenwa teachers, and they are quick to say that those exercises helped them learn to collaborate the way they do.

But when they come across the question of heredity, their ability to converse productively reaches its limit. They argue, several speaking loudly and angrily at the same time. They stop listening.

The issue is a hard one indeed. The question they see before them is whether intelligence is inherited, and there is a tremendous amount at stake. For example: they regularly have students whom they have trouble teaching. Some of the teachers have noticed, or believe they have noticed, that many of these children come from families in which other children have difficulties as well. Many of the children’s parents have no education. Many of the parents raise their children in ways the teachers disapprove of. It can be tempting for teachers to say that this or that student is troublesome or troubled because of the family he or she comes from. From there it can seem like a short step to conclude that the problem is hereditary. The apparent advantage to this conclusion is that it seems to let the teachers off the hook. They tried, they can say, but there was nothing they could have done. A student’s limits can simply be too great, and those limits are with him or her from birth.

Various members of the Matenwa faculty present arguments against almost every step in this reasoning, as they very well might. There are plenty of wholes in the argument. For one thing, families can share traits without those traits being hereditary in the biological sense of the word. The traits might thus be very much susceptible to influence. For another, suppose for the sake of argument that a child has severe limitations to his or her potential development that he or she inherits from parents at birth. Even then, we cannot conclude that we cannot work to help such a child succeed. We can’t know in advance exactly what a child’s limits are, so there’s no point to arguing about where the limits derive. We must in any case treat each child as though they can succeed, so we might as well assume that they can.

That has more or less been Abner’s argument: That the discussion of hereditary is pointless because we must behave as though we believe that a student’s development can be influenced nonetheless. But he has had a hard time expressing it. And even if he could express it well, it might not help. The issue of their students’ limits has pushed the teachers up against a limit of their own, though a limit of a different kind.

I hope the question keep arising. I know that, at some point, someone will say something that breaks through their colleagues’ inability to hear or to learn.

In the conversation in which we evaluated our discussions of Piaget, Abner said something both striking and encouraging. He said that our conversations were helping him appreciate how much more we can learn when we work together. I think that the opinion he was expressing was general. I myself certainly felt the same way. And a group whose members are devoted to the idea that they learn best, that they work best, together can only continue to move ahead.

Life goes on in the midst of the current difficulties in Haiti, for better and for worse. Last weekend, I got a heavy dose of the better and it seems worth sharing.

I spent most of the weekend at the Villa Ormiso. It’s a guesthouse run by conservative Protestant missionaries, here in Haiti to convert the masses. They would not normally be my cup of tea, but the guesthouse they run is valuable to us as a pleasant and accessible place where we can organize inexpensive meetings that last several days. Last weekend, more than forty of us gathered there for the fourth annual meeting of the Haitian Open Space Institute. I missed last year’s meeting, but had attended the others, so I was anxious to attend this year’s as well.

Open Space meetings are something special. They were designed around the notion that the most productive time that groups spend together is often the unscheduled time: the coffee breaks, the lunches, the unforeseen delays in otherwise tight agendas. Those are the times during which meeting participants talk with the people they want to talk with, and talk to them about the things that are important to them.

At an Open Space gathering, the participants create an agenda for the a meeting – ours was to be two-and-a-half days long – during its first few minutes. The agenda consists of a schedule of group discussions running parallel to one another on themes chosen by the participants who propose them. Each participant then chooses the small group discussions he or she wants to attend. The guiding principle is that you should not be part of anything you’re not interested in. The underlying assumption is that, given the freedom to do so, people will make good decisions about how to use their time.

For me, the most important thing about the structure of these meetings is that it allows me to find time to meet individually with various people I want to talk with. I find that I don’t often attend many of the scheduled conversations, but that I get a lot accomplished nonetheless, much more than I could accomplish if we were all following a carefully planned schedule.

I was especially grateful this year for the opportunity to meet with people on the edge of the meeting because I was actually able to attend rather little of it. Life goes on here in Haiti even as the political situation seems to spin into chaos, and that means work goes on as well. I had a busy schedule of meetings to attend in various places as the large Open Space meeting at the Villa Ormiso was going on.

