Once in a while, someone expresses a thought so perfectly that the phrase just jumps out at you.

I was meeting with a small group of university students. They are studying a range of subjects – administration, medicine, accounting – at a range of schools, public and private, in Port-au-Prince. What they have in common is that they are all from Hinche or thereabouts. Hinche is an important city in Haiti’s central plateau, a rough five-hour ride from the Port-au-Prince outskirts. Our meeting had been arranged by a med-school student who is a friend of mine and is also part of the group.

He suggested that we start by introducing ourselves to one another, so we went around the circle we were seated in, saying a few words about ourselves. After that, the one of them who seemed oldest started to speak. He had been chosen as their spokesperson. He talked about the group and about why they had wanted to meet with me. He said that they were all committed to development in Hinche. He talked about various problems he and his friends see Hinche as facing and about how much the group feels that Haiti’s central government ignores the region. He showed me the group’s statute, written in what looked to me to be good formal French, and explained that they had applied for official government recognition that they had not yet received. The recognition is in the works.

The group had, he said, lots of dreams, but they found themselves hindered in their hoped-for progress, and that was where they thought I might be able to help them. Their group, he explained, lacked clear direction. They needed someone to show them the way, someone older, he said, someone with “plis bagaj intelektyèl,” or “more intellectual baggage.”

I managed not to laugh.

As I thought about what he actually meant, I also thought to myself that my years at Shimer and St. John’s College, at the T.U. Braunschweig and Loyola University of Chicago had certainly provided me with all the intellectual baggage that someone could want. I had been granted the opportunity study, both a student and as teacher, a nice range of classical European works. Almost all of this is precisely intellectual baggage – at least in the sense that we might give the phrase. I once was, for example, something like an expert with respect to a certain book by Anselm, Archbishop of Cantebury, but little needs to be said about the value of that knowledge for the group from Hinche.

It is hard to explain what I am doing in Haiti. I can talk in detail about the different projects I’m involved in, whether they are classes I’m teaching, study groups I join in, or something else entirely. I can explain why Johny St. Louis and I decided to read Racine with his high school students, or why the teachers at the Matenwa Community Learning Center and I are studying Piaget, or what’s behind the literacy work that Frémy César and I are joining in with Fonkoze and GTAPF. But each of those activities is unique, with its own goals and difficulties. There’s no clear overall picture. It’s hard to say what, precisely, I bring here. I have no expertise in Racine or Piaget, or in literacy or adult education for that matter. What I have is a lot of intellectual baggage. My meeting with the students from Hinche brought to mind in a striking way just what such baggage might be for.

Haiti is a place where formally acknowledged expertise counts for a lot. It is probably not alone in this, but the example I come across most regularly here is the constant desire among some of the people I work with for a certification process for Wonn Refleksyon discussion leaders. The desire can come up in the very first meeting of a new group: Someone will ask whether they will be awarded a certificate. Or it can emerge after a group has been meeting for awhile. Several members of the group that Johny and I are reading Rousseau’s Emile with asked the two of us to arrange for them to receive a certificate of participation. They want certificates so that they have a way to show people what they’ve done and can do.

The members of the group from Hinche are especially likely to feel the importance of such expertise because they all are working so hard to acquire it. That is, after all, a big part of what their university education is about.

So if their growing expertise is not giving their hopes for Hinche any direction, it’s not hard to imagine why they would look to someone whom they seen as being farther along than they are at more or less the same game. All this is to say nothing of the range of reasons they might have for assuming that a blan, or a white foreigner, is the one who is likely to have their answers, let alone one ten or more years older than they are and with the gray hairs to prove it.

It’s just as easy to imagine at least one explanation for the fact that they don’t know what to do for Hinche: They aren’t there. Some of them have been living in Port-au-Prince since they were children. Instead of being immersed in the realities of the Central Plateau, they are living and working in Port-au-Prince, a city with its own very particular set of realities. They may all have family members and friends who daily face all the challenges that life in Hinche throws at them, but they themselves must focus on very different things.

There are simple questions about the nature of expertise, or know-how, very near the surface when one confronts a situation like this one. Apart from the prejudice that pretends that know-how is the province of those who have completed formal training and who have the documentation to prove it, the notion that know-how is something absolute, that it’s something that can be detached from the particular conditions in which it is supposed to act is at least questionable. What is the basis, after all, for an assumption that plans and programs developed in Washington, Paris, or Port-au-Prince will work when they have to enter a plce like Hinche?

At the same time, there is a logic that argues against continually reinventing the wheel. It’s hard to see why the lessons of experience drawn from one context should be without any application to another. If the students from Hinche were learning nothing in Port-au-Prince that they can apply towards improving life in their home city, then it would be hard to imagine why we should have anything like higher education at all.

So there must be a middle ground, a place where young people who are pursuing advanced studies in a major city can bring what they are learning to bear on a set of problems most clearly understood by the population that is living with those problems everyday. The challenge is to find that middle ground.

But that ground will remain hidden from those students as long as, rather than seeking it, they look instead for a formal expertise even more rarified than the one they are struggling to acquire. If what they look for is a more expert expert, taking that word in its traditional sense, then the people who could truly give them direction will appear as though they have nothing to tell them.

What will happen, however, if the expert they turn to tells them that he has no idea what they should do? And what if he explains that he cannot have any idea what to do for Hinche because he’s not part of daily life there?

I am right now scheduled to continue to meet with the group. What I hope to do is help them see that I am not the place they should be turning to. I hope to help them see that intellectual baggage is the last thing they should be looking for. I will try to convince them that their friends and families in Hinche must know much better than they or I could what the Central Plateau really needs. I’ll encourage them to try to organize a meeting back home at which they can figure out how to turn to the people living and working there for direction. They might find that there is a lot that they can, as emerging experts, do for their home region once they learn to listen to the people they would be doing it for.

This is a role that my intellectual baggage – and the other baggage I carry around with me – can usefully play, I think, and it is one part of the supportive role I can play in Haiti. If I can put to use the importance that I’m sometimes given by virtue of the fact that I am a middle-aged white foreigner with a doctorate, if I can make it help people turn to themselves and to the people around them for the guidance they need, then that importance can become a tool, and a useful one.

