Discussion groups should never stop learning. Or maybe it would be better to say that, if they feel that they have no more to learn together, they probably no longer need to be a group.

I had been working with the women from Kofaviv – the Commission of Women Victims for Victims – for about a year, and I had begun to feel that they had reached a plateau, that they were no longer moving forward. They are an accomplished group, both in our work together and otherwise. We could simply have decided to continue enjoying the pleasant meetings that we have, or to end our collaboration, but neither of those options seemed right.

They have learned to follow Wonn Refleksyon procedures more than competently. They are fearless in the face of texts that other groups in Haiti have thought to be too hard. For example, whereas Haitian university students and others have doubted whether one can even discuss Newton’s laws of motion, or at least whether someone without a fair amount of education is qualified to talk about such things, the women of Kofaviv, who range from high school graduates to women without any formal education at all, have simply done it. They listen to one another and encourage one another to speak. Each of them seems to recognize that she has something to say. As a result, any one of them might be the next one to speak at any time. This is true when I’m the one leading their conversations, but it’s just as true when one of them is playing that role. We take turns leading, and they respond well to one another just as they respond very, very well to me. It’s wonderful.

At the same time, I can’t get away from my sense that there are steps the group hasn’t taken. While they are really good at helping one another share their thoughts, I don’t see much evidence that their thoughts are changing, or developing. One of Wonn Refleksyon’s core objectives is to make our opinions visible to us in a manner that invites us to challenge them, and I have to admit to myself that the Kofaviv women do not seem to me to be challenging their own thoughts.

So we decided to try a couple of experiments in an effort to shake things up a bit. One was intended to help them make better use of texts, the other to help them rethink what it means for them to lead discussions.

I wanted to help them look at texts differently because I thought the texts they have been using could be much more useful than they’ve been so far. Some of them express puzzling, surprising thoughts. We include a text in which Herodotus quotes the Athenian lawmaker Solon as saying that he can judge no man happy until he’s dead. Some of the texts we use make ordinary thoughts seem surprising. Newton’s explanation of the laws of motion includes the claim that, if a horse pulls a rock, the rock pulls the horse just as much. The example has the power to create more intense and varied discussion than one might imagine.

But the women of Kofaviv rarely find that the texts challenge their thinking because the way they use the texts doesn’t draw that sort of help out of them. They let the texts suggest issues to discuss, but once the texts suggest what we’ll be talking about, more or less, the women don’t much return to them.

For example, one of the postulates that Euclid’s geometry is based on, that a straight line can be drawn from any point to any other point, occasioned a wide-ranging discussion about how they find their various ways around Port au Prince, about how the best route is not always straight. There’s nothing wrong with using the text in that way. We are not a math class. The fact that the text invites them to share their experiences is a good thing. But once they start talking about how to get around Port au Prince, the text can’t help them anymore. They are on their own, and the degree to which they can challenge one another and themselves will simply depend on the habits they’ve already established.

We tried to address the group’s use of the text by spending two weeks working through the Euclid slowly. We all agreed we would temporarily try a different style of work, one that was more focused on figuring out what that text can tell us. We went through it together, almost line-by-line. In order to emphasize that what we were doing was not a standard part of Wonn Refleksyon, we even gave it a different name. We said we would be working in something called a “study group”.

And with the exception of the very interesting discussion of getting around Port au Prince, it seemed to work. The women patiently pieced together different ways of understanding Euclid’s definition of right angles, for example. More importantly, it seemed to help them in the weeks that followed when we returned to our usual style. Shortly afterwards I led them in a discussion of a short excerpt from one of Darwin’s books, and they were willing to let it puzzle them and raise questions about some of their own thoughts.

The second experiment was very different, and it’s far too early to hazard a guess as to its results. It took shape in a conversation with Kerline, a lab technician who does blood tests for the rape victims that come in a too-constant stream to the Kofaviv office. Kerline is a strong member of the group, and has begun working with Frémy and me on other Wonn Refleksyon projects. She and I were talking about a discussion we led together at the office of a large international NGO in Pétion-Ville. Kerline said that what she felt she was learning as she worked with Frémy and me – and a third experienced leader named Abélard – was how to intervene in the discussions she leads with confidence.

This requires some explanation. The first thing that generally strikes Haitians about the way Frémy and I lead discussions is how relatively silent we are. Group leaders in Haiti generally dominate. Haiti is not unique in this respect. They do most of the talking, they respond to almost everything that others say, and they always have the last word. Compared to what the Haitians we work with are accustomed to, Frémy and I really are quiet. We push people to talk directly with one another, to set the course of their own conversation, and to do without a leader’s final word. Most of this we try to accomplish by simply leaving them the space to take these responsibilities on. In other words, by shutting our own mouths long enough so that others can talk.

One consequence of this is that many of the people who learn the process from us are reticent about asserting themselves. They can tend to think that shutting up is their role. When they do speak, it’s generally in one of two simple ways: Either they’re reminding participants of the rules that Wonn Refleksyon asks them to follow, or they’re expressing an opinion about the topic being discussed much as any participant might.

Kerline said that she thought that the members of the Kofaviv group needed to think more about what real leadership requires. They are good at encouraging participation and at energizing their groups, at monitoring rules, and at entering the groups they lead as one participant among equals. But they weren’t actively helping one another deepen their collaboration or their thinking. They were, rather, just letting things happen.

So we decided to spend a meeting focusing on what discussion leadership requires. We proceeded in four steps. First, we asked the women to separate into groups of five-six. Each group was to make three short lists: one of the three qualities of a good traditional classroom teacher, one of the three qualities of a good community organizer, and a third of the qualities of a good discussion leader. Neither Kerline nor I were very interested in the first two lists, but we thought that creating the three lists together would help the women concentrate on the most essential, unique qualities of a discussion leader.

Second, we brought the small groups back together and made a list of all the qualities of a discussion leader they had proposed. There were eight in all, including things like the ability to be on time, the abilities to motivate participants to come to meetings and encouraging them to participate actively once they come, and the ability to explain procedures clearly.

The third step was for the group to grade itself on each of the eight qualities. We decided to keep things simple. For each quality, they would say they are good, weak, or between the two.

There was a lot of consensus about these grades, and they graded themselves much as Kerline and I would have. There were only two points on which they gave themselves the lowest grade: One was for them not to be shy, and the other was to know when to intervene.

It turned out that these amounted to the same thing. The shyness that some of them were worried about was precisely a shyness about when to intervene strongly in a conversation. And a little talk was able to make this more precise. They don’t feel they’re timid about intervening to enforce the rules or that they’re timid about jumping in as participants with their own contributions. They feel they’re too timid, however, about jumping in to a conversation to change its direction: to suggest paths that might be more fruitful that the one a group is taking, to push a group to stick to a topic so they can deepen their reflections, to keep things from merely jumping from one opinion to another.

The fourth step we took was to return to small groups so that they could think about how to work on their ability to intervene decisively and well. Though the groups worked independently, they answered as if with one voice. They said that they don’t think they’re good at preparing for a discussion they are to lead. They think that if they had a clearer sense, from the outset, as to where a discussion might profitably go, if they were better able to formulate clear objectives before a group meets, it would be easier for them to feel as though they know what they’re doing.

It was an obvious point, but one neither Kerline nor I had considered. So we decided that we would all think about what we can do to learn how to better prepare for the discussions we are to lead. It will be a couple of weeks before I see the group again, and we all agreed we would come with ideas.

I haven’t come up with anything yet, but it’s a great question. If we are able to come up with a really good approach, it could quickly become an important part of teaching Wonn Refleksyon all over Haiti.