We arrived at the Ormiso on Thursday afternoon. It’s located in Bizoton, a neighborhood on the road from Pòtoprens into Kafou, its overcrowded southern suburb. The opening ceremony was Thursday evening, and it was unforgettable. My partner Frémy used the meeting as the occasion to get married. He and Nadine exchanged rings in front of the group of friends and colleagues that he has come to think of as his family. The whole crowd of 45 of us sat around with them in a circle, and as we passed a small box with their wedding rings from hand to hand, we each had the opportunity to share with them whatever thoughts or wishes we might want to share. It was, perhaps, an unusual ceremony, but Frémy and Nadine are unusual people.

I had to leave the meeting just before breakfast on Friday morning. I needed to get back to downtown Pòtoprens by 8:30. As always I left much earlier than I should have had to. The trip could be more than a couple of miles, but I couldn’t tell how long it would take for me to get onto a pick-up truck heading downtown, I couldn’t be sure of the traffic, and I wasn’t certain how long I would need to make the long walk I’d chosen to make so that I could get to my meeting without passing through any of the parts of the city that are dangerous these days. I was supposed to be at Fonkoze (See: www.fonkoze.org.) by 8:30 so that Anne Hastings, the foundation’s director, and I could drive together to a meeting with colleagues at PLAN International. PLAN is funding the literacy work we are doing in the northeast, and we had some questions about the budget they had approved and about their reporting requirements.

I hadn’t initially been looking forward to the meeting. The work with Fonkoze was already pulling me more towards administration than I would normally want to be. I had needed, for example, to teach myself to use Excel both to translate the literacy program’s budget and to simplify it so that the field supervisors would be able to work with it easily. Though I don’t mind dealing with simple numbers, and understand well the importance of a willingness to do some math, such work is not what I normally choose to do. I’d much rather be in and around the classroom.

But the prospect of sitting around a table with NGO decision-makers intrigued me. It’s a class of people I’ve had little contact with – except for Anne herself – and I’m learning so much by watching her work that the chance to see her meet with her equals was too intriguing to miss.

The meeting was short, but pointed. We had a detailed agenda of specific questions that Fonkoze had for PLAN, and Anne stuck to it closely. I spoke when called on, but not really otherwise. The other assistant that Anne brought with her didn’t speak at all. It was the farthest thing from the kind of fluid and creative environment that Open Space nurtures, and that seemed just perfect. The meeting’s focus allowed us to achieve our very particular objectives in very little time.

When I got back to Ormiso early afternoon, I was just in time to meet as part of a group that has gotten together to discuss the guidebook that several of us had created for the first volume of Wonn Refleksyon texts. They were mainly primary school teachers, and they wanted to talk about what they could do to better adapt the guidebook for use with children. (See: GuideBooks.)

I enjoyed the session and I profited from it. I think that a couple of us gained a clearer sense of how we want to proceed to write a new guide. I also learned from the clear contrast between the style of this small meeting and the style of the one I had attended in the morning. In the talk about guidebooks, everyone spoke. We were all there because we had contributions to make, and since there was nothing that distinguished who among us had the power to make decisions, nothing that distinguished whose words would really count, we all had our say.

The contrast struck me at first as a trade off. We had given up something of the narrow, efficient focus on needed results that governed the Fonkoze/PLAN meeting and had traded it for a broad involvement that opened us up to the possibility that we might be pushed in any direction that persuaded us. But as I thought more about it, that analysis came to seem too shallow. The focus of the Fonkoze/PLAN meeting was not available to us because we were a group coming together without a designated leader to guide us. No one had the right or the power to stipulate a rigid agenda in advance. We could not trade off something that was not available to us in the first place. What was remarkable was the way that, even without that tight focus, we were able to talk ourselves towards a relatively clear plan of action. Our conversation took on a life of its own, in a very literal sense. It organized itself, which is to say that it became something organic.

