Wonn Refleksyon depends on three elements.

That it depends on participants goes without saying. It needs a group of people willing to try to be at least reasonably good to one another.

It also depends on a discussion leader, someone who wants to lead by listening first, speaking second. Someone who strives to nurture the discussion’s shape, but who also enters into it with curiosity and openness.

The third element is the text. It needs to do two things. The first, the most urgent, the most obvious, is that it must interest those who are asked to read and discuss it. It must invite them to share their thoughts, their experiences, and their questions. Wonn Refleksyon aims, in the first place, to help people accustom themselves to sharing their own thoughts and to listening to others’. It needs to make it easy for someone to speak up, and the most important tool it has is a text that engages.

The second thing a text must do it support participants as their inquiry deepens. The goal Wonn Refleksyon sets for itself goes beyond just creating occasions for people to express their thoughts, beyond nurturing the habit of listening. Expressing one’s thoughts and listening to others both aim at a further goal: learning to learn together.

It’s impressive enough to watch a group whose participants have learned to share the time they spend together. It’s so common in most groups we work with for one or two members to dominate, for them to interrupt each other, for several to talk at once.

But the fact that participants take turns speaking doesn’t mean that they’re really listening to one other, much less learning from one another.

A well-chosen text can help. It can introduce complexities into a conversation, puzzles that give those talking about it something to chew on. It would, of course, be possible for a group of people to jump directly into questioning one another about the thoughts and experiences that they decide to share, but it can be hard to decide to do so.

But what do you do when you’re working with a group of people who cannot read? We thought we had found a good answer when we created a book in which discussable images alternate with Haitian proverbs. The proverbs engage Haitians, especially rural Haitian adults, quickly. They are so present in Haitians’ everyday speech. And the images do what the proverbs can’t: They provide perplexing details that participants can ask one another about, that invite them to try to search for answers together.

The problem is that we have not yet found a way to mass-produce that book. All the copies that we have so far were made by hand. Two women, Donna Struck and Tina Shirmer, used a first-rate photocopy machine at Dynapace Corporation, Donna’s company, to produce them one-by-one. They’ve sent us a couple hundred of the books, but as generous as they’ve been with their time and money, it cannot solve the problem over the long-term. We need a way to reproduce the books in Haiti and the funds to do it with. We will be working on the problem in the months to come.

But in the meantime, we need to be able to continue to work with non-readers. The literacy rate in Haiti is low, about 53% according to a CIA website. I don’t know how to estimate the percentage of non-readers among those we aim to work with and among who would be interested in working with us, but it’s certainly much higher. So we need to have a good approach to offer them.

And that’s why I find myself on Lagonav this week. I’m participating in a workshop for literacy teachers who work for AAPLAG, the Association of Activists and Peasants of Lagonav. These literacy teachers, most of whom are new to the field, have been working four days each week with new literacy learners since late August, and they came to AAPLAG’s center in Nanjozen for two days of meetings and further training. In January, AAPLAG’s leadership wants them to begin holding Wonn Refleksyon discussions with their students, and they asked me to figure out an approach I could teach them to use.

As much as I would like to offer them the book of proverbs and images, it’s not available. And that’s where driving the dog away comes in. One popular Haitian proverb is “//Se ak baton nan men ou, ou pouse chen//.” That means, “It’s with the stick you have that you drive the dog away.” It’s like saying that you play the hand you’re dealt. You can only use a tool that you have. We don’t have the book, and we’ve found no other way to introduce large quantities of appropriate images.

But proverbs are everywhere in Haiti, so I decided to see whether groups that use nothing but Haitian proverbs could flourish. With help from some friends, I assembled a short list of proverbs. There are thousands of them, but I settled for 22. I organized them according to increasing length and complexity of language. The first is “Fè koupe fè,” which means “iron cuts iron.” The last is “Se lè koulèv mouri, ou wè longè l,” which means “it’s when the snake’s dies that you see its length.” I imagined that such an order would mean that they could do double-duty as texts for Wonn Refleksyon and reading lessons as well. The teachers will write a proverb on the blackboard and help participants decipher it. She or he will then lead the group through a Wonn Refleksyon activity based on the proverb.

The workshop itself seemed promising. The literacy teachers took to talking about the proverbs right away, even though they themselves reported that they were surprised that they had as much to say as they in fact did. Not only that, but one of them led a sample class for a group of literacy learners while the rest of us observed. It went swimmingly. The women in the class – it was, in fact, all women – spoke fluidly and revealingly about the proverb.

The one we had chosen for the experiment was “Dèyè mòn gen mòn,” or “beyond mountains there are mountains.” It brought out detailed descriptions from two of the women about how they had been struggling to raise their children once they had been abandoned be men who immigrated to the States. Other women had other experiences to share. We were all excited about the results.

On the other hand, there was very little sign that the women wanted to move from simply sharing experiences to questioning one another and, so, learning together. And I don’t have much hope that they will take this next step this year. The proverbs don’t really support it, and the short time I spent with the literacy teachers wasn’t enough to help them see how to encourage it.

But that might not be so bad. Haitians also say “Tipa tipa zwazo fè nich.” That means “step by step the bird makes its nest.” We should probably be willing to take one step at a time.

We may have lost the space we were using for the larger English class in Cité Soleil. We had been holding the class in a school whose owner had been willing to let us meet in one of his classrooms. It is a very serviceable space: large and open, and therefore flexible. It’s on the second floor of a school building right on the main road between Belekou and Boston, two of Cité Soleil’s major neighborhoods. The road is partially paved in places, so it’s often possible to get there without trudging through the ankle-deep mud that’s almost everywhere in Cité Soleil.

When I was down there the other day, the guys explained that there is a problem. The owner isn’t sure that he wants to continue to leave the keys with one of his students, the kid who then lets us in. He himself lives more than an hour away, in Kwadeboukèt, so unless he leaves the keys, we won’t be able to use his school.

I can’t much blame him. On one hand, it’s probably hard for him to believe that there’s no money changing hands around our class, and he might reasonably figure that, if there’s business being done, the owner of the site should get a share. He might also be worried about having thirty or so assorted young men using his building when he’s not there. Though he doesn’t seem to store anything of value at the school, the building itself must represent a large investment.

As we were talking about the problem, one of the less regular members of the class approached us. He seems nice enough, but I rarely have spoken to him. I tend to shy away because he’s often heavily armed. This time was no exception. His handgun was not the least bit concealed.