“On March 24th, 2007, we met at 8:00 AM, at Steven’s house in Kaglo in order to finish writing the statutes for IDEAL . . .”

The last week or so has been important for the group in Cité Soleil and for me.

The first thing that happened was trivial in a way, but very much telling. I arrived in Cité Soleil on a Friday afternoon, having spent the day at the Fonkoze office after arriving from Wanament in the far northeast corner of Haiti. When the guys saw me, they invited me to hurry up and change clothes so that I could go play basketball with them. The unimportant side of this is that I used to really enjoy playing basketball, but hadn’t played in several years. So though I was a little nervous about playing with a bunch of spritely young men, I was very pleased to be back on a court. The important side of this is that the basketball court is several blocks from my room in Belekou, in the very heart of the neighborhood.

Here’s why that’s interesting: Since I started going to Belekou, I have spent all of my time either inside my room or on the street right in front of it. The room is on the second floor of a building at the intersection that leads into the neighborhood. When we started meeting together back in October, the guys I work with asked the gang leader who controlled the area whether my presence would be alright with him, and he said he had no objections. Even so, the guys always thought I should avoid raising questions about my presence in anyone’s mind, so they more or less insisted that I stay right where we work together and not stroll around other parts of the area.

But things have changed since UN forces took over the area about a month ago without firing a shot. It’s quite calm. And though residents resent the presence of the occupying force and though they shout curses and slogans when armored personnel carriers make their regular, heavily-armed rounds, they also seem happy about the peace. When the guys invited me to play ball, it required that I walk deeper in Belekou than they had ever allowed me to go, and they did so very casually. This was a clear indication of the improved safety that they feel.

The importance of the second thing that happened is hard to judge with certainty, but it’s very promising at least: The guys spent the last two days writing out a formal charter for their organization and electing its officers. The name the chose is “IDEAL,” which stand for “Independence, Development, Education, Association, and Lawfulness.”

It was nevertheless important in at least a couple of respects. For one thing, it’s something that they’ve wanted. From my very first meeting with them, they spoke of their sense that they needed to be organized. They have felt, rightly or wrongly, that their being part of a recognized organization, with an official charter, letterhead, and membership cards will give them an identity that they’ve lacked. Though I tried to convince them that they should link their identity to what they accomplish together rather than to pieces of paper, they have found my reasoning to be only very partially satisfying. Though several of them are rightly proud of the progress they’ve made through the English lessons that Héguel and I provide, it’s been clear enough that they want something more. And they think that they now have what they were looking for. In addition, their willingness to stay focused over the course of two days on the tedious work of formulating their charter is a testimony to how ready they are to invest themselves in moving themselves forward.

In writing down their charter, they got help from my long-time colleague Gerald Lumarque, a community organizer and literacy teacher from Fayette, a rural area outside of Léogâne. He’s helped numerous grassroots organizations establish themselves. He came to Cité Soleil and met with them in our room there for a day. It was his first trip to Cité Soleil, and he was very nervous. In fact, midway through the week he contacted me to say that he had been advised not to go there, that it was too dangerous. Only when I told him that I would be sleeping there the night before he came to work, did he change his mind.

At the end of that first day, we all went up to my house in Kaglo. The twenty-six of us spent the night, and then worked through the next day until the statutes were completed.

The photos below are from the evening and the following day in Kaglo.

I went up a little early on Friday to help get the house ready. Neither Byton nor I are good about doing dishes or keeping things clean, so there was some work to do. As always, Ti Kel and Mackenson came to help.

Lilly very quickly made new friends. Here she is with Haril. He’s an eighth-grader, his parents’ second child. He earns what he can by collecting rainwater in an otherwise-unused basin and washing motorcycles.

Here she is with Daniel. Daniel is less fortunate than Haril. He isn’t able to go to school, though he went long enough that he can read and write. He earns a living fixing the flat tires that are so common among the motorcycles and bicycles that work in and around Cité Soleil.

Once Gerald and the whole team got to my house, they had a long discussion about what they had achieved through their first day of work and how they would organize themselves for the second day.

The house wasn’t really designed to sleep twenty-six, but we managed well enough.

When they got up Saturday morning, we had a small breakfast of coffee with bread and butter. Here are some of the guys, ready to get to work.

In the front are Papito, Jasmin, Frantzeau, Guynold, and Raynold. In the back are Hugens, Rissa, Osnel, and Picard.

The group spent most of the day following Gerald at the blackboard on the front patio, working out the rules they would set for themselves. He would write down proposed formulations. They would then debate them, tinkering until they came to agreement. Their newly-elected Secretary General would then write them down. The rules covered everything for admission to the group, to its governance, to its name and objectives.

At the end of the day, before they left Kaglo, the group asked me to take a picture of all of them, standing under the great Mapou.

It will take more to make the group into something important than it took to write out the statutes and elect the officers, but everything has to start somewhere.

Latònal is a two-hour uphill hike from Fayèt, a small rural community already well outside of Leyogann and Gresyè, the closest little cities. Fayèt and Latònal have been important in our activities for some time, since Frémy and I spent more than a year meeting each week with EPA, a team of literacy teachers based there, coaching them in how to use Wonn Refleksyon and then helping them develop the guidebook they use for the book of images and proverbs that we created for non-readers.

In their years teaching literacy, EPA’s members had grown increasingly frustrated at the age of their students. Though most were still adults, they were getting more and more young people, kids in their early teens or even younger. These kids and their families had apparently resigned themselves to the fact that they were never going to attend a school, so they decided to join a literacy program to learn at least the rudiments of reading and writing. The EPA team began to feel as though the task
of teaching adult literacy would be endless as long as significant numbers of kids were unable to go to school. According to the 2003 Haitian census, less than half of all school age children in Haiti attend school.

The group undertook their own little census. They learned how many kids in their areas were not in school, and exactly where those kids live. They decided to open a school for these children especially.

This was not a small matter: they had no building, no materials, and no money to speak of. They found a small, four-room building they could rent for about $110 for the year. They pitched in their own money to build benches and buy chairs, blackboards, notebooks, pencils, chalk, and other materials. They set up a desk in the schoolhouse to begin registration. They decided to charge 100 gourdes for the year. That’s about $2.75. Kids whose parents couldn’t come up with the money would be accepted anyway.

Since September, I’ve heard reports of the school any number of times. I occasionally cross paths with the teachers at Wonn Refleksyon meetings in Pòtoprens and elsewhere. But I hadn’t been able to visit. When it became clear that the guys from Cité Soleil were interested in starting a school, visiting the school near Fayèt came to seem like it was too important to miss. I decided to invite a couple of representatives of the Soleil group to go with me, to see the work of a group that is somewhat farther along than they themselves are, but close enough to have clear memories of the challenges the Soleil guys were about to face.

So Junior, Anel, and I took a bus and some pick-up trucks to Dabòn and a motorcycle to Nan Mapou. From there, we waded across the river to Fayèt. The river was high because there have been good rains so far this year, but not so high as to be un-fordable. We spent a long afternoon and a morning in Fayèt. Between those two half-days, we spent a day in Latònal, meeting with the Fayèt group’s partner there.

The first afternoon in Fayèt was a chance for Junior and Anel to meet some members of the EPA team, Job and Ormilien, and to see their adult literacy centers at work. Junior and Anel are both a little over twenty, and they’ve both been through primary school, though not much farther. They were shocked to see kids younger than them, much younger than them, already in literacy programs. Neither of them had ever attended a literacy class meeting, and they were excited to see how enthusiastic, how engaged, men and women their parents’ age were.

After visiting the centers, we bathed in a beautifully transparent freshwater spring, had a bite to eat, and then chatted for a while before heading to bed.