I got to the American Consulate shortly before 9:00 AM. At 2:00 Lukha and I were still trying to secure the visa that we needed for him to visit Shimer with me in April. These were not hours of intense activity. We were waiting, just waiting. I was on the floor, because I didn’t want to stand up any longer and the benches were packed. Haiti’s not a place where one wants to whine, and I was sitting in air-conditioned comfort, but I wanted to be able to get home soon. I had a long trip planned for the following day, and I had a lot of reading to do.

For a combination of reasons, Lukha and I were in the part of the consulate where the interviews for visas were actually going on, so we could see who was getting approved and who rejected. Those who were approved would step over to a cashier and pay $5.00. That’s not much, but the interview itself costs $100.00. Very few get approved, and it was a striking scene.

I was trying to imagine what a parallel scene might be like in the United States: several hundred Americans who had paid a lot for the privilege of being packed into a small, bare space for hours, waiting to stand in a semi-enclosed cubicle and be interviewed briefly by someone who would only speak to them through thick glass and who would 19 times out of twenty swiftly deny them the request they came to make. It struck me that, in the States, such a scene would be spectacular. There would be yelling and cursing of all sorts. People would be demanding to see the next person up in the hierarchy. They would be arguing loudly and insistently. They would, as we say, “not take ‘no’ for an answer.” I was thinking of times when I had seen people at airports complaining bitterly, loudly, and sometimes foully about even minor inconveniences.

The scene at the Consulate was nothing like that. As each person’s request was denied, the request they spent a lot of money and a lot of time making, they quietly left and the next person stepped up, very likely to face the same fate. They left silently, quietly putting the documents they had brought in support of their request back in order, replacing them in the envelope or the folder or the briefcase they had brought them in. There were no loud complaints and there were no arguments. The one exception really just proved the rule: A German doctor was there with a patient for whom she had secured a six-month medical visa to visit Germany for treatment. Her patient needed an American transit visa for a two-hour layover at JFK, and it had been denied. She was furious, and was loudly and theatrically explaining to anyone who would listen how idiotic she thought the whole thing was. She phoned someone higher up — she was the only one in the waiting area talking on a phone; there were signs clearly forbidding it that she chose to ignore — and within five hours the decision had been reversed for her.

But she was not a Haitian. The Haitians who were there, without exception, quietly resigned themselves.

And that is what I found so striking. I was impressed by their dignity, and I mentioned that to Lukha. I told him that one generalization that I remembered Europeans I knew sometimes made about Americans was that we seemed a little childish to them in the sense that we seem to them to always expect that our dreams can come true. I asked Lukha whether he thought that something like that might be hidden behind the very different ways that Americans might react if they were set into the scene in front of us, and he had to agree.

But he also made an important point. If Haitians were showing their maturity by resigning themselves to the consuls’ decisions with dignity, then that maturity was not entirely a good thing. He pointed out that sometimes one should, perhaps, be ready to stand up and shout.

Lukha eventually got the visa, and I went my way, grumbling. I got a ride up to Petyonvil, and another to Malik, and then started the short walk from Malik to Ka Glo. I was struck by the number of people on the road, old and young, with gallon jugs in hand or five-gallon buckets on their heads, walking down the mountain from Ka Glo. I saw one medium-sized young man with two five-gallon buckets on his head, one stacked on top of the other. For several days, two of the major water sources in our area had stopped functioning. Problems in the pipes leading to them from the main source up the hill had caused them to be shut off, so people were walking to Ka Glo from as far as Dendenn, on the other side of Malik, to get water to drink and bath and cook and clean. They might have to walk almost an hour each way, and the triply heavy traffic at the source might mean more than an hour’s wait for their turn.

So Lukha and I had lost a day waiting to get a visa to visit the States, and folks on the mountain were losing their days getting the water they need to live. That helped put things in perspective.

The next day I went to Lagonav, and I returned two days later. There has been no rain on Lagonav in five months. Most rainwater cisterns are dry, and functioning water sources are few. I am told that it’s not unusual for someone to have to walk two hours each way for water, and, with the wait at the sources, that getting water is truly a day-long event. While on Lagonav I heard that there are areas so dry that, in order to get their donkeys to make the whole trip back from the water source, people light fires underneath them when they want to lie down.

I shared that story with Madanm Anténor, and she shuddered. I told her about how irritated I was by the wait for the visa, but how things looked different to me when I as forced to remember that I have neighbors with much more important concerns. When she heard about the donkeys, she proceeded to count her blessings, almost literally. She started to rattle-off all the things she could think off to be thankful for.

It made me think. Gratitude for the good things that are ours surely has its place, but what happens when that admirable gratitude interferes with anger or resentment that might move us to act? How many of the water issues, for example, could be managed effectively by a community that decided it could no longer accept the problems it faces every day? What would happen if the consuls knew that every visa denied would mean prolonged arguments and explanations?

One aspect of my work that has been particularly striking to me since I came in January is something that I don’t do.
I have spent very little time involved in Wonn Refleksyon, the project that brought me to Haiti in 1997. Wonn Refleksyon is an adaptation, for Haiti, of the Touchstones Discussion Project. It’s a method of working with a group, using a certain kind of text and a combination of individual, small group, and large group work that aims at helping people to take over responsibility for their own education, to collaborate more effectively, and to develop a healthy relation to authority – both the authority of a group leader and the authority of a text.

In all the years since I first came here, Wonn Refleksyon had remained the main focus of my work, so much so that my colleagues here have really come to identify me with it. When I’m explaining one or another of the activities I’m involved in right now, they generally want to know how it relates to Wonn Refleksyon. How is it the same? How is it different? They even tend to think of the teaching I do at Shimer College as a spin-off or an adaptation of the techniques that they know as part Wonn Refleksyon.

And Wonn Refleksyon is alive and well in Haiti. There are groups using the activity in primary schools, adult literacy centers, and other places where adults or children meet. A few of those groups are led by people who were introduced to the activity by me and my first colleagues, but many of them are not. There are second and third and fourth generation discussion leaders who are flourishing.

So I’ve been going about my work, quietly smiling about how little use Wonn Refleksyon really has for me these days. But I suddenly had the chance to watch a couple of colleagues introduce a group of teachers to Wonn Refleksyon for the first time, and I jumped at it.