We explained the situation to him, and he said that it wasn’t a problem at all. “For example,” he said, “the lock on the door could be lost. It might just disappear. Of course, we’d have to buy another one to replace it, but then we’d have a key.” It was the kind of conversation you might expect to hear on a TV show.

The usual procedure when I am to enter Cité Soleil is for me to call when I get to the Gonaïves bus station to confirm whether it’s safe to come in. If Héguel says it’s alright, I take a motorcycle from the station to his house, less than a five-minute ride. I could walk, but an experienced motorcycle driver is more likely to notice and be able to avoid any problems. It seems like a prudent way to go about things.

Saturday when I got there, I found a bunch of guys I didn’t know working on the street. They were being supervised by a couple of very big men dressed in camouflage fatigues. I greeted them, and walked straight up to Héguel’s apartment. I would usually spend a few minutes on the street corner first, chatting with the guys who hang out there, but the work being done seemed to have driven the usual guys away.

I told Héguel how glad I was to see them working on his street, and he just smiled. I asked who was supervising the work, and he confirmed my guess. Still smiling, he mentioned the name of the man who leads the local armed force. I asked Héguel why he was smiling, and he said that I had misunderstood what was happening. There was no street repair going on. The guys were, instead, ripping up the pavement to dig a ditch across the street that would, they hoped, block UN tanks. Just a few days earlier, armed irregulars in another part of Cité Soleil had somehow overrun a UN tank, chasing off the soldiers inside it and stripping of it of weapons and other supplies. The UN was said to be displeased. There had been heavy fighting, with lots of casualties, in Bwa Néf, an area on the other side of Cité Soleil – a long way from where I was – and local leaders were nervous.

My work in Cité Soleil continues. In a sense, I meet with two distinct groups there. One is made up of about thirty guys, many of whom attend only irregularly. They come with varying frequency to free English classes that Héguel, a long-time Haitian friend, runs three times a week. I try to attend at least once. Then there is a smaller inner circle, about fifteen consistently-unarmed guys whom I meet with before Héguel’s English class. We sit in a circle in a small room across from Héguel’s apartment. We sit on the floor because there’s only one chair. We do various things together: additional English work, unstructured group discussions, Wonn Refleksyon, and more.

The whole thing started because Héguel had spent years talking casually with the young guys who hang around in his neighborhood. He likes them, and they seem to look up to him as an older, distinctly upright man. He asked me to talk with them because they were expressing to him their sense that they lack direction. He felt sorry for them, because he came to see them as nice kids who are managing to stay out of gangs but who aren’t figuring how else to move themselves forward. They seem stuck. And he doesn’t like the way that locals look down on them.

He thought that meeting with them might help me better understand an important side of Haiti that I’ve had little contact with and that, if the guys and I hit it off, our conversations might help them find some of the direction they need.

From the very start, I’ve been reluctant to approach them with much of an agenda. Their lives are very different from anything that I have ever experienced, and it would be crazy for me to believe that I know what they should do. But I was a little surprised and a little disappointed when they told me that their first interest was in learning English. On one hand, it’s a little hard for me to see just what it will do for them. They are unlikely to have tourists around them any time soon, and jobs that require English are likely to require other things they don’t have: like advanced education, good connections, and decent clothes. On the other, English teaching is not a kind of teaching that I’ve enjoyed. But the guys were clear enough about their interest in English, so Héguel and I – mainly Héguel – put something together for them.

We also just started a Business Development class. I had told them about Fonkoze, and about the various educational programs it offers, and they were particularly interested in Business Development. Several of them have little businesses they depend upon to keep money in their pockets. One is, for example, a candy maker. Another raises pigeons. A third makes gas lamps. Two of them work as a team, fixing motorcycle tires. Others who have no work would be very happy to start something.

Fonkoze’s Business Development program emphasizes control of one’s business: how to keep track of investment, inventory, income, and expenses. Such control is unusual in Haiti, where it’s much more common to run a small business straight out of one’s own pocket, without a clear sense of where money comes and goes. The guys were surprised to see how much money the candy maker has invested in his business, and they were interested to see just why it’s important for him to keep track of such a thing.

Their initial reaction was that, since it is his business, there’s no reason to set his personal money apart. I found myself in the for-me-surprising position of explaining how businesses work. I spoke of how easy it would be to be wrong about whether a business is actually helping its owner unless the owner knows how much money they have invested and how much they have removed. When he realized what I was saying, Harold, who used to have a small business making mattresses, chimed in his support. His business had, to all appearances, been going swimmingly. His mattresses sold well; money was coming in. Then he discovered that rent on the space he was using was eating up everything he had. Before he knew it, the business died because he couldn’t pay the rent.

When members of the inner group said that they wanted to know more about my work in Haiti, Héguel and I took that as an invitation to introduce them to Wonn Refleksyon, too. We’ve been holding regular Wonn Refleksyon discussions with them ever since. These discussions are designed to help them learn to work together more effectively. The guys enjoy them and are, I believe, benefiting. Though they still like to argue more than is to my taste, they’ve already gotten better about encouraging one another to speak.

And getting better at working together is important if we are to make progress in what still seems to me to be our most important activity: unstructured conversation. I try to make sure that we spend a certain amount of time whenever I am with them just chatting about whatever is on their minds.

They usually want to talk about stuff that’s going on in their families and about the always-shifting security situation. They have all grown up right in Cité Soleil, so they’ve lived all their lives around rape and shootings and other violence.

Let no one imagine, however, that they are, as we might say, “used to it.” Nothing could be clearer than how hard they find the periods – sometimes more frequent, sometimes less – of heavy gunfire to bear.

Saturday, we spent a lot of time talking about two t-shirts. My main collaborator in Haiti, Frémy, and I had created a t-shirt that says “Let’s destroys the guns.” He had printed several of them, and I wore one once to Cité Soleil. The guys liked it, and I agreed to give them the two other I had. So I brought them with me on Saturday.

When it came time to distribute them, Salomé made an important point: The armed guys who are all around them might be upset to see the t-shirt. They might think that we were judging them. This partially echoed Héguel’s concern: Our activity had been accepted by the local leader as an educational activity. If he thought we were creating a political movement, he might think differently.

As the dialogue continued, the general feeling was that the higher-level members of the local force were unlikely to be too worried about t-shirts. On the other hand, lower-level members were something different. These lower-level soldiers are young men, not very different from the guys in our group. Except that they had chosen to take up arms, to join the local militia, in order to get ahead. Farid and Lele both reported their sense that guys like that resent them because they manage to stay away from such things, and they thought that wearing anti-gun t-shirts would only aggravate that resentment. And they are understandably reluctant to aggravate young men who carry guns. After much discussion, we decided to put the shirts away.