The next morning we left Fayèt before 5:00 because I knew that the road up the mountain would be a challenge, and would be all the worse once the sun came out. It was almost 7:00 before the sun burned through some cloud cover, and by then we were within 15 minutes of our goal.

We had two objectives for our day in Latònal. In the morning, we would visit a community school just a few years old. It’s run by an experienced educator, but staffed mostly by recent graduates – recent primary school graduates, that is. I thought it would help the guys imagine themselves as teachers. I also wanted to watch our host, Thomas, lead a Wonn Refleksyon discussion for a community group he’s part of. Few of the group’s members can read, so Thomas is using the book of images and proverbs that a group of us created several years ago. I hadn’t seen the book used in some time – there never were many copies – and I wanted to be reminded how it works.

I was glad I went. The Wonn Refleksyon discussion reminded me of something important. I had stopped thinking much about the use of images. Our in-many-ways-successful experience using proverbs exclusively on Lagonav made it seem unimportant. One could use proverbs with those who can’t read, they work well as tools to get conversations going, and they don’t involve having to print or distribute books. It seemed like a much easier way to address the same need that images address.

The problem is that it’s just not true. Proverbs and images do not work in the same way, and those using proverbs only were probably missing something.

Proverbs give participants something to talk about. They are familiar, and participants have an easy time connecting them with their lives. They encourage them to share their experiences.

But images do something quite different. I can explain this by talking about the discussion that Thomas led. It was on a Haitian proverb, “//Se lè poul la mare, ravèt ka bay eksplikasyon l,//” or “It’s when the chicken is tied up that the roach can explain itself.” Apparently, chickens just love cockroaches. The proverb was accompanied by a drawing that was done by a student at the Matènwa Community Learning Center.

What was striking to me about the conversation is that participants spent a considerable amount of time talking about whether the leash that was holding the chicken in place was really short enough to prevent her from eating the roaches. At first, I was frustrated by what seemed like an example of a group’s veering into bickering. I thought they would be sharing experiences related to the proverb. But then I realized that something important was happening: Participants were working together to iron out the details of an interpretation of the drawing in front of them.

And what was pushing them to work together was a feature of a visual image that proverbs simply don’t share: a range of details that one can argue about. I might not care very much about how long the leash in the picture is. I might be perfectly happy to have the group conclude whatever it wants to. But developing the habit of working together, through whatever agreements and disagreements they have, is enormously valuable. Proverbs encourage participants to share experiences, but they don’t tend to lead to disagreements. Or if they do, they are the kind of disagreements that cannot be resolved: You see the proverb in one way, and I see it in another.

We got up just before 5:00 the next morning to go back down the hill. We wanted to get back to Fayèt as early as possible so that we could spend as much of the morning as possible as the school. We got to the small, four-room building at about 8:30.

The school has four teachers. Three of them are volunteers, part of the team that decided to establish the school. The fourth is a trained kindergarten teacher that the volunteers pitched in to hire with their own money. That having be said: It turns out that they don’t really pay her, because they don’t really have any money.

I spend most of our visit sitting in the room that held the kindergarten and first grade. The kids wanted to show me what they had learned, so they asked me to put some addition and subtraction problems up on their blackboard. I kept the problems simple, not knowing how far along they were. There was one boy who wanted to do al the problems. He must have been twelve or thirteen, but his teachers told me that he had never been to school before. He seemed to be learning so fast that his teachers could easily have had a hard time keeping up with him.

Eventually, I hit upon a plan. I asked whether any of the kids wanted to put problems on the board for other kids. The boy volunteered right away. But instead of the simply, one-digit problems I had been giving them, he went straight to four-five digit problems that involved all sorts of borrowing and carrying. Job and I watched in stunned silence as the kids handled the problems easily. Job wasn’t sure how. He hadn’t, he said, taught them how to borrow or carry. But somehow that knowledge existed in the group. Perhaps siblings or neighbors have shared such techniques with these kids. Maybe the few of them that have spent some time in schools before brought the knowledge with them. In any case, the kids were farther along than even their teacher suspected.

The trip back to Port au Prince seemed to pass too quickly. Anel and Junior had been excited by what they had seen, and they wanted to talk about it. What most impressed them was how well they had been fed, both at Thomas’s house and at the house in Fayèt. But they also had a lot to say about the young people who were teaching at the school in Latònal, the excitement of the kids in the school in Fayèt, and the considerable amount of work that is before them.

The credit center in Fòche is beautiful. It’s underneath the massive spread of an old mango tree. The branches must cover a circle, at least forty feet across, that is enclosed by a fence of woven palm leaves that’s five or six feet high. A couple of additional palm-leaf walls reach ten-twelve feet from the outer wall towards the center. They divide the space along the circumference into classrooms. This same tree is home to a primary school. There were two groups of little kids doing very basic Math and French while we were visiting.

I call what I visited in Fòche a “credit center.” The term has a precise meeting in the context of Fonkoze’s method for disbursing microcredit.

Fonkoze’s main credit program does not involve loans to individuals. Instead, money is lent to groups of five women – friends, family, or neighbors – who borrow it together. The women agree to take shared responsibility for repayment. This has two important advantages. First, it serves in lieu of collateral to guarantee repayment of the loan. Fonkoze borrowers don’t sign over anything, and yet they repay their loans at high rates, partly because of the responsibility they share. Second, it encourages solidarity and collaboration among the women. It helps ensure that they all have obvious places to seek advice and support. They can just turn to one another.

These groups of five are collected into credit centers of six-eight groups, or thirty to forty women. The centers give Fonkoze a way to organize the delivery of services like credit, but also other financial and educational services. Members of a credit center do not have to come to Fonkoze’s branch to receive credit or to make a payment. The branch sends a loan officer to them. Centers broaden the sphere of solidarity available to members. Instead of having just five women to depend on, a woman is a member of an organized collection of thirty to forty women who come together regularly to get new loans or repay old ones, but also to share their problems, their advice, and their experiences with one another.

Ideally, centers would meet quite regularly: once a month for loan transactions – either disbursement or repayment – and once or twice a week for educational programs like Basic Literacy, Business Development Skills, and Health Education. In addition, there would be one meeting per month just to chat.

But providing educational programs depends on funding. The programs Fonkoze offers are inexpensive. They cost only about $25 per participant for a four-month class. But income from interest doesn’t yet cover this cost, so Fonkoze has to depend on outside funding. We work very hard at fundraising, but it hasn’t been enough to offer the programs at all thirty of Fonkoze’s branches. So at least half of Fonkoze’s credit centers have occasion to meet only twice per month – once for loan activity and once to chat.

But things are more complicated. Holding a meeting of busy business women just to chat turns out to be difficult. Credit agents and the centers’ elected leaders, who share responsibility for these meetings, can lack both the skills to nurture dialogue and ideas about issues that center members might profitably discuss. The meetings can deteriorate into lectures – or, rather, sermons – about the importance of timely loan repayment and proper loan investment. Attendance at these meetings drops off, and understandably so, because participants who are working hard to build their businesses don’t really feel their benefit.

The loss of these discussion meetings is expensive for Fonkoze and its membership in two ways. On one hand, there is the cost of a lost opportunity. The advantages the women could gain by getting together regularly and sharing advice fall away. On the other, the discipline of loan repayment tends to weaken because center solidarity isn’t there to reinforce it.

So we decided to work at making these monthly dialogues more meaningful. We would create lesson plans for them. The plans would address issues important for Fonkoze’s membership, and they would also outline simple procedures designed to help the credit agents who use them to encourage dialogue among members.