Saturday morning, I left early together with Frémy and Abner Sauveur, the founder and principal of the Matenwa Community Learning Center. We had been invited to visit the Peasant Association in Fondwa, a small town between Léogane and Jacmel (See: http://haitiforever.com/fondwa/fondwa.htm.) The founder of the association, Father Joseph, asked us to come to talk to him about some concerns he has both with the association’s school and its university.

Father Joseph, who also founded Fonkoze, explained that both the school and the university had been created with a view towards preparing young people to live in the rural areas that they come from, but he also explained that, in just this respect, both institutions were falling short. The school is hampered in two ways. On one hand, the importance of the national exam system pushes teachers towards a traditional academic program that has little relationship with the lives the students actually lead. On the other, the teachers’ own experience in the classroom has offered them little in the way of alternative models to learn from and explore.
The issues at the university level are slightly different. Though the curriculum at that level does, he think, respond to the real needs of rural communities – it offers such majors as veterinary medicine and agronomy, areas of expertise that rural communities badly need to develop – there is something about the university’s culture that fails to integrate its faculty and students with the people that live around them.

As Father Joseph detailed the kind of training he wanted us to provide the faculties of both institutions, we could only sit and listen. He had a lot to say. He had already developed a very detailed notion as to how our work with them should go. He’s been a stunningly effective leader, at the heart of a movement that’s produced some of the most interesting, most compelling organizations I know of.

At the same time, we simply do not take the approach that he suggested we take. We call ourselves apprentices, and we mean it seriously. We cannot enter a relationship with even the outlines of a prefabricated solution in hand. We are delighted to sit together with colleagues that have a problem they want to address and to help them decided how they want to address it, but more we cannot do. We proposed to Father Joseph that we organize an Open Space meeting for both school and university leadership. The theme of the meeting could be the problem Father Joseph was trying to pose: namely, how can both institutions better succeed at preparing their students for life in rural communities?

Father Joseph seemed open to our idea, only adding that it was crucial that clear and concrete plans emerge from whatever we do. It was hard to tell, however, whether he was really open or simply unwilling to get too involved in the matter, preferring to leave it in other people’s hands. For now, the difference doesn’t matter to us very much. What we need is for his strong leadership to allow for space in which the people working under him can reflect, make plans, and act. We would be pleased if the space opened up because he was convinced of its importance. We can be satisfied initially if it opens up because he is too busy to keep it closed.
The ride to Fondwa and back took us through heavy Kafou traffic both on the way there and on our way back, so it was early evening by the time we returned. We had missed the day’s activities, and so were left to read about them in the notes that were taken.

We spent the evening, however, hearing about various conversations that had been held that day and watching a theatrical piece presented by a group of women who were attended the meeting from Lagonav. The group, //Fanm Kouraj//, or “Courageous Women,” creates and performs pieces presenting problems that rural Haitian women face. The women then lead their audience in discussions of the pieces. (See: http://www.womens-rights.org/pdf/PopularTheater.pdf.) They had performed a similar piece Friday night as well.

Sunday morning there were more small group discussions, and then we met at 11:00 for final reflections and goodbyes. There were several visitors from the States who had planned to attend the meeting but couldn’t because of the unstable situation here, but our Haitian colleagues accepted no such inconvenience. Though those from the countryside fear entering Pòtoprens, and though those from Pòtoprens might be reluctant to circulate, the meeting at Ormiso was their best chance to get together and further their own work. And the work of conversation and of the practices that nurture it could hardly be more important here in Haiti than they are right now.

I suppose I should always have suspected that life goes on even under what might appear to be dire circumstances. Some of my very dearest friends are Colombians, who have been raising their beautiful children and living their interesting and varied lives all these last years while a violent and complicated civil war is being fought around them.