I’m not sure what I’m looking for in these conversations. I’d like to say that I’m hoping that they’ll eventually use them as a path towards organizing themselves to change their neighborhood and their lives. But I need to be careful. More than anything, I’d like for them to feel better about themselves, for them to develop some confidence, a sense of where they want to go and how they might get there, and anything I do to share my own vision could very easily undermine their initiative.

And so I wait. We keep chatting, and I keep hoping.

I think we’re moving forward. Our conversations get more serious, more quickly. More of them speak more freely. They listen to one another and encourage one another more than they did at the start.

But it’s hard to tell. Progress depends on having a goal. Without a clear sense of where you’re going, it’s hard to know which direction is forward and which direction is back. The guys and I are very far from knowing what our objective really is, and the environment in which the work is progressing – that is, at least, what I want to say it’s doing – the violence, the poverty, makes it difficult to hope for very much.

On the other hand, on a day when a tank barrier was being constructed in front of our classroom, 25 young men spent fours hours with me learning more about how to run a business, working on their English, and talking sensibly about the possible effects of t-shirts. The preparations that were being made for a possible military invasion – I don’t know what else to call it – might seem as though they ought to have been a distraction, but they turned out to be nothing of the kind. The guys’ untiring interest in learning and their openness to discovering something new are considerable lessons to me. If nothing else, I am making progress in their hands.

It’s surprising to discover how many people believe that Newton’s laws of motion are false.

I’m not thinking of people who’ve read Einstein or other modern thinkers and who have learned to see the laws’ limitations. I’m thinking rather of people who discover, as soon as they begin to think about the laws seriously, that they just aren’t convincing.

Yesterday’s discussion at Kofaviv offered plenty of instances. We spoke, among other things, about the way Newton explains one of the laws, that for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction. The women especially wanted to talk about an example he uses: that if a horse pulls a rock, the rock pulls the horse just as much. Some of the women thought the claim simply absurd: Rocks, they said, do not pull horses. Most of those who opposed that objection did so by denying Newton’s claim in another way: They said that a rock could pull a horse if it was big enough and if it was falling, rather than sitting still. But that very defense of Newton’s claim still implied that either the rock or the horse would do the pulling, not that a paired action and reaction, always equal, would always be taking place.

As the meeting began, it had felt a little odd that we were to talk about Newton’s laws at all. We meet on a patio in front of Kofaviv’s main office, and that patio is also a waiting room. Women and girls who come to Kofaviv for the services it offers sit along the wall, outside of our circle, while we work. Kofaviv, the Commission of Women Victims for Victims, is a group of women who have suffered rape and other violence. They organize a range of counseling, medical, and advocacy services for other rape victims. So the women sitting with us on the patio as we hold our meeting are rape victims, young and old, and their presence and the images it calls to mind force one to ask whether a text on classical mechanics is really worth talking about. Shouldn’t we be more focused on the difficult problems they face every day?

That’s a serious, not a rhetorical question, and taking it seriously means asking what the texts we use in our discussions are for. Folktales from around the world and Haitian proverbs might not seem to force the question quite as starkly, because they let us feel comfortable as we talk about them in a way that Newton’s laws do not. Tales can be entertaining and, in Haiti, even when proverbs are curious, they’re always familiar. But neither relates more directly to the horrible reality the Kofaviv women have all suffered than the Newton does. The best way to explain what the texts we use are for is not a lot of theory, but an account of the work we did on Newton, so I want to talk about that meeting.

I rarely lead these meetings now. Usually, they are led by volunteers from among the women. We’ve been working together since February, and it has seemed appropriate, even important, to encourage them to take increasing control of our activity. The meeting on Newton’s laws was led by Adjanie, a young woman expecting her first child. I had worked with her two weeks ago, and she had run off every 15 minutes or so to throw up, but she seems now to be over that.

Adjanie started us off, even before having us read the text, by asking us to think about what a law is. She invited us to sit quietly for a few minutes as we thought. After about three minutes, she had us divide ourselves into groups of three or four to discuss our answers.

These conversations were animated and interesting. Though I was in one out of the four small groups, it was easy to see that everyone was very much involved in the work. Small group work is an extremely important part of what we do. It allows several people to speak at once – one in each group – and so facilitates broad participation; it encourages quieter participants, who might initially be afraid to speak in front of a large group, to start talking in a less intimidating environment; and it forces participants to start talking to one another without the group leader’s mediation.

After about 15 minutes, Adjanie had each group give a report. This led to a short conversation about how laws help us and hinder us in our lives. The women drew examples from their own experience: They spoke as mothers of making laws for their kids, as citizens of the laws their political leaders make, and as victims of ways in which various kinds of armed men make rules in the neighborhoods where they live.

Adjanie was now ready to read us the short text. She asked another woman to reread it for us, and then invited us to think about it individually as we read it a third time in silence. After a couple of moments, she started us off by asking what we thought of Newton’s laws.

For the next half-hour, we talked about whether there are exceptions to the laws, whether a rock can pull a horse, whether the right way to characterize the effect of gravity is to say that it makes objects “fall” or makes them “descend,” whether natural laws are like the laws that people make, whether natural laws are useful in our lives, and whether we can throw rocks in a straight line. In other words, we spoke of everything from details in the texts to broader issues.

What was most striking was how the group spoke. Participation was broad. Nearly everyone talked in the course of thirty minutes even though only one person spoke at a time. The women listened to one another, responding to one another directly and encouragingly. The couple of times that the conversation degenerated, Adjanie said nothing but “Remember the rules of the game,” and order was quickly restored.

The text had given the women something to talk about. It raised questions that invited them to talk about their experiences – like whether natural laws and human laws are useful – and other questions that simply invited them to let their imaginations go to work – like whether a rock can pull a horse. Both sorts of questions provided opportunities for the women to work together: listening, encouraging, questioning, responding.

The result of the work was all the more striking on Tuesday because it was my second meeting of the day. Earlier I had met with a group of Haitian professionals, the staff of an important NGO. It was the first of planned weekly meetings, and the text we used was an engaging little folktale. These professionals interrupted each other constantly. They spoke two or three at a time. They spoke to me, the group’s leader, rather than to one another. There was, in other words, very little listening, very little cooperation.