I’ve written two so far. One is about credit center security. This is extremely important because the centers are unguarded locations where large amounts of cash regularly changes hands. Few of these centers are anywhere near the nearest police. The lesson is built around a short story I wrote based on a theft that actually occurred at one credit center when members and their credit agent were negligent. The other lesson plan is about different ways a small business woman might decide to invest her profit. It’s a story of three women: one who reinvests profit into her business, one who uses it to buy additional income-generating assets, and one who uses it to send her children to fancy and expensive schools in Pòtoprens. Both lessons come with questions for the women to reflect upon and with instructions for the credit agents as to how to divide the women into small groups to address the questions.

Our first experience with one of the lessons was last week, in Fòche, a small community off the main southern highway from Pòtoprens to Okay. It’s just outside of Grangwav. The center in Fòche is served by Fonkoze’s small branch in Twen, which currently has no educational programs. It’s long haul from Twen to Fòche. The direct road has been so badly eroded by flooding as to be nearly impassable. Only during the dry season can a motorcycle weave along and through shallow river beds. So the credit agent regularly makes a great circle out of the Twen valley, up to the stunning mountaintop road that runs between Leyogann and Jakmel. He takes that road all the way down to the southern highway, which he then takes to Fòche. The route takes about an hour and a half.

I went to Fòche with two Fonkoze credit agents. Our plan was that I would lead the meeting, following the lesson plan, and they would observe. Later in the day, we had another credit center meeting scheduled back in Twen, and one of them would lead the same discussion there. That way, we would all get to see whether they were comfortable with the way the lessons were designed to work.

We got to the center as the women were beginning to arrive, and soon there were almost twenty, a little more than half the center’s membership. After introductions, I explained why we had come. I then read the story out loud – many of the women need to learn to read – and one of the credit agents read it a second time. Then we divided the center into groups of four to five women, and asked each group to come up with answers to a couple of questions. Each group was asked to explain what caused the security problem in the center the story describes, and then each group was asked to say what one or more of the characters in the story might have done differently to prevent the problem. After about fifteen minutes, we returned to the circle to share answers and for further conversation.

The meeting went splendidly. The women seemed to really enjoy themselves, and they had a lot to say. They spoke well about the importance of secrecy, and also of attending all center meetings. They pointed out that if they only come to the center when cash is going to change hands they make the center an attractive target. If, on the other hand, there are other regular activities, robbery becomes harder to plan.

The women had good questions, too. For example, one asked whether, when a credit agent is robbed as he returns to his branch after collecting repayments, the credit center members are then responsible for making up the loss. It provided a great chance to remind them of the importance of keeping their receipts.

The women really held us there with them with their questions. They are very upset that they’re not getting the educational programs that they’ve heard about. They resent having to sign loan agreements and receipts with their thumbprints. They feel they need to learn more about running their businesses. I explained the problem we have funding these programs for everyone, and they understood, but my saying that we are growing quickly is cold comfort to those whom we haven’t reached yet. On the way back to Twen, the credit agents and I worked on a cheap way we might get some version of a literacy program to them.

By the time we were able to leave the center, it was getting near time to be back in Twen for the other meeting. We took a chance and took the direct road, hoping it would help us arrive in time. It was very tough going for the agent who was driving the motorcycle. We crossed a shallow but quickly-flowing river at a couple of points and, what was sometimes harder, had to run along the river’s pebble-ly bed. We were within reach of Twen, when the back tire went flat. The driver managed to get the cycle the rest of the way, but the other credit agent and I had to walk almost 45 minutes. By the time we arrived, it was much to late to go to the meeting.

The experiment will now continue. Fonkoze has chosen three branches in different parts of the country. By the end of April, we like to have implemented the new lesson plans branch-wide in all three. We would like to do a real study to see whether credit agents can learn to use these lesson plans and whether the plans can improve attendance at credit center meetings. If both answers are positive, we’ll know we have a new tool that it’s worth really investing in.

I was talking to Milienne Angervil, the Matènwa school’s wonderful second grade teacher. I’ve written of her work before. (See: StartingWhereTheyAre.) I hadn’t seen her in awhile, so we were catching up. She had recently missed about a week of school, and was telling me about returning to her class. One of the days she missed was the day I spent with the school’s sixth graders, so I was explaining to her how that went.

I told her about the problems I felt I had directing the class. I lacked even the minimal control that I thought I was expected to maintain. We got through the day, and did some good work, but it was more chaotic and louder than it should have been.

Milienne found my troubles funny. I said what I’ve told her before: Sixth graders were hard enough; I cannot remotely imagine taking a group of second graders for a day, much less for a year.

She answered that the younger they are, the better she likes them. She likes to see their progress, and she gave me a clear example. In the two weeks since she had returned to school, her kids had learned to leave spaces between the words when they write sentences. It had been sudden, dramatic progress that spread like a wave through her class. Everyone had learned at once. Except Ronaldo, who still refuses to leave spaces. He says, she explained, that he’ll use up his notebook too quickly, and she accepts his reasoning, at least for now.

Milienne’s words pushed me to consider the groups I work with. Some of my work involves planning, program design, and the like. But there are groups I lead or co-lead directly. I decided to ask myself whether I could report the kind of clear, concrete progress Milienne could. The answer turns out to be as varying as the groups themselves are.

The first group I need to talk about is the Kofaviv group, the victims of rape who have become community organizers, helping new victims find health and other support services. I want to take it up first, because we’ve been working together for a relatively long time: almost weekly for about a year. Several of their lead members had been part of a Wonn Refleksyon group a couple of years ago, and they had decided that it was important for all the field workers to learn how to use Wonn Refleksyon to lead groups.

We went straight through the first volume of texts, and then decided to take on the second volume. These texts are much more difficult, or at least more alienating. For example, they include simple, but technical texts in math and science. Various otherwise-successful groups in Haiti had been consistently shying away from them.

The women were not at all put off by these challenges. In fact, they have barely taken note of them. But this is for a very simple reason: They consistently find some angle in the text that relates to their experience, and they take their departure from it. For example, when we read a text from a Richard Dedekind book on number theory, it became the occasion for a discussion of arithmetic skills, why some educated members can manage numbers while their illiterate mothers, sisters, and aunts handle them with ease.

There’s nothing wrong with that. In fact, it’s very much what the texts were designed to do: give group members a way to raise and address issues important to their lives. There is, after all, no particular reason for the women to study number theory.

At the same time, I felt that the women were ready to make greater use of the texts. The texts can do more than just suggest topics that are important to us. They can give us a way to face them, a tool that furthers our shared inquiry. For example, the Dedekind text suggests a way to understand what arithmetic is and where it comes from. Specifically, it suggests that it’s a series of tools we human create. That challenging claim might be able to help us think about why some of us take to math more easily than others, and why it has little to do with our level of formal education, if, that is, we let it help us.

To let a text do more than suggest a line of inquiry means returning to its puzzles in the midst of our dialogue, to see how they might relate to the questions that interest. This is something the Kofaviv women are not yet inclined to do. Once they hit upon the issue that they want to focus on, they’re off to the races. They’re unlikely to look at the text again.

So I’ve been trying to wrestle with this. I’ve been trying to help them look harder, and more often at the words on the page in front of us. I’ve lead a couple of our meetings personally over the last few weeks, temporarily turning away, with their encouragement, from their routine, which is for them to take turns leading the group. It’s too early to say whether it’s having an effect. But a couple of weeks ago, we spent 90 minutes going line by line through a series of definitions from a geometry text, and when we were finished, they asked to spend a second week the same way. So the least I can say is that they are enjoying our shared effort.