Then, a few months ago, I myself had the experience of crossing what was then something like the front line in a war of attrition between the forces of the UN in Haiti and those of what was then being called the “former military”, irregular thugs who had put themselves in charge in a couple of parts of the country. They claimed to be former members of the Haitian military that President Aristide disbanded when he returned from exile in 1994. At the time, I was on the way to Hinch with Saül, my godson’s dad, and Saül’s younger brother Job. As we crossed that line, it was striking how little it affected us. The war – if it was a war – was being fought on a level that didn’t touch us; our little visit to the countryside went on as if there was nothing strange about our crossing a market town occupied by a half-organized band of heavily armed men. (See: ToEnch)
Lately as things seem to be spinning out of control in the Port au Prince area it is both striking and instructive to watch, to experience, how life simply continues in all of the good and bad ways in which it goes on all the time.

I have carefully avoided changing names and hiding identities in what I’ve written so far about Haiti. Partly it’s been out of a sense that I have not been writing about people who are guilty or innocent; I have not been writing about people whose true identity needs protecting. Partly too it’s been that I haven’t wanted to turn anyone’s life into something like fiction. What I’ll write right now is different, and I will hide the identities of all those involved. The reasons will be obvious enough.

Several months ago, on a Sunday afternoon, a front yard not too far from where I live erupted in the sound of angry people arguing. It was the unveiling of a great scandal. A man had entered the yard with his three oldest daughters – his wife is deceased – to announce that the third of the daughters, a lovely seventeen-year-old girl, was pregnant by his neighbor’s fifteen-year-old son. He had brought her to his neighbor’s yard with her married older sisters to put the case before the unsuspecting parents. He was demanding an immediate marriage.
The girl insisted that she had been together with a boy only once, and, so, that the question of paternity was clear. There was no suggestion of rape. The boy, for his part, corroborated his part of her story. They had been together. He would not deny it. He too said it had been just once. Though he and his parents strongly suspected that the girl had been with other boys as well, they did not feel that they could simply shut the girl’s claims out of their lives. They are very decent people.

At the same time, they would not consider marriage. The boy is a child. He’s a long way from finishing school, a long way from finishing growing up or even growing. Apart from all the practical issues marriage would Fce him with that he is in no position to address, there is the damage marriage would do to his prospects for the future. And marriage for someone his age isn’t even legal in Haiti.

So there was a scandal and, for awhile, an impasse. The boy’s parents agreed immediately that they would financially support the girl through the pregnancy and then support both the girl and her child for the first weeks or months of its life. They would then pay for a paternity test – an enormous expense for a Haitian family, costing more than twice the average Haitian annual income.

They were able to finance the test by borrowing money from a family friend, but they are far from believing that the test will resolve the problem. If the result is positive, the girl’s family is likely to return to its original demand, marriage. If it’s negative, they are likely to believe the test was a fraud that their relatively-to-them wealthy neighbors were able to buy. The boy’s parents nevertheless decided to have the test done for their own peace of mind. They feel they need to know.

A lovely little boy was born in May and the families now await the results of the test. DNA tests aren’t performed in Haiti. The samples are sent to the States. So they take some time. If the baby is indeed their boy’s child, they will take him in. If he is not, they will not. I don’t know the girl’s family, so I can’t report what they are thinking about.

I am close to another such case right now, though the second isn’t as far advanced as the first. It is, however, in some way much sadder. It involves two restavek children, a boy and a girl, both in their late teens. A restavek is a child who lives outside her or his parents’ home. The word comes from the French for “stay with,” and restavek children stay in homes as domestic servants. Generally they are from families that cannot afford to raise them. Jean Robert Cadet’s book Restavek is a moving account of a way of growing up that is probably hard for most Americans to even imagine. The children’s parents give them up hoping they will find better circumstances than they themselves can provide, but often enough they receive the worst treatment imaginable.

This is not quite the case for these two children. They are treated decently in the houses where they live. The boy lives with his aunt, her daughter, and his grandmother in a one-room shack in a small slum in Delmas, one of Port au Prince’s large suburbs. The girl was living with a woman, no relation to her, whom she calls her aunt and the woman’s two young girls when the woman lost her housing. She asked the boy’s aunt whether the girl and her two daughters could stay temporarily in the boy’s aunt’s house. So, for awhile, the house’s one small room was home to the boy and six girls and women, ages six to seventy.