I had been planning a trip to Lagonav since I first arrived here. I needed to go to Matenwa, because the teachers at the school there and I wanted to read a book together – a short one by the French psychologist Jean Piaget – and planning really needed to happen face-to-face. In addition, I have many friends there, collected over years of visits. Finally, my newest godchild had been born in Matenwa in August, and I had yet to meet him.

In any case, I wanted to go.

But getting to Matenwa is a nuissance. Just to get to Karyès, where you catch the boat that takes you from the mainland to the island, is complicated these days. The combination of busses and pick-up trucks you need to take can vary depending on which neighborhoods the drivers believe are safer on a given day. After those rides, there’s a sometimes-rough ride on a boat and an always-rough pick-up truck that winds from the port city of Ansagale up the mountain to Matenwa. So when Johna offered me a lift to Karyès in a comfortable SUV, I was very grateful. I stayed at her office in Delma Friday night, because she wanted to leave by 5:00 AM Saturday morning.
Johna is a missionary in Haiti, and she supports, among other things, a small school in a desolate area outside of Ansagale. She had heard about Wonn Refleksyon and decided to offer the teachers at her school training in it. So she hired an experienced team from the school in Matenwa, and started a six-month training at the beginning of February. She was going to attend the training session on Saturday – she goes every week – so my ride turned into a way for me to attend as well.

The training was led by Abner Sauveur, the founding director and a teacher at the Matenwa school, with assistance from another teacher, Benaja Antoine. It was the group’s fourth meeting, and Abner led it following the guidebook that a group of us that included Abner had written for the first volume of discussion texts that we use.

The guidebook suggests that the fourth meeting be devoted to helping participants start to think about the kinds of questions that they ask. They are asked to work in groups to articulate short questions about the passages in the text that strike them most. After sharing all their questions with the whole class, the class then spends twenty minutes or so discussing whatever points about the text or about the reflections the text evokes move them.

Abner directed them through the series of the day’s activities with short and clear instructions. Generally, he let them work on their own, prefering not to say very much, but he made a point of circulating through the class when small group work was going on to make ceratin that everyone knew what they needed to do, and he intervened in the larger discussion to give it focus, explore ideas the participants introduced, and make space for quiet people to get into the flow.

After the meeting, he invited me to join a question-and-answer session that went almost an hour past the time they had been scheduled to end. It was hot and dusty, and we were outdoors, so the fact that people wanted to stay and talk says a lot, especially since Abner made a point of inviting all those who needed to to leave.
The main topic of this concluding conversation was leadership. The main question was whether anything – Wonn Refleksyon, a classroom, a school, or anything else – can function without someone who’s the boss. Surely the question was moved in part by Abner’s very understated leadership of the group. He is a quiet man anyway, but he also chooses in his Wonn Refleksyon groups to let others speak more and speak first. It was also surely moved by the situation at the school: Johna had just fired its principal, and showed no signs that she planned to replace him with someone else.

Abner, Benaja, and I each argued in different ways that bosses are not necessary – at least not always. The conversation grew interesting as the group talked their Wonn Refleksyon group itself. Though Abner was by no means bossy, he had chosen the text the group would read and every step of the procedure they would follow. He had led the group.There could be no denying that.

The discussion ended without a real conclusion – it didn’t really need one – and we all went about our ways. I followed Anber and Benaja as they did errands in Ansagale, then the three of us went up the mountain together.
As I reflected through the afternoon and through the night that followed one thing struck me strongly: Abner had been so committed to limiting his own talking, to making his instructions as unobtrusive as he possibly could, that he had given them without any explanation. In a sense, that was okay. It worked. The instructions and the steps that they asked participants to follow were simple enough that they could be accomplished without much explanation.

At the same time, the group left the meeting not knowing why it was important to work on asking questions, nor why good questions could emerge from the process he asked them to use. What’s more, without explanation, the instructions really were just commands. As gentle and unassuming as his manner was, Abner had set himself apart from the group, reinforcing whatever sense they had that he is, in the end, a boss. A nice boss, but a boss nonetheless.

Abner and I discussed this issue the next morning, as we drew rainwater for bathing from the cistern at his home. I think he understood my concern.

Watching a long-time colleague work can be a little like looking at a mirror. In most of the Wonn Refleksyon groups that Abner has seen me lead over the years, I’ve said little more than he said in his. Much of the difference between how much we each talk reflects my relative incompetence in Kreyol. It takes me longer than Abner to say almost anything. I’ve tried to minimize my speaking to make space so others can talk.

I think that there’s a lot to be said for teaching that doesn’t involve talking very much, but I’ve grown to think that a teacher can say too little, too. If I am to lead a class, I must sometimes tell its members what to do. But I should take the time to explain my reasons as well. Participants in groups I lead cannot begin to share authority or responsibility – or they cannot share either well – if they do not understand the reasonings that it follows. As quiet and encouraging and inviting as I might be, I do not begin to bring those I work with into leadership unless I tell them what I, their leader, think.

The other day, I was at a community group’s meeting in a village outside of Dabòn. The meeting was led by the friend of mine who brought me there because the local man who was supposed to lead it was called to the biggest city in the area, Leyogann, on community business. The main topic of the meeting was a relatively large project the group was managing. They were building outhouses for over twenty of the group’s members. People in the area generally use the bushes or a quiet spot along the road or the river to do what they need to do, but thanks to the group’s work and to resources made available to the small network of community groups they are part of, they are building good outhouses. It’s a big deal.

The particular issue under discussion was the following: The outhouses are really pretty nice. So nice, in fact, that folks don’t use them. At least some don’t. So a lot of time was spent going over the very real health issues connected with not having or not using latrines.

I had to laugh. Not at the Haitians who were sharing their thoughts in front of me. Nor at the visitors or potential visitors from the States I had spoken to since I began coming to Haiti who expressed concerns about needing to use an outhouse while here.

But there’s a Haitian proverb that goes “woch nan dlo pa konnen doule woch nan soley.” It means that a rock in water doesn’t know the pain felt by a rock in the sun. We can have a hard time imagining the concerns of someone in a situation very different from our own. The very different views of an outhouse seemed a funny example.