Another of the groups I work with directly is the collection of guys I meet with in Cité Soleil. They are not yet organized in any official sense, though that may change soon. We still meet together as frequently as I can. Since I am increasingly spending nights in my room down there, the same room we meet in, it means we can have several hours together each week.

The experience is very much a new direction for me. The guys and I want to achieve something more than learning to learn together. Though Wonn Refleksyon plays an important role in our collaboration, it cannot be the core of it. There is, for one thing, their desire to learn English. They have been working hard, mainly with Héguel, but also with me, and some of them are improving quickly. Five or six of them speak pretty well, even though their experience of the language is still limited. I had to laugh the other day when Jimmy told one of the other guys, “If you don’t sing with me, I will beat you up.” It was clear as a bell, and though I would worry about the sentiment if I took it literally, the giggle in his voice made it perfectly clear that he was just having fun.

But what we’re really trying to achieve together is a transformation in the way they see and, eventually, live their lives. The centerpiece of this project is a business we’re trying to establish making and selling inexpensive solar power chargers for cell phones. In addition to all the external barriers to such an initiative – among other things: securing needed materials and start-up capital and getting the training we’ll need – there are internal barriers as well: the group needs a clear structure with transparent ways to make decisions. And these must be in writing. The group needs some kind of charter in order for it to open the little bank account that getting started will require. They have already decided that they do not want to leave group money in any individual’s hands, not even as an interim measure.

What has impressed me recently is the clarity and the patience with which the group is discussing these sometimes-complex questions. They are listening to one another and deciding things together, making real efforts to leave no one behind. Just a few months ago, two or three of them were simply shouting one another down, and that in a discussion of a folktale about two mice, some cheese, and a clever but sleazy monkey-judge. Though things will get harder when money, and therefore competing personal interests, enter the scene, for now, I am hopeful.

The last group I want to mention is really two very different groups. It is two sets of employees of the large Irish NGO, Concern Worldwide. One of them, on Lagonav, is close to the beginning of their experience of Wonn Refleksyon. The other, at its Petyonvil main office, is much farther along.

The Lagonav group has been struggling. That’s the main reason I was invited to join them. Its main leaders have been Milienne and Abner. Much of Concern’s Lagonav staff has been reluctant to invest itself too heavily in the process. They don’t yet see the point. Some, however, have been quite engaged. I was sitting with them for the first time.

The group has a lot of work to do. It consists of a wide range of staff members. Predominantly men, there are a few women. It includes engineers, community organizers, administrative, security, and custodial staff, and drivers. Though almost everyone participated in some way – whether just in the small group work or by speaking up, as many did, in the large group discussion – that discussion was very much dominated by three men, all of them higher-level staff.

Strangely enough, I think part of this has to do with the shape of the room we met in. It’s relatively long and narrow for the size of the group. So we sat in what became a thinnish rectangle, rather than in a circle. The two most dominant figures sat in the center of one of the long sides of the rectangle. The other sat in the middle of one of the short sides. I sat opposite him, on the floor. There wasn’t room for enough chairs. The arrangement left spaces in the corners where three or four participants we crowded in a way that very much seemed to take them out of the discussion. It was much easier for them to whisper to a neighbor. They couldn’t always see the face of the person talking, nor could they always be seen.

The constraints of the meeting place weren’t the only problem, however. There are problems in what I would call some participants’ “interest in listening” that the group will have to face. These problems were most evident at two moments.

At one point, a custodian quickly and quietly made a short contribution that he punctuated by saying “That’s what I think” before returning to silence. His remarks were greeting with derision by some of the other men, who patronizingly called him “doctor” after laughing audibly as he spoke. At another point, one of the dominant members made a long and loud point. When I asked what others in the group thought, he asserted, again loudly, that they agree, quoting a French saying that silence implies agreement. I told him he was nuts if he thought that silence in a conversation truly implies agreement, and there was uncomfortable laughter. The words I used were a little harsh.

Both these instances show how far the group is from knowing how to talk together. At this point, it’s not even clear that they want to talk together. But, if we can help them see what they have to gain from listening and help them then learn the patience they’ll need to do so, they will have gained a lot.

The Petyonvil Concern group is at another point of its development entirely. They have been meeting almost every week for over two months, and the consistency of their work is starting to pay off. Within the first few weeks, members of the group were making the space necessary to allow as many as possible to speaking, but more and more, they are now listening to each other, responding to each other. Rather than just politely taking turns – itself an important step – they are starting to work with the ideas that participants put forth.

At the same time, the group has divided itself ever more clearly into two subgroups. One subgroup participates every, or almost every, week, showing upon time almost on time to each of the sessions. The other is increasingly casual about the meetings, often missing meetings entirely. Its members simply aren’t sold on the value of the process.

I led the group personally last week, and I made a point of emphasizing Concern’s goals for the process, the reasons that Concern’s leadership had invited us to work with them. There are two: On one hand, they want to improve the quality of communication within the organization, especially between people who are at different places in the hierarchy, and, on the other, the want staff members who work in the field with grass roots organizations to learn a new way to lead meetings.

Then I talk just a little about the Wonn Refleksyon process generally. I said that there are two very different ways to express its fundamental goal. Usually, we frame that goal in terms of what we want for the group. We say that we want groups to learn how to share authority and responsibility equally among their members.

But there is another way to frame the same goal that takes individual progress as its starting-point. We can thus also say that we want each individual to be, as much as possible, both a leader of the group and a participant. I spoke a little about this second way of framing the goal, saying that a key part of achieving it is encouraging everyone to evaluate their own work as leader/participants. And so I asked members of the group to evaluate both themselves and the group.

That’s when things got interesting. The conversation became an attempt to figure out why some colleagues had been participating less and less in the activity. There was lots of interest in the question because those discussing it were a self-selected collection of folks who had already decided the activity was worth their time. But they wanted colleagues who had caught their enthusiasm to rejoin us.

The more we talked, the more urgent the question seemed to feel. When it became time for us to leave off evaluating ourselves and turn our attention to the week’s text for discussion, I asked whether they wanted to turn to the planned text or to keep working on the question before us, and the answer was clear. They wanted to keep talking about how they might improve the group. It was a kind of rebellion: They were not interested in turning to our planned activity until they had figured out the more important question they had on their minds.

And it led to a larger rebellion. The group decided that one of our problems is that some of their colleagues are thrown off by the texts we use. They might enjoy them – although some of them might not even do that – but the fact that the texts do not relate directly to their work has them thinking that the activity is, at best, supplementary, not really important for their work. I can be sure whether this is really the reason some people are dropping out of the activity, since the participants who have not been coming were, of course, not there to speak for themselves. But most of the folks who were at the meeting seemed convinced.

When I asked them to suggest texts that people would want to talk about, there were lots of very general suggestions – something about this, something about that – but, initially, nothing concrete.

Then I changed my tack. I asked whether anyone would volunteer to meet with me before the next meeting to look at possible texts and to plan how we would use one. I added that the volunteer would then co-lead the class with me. There was a prolonged silence. Eventually, I caught the eye of a member of the security staff named Ishmick. He had been vocal in expressing his opinion that the Wonn Refleksyon discussions are important, but also that they’re not catching on because too many people fail to see their importance. He had suggested a book we might find a text in – a kind of overall policy manual Concern works with – but didn’t name a text. When, however, I asked him outright whether he’d work with me, he cheerfully agreed.

So that’s where things stand: Ishmick and I must meet by Monday to talk through how we will lead the class. It’s nothing like anything I’ve done in Haiti. It’s like turning the asylum over to the inmates, as we like to say, but these inmates may know much better than I ever could just what course they need to take. And even if they don’t, they’ll probably learn more from experiencing the consequences of their intuition than they could ever learn from following mine. My job is to accompany them as they work things out. If I can help assure that they both evaluate their work explicitly and then act on their evaluations, they are certain to move forward.