The women of Kofaviv have made very good use of ten months of texts. The texts, both the excerpt from Newton’s laws and the others, have helped them learn to speak with one another, to listen to one another, to work together. If all groups worked together the way the Kofaviv women do, the world would be a very different place.

Saturdays can be physically challenging. On the weeks when I visit Lagonav, I generally rise at about 2:00 AM so I can get down the mountain in time for an early boat. About the trip down the mountain, suffice it to say that, if there’s a moon and if I don’t have much baggage, walking a few hours is a tempting alternative to the bone-rattling truck ride. When I get to Pòtoprens, I go straight into Site Solèy, where I have an increasing range of groups and individuals who are asking me for my time. I grab a cup of coffee when I get there, and am then on my feet, talking with young people, most of the day.

The contrast between the two communities could hardly appear to be greater. Both are poor, but that’s where the similarity stops. Matènwa, my base on Lagonav, is a very rural place; Site Solèy is a crowded urban slum.

At the same time, a series of experiences in the two places over a couple of days brought to light a single principle. It’s an assumption that guides almost all of my work, so it’s interesting to me to see it exemplified in different ways. One way to state the principle is like this: People make progress through their own activity.

I spent some of Thursday afternoon with Catheline. She’s a first-grader at the Matènwa Community Learning Center. An orphan since her father died, her mother sent her and her older sister to Matènwa, where they live with their paternal grandmother.

Catheline was counting her fingers, tallying one hand, and then moving to the other, as people normally do. But she kept getting different answers. One time it would be seven, another time nine, and a third, eleven. She was having a hard time keeping track of which fingers she had counted. She just wasn’t seeing the array of them clearly. She giggled after each new result, but it wasn’t joyful laughter. She seemed to recognize that she could only have one quantity of fingers.

Finally, she did something I’d never seen. She placed her hands together palm to palm, with her fingers spread. She counted her two thumbs, her two index fingers, her two middle fingers, her two ring fingers, and her two pinkies. She reported the new total, ten, with a big smile.

By thinking about the problem she was facing, she had discovered her own solution. She found a way of keeping good track of her count. She was proud of the certainty she felt. When I asked her the next day how many fingers she has, she answered correctly without hesitating.

Friday I was working with the Matènwa teachers. We are learning to use the microscopes they have. The microscopes have been at the school for some time, but they haven’t been used much in the classroom. I am very far from being a skilled microscopist, or even an unskilled one, but I’ve taken as many science classes as most Americans. I’ve even taught a few. I also had a microscope as a kid, and I remember how much fun it was to look at all sorts of stuff.

We started by working on the basic techniques they would need: preparing slides and focusing. Though these are things that one could continue to improve at for years, especially slide preparation, nevertheless five or ten minutes of coaching is more than enough to get one started.

For the teachers, seeing things, like an ant, under a microscope is, first and foremost, a spectacle. Their initial temptation is to let their excitement be the center of the experience, to just leaves things at “Wow! Isn’t that cool?” and then to look at something else. I wanted to help them slightly change their focus. Rather than seeing the microscopes as the wonderful toys that they are, I wanted to help them see them as tools of investigation. So I had given them homework. They were to identify a question that they wanted to answer by looking at something under a microscope. They would write down the question and the answer that their study revealed.

The most interesting answer came from Fritzner, a teaching intern visiting the school from the Haitian mainland to learn how the Matènwa teachers work with kids. He had wanted to know how many legs ants have, and had learned that they have ten.

Fritzner had not been the only teacher interested in looking at ants. Robert had look at them as well. So had Isaac, another intern. They each reported that they had seen only six legs. So we all went back to the drawing board together. Fritzner hypothesized that the way his ant had been curled up on the slide had confused him, so the teachers talked about what they might do to ensure that they were getting a good, clear look. They decided to use a drop of water to spread its legs.

It was not long before our judgment was unanimous. Ants have six legs.

Twenty-four hours later, I was in a hot, cramped second-floor hallway in Site Solèy. I was talking with about a dozen young guys, teenagers mostly. It was our third conversation. In our previous meetings, they had asked me to organize them and to give them a mission. They had insisted that they had nothing, that they were capable of nothing. They needed a savior, they said. They used that very word. And they had chosen me.

I was, of course, put off by the thought that a group of guys I hardly know, who live in circumstances I can hardly imagine, were looking to me to change their lives. I had insisted through our conversations that I could give them nothing but my time; they had responded that they needed much more. I should add that I’m sure they’re right: There’s precious little that residents of Site Solèy don’t lack. But I don’t have the resources to even begin to address all, or even some, of their needs properly.

So we focused in our second conversation on their desire to feel organized. They wanted me to help them create an organization. They even thought that I should give it a name. But I tried to talk about what it means to be organized. I spoke about organizations I’ve seen. They have by-laws and hierarchies. They might have a president, a secretary, a treasurer, and more. None of that actually means that they’re doing anything.

The Site Solèy guys, on the other hand, as lost as they felt, were already organized in a very important way. Every morning, they put together whatever little money they can find and buy the ingredients to make a very simple meal. And then they share it, even, as they explained, if everyone gets only a single spoonful.

I explained that as soon as they set out to accomplish some specific goals that they set for themselves, they will discover they are already organized. They’ll discover that the tasks themselves will organize them in a much more meaningful way than by-laws could.

And we talked about things they might try to do with the resources available to them. One idea that came up was spending a day clearing away litter from their street. They complained that they would need wheelbarrows, shovels, and brooms, all things that they don’t have. I told them that they should consider either how to get hold of such things or how to make do without them. They seemed so pessimistic about themselves that I wasn’t sure what, if anything, they would try.

When we met Saturday, the first thing they wanted to say was that they had spent Wednesday cleaning up the street. They had used sticks, pieces of cardboard, beat-up old buckets, and their bare hands. They had divided themselves into teams, with various responsibilities, shifting duties as the day went on. They seemed happy with the result, and said they would make clean-up a regular activity.

If I had had any doubt at all about their sense of accomplishment, it was washed away by something that happened when the conversation closed so we could start the English class I had promised to give them. These are young men live in what is sometimes cited as the worst slum in the hemisphere. They have no work and are not in school. They are underfed and have limited access to healthcare and safe water. Their neighborhood is subject to flooding, and poor sewage ensures that mud is the best part of the oozy fluid that sometimes covers their streets. But when I asked them, in Creole, what the first thing they wanted to learn how to say was, they replied, without hesitation, that they wanted to know how to say, “What a beautiful day.”