A more disturbing example occurred this past weekend. A complex set of circumstances brought me to Pòdepe, an important coastal city in the far north of Haiti. My father and I were there with his temple’s Haitian-American caretaker, delivering goods that were collected for two villages that were struck by the hurricane that did so much harm to Haiti last fall. For lots of reasons, I would normally avoid such a project, but it was my father’s temple and his trip. It would mean a rare chance to spend a few days with my dad and to visit a little bit of a part of Haiti that I had never seen.

I missed the actual distribution of the goods — hundreds of pounds of flour, some medical supplies, clothes, and shoes. Half were locked into a health clinic in the affected town. The clinic’s doctors agreed to get it into needy hands. The other half were to goto the other town the next day. My father reported that by the time he and the temple caretaker left the first town’s clinic in the emptied truck, several hundred people were waiting in line, struggling with one another for a little flour.

I was reminded of a scene my grandmother described to me years ago. She used to volunteer at her local Hadassah store. Hadassah is a Jewish charity that runs thrift stores. Her help was especially welcome because she spoke Yiddish and, so, could communicate well with recent Jewish immigrants — something hard for the store’s paid staff.

She described for me the scene of two women fighting over a coat. I was a young boy at the time, but I had already developed upper-middle-class sensibilities. I must have expressed contempt for people who would fight over such a thing.

She chewed me out, pointing out that I had no right to speak, that the two women really needed the coat. I was a rock in the cool, clear water, and had very little reason for thinking I could understand, and therefore judge, rocks that were battered by the sun.

The proverb expresses pretty well one side of the reservation I feel about this kind of work. The people I was with had a weekend to enter Haiti and distribute handouts to those who really need them. But evaluating someone’s needs is very tricky business. It’s hard in a community that one is part of, harder in one that one knows as a stranger but knows pretty well, hardest of all when one has no fixed relation to the people involved. It’s one thing to go somewhere as a visitor, hoping to build a long-term friendship that will be helpful and pleasant to everyone involved. To seek to make a dramatic, positive difference in the lives of people who live in a community one doesn’t know, however, seems a long shot to me. So, while I am impressed by the generosity of those who undertake such work, and I believe that the gifts they sent will make someone’s lives better for awhile, I myself would rather leave aid work in other people’s hands.

My luxury, the water that keeps me cool in Haiti, is the time I have and have had to develop friendships and partnerships from which I continue to learn.

Giving is complicated, especially across cultures. Questions as to who is giving what to whom seem to me eminently worthy of reflection. I invite anyone with questions or comments about the issue to append them to this piece.

It’s huge. Much larger than I thought it would be. And that’s saying something, because by the time I arrived last summer it was already clear that it would be much bigger than what I had planned.

Almost a year and a half ago, I decided I was ready to build a house in Ka Glo. I have been living there on and off since 1997. After spending a first summer in a small room in an abandoned house, I had been in Madanm Anténor’s dining room since 1998. The room, with its little cot, became a real home to me – a place where I could eat and sleep and read and chat with friends. With a couple of additional mattresses on the floor, it’s served plenty of guests, both Haitian and American, as well. I have no regrets and no complaints about the years I’ve spent in its comfortable confines. At the same time, as I’ve come to see myself more and more as a long-term member of the community in Ka Glo, I’ve thought about having my own place.

When I first spoke with Mèt Anténor and Madanm Mèt about this, they were pleased. Though they’ve always shown that they were happy to have me in their home, they recognized at least two things in my desire: first, that it was an expression of my long-term interest in Ka Glo and, second, that it was part of the natural transition a Haitian young adult would make towards independence. If I had decided to leave their house to enter someone else’s, I think they might have been hurt, but the idea that I would move into my own house in their own neighborhood pleased them greatly.

The first thing to decide was where to build the house. Mèt Anténor’s initial suggestion was that I speak with his middle brother, Mesenn. He’s a successful carpenter, who lives with his wife and kids in Pétion-Ville. He has his share of the family’s land in Ka Glo, and he’s not using it.

I didn’t want to buy land. First of all, it would be expensive. Second of all, though it could be done, it would violate Haiti’s 1987 constitution because I am neither citizen nor permanent resident. I hoped to get permission to build a house on someone else’s land. I would live in the house rent-free – perhaps for a contractually fixed number of years – and then the house would belong to the landowner.

Mesenn was happy to offer me a piece of his land, and it was a beautiful spot, with a nice view of the plain below. At the same time, it was steeply inclined, and leveling it off would have been a big expense, even before building could get started, so Mèt Anténor and I looked for another option.

And so we spoke to Castera. He’s Mèt Anténor’s next-door neighbor and his first cousin. His house is one that I spend a lot of time in because of my close friendship with his five children, especially the youngest three: Andrelita, Byton, and Myrtane. I love Madanm Anténor’s three children, but they really are young kids. They spend their evenings memorizing their school work. Castera kids are older by a decade, much closer to my age, so I tend to pass free evenings chatting with them instead.

Especially Byton, their younger of their two surviving sons. He in particular was excited about the prospect of my building a house in his father’s yard, so he took the lead. He helped with conversations with his father and his older brother Casnel. Casnel is 40, but he still lives at home. His own house isn’t finished. He’s a second important authority in the household.

The idea seemed good to everyone. There was a very small square of free land, right behind Castera’s kitchen. He would have to cut down a couple of trees, but they were ones he had already planned to remove because they were getting tall and starting to threaten Mèt Anténor’s house.

Byton agreed to work as the general contractor, with his father, a stonemason, as consultant. I asked another friend, Micanol, who’s a student in a school for contractors, to do a blueprint. He surveyed the little square of land and talked to me about what I wanted: two small rooms with a patio in front and an enclosed bathing area in the back. He did the drawing within a couple of days. It’s beautiful. He really worked hard on it. I still have it somewhere.

Byton said he liked the drawing, and I left it in his hands with some money to get started when I returned to the States after a short visit in January 2004. Through the spring he sent me occasional e-mail updates, and I sent money as I could. As I prepared to return at the beginning of the summer, I was excited to see how far he had gotten.

I was surprised. He had nearly finished laying down the foundation, and it was almost twice what I had asked for. His father had decided that he was willing to cut down and extra tree, and upon doing so he found the extra space to make the house larger as well. Whether I wanted a larger house was not an issue – I did not, and tried to say so at every opportunity. They were committed to building the house that they’d imagine I would like, and the things I said about my own wishes seemed to them less decisive evidence than their own thoughts about what my real desires must be.