Héguel’s mood dramatically soured half-way through our English lesson. This is extremely unusual, the first time I had seen it in the more than seven years of our acquaintance. But it turned out to be understandable enough.

The class itself could hardly have been the reason. It was a joy. As difficult as it might be to see the good that English classes are doing – even though some of the guys’ English is improving very quickly – the meetings we spend learning songs are always a pleasure. The guys had been working hard to master “I Can’t Help Falling in Love with You”, and the results were encouraging.

We are, however, making more serious progress as well. The Cité Soleil group has begun to focus its attention on an aspiration that is becoming ever clearer: They would like to establish a business. I came across an interesting project that might work well for them while I was visiting Oxford in December on behalf of Shimer College. A British engineer had developed a way to produce small solar electric panels very cheaply. They are large enough to run a little transistor radio.

Or, what seemed more to the point to us, to charge, though slowly, a cellular phone. Cell phones are spreading quickly through Haiti, but electricity is unavailable in many areas and unreliable in many others. The guys are very confident that cell phone owners will snap up solar chargers as quickly as they can produce them as long as we can keep the price down, and I’m pretty sure they’re right. They’ll be a couple of hurdles – getting some of the materials into Haiti, organizing the group in a manner that’s productive, but also transparent enough to prevent misunderstandings, and finding the small amount of start-up capital we’ll need to get the ball rolling. But it’s the most promising possibility we’ve come up with thus far. Héguel is especially excited about it, because he’s an experienced electrician and, so, he knows he can contribute in important ways to making the guys’ dream real.

Héguel and I have been friends since 1999, when he was one of my colleague Erik’s principal Creole teachers. Over the years, he’s become more and more involved in the Wonn Refleksyon education movement that we are part of here. He participates in regular events, and has co-led groups of new participants. He is the one that invited me to begin meeting with his young neighbors in Cité Soleil, where he has spent almost all his life, and is my apartmentmate when I stay there.

On Wednesday evening, I had an interesting conversation that he arranged. We chatted for almost an hour with one of the leaders of the militia that controls Belenkou, the area of Cité Soleil where the apartment sits. He dropped by on his motor scooter, on the way home from playing soccer.

Héguel and I had thought it was important for us to talk. Nothing can happen in the neighborhood without this man’s knowledge and approval. Trying to go around him or behind his back could only lead to trouble. It will be best – in this case, “best” means “safest” – if everything is out in the open, so that we can address any questions or concerns the guy might have.

So he came by, and we had a friendly talk. It was interesting to learn something about his life. Though he circulates freely within Cité Soleil, he cannot leave the area. He would be arrested. Since police don’t enter Cité Soleil, he’s safe there. He talked about a recent trip just outside of the neighborhood a few months ago. It was his first in two years. He talked with energy about how much of what he saw seemed new, how much of it seemed to have changed since he last left Cité Soleil. He made fun of his feeling that he didn’t really know his way around. He was a little discouraged because he hadn’t had the chance to see very much because it was dark – he wouldn’t risk even a short trip during the day.

He was most interested in discussing recent news. Early that same morning, UN forces had attacked the next neighborhood over from ours, an area called Boston. They had occupied an abandoned school, the one tall building left in the area, and thus acquired a vantage point that enables them to control a lot of movement.

Now people in Belenkou were worried about the UN’s next move. That very afternoon, UN soldiers had rolled through in tanks, distributing leaflets in Creole. The leaflets advised folks to go inside and get on the floor whenever they hear gunfire. Such warnings had been the preface to UN attacks into Belaire last year, and so people in Belenkou were scared – and still are.

The man we were talking with had, however, a more specific, a more tactical concern. The second-floor room we were sitting in was my bedroom, the group’s classroom. Héguel and I live in the only two-story building on the intersection leading into Belenkou. It would be the perfect spot for the UN if they wanted to occupy a building to have a good view of Belenkou. So the guy told us that he and his main partner were thinking about what they might do.

In the middle of our musical English class, Héguel heard a rumor that made it sound as though they had settled on a plan. A neighbor came by to tell him that the local militia had decided to tear down the building the next day. They would give residents the chance to collect their things – which is more than can be said for UN forces – but they would then rip the building down.

The move would make some sense for them. Though they have lots of big guns, they do not have the arms to stand up to a concerted UN attack. The UN has tanks and helicopters and is willing to use both. So they can’t hope to defend the building if it comes to an attack. And if the UN were to set up a base on the roof of the building, no one would be able to leave or enter Belenkou – or even circulate much within the neighborhood – without their seeing.

For Héguel and our downstairs neighbors, losing the building would be a real blow. I don’t know our neighbors’ stories, but I know something about Hèguel. He’s been living alone in the apartment for years. It’s inexpensive, and he’s comfortable there. He’s filled it over the years with the books and other personal possessions that shape his life. He’s worried because he doesn’t know where he would go if he loses his home; he doesn’t know where he might find living space he could afford. A simple room in most other neighborhoods of Port au Prince could cost almost ten times what Héguel pays. As they say, “location, location, location.” Not to mention how uncomfortable it would be for him to have to figure out a new life in a new, unfamiliar part of town.

He and I were in touch on and off all throughout the day on Friday, and as of the last time I spoke to him, no move had yet been made to tear down the house. Where there is life, there is hope.

Here’s the Belenkou Boys’ rendition of “I Can’t Help Falling in Love with You”:

A final note about vocabulary: I describe the man whom Héguel and I spoke with as a militia leader, but I’m not sure whether that’s the best term. He and his partners are regularly referred to as gang leaders by some, as community activists by others.

The latter term seems wrong, or at least incomplete, because it overlooks the fact that they are heavily armed. But the former makes it sound as though they are simply criminals, and I’m not sure that’s entirely fair either. In their own view, they are struggling against a foreign occupying force, and there is much in the UN’s behavior to justify such an attitude – whether or not it is, as a description, any more accurate than “gang” is for those for whom it’s used.

I don’t think I should be neutral at the cost of being truthful, but I don’t think I should pretend to understand more than I do. It makes naming things an uncomfortable business.

The group in Cité Soleil continues to show signs of flourishing, even if, as I have written before, I’m not sure towards what end. The guys will sit with me for three or four or even five hours at a time, engaged in one activity or another: the English class, Wonn Refleksyon, Business Skills Development, or just talking. It can be almost more than I can handle.

But I was a little concerned about one of the group’s members when I first saw him on Saturday. His name is Ari. He’s a dark, slender young man, probably around twenty. I hadn’t seen him for awhile. Just before the New Year, he had told me he would be missing a few meetings because his parents decided to send him to spend the holiday visiting his grandmother. I didn’t think anything of that. It seemed natural enough. I wished him a good trip.

Now that he was back, though, he seemed different: gloomy and much thinner. And though I don’t know his grandmother, I’ve known enough other grandmothers – including two wonderful ones of my own and my mother and aunt, who are grandmothers to an appreciative younger generation – that I was surprised to see that a teenager would lose weight while visiting his.

Saturday things became clear. As soon as I arrived in Cité Soleil, after the long trip from Matènwa, Ari took my backpack and walked up to my room with me. As I went in to greet Héguel, Ari started sweeping my room. I was grateful: I was tired and the pack was heavy. It felt nice to be getting un-requested support from a young friend. I asked him how he was, and then noticed he was close to tears. He motioned me to sit down next to him as he said he wasn’t doing so well.