Somehow, in those crowded conditions, the girl and the boy found a way to share an intimate moment. I have heard not the slightest suggestion that he forced her. But now she is very much pregnant, and it’s hard to imagine what she, the woman responsible for her, the boy, and his aunt will do. Their circumstances were already very difficult.

So, one of the ordinary parts of life that just goes on during a political crisis is, unfortunately, unprotected sex among minors who are unprepared for its possible consequences.

The current “crisis” – whatever we really mean by that word – may make things harder for them in various ways. Prices continue to rise. Jobs become scarcer. The visitors, both foreign and expatriate-Haitian, who would normally be bringing dollars and demands for services into the country, especially during the summer, are staying away.

But the real problem is not this particular difficult moment in Haiti’s history. It’s the fact that children grow up here, as they do in many places, unprepared to deal with the temptation that sexual maturity presents them with and unprepared to deal with the consequences of their poor preparation. It is the world’s oldest form of recreation, but surely the world’s oldest problem as well.

As far as I can remember, Saturday was the first time I’ve had to take off my pants in order to get to a class. I must have made quite a spectacle: a lone blan, crossing the river in his underwear, with his pants in one hand and his sandals in the other.

Since the demise of my chakos, I depend on sandals that are less resilient than my feet, so I took the sandals off in order to ford the river barefoot. I took off my pants because the water was high enough in places to muddy them, shorts though they were, and I didn’t want to sit through the class in shorts caked with the mud that the water was carrying with it.

Frémy and I normally drive to our Saturday morning workshops in Fayette in his small four-wheel-drive, but there’s been quite a bit of rain, so the river between Nan Mapou and Fayette was too high for the car. We thought about missing the class and sending our apologies. The group would understand. Rain is a common and acceptable excuse for all sorts of absences in Haiti. But Frémy had missed the previous week because of work elsewhere, leaving me to meet with the group alone, and it seemed important to keep up the group’s momentum. So we took off our clothes, and waded across.

The real difficulty I encountered as I crossed was not the feeling that I was making a spectacle of myself. Not only were all the Haitians, in whichever direction they were crossing, in the very same boat as I was, but I simply could not live here in Haiti as I do if I was too sensitive about the attention I draw to myself. I’m used to it. The real difficulty was that the water was so muddy that I could not see where I was putting my feet. I was stepping from underwater rock to underwater rock, and my unaccustomed feet were having a hard time of it. They are too soft, and many of the rocks simply hurt. Feeling my way little-by-little was slow and painful work.

The group in Fayette is the part of our collaboration that Frémy and I are sharing most closely these days, and so we value it for that. In addition, the work is interesting in itself. We were invited to collaborate with the group of adult literacy teachers and community organizers in February, and we began soon after that. This is the second year that the teachers are holding literacy classes in centers supported directly by Shimer College. Our collaboration with them is the most extensive Wonn Refleksyon training that we’ve ever undertaken. We have a longterm commitment to weekly two-hour meetings with bi-monthly day-long workshops as well. The size of the time commitment is especially welcome because we’ve had the sense that the shorter, more limited workshops we’ve generally undertaken have been shallower than we would like.

But there’s yet another reason we’re so interested in the collaboration: The group in Fayette is the one currently experimenting most seriously with the book that we created for non-readers. That book is called Annou Reflechi Ansanm. In English that means “Let’s Ponder Together.” The book uses pictures and Haitian proverbs as topics of conversation, rather than the texts that our other books have been based on. Each of the literacy teachers is committed to leading weekly meetings with his or her group, and so their work and the time we spend with them combine to offer us the chance to learn a lot about how the book functions in a classroom and about how to help teachers use it most effectively. Our core strategy has thus far been to lead the group through the creation of weekly lesson plans, to create a kind of teachers’ edition, or guidebook, in collaboration with them. A weekly lesson plan can give them a clear sense of how to lead their classes, and the process of creating it each week pushes them to think in specific, concrete terms about the challenges that their groups are facing, the particular objectives that those challenges imply, and the strategies they might employ towards attaining those objectives.