I could have told Catheline that she had ten fingers. Her big sister, Sondie, was trying to do just that as she struggled. But taking in an answer passively would not have accomplished what the solution she discovered did. By facing and overcoming the difficulty herself, Catheline developed more than new knowledge. She developed as a thinker, as a problem-solver. And her happiness shows that, at some level, she was excited about that result.

Fritzner and the rest of us could have learned that ants have six legs from any book about insects, but the lesson would not have been the same. Rather than just capturing information, we had experienced what it means to investigate. And Fritzner had learned a more important lesson that he was able to clearly express: What you see depends very much on the care with which you prepare your slide. That is to say that real investigation is not the business of what we now call “couch potatoes”, but exacting work. A textbook could never have taught him such a thing. When he wrote up his homework a second time, he included a very detailed drawing of a six-legged ant. He was learning to look with care.

Listening to the guys from Site Solèy say to each other, one after another, “What a beautiful day!” was a stunning result of their own achievement. It’s hard to imagine anything that someone could have done for them affecting them in quite that way.

The work in Site Solèy will continue to be challenging. I try not to fool myself. They may need help choosing objectives that challenge them more and more without overwhelming them. And despite everything I’ve told them, they surely still have expectations that, at some point, I will invest much more with them than time. That would be only too natural for struggling guys who befriend a wealthy foreigner who enters their midst. But by being as clear and as frank as possible, both about what we expect and what we intend, we should be able to move forward.

Zilmit sells household items in the market in Gonayiv. She sits behind a patch of sidewalk, with careful piles of pots, pans, dishes, glasses, and cups arranged in front of her. It’s the beginning of the school year, so she extends her business to sell school wares as well. Colorful backpacks, book bags, and lunch boxes hang on a fence behind where she sits.

By September 2004, Zilmit had already been a member of Fonkoze for two years. On Wednesday, September 15th, she received a new credit for 12,000 gourds, or about $300. On Thursday, she went to Port au Prince to buy merchandise. She returned to Gonayiv early on Friday, as a storm was starting. By late evening, the water was rising in her home. As it reached her knees, then her hips, then her chest, she knew that she and her little boy had to flee. They ran to a neighbor’s house and climbed onto the roof. From there, they watched as the water swept their belongings away. Her merchandise disappeared with everything else she own.

Hurricane Jeanne devastated Gonayiv. It’s said that 250,000 lost their homes. Flood waters rushed down the mountains that surround the city. Those mountains are utterly bare. Not a tree remains. Plant life, with the topsoil that could have held some of the cascading water, has long been torn away. The slopes give the city and its surroundings the appearance of a large, porcelain bowl. It’s easy to imagine how the torrents of rainwater must have rushed in from all sides. The shallow new lake that the hurricane created just south of the city remains two years later.

Zilmit was ruined. She and her son escaped with nothing but the clothes on their backs.

For the first months after the flood, she could do nothing. It was all she could do to get her hands on the food, clothes, and water that she and her boy needed to live. She could make no repayments on the loan she had taken, because she had no merchandise to sell and no money to buy new merchandise with. She spent the time clearing the mud from her house and replacing the roof that the flood washed away.

Fonkoze contacted Zilmit shortly after the flood to see how she was doing. When she was ready to go back to work, Fonkoze lent her another 12,000 gourds for twelve months with no interest, and cancelled the interest on the first 12,000 gourds. She was able to rebuild her business, and now she’s repaid both of the loans.

Madanm Awòl Jeune had already been a Fonkoze client for three years when the flood hit. She sells foodstuffs – rice, beans, sugar – by the sack or in smaller quantities, working from a small room in a building in the same yard where she has her home.

She too lost everything in the flood, having to flee from her home with her five children. Shortly after the six of them escaped to a neighbor’s cement roof, the waters in and around the house they abandoned were more than six feet deep. The family had no drinking water, no food, no clothes. When Madanm Awòl returned to her shop the Monday after the storm, she simply threw everything away. Not a scrap of unspoiled merchandise remained.

That Monday, she and her children had to leave the roof where they had spent two days. They eventually settled at a friend’s home, where they lived on a porch while they worked to reconstruct their lives.

Fonkoze worked with them. Not as an aid agency, but as a partner. When Madanm Awòl was ready to re-establish her business she received an interest-free loan, just like the one that Zilmit received. Fonkoze cancelled the interest on her outstanding debt and stretched out the repayment schedule, giving her a year rather than the usual six months. Like Zilmit, Madanm Awòl has repaid her loans and once again has a business that ensures a livelihood for her children and herself. She’s moved back into her house, though she says that, occasionally, little clumps of mud that she and her children failed to remove still fall from the ceiling of their small home.

By lending the flood victims money, Fonkoze went against all sorts of conventional wisdom. Generally speaking, disaster victims get well-intentioned aid . . . if they get any help at all. Most would assume that such women, left without assets that could be used as collateral, left without much of anything at all, would not be creditworthy. It would be easy to assume that such women would have very little chance of repaying a loan. Those who make such assumptions could tend to think that they are only being realistic.

But the reality turns out to be rather different from what such realists might think. For poor women whose livelihoods depend on the small businesses they run, access to relatively inexpensive credit is crucial. Poor women repay their micro credit loans at rates that commercial banks, with their well-to-do borrowers, can only dream of. Their desire to qualify for the next loan, to make their businesses grow, to improve their families’ lives is all the motivation that they need.

It’s not that the formula for success is simple. Fonkoze has Gonayiv customers who continue to suffer the consequences of the flood. Mirlande, for example, used to sell cosmetics and other notions in Passe Reine, a short way out of Gonayiv on the road north to Okap. She spent the night of the flood standing with other adults in chest-high water in her house. They put the children in the ceiling rafters. Most of her neighbors were forced to flee to a nearby church, but her house was saved when the house next to it was washed entirely of its foundation. The waters pushed the one house into the other, creating a barrier that protected the folks who were in her house from the worst of the flood.

Mirlande too lost almost everything in the flood: her clothes, her livestock, her merchandise, and 15,000 gourds, or about $375, that she had saved up so that she could buy more goods to sell. But unlike the other women, Mirlande has not really recovered. She received the same interest-free Fonkoze loan that the other women received, but two years after the flood her business still does not exist.

Part of the problem is that when she received that new loan, she used it to buy household items that she felt she needed. She surely did need them, but their purchase ensured that the money she borrowed would not be used to generate income. She thus lost any chance to rebuild her business, let alone to repay her loan.