He asked me whether I had noticed how skinny he had gotten. He lifted his sleeveless basketball short, as though things weren’t otherwise clear enough. I immediately admitted that I had. Though he was already skinny – the “slender” I used above was really just a euphemism – he was now terribly, terribly thin, his cheekbones protruding, the flesh just below his eyes sunken, the skin drawn around his elbows and knees. I asked him whether he was sick, and he said he wasn’t.

Then he told me the following story: Ari earns a few gouds now and then by pulling one of the large transport carts that carry merchandise around Port au Prince. One sees the carts in cities throughout Haiti. They look a little like giant, elongated wheelbarrows, with two wheels on an axel at one end, and two handles at the other. The guy working puts the two handles under his arms, and pulls the wheelbarrow behind him. They’ll be piled high with 30-40 cases of bottled soft drinks, a couple dozen 110-pound sacks of flour or sugar, stacks of crates of used clothing, or various sorts of building materials. For a really heavy load, a second and sometimes even a third man will push from behind. I had heard that Ari sometimes did this work, when he’s not fixing motorcycle tires or washing those same cycles with rainwater he collects for the purpose – anything for a little honest income.

Just before the New Year, someone had hired him to buy and deliver a load of ice. Haitians like their drinks cold, and since electricity is unreliable, they depend on ice companies that make the ice with big diesel generators. Wholesalers drive around in flat-bed trucks with enormous blocks of the stuff selling to retailers. Ari’s client had given him 330 Haitian dollars, which is 1650 gouds, or about $44 US in cash, and sent him off.

That’s when disaster struck. Ari somehow lost the money. He couldn’t tell me how. He simply said that it disappeared in his hands. I didn’t have the heart to press him. Just speaking to me about the matter was manifestly causing him such pain. I had to make it worse, because I could hardly hear him. His usually lively, penetrating voice was down to a bare whisper.

The client was furious, threatening to have Ari killed. The trip to his grandmother’s had been an escape ploy, a way for him to flee to safety while his father, who was willing to stand behind his son, negotiated a repayment plan with the angry client. The father could no more produce $44 US all at once than the son could.

Ari was so upset, about the danger he was facing and the burden he had placed on his dad, that he had stopped eating. And he was withering away. So he got up the courage to ask me whether I might be able to help in some way.

I happened to have a lot of Haitian cash with me, several hundred dollars worth of gouds. This is much more than I would usually carry, but someone had just paid back a for-me-large loan I had made. So, there was no question as to whether I could give him the money he needed. Though money is shorter for me right now than it normally is, things haven’t gotten to the point that I can’t afford to give someone $44 in a jam.

But I was frozen at first. I told him that I would definitely do something for him, but I couldn’t right away say what. He went downstairs, and I went across to Héguel’s room to ask for advice.

What had paralyzed me initially was the following consideration: Ever since I came to Cité Soleil I had consistently told the guys I work with that I would invest all the time I could spare, but that I would not put money into our work, that I simply couldn’t. I was worried that if I became a source of handouts, we would not be able to accomplish anything: The genuine and in some cases even urgent needs of the people around me in Cité Soleil so distantly outstrip any financial help I could hope to bring. Setting myself up as a source of money would uselessly distract us from the difficult but perhaps achievable task of organizing ourselves to make small, sustainable progress together. After the first weeks, the couple of the guys who had initially asked me for money stopped doing so.

So I was worried that I was opening a door that I had only just been able to close. Once it gets around that I gave one of the kids money for something, why wouldn’t others start turning to me as well? So I had decided that I would stick by the principle that I wouldn’t give handouts. It’s a good principle, as principles go.

But it doesn’t feel right. I am living and working in the midst of a community that is terribly poor – poor enough, for example, that $44 can be, very literally, a life-threatening loss. It represents more than a month’s income for many of the Haitian families who live on as little as a dollar a day. A few days earlier, for example, I had spoken with a couple of young guys who were running off at 5:30 in the morning, in their best clothes, to apply for factory work that pays 70 gouds a day, or a little less than $2 US. At that rate, they would not earn the $44 in a month, much less be able to accumulate $44 in savings. And they were very much hoping for the jobs.

The reality is that, whatever I think of my salary, as convenient as it would be to earn somewhat more, I am stunningly wealthy compared with many of those around me. I cannot pretend to be living and working in solidarity with them if I hide this simple truth about our lives.

So I gave Ari the money. He and Héguel then had a long talk about how Ari might be able to handle things so that word does not spread that I’m the one he got it from. I myself am skeptical. I can’t imagine that others won’t hear, or at least figure out, that that’s what happened.

But that’s ok, I suppose. Facing such requests seems reasonably to belong to living in Haiti. To avoid hearing them or, what might be worse, to avoid giving them individual consideration, would be cowardly. Or, at least, unrealistic.

I was afraid something of the sort would happen.

Two-thirds of the way through my first experience as a fully-fledged substitute sixth-grade teacher, I was separating two kids who were ready to exchange blows. It was easy enough to do. I simply changed seats with one of them. They weren’t very intent on fighting. But that things had gotten that far didn’t exactly show strong great classroom management skills on my part.

I was taking their class because their teacher is a member of a theatre troop. The troop had been invited to perform in another part of Haiti. The teacher had to miss a day of classes, and her sixth-graders, who are preparing for the national graduation exam they will take this summer, couldn’t really afford to lose the day. Though I doubted my ability to manage a class of twelve and thirteen-year-olds, I couldn’t well say no.

Passing the national sixth-grade exam in Haiti is a big deal. Being in school at all is a right that not all Haitian children can take advantage of. Though the Haitian constitution specifies a right to free primary education, and even makes it compulsory, the reality is that a third of Haitian children never go to school at all and fewer than half of primary-school-age children are in school at any given time.

Of the minority who make it through primary school to take the sixth-grade exam, the percentage that passes is not very high. Though there are elite schools that are able to get virtually every student through, there are many schools where only a few or only very few pass. I’ve written before about my godson’s cousin Vunet, who failed the exam for the second time last year – together with his twin sister and all the other sixth-graders from his school. (See: Vunet).

The Matènwa Community Learning Center takes the exam seriously, though it’s an uncomfortable fit for them and it’s not easy. The school emphasizes learning based, at every level and in every way it can, on understanding gained through practical investigation and on the reality the school’s children face every day. The philosophy fits poorly with the exam, which can tend to emphasize skills and knowledge very much abstracted from life on Lagonav. Many of the schools that get high percentages of children through the exam do it by putting a premium on memorization. In Mèt Anténor’s school, near my home, Anténor consistently gets a high percentage through by spending a lot of time throughout the sixth-grade year testing the kids with old exams and forcing them to memorize what they don’t know.

The Matènwa school has been trying to do things the hard way. They work with the kids in the way they think best for their intellectual and social development, and hope that a consequence will be strong showing on the test.

The results have been mixed. Generally, results for schools on Lagonav have been terrible, and the Matènwa children have done better, but they are by no means passing at a rate the school can be satisfied with. And the school’s staff recognizes the fact that, whatever it thinks of the exam, it has to take it very seriously. Like it or not, it is the gateway to further education for the children of Haiti. Kids who fail cannot go to secondary school.

So they really work hard at it, providing the kids all the time and support they can. For one thing, the have the kids come to school at 6:00 AM, two hours before the other children. And they offer extra afternoon sessions whenever they can. All this extra time is referred to as “kou siplimantè”, or “supplementary classes”.

I first started working with the kids in the afternoons. A very bright but mischievous boy named Josias had asked in his class’s name whether I would do some math with them. He had seen me doing math with his teachers. I readily agreed. I enjoy doing simple math with young people. I’ve discovered that I can help Haitian kids through about the eleventh grade. After that, they start getting beyond what I can easily remember.