Our team in Haiti began working towards creating guidebooks in 2000. Erik Badger pushed us in that direction, the same direction that the Touchstones Project, our parent in the States, had begun taking more than ten years earlier (www.touchstones.org). Erik was working closely with inexperienced discussion leaders – some of them very inexperienced – who were leading lieracy classes on the island of Lagonav. He felt that the leaders’ understanding of Wonn Refleksyon was marginal at best and that they often seemed lost in fundamental ways as they tried to lead their groups. He suggested that we created a guidebook that would do two separate things. On one hand, it would break down the complicated array of goals that discussion leaders can have for their groups into distinct pieces so that over the course of eighteen to twenty weeks the leaders would have the chance to read about and better understand the various goals. At the same time, each lesson plan would set out a simple procedure that a leader could choose to follow closely. These procedures would give even very inexperienced discussion leaders a way to enter a classroom with a certain degree of confidence in their sense of what they were going to do.

Erik and I wrote an initial draft of the guidebook for our first volume of discussion texts with help from various colleagues over the course of a couple of months. As our network became more and more familiar with it – with its strengths and its weaknesses – we invested time in revising and rewriting it. A large group of us met over the course of several days a few years back to thoroughly rewrite it. Finally, this year Frémy oversaw the publication of a polished version of the revised work. Its roots are still traceable to the work Erik and I originally did, but it has passed through many other hands as well and is much the better for it.

The experience in Fayette is quite different and more interesting than that original one was because, though Frémy and I lead the weekly meetings where the lesson plans are created, the plans are being created nonetheless by the same emerging discussion leaders who’ll take them into the classroom as well. We’re three lesson plans into the process, and I’m impressed both with the plans themselves and the conversations about challenges and objectives that the plans are built upon.

The question of objectives is important. That should be obvious enough, but I’ve also begun to see how critical setting the right objective can be as I’ve observed a friend who tried to use the original guidebook this year with his own group. His name is Benaja Antoine, and he’s the fourth-grade teacher at the Matenwa Community Learning Center, the community school on Lagonav that has become one of my homes here in Haiti. He has been leading weekly discussions with his students over the course of the school year, and has discovered that the guidebook that should have been helping him is more-or-less useless.

And it’s no wonder. All through its early development, the people mainly, most seriously involved were using it to lead groups for adults. And even though we have considerable experience that shows that the same discussion texts can work well with both adults and kids, there’s little reason to suspect that they would work in the very same ways.

The objectives that the current guidebook sets out are a poor fit for Benaja’s students in two respects. On one hand, the guidebook very heavily emphasizes handing leadership of the group over to participants rather quickly. This makes a lot of sense for adults. It is reasonable to hope that they can, relatively quickly, get a sense of the activity and choose to take control of it. With children, things are more complicated. Though it is important for them to feel ownership of the activity, and though they need to be drawn into a share of the responsibility, they also need space to just be kids. Pushing them too hard too fast to lead themselves in conversations that are serious and sustained makes no sense.

On the other hand, the guidebook fails to sufficiently emphasize improving their reading or their ability to consider critically what they read. The kids in Benaja’s fourth-grade class are generally much better readers than are the participants in literacy centers that the guidebook was written for, and so the guidebook doesn’t help a teacher push them as readers nearly as far as it could.

So Benaja and I have decided to work on another guidebook, one especially for use with kids. I’m not yet sure what shape that will take. I don’t know what a new guidebook will look like nor exactly what the process or the timeline for creating it will be. But I have been very impressed with the way creating a guidebook in Fayette is working out, so I look forward to a similar experience in Matenwa.

There are projects that are best, or even necessarily, undertaken step-by-improvised-step. An example is fording a stony river bed barefoot. Each step is a new experiment. There’s not much thinking you can do two or three steps ahead. Leading discussions can be like that too, but it doesn’t need to be. Guidebooks can give discussion leaders a way to look forward to the route their groups might take. More importantly, the process of creating a guidebook can force us all to think through what we are trying to achieve and how we are going about our work. The understandings that emerge are not just deep, but detailed.