But the lesson to draw from Mirlande’s story is not that flood victims cannot make good use of credit. The stories of Zilmit and Madanm Awòl would counter such a claim. And theirs are not the only happy stories I could relate. The lesson is, rather, that one must work with flood victims to help them ensure that they use their credit well. For Fonkoze, this is a work in progress. Just as Zilmit and Madanm Awòl are just two exemplary success stories, Mirlande is only one example out of many as well.

But the story of Mirlande and of other women who are still in trouble is not over, and Fonkoze will continue to try to work with them in whatever way it can. It’s not yet time to call the loans made to such women a failure.

Vagens

At eleven years old, Vagens is already an experienced vegetable gardener. He lives with his mother and his older brother in a small one-room house on the road leading to Matènwa, on the rural Haitian island of Lagonav. He’s had his own garden at home since early 2005. In Matènwa, where planting can go on year-round as long as there’s water, this has meant that he’s already a veteran of five harvests.

Vagens

He’s is a sixth grader at the Matènwa Community Learning Center. The Center is comprised of a primary school and a middle school. It hosts an adult literacy class, and runs a range of community education and development programs as well. The school is devoted to providing a non-violent, student-centered education tailored to the needs of the rural community it’s in.

This simple mission runs directly against the current of almost all Haitian education in three ways. First, Haitian education, especially at the primary level, is violent. Beatings and humiliations are standard pedagogical techniques, used to combat everything from misbehavior to failure to memorize one’s homework. Second, classroom practice is neither student- nor even teacher-centered. It’s text-centered. Students whose language is Haitian Creole memorize passages in French that they rarely understand either from textbooks or from summaries that their teachers write on blackboards. Third, those texts are not tailored to the communities they live in. They rarely have anything to do with the realities that children face at all. They have been designed, as have a host of customs, including strict dress codes, to prepare students to enter into someone’s image of what proper society is. And proper society is almost always urban society, not the very rural world of Matènwa.

On first looking at Vagens, an American might think him a typical sixth-grader, even if he’s just a little small. But this appearance masks a larger truth. Before the Matènwa school was founded, about ten years ago, children in the area had only limited access to formal education. In the school’s first years it was filled with overage children, kids who had not been able to start school on time and who were, therefore, well beyond typical school age. So if Vagens is now a typical sixth-grader, that is only because the school is largely succeeding in getting local children into kindergarten and first grade on time.

Vagens learned to garden right at school. The school’s vegetable garden is one way it teaches its students to appreciate their rural community. It also teaches them a skill that can directly improve their lives there. It provides much of the food for the school’s meal program as well.

Vagens learned how to create beds of decent soil, how to plant the seeds and to take care of the young plants. He decided to try it at home. He planted carrots and cabbages. He made juice with his first carrots, and ate his cabbage with cornmeal or beans and rice. He’d like to try planting eggplant soon. He likes eggplant, and wants to grow his own. His only frustration has been with the goats that sometimes slip the cords he ties them with and eat his young plants.

“Growing food in your own garden feels great,” he says. “You get to eat vegetables without spending money to buy them in the market.”

Resena

At fifteen, Resena is a fifth-grader at the Matènwa school. She’s not originally from Matènwa. She was born in Arkaye, an important coastal market town across the bay, on the Haitian mainland. As a little girl, she was sent to live with distant relatives when her father and several siblings were killed in a boating accident. She’s been at the Learning Center since kindergarten.

Life in Matènwa has be hard for her. Though the family that took her in sent her to school, they can be neglectful in other ways. This year, Margaret, the Learning Center’s head cook, a woman with three children in the school, and who is herself a fifth-grader there, was walking by the house Resena was living in when she heard her cry out. She went to see what was wrong, and discovered that Resena had been left-alone. Her adoptive family had gone to Pòtoprens and left Resena all alone. She was being harassed by a group of teenage boys, and was struggling to defend herself.

Margaret did not hesitate. She told Resena to collect her things, and brought her to live in her own already-crowded home. Resena suddenly seems like a happy child. The Learning Center’s Principal, Abner Sauveur, says she’s a very capable student.

Like all of the school’s students, Resena regularly works in the garden with her class. It’s work she loves. “We take such good care of the garden. The plants don’t die.” She especially likes working in the cabbage because she likes eating it when it’s ready.

She tried to start her own garden, but it was ruined by chickens. Now she’d like to try again, but wants to fence off a little plot before she plants it.

For more information about the Matènwa Community Learning Center, go to http://www.matenwa.org or e-mail its American Co-Director, Chris Low, at [email protected].

As I was leaving Tuesday’s meeting with Kofaviv, I was asking myself why the United Nations never came up in the conversation. The text we had been talking about is by Thomas Hobbes. He claims, among other things, that we humans are naturally inclined to conflict, and that only the presence of a power that we fear makes us safe from one another. Connecting his point to the UN presence in Haiti, where several thousand heavily armed UN soldiers constitute what is called a “stabilization” force, seemed only too obvious. It was on my mind through almost the entire class. But the group found other things to talk about, and I never found quite the right moment to bring it up.

A little way down the street from the Kofaviv office is the side street that leads up to the Social Sciences branch of the national university. That’s the branch where Frémy and several other of my Haitian colleagues studied. It has long tended to be a source of political activism, attracting as it does some of the more radical of Haiti’s intellectuals and youth.

As I got to the intersection, I saw a student whom I recently met. He was working with some of his friends to block the street. They had hauled the wreck of an automobile into the middle of the intersection, and were now surrounding the wreck with large rocks and tires. When I asked him what they were doing, he smiled and said that they were celebrating the anniversary of the UN. It was, in fact, United Nations Day. The student, whose name is Jean-Louis, laughed as he said that the UN was in Haiti to help Haitians and that they had decided to help too. His sarcasm could not have been more clear.

UN forces have now been in Haiti for over two years, and it seems worth considering what they are accomplishing. In and around Pòtoprens, one sees them everywhere: standing in and around the tank that sits within 100 yards of Suzette’s home in Douya, driving personnel carriers or fancy SUVs up and down between Pòtoprens and Delma on any of the three congested roads that link the two, guarding the entrances – or should I say “the exits”? – of the city’s slums, sitting in Epi D’Or, Delma’s first-rate fast food establishment. I even heard that they passed by Ka Glo once. There are Brazilians, Argentineans, Jordanians, Sri Lankans, Peruvians, Moroccans, Nepalese, Chileans, and others.