The Matènwa kids were doing what looked like a kind of pre-algebra. Here is a sample problem: If seven pumpkins cost $35, how many would ten cost?

They have learned a way to set the problems up by drawing a four-square grid. In the upper left-hand square, the write “7”, and in the upper right-hand one the write “35”. On the lower left-hand side they write “10”, and they draw a question mark in the lower right-hand one.

They then make a large “x,” connecting the diagonal values, and they “cross-multiply.” Under the grid, they can thus write:

35*10 = 7*?

They are taught to “get the question mark by itself” by moving the 7 over to the left-hand side. They then have:

35*10/7 = ?

So they can calculate the answer.

The problem is that, though most of them can remember the procedure pretty reliably, it’s not clear how much of it they understand. For example, most do not know that what they’re doing when they isolate the question mark is dividing **both** sides of the equation by seven, and that, in general, they are always free to treat both sides of an equation in the same way. Their teacher wasn’t around, so I wasn’t even sure what I should expect them to understand. Maybe it’s ok for them to learn the process first.

In any case, we spent a couple of long afternoons working together, so by Friday we had a developed a report. The first thing I noticed was that the kids, who for years had been calling me “Steven” or “Estiven” or “Estiv” were suddenly calling me “Mèt la”, or “master”, the standard title for a teacher who is male.

And there was a lot in the group’s dynamics, in the ways in which the kids worked with and related to one another, that I was figuring out on the fly. To take one example: the kids have a competitive edge. They enjoy putting one another on the spot. They liked it when each person who went to work out a problem at the blackboard got to create the next problem and choose who had to solve it. We were able to spend a lot of time cycling through the class, as each put a progressively harder question on the board for the next.

But along with the competitiveness, there is an equally intense sense of solidarity. It is very hard to evaluate what each one can do because they cannot resist working together. As soon as one of them starts to struggle, other will immediately jump in. I very often asked them not to, but my words had no effect. They couldn’t seem to help themselves.

I eventually got around the problem by creating a question that would be different for each of them. I told them to imagine that their mother had bought them sneakers for a certain price, and then asked them to calculate how much it would cost to purchase sneakers for all their other siblings as well. The question wasn’t as straightforward as I had thought it would be: Some of them needed to know whether half-siblings and step-siblings should be included as well. But I left it up to their own discretion. By the end, we had spent an awful lot of enjoyable and productive time going back and forth between work at the blackboard and work in their little notebooks.

The day I finally took them was, fortunately for me, a half-day. The school sends kids home early every Friday to allow for faculty development. I would have been worried about spending a longer day with them, because my bag of tricks is so limited. Without significant preparation, I can do nothing but math with the kids, and it’s hard to make them spend a whole day that way. But I was glad for the time I was with them. I gave me a larger, though still very incomplete sense, of the challenges the school teachers I work with face.

And the kids are very nice. It’s beautiful to watch them get new stuff down. Young people wear their learning so vividly on their sleeves.

Some things are handled quite differently in Haiti than they would be in the States. There’s so much less infrastructure here, so much less governance, so many fewer public services. We in the States can tend to take a lot for granted.

I was on the way back to Pòtoprens on Friday from Sodo, a small town in the Central Plateau. I was a little annoyed, because my host’s planning had cost me a day at a very busy moment. I had been in Sodo since Wednesday morning, and had asked my host, at that time, to simply help me get to Mibalè Thursday afternoon, after we finished our work. I would sleep there, and then take public transportation to Pòtoprens early Friday morning. I could use the evening in Mibalè to meet some people I wanted to talk with, and would be able to travel back into Pòtoprens early enough to do most of a day’s work and then still ride up to Ka Glo by a reasonable hour. I needed to get home to make sure everything was ready for the workshop I was to host in my house in all day Saturday.

My hosts would hear nothing of it. They would drive my all the way to Pòtoprens early Friday morning. They had brought to Sodo, and they would take me home.

By Thursday evening, they were telling me that I would no longer be able to leave first thing Friday morning. They were down to only one truck. They would, however, send me to Pòtoprens when their truck returned from an errand in Mibalè.

When the truck got back, they told me that they could only take me to Mibalè. They could not afford to send their only truck away for the half-day it would take to get to Pòtoprens and back.

So I was sitting in the back of a pick-up truck that I had found in Mibalè, and pouting because I hadn’t been on my way half a day sooner. I got the last seat as the pick-up pulled off towards Pòtoprens. I’d get to the Kwadeboukèt station by early afternoon, and would be home by 4:00. Not ideal, but workable.

The road from Mibalè to Kwadeboukèt winds over a mountain, rising out of the Plateau and then descending into the so-called “Cul de Sac,” the coastal plain that Pòtoprens sits in. It’s a dry, dusty part of the country during this rainless time of the year. Water sources can be a long way away for the folks that have to get their drinking, bathing, washing, and cooking water everyday. Young boys often try to shorten their trip by hopping onto the back of trucks and busses that drive by. They stand on the fenders and hang on. Some drivers will chase them off, but most just let them ride.

Of course it’s dangerous. And when we got to a level part of the road just short of Trianon, we saw why.

There was a large flat-bed truck, pointed towards Mibalè, parked in to middle of the road. Its engine was still running. A few yards behind it was a boy, eleven or twelve perhaps, sitting in the dust at the side of the road. He was wincing in pain as two middle-aged women and a pack of smaller children looked on. He had jumped onto the truck for a ride to water – his gallon jug was still in his hand – but he fallen and had, to all appearances, broken his leg.

The truck’s driver had intended to simply drive on to Mibalè. It was not, he thought, his problem or his fault. He had told the boy to get down, but the boy hadn’t listened. The two women were market women who had hired the truck to take them and merchandise they had bought in Pòtoprens back home with them. When the driver started to continue on his way, they had gotten of the truck, refusing to go on. They wanted him to take the boy back to Tè Wouj, where he could get medical attention.

It was a stalemate. The driver wouldn’t turn around, but he wouldn’t continue without the two women either.

The women explained the situation to our driver. They asked him to take the boy to Tè Wouj, but he said that it wouldn’t be right. The boy should not have jumped on the truck, but the fact that he did made him the truck driver’s responsibility. He took out a notebook, and went to talk with the other driver.

There was a lot of yelling between them. It turned out that one of the reasons that the truck driver was reluctant to return was that he was driving without license plates on his truck. He was worried that stopping in Tè Wouj – a market town he had just driven through where there is a UN military base and a Haitian police station – could mean no end of trouble.

But they argued and they argued, and finally the truck driver gave in. He turned his rig around, and headed back to Tè Wouj, about 45 minutes away. Our pick-up could have made the trip much more quickly, but our driver refused to pass. He didn’t really trust the other driver to keep his word, so he followed him all the way.

There’s an amusing scene at the beginning of //The Man without Qualities//, Robert Musil’s massive unfinished novel. A couple, strolling through pre-World-War-One Vienna, is witness to a traffic accident. They see a man struck by a speeding truck. The couple looks on in awe as a crowd of witnesses makes way for the clean, professional-looking ambulance attendants who whisk the victim swiftly away in their bright, new machine. The narrator can only remark, “How admirably everything was functioning!”

That was 1913. Here, it is 2007, and the boy on the road through the Central Plateau – National Highway #3 – has nothing of the advantages of the book’s nameless victim. Here in Haiti, not everything is functioning so admirably.

At the same time, the market women and the pick-up driver handled things very well given the means available to them. I certainly would not have known how to accomplish what they managed to do.