So I swallowed hard and adjusted myself to the developing reality. I had some concerns about the amount of money the larger house would take, but Byton was being as frugal with my money as he knew how to be and I resigned myself to hoping for the best. I was able to squash a couple of expensive ideas. One was to build a water cistern under the floor of the house. (There are enough cisterns in Ka Glo. Mine would only attract mosquitos.) Another was to hollow out part of the filled foundation to make a basement room or two. (I already had enough rooms, and couldn’t see what a windowless underground space would add.) By the time I returned to the States in August, the foundation had been filled with gravel that Byton had personally collected by wheelbarrow from the road leading to Ka Glo, and most of the cinder blocks that would be needed to build the walls had been made in Castera’s front yard and were ready to be set into place.

Through the fall, I got a few more updates from Byton and I sent more money. By early January, I was ready to move to Haiti. I could hardly wait to see the house. I arrived January 19th, and crossed from Mèt Anténor’s yard to Castera’s as soon as I could do so without feeling rude.

The house was almost finished. Walls and roof were in place. Only windows and doors remained.

And the house was much larger than the space that the large foundation they had build had promised. Byton explained that, in starting to put up walls, he had noticed a way to extend the front room and the front patio, so he added another piece to the foundation and he kept building. Obviously, he supposed, I would want as much house as he could give me. He told me that it would be ready soon. Doors and windows are part of his own speciality, so he would build them each himself, and it wouldn’t take long. In the meantime, I would continue to live with Madanm Anténor. She made it clear that I would always be welcome in her home.

January became February, and the work proceeded slowly. Byton himself had not reckoned with the amount he had left to do. Every door and window had to be measured and built by hand. The frames had to be made, as well as the doors and windows themselves. The house has four doors – it will have a fifth – and six windows. That might not sound like much, but each door involves at least thirteen pieces of wood and each window at least two or three times that. And each piece of wood had to be measured, cut, and finished separately by hand. They the pieces had to be assembled and set carefully into place. Byton has no access to prepared lumber. He also has no power tools. So he worked and worked and worked. Day after day, I would see him there by 7:00 AM. He would be there by candlelight when I went to my own room at 7:00 PM. I have long known that he was a disciplined hard worker, but I had never seen anything quite like this.

But Saturday I moved in, with a couple of small beds, a table, some chairs, and assorted small necessities as well. I have two bedrooms, one large and one small, a large living room, a smaller bathroom – this is just a room with a drain in the floor that one can bathe in – and two patios. I am especially excited by the back patio. It’s a small balcony overlooking a plantain grove. It’s designed as a quiet, private place for me to read and write.

It will take me some time to learn to live in this house, to really live in it. I’ve made coffee in it, but am not yet cooking. There are some more pieces of furniture and other sundries I could use. In the meantime, I am pleased to have a space I can call my own.

My Haitian neighbors see something larger in this. Most Haitian young men I know stay with their parents until they finish their house. When the house is ready they marry, often after having waited for a very long time. So when I showed Bòs Philippe that I now have a key to a house, he answered that I now had to find the one who’ll hold the other key.

I told him that we’d see about that. For now, it’s just me.

There’s a Haitian proverb that goes, “Two prese pa fè jou louvri.” A literal translation might be something like, “Rushing too fast won’t make the sun rise.” The meaning is clear enough. Things take time. There are processes that no amount of hurrying can accelerate. One wants to get right to work, but some things just take time.

One of the central activities I had planned for my first semester here is having a hard time getting started. My partner, Frémy César, and I had been planning to teach a course on a book by Paulo Freire at a rural university outside of Léogane. The University of Fondwa is a fascinating institution. It was established as a private university by a very strong peasant association that saw the need to create higher-level professional training for rural young people that would keep them from migrating to Port-au-Prince. It’s faculty is mainly Cuban, and it focuses on training in three professions that can be especially useful in rural Haiti: agronomy, administration, and veterinary medicine.

In discussions between Frémy and the Dean of the university, it seemed interesting to invite the students to think about how best to employ the expertise they are gaining. Expertise is a funny thing. It can very easily turn into a kind of leadership that silences the voices and the thinking of those it should be serve. Rather than unlocking and developing the capacities of those around it, it can shut them down. Freire’s work, with its emphasis on the liberating power of learning, might give such young people a lot to consider, especially if they confront it in a classroom where conversation among equals is the rule. Frémy and I were excited to get started, so we made an appointment to talk with the Dean soon after my arrival.

We made our way up the road from Léogane. Fondwa is right on the main highway that crosses the mountains towards Jacmel in the south. It’s one of Haiti’s really good roads, and it’s a good thing. As it is, it winds narrowly, steeply and frighteningly through a tight pass. The large busses and trucks that go between Port-au-Prince and Jacmel barrel along threateningly in both directions. The battered girders along the hairpin turns speak eloquently.

Our meeting with the Dean was short and helpful. I was a little surprised because I thought that the planning was fairly advanced. In fact, whatever discussions Frémy had had with her already – and I know for a fact that there had been several – hadn’t accomplished much. She had been excited about the prospect of her students reading Freire, but she hadn’t considered very much how it could fit into their rather full program of studies and she hadn’t yet spoken with either her students or her colleagues.

A few days later, she sent word that she and her colleagues had decided in favor of the course, but also that she wasn’t yet sure when it could take place. And so we wait, which is fine.
Another activity we have planned is a reading group for members of the faculty at the Matenwa Community Learning Center and the network of primary schools they’re a part of . The Learning Center is a community institution in a very rural mountain village on the island of La Gonave. We have been working together with the school for some years. The school was one of the first places in Haiti that implemented Wonn Refleksyon, the Haitian version of Touchstones. Wonn Refleksyon is the discussion activity we began developing when I first came to Haiti in 1997. Since then, I have occasionally spent a few days at a time in Matenwa working with the teachers. We spent a couple of days once translating a few short pieces from the French they learned in school to the Kreyol in which they are at home. Another time we studied the first few pages of Euclid’s Elements, the classic text in geometry. They wanted to see how math could be discussible.