The first time their presence really struck me here was shortly after I arrived. I was traveling to Ench with Saül, riding in a pick-up truck on the road that connects Pòtoprens with the Central Plateau. Just before we got to Tè Wouj, a small market on the way, we saw a contingent of Nepalese soldiers, sitting on and around two armored personnel carriers. When we got to Tè Wouj itself, the market was filled with heavily armed Haitians in an irregular range of semi-uniforms. They seemed to be just wandering around, snacking and chatting with market women. A few turns in the road after Tè Wouj, we saw another Nepalese force. We had just crossed two battle lines. The Haitians, who were part of a group identifying themselves as former members of Haiti’s disbanded military, were surrounded. That Haitian force had been one of the collection of violent and non-violent groups that had contributed to the deterioration of the situation here before President Aristide left in February 2004. But it had not put down its arms when Aristide left and the interim regime supported by the American government took power.

What was most striking to me at the time was how little the battle lines meant to those of us who just happened to be heading to Ench that day. Though it is intimidating to see a heavily-armed military force, and even more intimidating to see a heavily-armed group of irregulars, nothing actually happened. We were not stopped. No one asked any questions. Apparently, we were of no interest to either side. Shortly after we made the trip, the force of former soldiers evaporated.

Things have changed in Haiti since that time and, except for continuing inflation, the changes have mostly been improvements, at least as far as I can tell. Pòtoprens is very much safer than it was. A year ago, both Haitians and foreigners needed to be very particular about where they went around the capital. Gunfire was a constant in several neighborhoods. Kidnapping was a daily occurrence.

Things really are different now. But it’s hard to know whether to credit the UN. The most dramatic change we’ve seen can serve as an example. Violence stopped very suddenly in Site Solèy shortly after René Préval was recognized as the winner of the presidential election. It just stopped. At least for awhile. This was after months of almost continuous fighting between the Haitian police, supported by UN forces, and the area’s gangs.

I don’t think there was much connection, though, between that sudden peace and anything that the UN forces or the Haitian police were doing. It would be more accurate, I think, to say that the gang leaders decided they wanted to give Préval an opportunity to deal with them peacefully. Or that they found some less violent way to further their interests.

I have occasionally seen UN soldiers roll up their sleeves to do real work. I once passed a friendly group of Chileans, with shovels in hand and a tractor helping out, repairing a road between Twoudinò and Fòlibète that floods had made impassable. One reads about school construction and other useful labor as well.

But we should not kid ourselves about such work. Unemployment in Haiti is extremely high. Ka Glo itself, where most of the men are skilled construction workers, is filled with guys who can’t find jobs. It is hard to understand why the UN or any other organization would think that it is in Haiti’s interest for them to send teams of soldiers to do construction work. It would, I imagine, be much less expensive and more beneficial to hire available Haitians.

And those projects may not all be as helpful as one would like. The heavy – though distant, Mom – shooting that I heard last Saturday was directly connected to one such project. Here’s a link to a description in the “International Herald Tribune”:
http://www.iht.com/articles/ap/2006/10/19/news/CB_GEN_Haiti_Slum_Violence.php

But the story I heard from numerous conversations – none of which was, I should add, with an eyewitness – was at odds with the newspaper report. I heard that, in the course of building a road, UN troops were knocking down houses. The houses were being bulldozed with all their residents’ possessions inside, and the residents were neither being compensated nor helped to find a new place to stay. I was told that residents were trying to defend themselves.

I cannot vouch for the truth of the matter. I wasn’t there. But the story both reflects Haitian opinions of what the UN is likely to do and further denigrates the UN in Haitians’ eyes.

Usually, if I ask a Haitian what the UN is doing here in Haiti, they will say one of two things. Either they’ll say that they are doing nothing or that they are making money. Salaries for UN personnel are large. I once spoke to a Chicago police officer who was considering an offer of over $100,000, tax-free, to spend a year in Haiti training police. High UN salaries must be especially attractive to those who come from poor countries. It’s easy to take a cynical view of the UN’s work.

I should, however, finish with a serious and opposing view. When I asked Suzette what she thinks of the presence of the tank and its soldiers so near her home, she said, a little sadly perhaps, that she is glad that they are there. Their presence, she said, has settled things down. If they had not been there, she added, she could not have invited me. It would not have been safe.

Simple answers are hard to find. To say that things would be better or worse without the UN presence would be hard to argue convincingly. Comparing reality to hypothesis leaves lots of room for the imagination. What is clear is that a peace that simply depends on the presence of an occupying power is not a good peace. It may be better than nothing, but it’s not simply good. Sooner or later, Haitians will have to be allowed to work things out.

Heard from a safe distance, gunfire sounds a little like popcorn. I should add, before I continue, that I never hear it from any less than a safe distance. In fact, I hadn’t heard any at all for awhile. But I spent Thursday morning in Site Solèy, and it was a tough morning in a part of that large neighborhood within distant earshot of our meeting place.

It must be a hard place to live even in the best of times. The better housing available is merely dilapidated. Small, concrete rooms separated by narrow, crooked alleys. Most of the housing is worse. I think of the place where Geto lives with his grandmother. It’s not much more than a twisted wooden frame covered with metal roofing material. It’s a little hard to tell whether the frame is supporting the roofing material or the roofing material is holding the frame together. The house’s best feature is its raised concrete floor. Plenty of homes in the area have dirt floors, which turn to mud wherever it rains.

And these are not the best of times, even if they’re not the worse, even if things are, in some ways, looking up. Thursday’s gunfire is one testimony to that. The UN tank I saw near Suzette’s house last Saturday is another, even if Suzette explained that it was thanks to that tank and the soldiers in it that she felt confident that it was safe for me to come. The fact that Peruvians in blue UN helmets frisked me as I left Héguel’s neighborhood on Thursday is a third.

But a more meaningful testimony to the difficulties in Site Solèy was Thursday’s meeting itself. I was meeting with a group for the first time, more than 35 young men. They had invited me, through a friend named Héguel, to talk with them about their situation. He had told them something about the kinds of work that I do, and they wondered whether there was anything we might want to do together. They were not members of any organization, just young, unemployed men, looking for ways to improve their situation.

What was initially surprising was that there were so many of them. Héguel lives in the neighborhood, but had not really been home much over the past four weeks because of work he had found. He’s a strong English speaker, and he got two weeks of work as a translator. After that, he spent almost two more weeks attending a workshop for interviewers who are going to do the research necessary to develop a new educational program.