I had spoken with the faculty last summer about my plans to return to Haiti this year for a longer stay, and we decided to try to do something more extended together. I proposed that we try reading some longer things, things that might be of mutual interest, and they agreed. I thought that some books about children and teaching would be interesting. They’d have a chance to reflect on how they do what they do, and I could learn from their reflections. So I ordered some copies of a book by Jean Piaget, the French psychologist. I gave one to the school’s director, Abner Sauveur, and he liked it, so we’ll start as soon as we can.

But Matenwa is a long way from my home in Ka Glo, and it’s still a little hard to imagine how it will all work. Getting there involves a two hour bus ride from downtown Port au Prince, which is already at least and hour and a half from where I live. After that, there’s an hour on a boat, and then a ride that seems endless on the back of a pick-up truck. The return trip is worse, because you pretty much have to leave by 2:00 AM. My first opportunity to visit Matenwa will be the end of this month, and we’ll have some hard thinking to do. The ideal thing would be if I could spend a solid month in Matenwa, but my current activities won’t really permit that any time soon, and the teachers and I are anxious to get started. I could try to go once-a-week. I even know someone who does that. But I question my stamina for that much travel. It will probably have to be something like every two or three weeks, for a couple of days at a time, but developing the kind of continuity a group needs will be hard, especially since the practice of reading together in a group will be new to some of them at least.
The third plan I made before I arrived in January was really two plans with one partner. I’ve wanted to work more closely together with Johny St. Louis for a long time. He’s an important teacher, school principal, and community leader in Darbonne. We’ve been involved together in discussion groups over the years, and he has played a leading role in hosting groups of my students and colleagues who’ve come to visit from the States. In addition, through him I came to know Erold St. Louis, his younger brother, who is now a student at Shimer College.

Last summer, Johny and I met for two weeks with a group of primary school teachers from a couple of different schools. Together we read Freire’s book, Education as the Practice of Freedom. The group decided that it wanted to continue working together once I returned. Meeting in December before I returned to Haiti, the group chose Rousseau’s book on education, Emile, as the text to study. We had our first meeting, an organizational one, on Tuesday and we’ll start next Friday.

Johny himself is, among other things, a high school teacher, and we decided that we would like to try an experiment with high school kids, too. They are required here to have a certain familiarity with classical French literature. It is an important part of their national high school graduation exam. But often their direct experience with the works is limited. They have text books that tell them about the plays of Racine, Corneille, and Molière, for example, but they might not read the plays. They might not get hold of them.

We decided to see what it would be like to read one of the plays with real care. We would try to translate it from French into Kreyol. The discipline of translation would force close reading, improve the students’ understanding of French, and make them better writers of Kreyol as well. For Johny and me, it represents the chance to extend some of the practices of discussion we’ve been working with here to the more standard educational environment. Our first meeting with school administrators was Tuesday, and we meet with the students – a class of 10th graders and a class of 11th graders – today.
So the work my colleagues and I have been planning is starting, if only slowly. At the same time, we’ve been presented with an opportunity we hadn’t counted on. It’s work that’s shown me another side of the proverb.

A few weeks ago, I was invited to meet with Anne Hastings, the Director of Fonkoze. Fonkoze is a popular bank. It makes banking services, especially small loans, available to many poor Haitians who would otherwise have no such access. I was excited about the meeting, because I admire the institution enormously. Fonkoze’s credit program includes ongoing education for its borrowers, who are almost exclusively market women. They are offered basic literacy courses and classes in such areas as small business administration, reproductive health, and human rights. Almost 30,000 borrowers are involved in all corners of Haiti.

But there are problems with the educational programs. Fonkoze has set itself a remarkable ideal. They want to avoid the standard practice here, which would be to hire teachers, very predominantly men, to teach the various classes. Instead, they want to find women who are already participants in the credit programs, women willing and able to step forward to teach the classes. The long-term goal is to have solidarity groups continually educating themselves, groups whose members take turns accepting the leading role.

It’s an ideal very hard to achieve. Anne explained that as soon as many of the market women feels themselves labeled “teacher”, they turn into the same authoritarian creatures that they’ve seen in the educational institutions around them. They stand in front of their classes and do all the talking. Since conversation and the shared reflection on experiences that it nurtures is fundamental to the curricula Fonkoze would like to implement, the authoritarian model won’t work. The problem for Fonkoze is to figure out how to cultivate a different kind of teaching in an environment where only minimal preparation of teachers is possible.

And it’s harder than that. As liberatory as its educational goals are, Fonkoze is a very authoritarian, hierarchical organization. It may be that, in order to develop as a bank, with all the detailed accountability that a financial institution requires, it’s had to be. But that puts the institution is a difficult position. Its institutional character may tend to reinforce the tendencies it’s trying to eliminate.

This problem is evident in the way we have been asked to attack the problem. Frémy and I were asked to work together with two of Fonkoze’s field supervisors for literacy and two members of the Port-au-Prince administration to begin to create a guidebook, a series of lesson plans that literacy teachers could be taught to use. The lesson plans would, presumably, encourage them in various ways to work more collaboratively with their students, to make conversation the fundamental mode in the classroom. But it is somewhat ironic that the means we are asked to use to nurture egalitarian practices is a top-down directive.

I doubt it will work very well. The habits that lead market-women-teachers to behave in a certain way with their market-women-students run deep here in Haiti as in many other places as well. It’s hard for me to imagine meaningful change without more intense collaboration, collaboration of the sort that models the practices we would like to build.

And we’re just not sure how to do this. There are difficulties at many levels. So we should probably start slowly, study the problem, begin with some experimentation. But instead we’re plowing ahead. We are, I think, two prese, in too much of a hurry.

There is, however, another Haitian proverb that also applies. It is “pye kout pran devann.” Short legs take the lead. The idea is that because someone with short legs walks more slowly they better get started right away.

It’s probably fair to say that, with respect to the educational goals my Haitian colleagues and I are trying to attain, we all have pretty short legs. So we might as well just get started.

The ride is about five hours long, and the road ranges from bad to awful. We had great seats: We were three of the four passengers packed tightly with our luggage across the back seat of the cab of a Toyota four-door pick-up truck. We were pleased about our seats because they allowed us to arrive in Ench (Hinche) without a layer of chalky-grey dust. Whether in the cab or in the back of the truck, it’s a bone-jarring, joint-cracking trip.

Saül, Job, and I had planned the trip last summer. Saül is my godson’s father, my monkonpè, and as close a friend as I have here. He is the caretaker at the office that I used back when I first came to Haiti. Job is his younger brother, a third-year medical school student. We wanted to go in August, but my time ran short. We decided we would go during Kanaval, the festive days leading up to Mardi Gras. They would both have short vacations. They are from Ench, a major city in Haiti’s central plateau. Saül actually grew up in Koladè, a village about 90 minutes by bike from Ench. He’s a good deal older than Job, and by the time Job was growing up, their parents had a house in the city itself.

We planned to leave early Saturday morning, sleep at their mother’s house in the city Saturday night, go to the countryside Sunday morning, see their father and Saül’s in-laws, return to Ench Monday, and come back to Pòtoprens on Wednesday.

But just getting out of town on Saturday. I slept at Job’s place, down towards Pòtoprens, on Friday night. We would meet Saül at the bus station Saturday morning. Job got home after dark on Friday, however, so his cousin wasn’t able to cut his hair. Job couldn’t go see his mother looking anything but his best, so we were delayed Saturday morning as Joseph gave him a meticulously trim with a razor blade and a comb. By the time we got to the bus station, it was past 7:00, and Saül had been waiting for awhile.

We started to look for a ride. Most of the drivers leave Ench early in the morning. There are about five or six regulars who work the route, plus a couple of large busses. They fill their truck, drive to Pòtoprens, take another load of passengers, and return. That’s their day. Regular passengers like Saül and Job have drivers they prefer, so they’re a little picky. In addition, Saül was very certain that he wanted us to sit inside the cab rather than on the back. It costs more, but this is the dry season, and the dust can be two inches thick on parts of the road. When we arrived in Ench, the passengers who had been in back looked as though they had been drenched in grayish-white shake-n-bake.

We declined one truck and missed out on another, and it was getting towards 10:30 as we waited in the hot, dirty marketplace/station. Saül finally saw another likely truck, and we ran. He had gotten Job and, then, me into the back seat, when someone announced it was full. Two others had entered the door on the other side.

I figured we were out of luck and would have to wait for the next truck, but I was wrong. One of the other men in the back seat had no intention of going to Ench. He had taken the seat because that’s how he makes his living: He fights his way to attractive seats on the various trucks and busses that go this way and that from the station, and then sells his place to someone who needs it. He’s like a scalper, I suppose. Saül paid him, and we were off.

The first hour or so of the trip is the roughest. The truck has to fight its way up Mon Kabrit, a long, steep climb out of the plain that the capital sits in. Abandoned cars and trucks remind you at regular intervals that you might not make it. A few of the morning’s busses and pick-up trucks were on the side of the road, undergoing repair as dusty passengers watched and hoped.

Our truck made it to the top, and we headed to Tè Wouj, a small market town that would be the next cluster of people we would pass. When we got there, we saw a dozen or so heavily armed men, wearing various combinations of green camouflage and whatever else. They are what are called “ansyen militè” or “old military” men who had supposedly been in the armed forces before Jean-Bertrand Aristide dissolved them after his first exile ended in 1994. Frankly, some of the men looked too young to have been soldiers that long ago.

They are a considerable force in Haiti right now, fighting for back pay and new power. They were wandering the small marketplace, serious-looking rifles across their shoulders. Most seemed to be eating at food stalls. Their guns looked enormous.

Our driver took us carefully through the town. A tire or two were in the final stages of burning themselves out at various spots along the road. The driver wound his way around them. A small jeep was burning more seriously. Apparently, a few minutes earlier a driver had gotten too close to the flames and his tank ignited. We heard that no one had been hurt.

We got out of town. The soldiers showed not the least interest in us. A few miles down the road, we came across several large U.N. personnel vehicles. Several dozen young Nepalese soldiers were relaxing around them in such shade as they could find. They are part of MINUSTAH, the multinational U.N. stabilization force here.

The Nepalese soldiers smiled and waved. They seemed friendly. And bored. I suppose they were waiting for instructions. Though they seemed to have overwhelming force on their side, they did not seem to want to attack. The hope is, for now, just to establish stability on the ground.

What struck me is that I had just been through something like a war zone, and it was all impossibly unreal. Except for the extra caution our driver seemed to show – he chose not to make a snack stop in Tè Wouj – the fact that we were crossing a line marking out the areas of influence of two opposed forces had nothing to do with us as we went about our business.

So far, I’ve seen Brazilians, Argentineans, Jordanians, Peruvians, Nepalese, Sri Lankans, Canadians, and Filipinos. One comes across the U.N. all over the place these days. But my travels have kept me very strictly outside of the places where I would really sense the reason for its presence here.

And yet I know that they’re needed. I have friends and colleagues who’ve had to forfeit as much as half a year’s rent and borrow money to pay for a new apartment at an inflated price to get out of the neighborhoods where something like war is raging. The reason Job was so late on Friday is that armed gangs refused to allow students to leave his school’s campus until the Dean called in riot police to clear a path.

So I can be grateful for the safety that the requirements of my work and the excellent advice I get allow me. I can talk to my Haitian friends about the ansyen militè, the police, and the U.N. forces. My friends are particularly moved to know that the Sri Lankans are here despite all that Sri Lanka has suffered these last months.

It’s hard to guess where these troubles will lead. It’s instructive, however, to notice that life – weekends with friends in the countryside and more vital things as well – all goes on in and around them. As it must.

Luis Fernando Arango, a Colombian friend, sent me the following question for Eli:

“I enjoyed your adventure in Haiti and have a question for Eli: Do you pray for the kind of bone trauma Steven had as a way to cure it?

“I ask that question since deep in the Colombian countryside (farms far away from big cities) it is usual to pray to heal many kind of injuries and illnesses.

“When I was a young man I remember an experience where one of my brothers fell from a horse and his hand got twisted badly. The workers at the farm told me to take him to the director of the only school in the region. She was a very kind old lady that took my brother’s hand, rubbed it softly and begin to say a few words just whispering.

“My brother was O.K. next day, so I went back to her, asking what kind of medicine She had applied to him. She explained me (after I insisted many times), that She had said a very old pray and that people who use it correctly must have a strong faith to accomplish that kind of cure. I never forgot that experience, and want to know if people in Haiti uses similar medicine.”

I spoke to Eli about this. He’s a very devout Seventh Day Adventist. Though he believes that the power to heal comes from God, he does not include pray as a specific part of his work. He added that others who use the same basic techniques do either pray, or make crosses on the part of the body they’re treating, or do both.

I nearly fell today. The event lacked the drama of my short but consequential drop during a climb with Erik on Lagonav in the summer of 2003. I didn’t, for example, bleed. No amateur surgery, however minor, was called for. Nevertheless, it promises to be a little bit of a nuisance, because I often have no alternative to walking, and it has already had interesting consequences of its own.

I arrived in Haiti on Wednesday, January 19, and made it up the mountain to Ka Glo early the same afternoon. A friend had borrowed a pick-up truck to meet me at the airport, take me for a quick visit to my godson’s parents’ home — always my first stop on entry — and then take me and my considerable pile of possessions up the mountain. I used the stop to reorganize my things and leave some of them I wouldn’t need in Glo down the hill, but in the confusion I forgot one of the bags that had things I did want. It happened to be the one that had my sneakers, so I had to postpone my desire to return to the consistent jogging schedule that the Shimer Dean’s Office had made so difficult to sustain.

I collected my sneakers Thursday, but was pressed for time Friday and Saturday, so Sunday morning was my big chance to get started. I left shortly after enjoying a sip of morning coffee, sweet and black, and had a wonderful trot.

The road that passes Ka Glo goes upward along the ridge overlooking the plain of Pòtoprens. It’s unpaved and very rocky, winding uphill for well over an hour’s walk. Because it is one of the few roads in the area that’s anything more than a footpath, running for me has usually meant running up it as far as I want to go, then heading back down the same way. I usually have walked back down because I worry about my downhill footing, but I had a friend whom I needed to see about halfway to the spot where I thought I’d turn, and he was pressed for time, so I ran down to his family’s home. Just before I got to him, I turned to stare down a couple of noisy dogs, and that’s when it happened. I took my eyes off the path, and made a fopa, or faux pas.

That doesn’t mean that I said or did anything tactless, but very literally that I took a false step. We would say I twisted my ankle.

It hurt a little bit, but I had no trouble getting to my friend’s and limping with him back to Ka Glo. He was headed down to Petyonvil. I sat chatting with some visitors for awhile, pretending that the slight pain would just go away, but it got worse rather than better as the morning continued. A friend who’s in medical school happened to be visiting, so he took a look. He was more inclined to see my ankle in terms of Haitian folk remedies than in terms of his training. He called for hot saltwater, and rubbed my foot with it until the water cooled. That’s when we saw Eli.

There are a lot of remarkable things about Eli, some of which I know of. He has a bright and easy smile and big laugh. He’s a serious and hardworking student, currently in the second-to-last year of high school. The road through school has been hard for him. Not only because he has an hour’s commute, much of it on foot, to and from school each day. Nor because of asthma that has made the commute a good deal harder at times. On top of it all, he has a tendency towards astute critical reflection. The flip side of this tendency is that he’s not great at rote learning. And the Haitian schools he’s been attending push memorization above all else.

He is very smart; he’s especially good at watching how someone does something and figuring out how to do it himself. He’s more than an imitator, though. He knows how to apply what he’s learned in order to perform new tasks. I remember watching him once, a few days after he saw someone repair a soccer ball, making a new ball from scratch using what he had learned.

When Eli saw what was going on, he came over. He asked what had happened, and had a look. Then someone told me that Eli knows how to rale. “Rale” generally means something like “to pull”, but in this context it means something more precise. A somewhat misleading translation would be “massage,” but it would be more accurate to say he knows the Haitian art of painfully pulling and twisting sore or injured limbs to help them heal. He was happy to work on my ankle, and immediately asked someone to roast an orange.

He talked a little with the doctor-to-be, and then poked, rubbed and twisted my ankle a little. It hurt like hell. They agreed that a vein had popped out of place. The swelling was obvious. Eli complimented the medical student for the salt water treatment. He said it would get my blood flowing. He then said he’d be back as soon as the orange had been roasted and cooled.

I sat thinking.

The nearest ice is about a mile down the hill. If I was certain that ice was what I needed, someone would have been happy to get some. But it seemed like a lot to ask when I wasn’t even sure whether it would help. Leaving the ankle alone seemed like a decent plan, but Haiti is a place where almost nobody can afford to let minor hurts slow them down. A lost day’s wages means a day without food for some. Although this is not the case for Eli, or for most of the people I know well, it seemed very likely that the need to keep going had taught people here a lot. I also like and respect Eli, so it seemed worth giving him a try.

When he came back, he told me to stand on the foot, and he felt around it to establish where it hurt and where it didn’t. He pressed hard on the sore spots until he identified their center. He then pressed harder, sweeping with his fingers along a line from that spot to each of my toes in turn. When he got to each toe, he pulled it, then he twisted it until it cracked.

All this was bad enough, but then the real rubbing started. He halved the orange and rubbed each half around and over the sorest part of the ankle. He later explained to me that the orange would loosen my vein ands get my blood flowing.

I began to feel light-headed. Children gathered round to watch, hoping I would scream or yelp or at least make funny faces. I tried to disappoint them. Just when I thought it had to stop, it did. I sat down and tried to concentrate as Eli explained that I should try to keep the foot moving as I sat and read or chatted through the day. I thanked him.

I went by the next morning to thank him again. My ankle was a little stiff, a little sore, but I had no trouble walking without discomfort.

Now, of course it might be true that if I had simply left the ankle alone it would have improved without Eli’s help. I can’t be sure, though it sure feels as though his treatment made a difference in the way my ankle feels.

But whatever it meant for how quickly I’m healing, one thing seems certain. It was worth trusting Eli, who is my neighbor, and the other neighbors who recommended him. As a stranger in a land that is still, after seven years, very foreign to me, I will need to depend on them a lot. The more I show my trust, the better off I’ll be.

A last note: Eli knows that I am writing this essay, and he has said that he would be happy to respond to questions that people have for him. Just append them to this text or e-mail them to me at [email protected]. I’ll see that he gets the questions and I’ll communicate his responses.