In any case, he hadn’t been home to encourage anyone to come to the meeting. He just let the word spread that a foreigner who works in education would be visiting him on a certain day. When I got to his place, there were already fifteen or so waiting for me, and twenty more were there within a half-hour.

That is to say that none of these young men, all of them in the prime of their lives, has anything better to do with their time in the middle of a Thursday morning than come to meet with a foreigner they know little about. They are not in school. They do not have jobs. They don’t run small businesses that require their presence. They are idle.

And if their presence during a three-hour meeting hadn’t made this clear enough, then what they said at the beginning of the meeting left no room for doubt. They have no work. Some said they wanted to, but could not afford to, go to school. Some said they had children, but that they couldn’t send them to school. They talked about the lack of decent water, the lack of decent housing, the lack of health services. Some said they were hungry. And that was all in the first twenty minutes, when we were introducing ourselves to one another.

We met on an enclosed porch next to Héguel’s one-room, second-story apartment. There was only one chair, so we sat in a circle on the floor, leaning against the wall. For my own part, I introduced myself at greater length than I normally would. I felt that it was important for me to be clear from the start: I am not in Haiti with a big budget I’m looking to invest in Site Solèy or anywhere else. I will not be giving them jobs. I won’t be building schools or homes or health clinics or libraries. The resources I can make available are my time and my interest in talking with them. Better that the meeting evaporate early than that it proceed fueled by false hopes or expectations.

But the meeting didn’t evaporate. There were about a half-dozen of the guys who took on strong roles. They wanted me to hear a lot about the way they live and the problems that they face. Two main threads of the conversation emerged quickly. On one hand, there was the continually increasing list of their unmet needs – for jobs, homes, education for them and their children. On the other hand, there was their feeling that they would like to be organized but that they don’t know how.

I tried to turn those two threads into one. I said that there are different ways to look at what it means to be organized. One way, not the most interesting one, is to establish what is called an “organization.” You can give your organization a name, schedule meetings, choose leaders, and make rules. The other way is to simply choose an activity you want to undertake together and let that activity, and the various tasks it involves, serve as an organizing principle.

They bought my reasoning, and so we turned to considering whether there was an activity we could take on together. The number of speakers narrowed as two or three insisted that what they want is education. At this point, I was a little concern about the number of voices that were not being heard, so I suggested an experiment. Rather than simply heeding what the more active speakers were saying, we would make a list on the blackboard of the range of activities that might be of interest. We would then invite everyone to come to the blackboard and mark the one that seemed most important to them.

It was a miserable failure. After the first few people, all of whom had been among the active speakers, had marked training as their highest priority, others simply followed suit. It was unanimous. And while it is possible that they were all genuinely in agreement on the point, it seems likelier that the pressure to conform played a strong role.

So we began to talk about the different kinds of education or training they might be interested in. One or two of the have professional skills – there was a stonemason and an electrician among them – and we considered whether they wanted to ask those professionals to share what they know. But though a couple of them entertained the idea briefly, it never gathered much momentum.

For whatever reason, what really excited them was the prospect of learning English. Several of them said they wanted to speak English the way I speak Creole. I explained that this would be hard, that my being in Haiti, among Haitians, is what is helping me learn their language. For them to learn English in a classroom would be a very different matter. I also said that language learning needs to be regular, and that I could not even guarantee them that I would be able to join them once-a-week. I said that if they wanted to organize an English class, I would come whenever I can, perhaps almost weekly, but that they wouldn’t achieve much unless they could find someone else to work with them more often.

At this point negotiations centered around Héguel. He already teaches English to several private students, and it turned out he was willing to give the group some of is time as well. So we agreed to get started.

I’m a little unclear where this will all lead. I’m skeptical as to whether English will really be useful to them, and I imagine that they may feel, soon enough, that they want something different or more. But I’m hoping that the class can address the larger problem. I’m hoping we can find ways to use it to help them organize themselves for useful tasks. Perhaps we can create simple conversations around practical questions like how they can get their children to school or, more generally, what they can do to change their lives.

If we can, it will be a very different English class from anything I am used to. And participating in it will be of very great interest indeed.

The Kovafiv group continues to plug away. Kofaviv is the Commission of Women Victims for Victims, an organization founded by rape victims for other rape victims. They provide health services, education, advocacy, and counseling. Frémy and I have been meeting with them since February.

After finishing our work with the first volume of Wonn Refleksyon texts, we decided to do two things. On one hand, we would continue our weekly meetings, working on the more difficult second volume of texts. Rather than their depending on Frémy and me to lead the discussions, however, volunteers from among the Kofaviv women would step up to lead each week. On the other, the women would establish discussion groups in their own neighborhoods. I would begin visiting them in the field to observe them as they lead discussions, offering such coaching and encouragement as I can.

Tuesday’s discussion from Volume Two was especially striking. We used an excerpt from a book about number theory by Richard Dedekind. The text discusses the nature of the four basic arithmetic operations, arguing that they are human creations, extensions of the simple act of counting. It’s a text that’s generally felt by the Haitians I work with to be especially challenging. They can’t imagine what they’ll have to say about mathematics. It seems irrelevant, too far from their real interests, to serve as the source of conversation that we expect our texts to be.

Suzette, the volunteer leader of Tuesday’s meeting, felt just that way. She wasn’t sure how a text on mathematics could foster discussion. But at the beginning of the class, she gritted her teeth and got to work. She had volunteered to lead the group, and it was too late to back out.

She went through the standard procedures. She read the page-and-a-half-long text aloud for the class, and then invited them to re-read it silently, thinking of questions they felt could be used to open a conversation. She then sent them into groups of three or four, assigning each group to talk about the questions that its individual members proposed and to choose the one question that could serve the class best.

While the participants met in those small groups, Suzette asked me to talk with her about the text. She had been reading and re-reading the text all week, but she said that she had no questions to ask.

This was false. She had several questions. What she meant was that she had little confidence that they were good questions. We talk in our meetings about what it takes to form a good question, and we try to convince people that good questions are short, clear, and honest, that it’s really this simple: People should ask about simple things they want to understand better. They often feel, however, that their questions need to reflect some special understanding they already have. Therefore, when they feel as though they don’t understand a reading, they can tend to think that they have nothing to ask, rather than that they have all the more reason to pose questions.

Suzette should know better, and I told her so. She’s a pillar in our Tuesday group, precisely because she’s willing to just ask anything that strikes her curiosity. Often enough, she’ll complain that she doesn’t understand a text, only to show us all that what she describes as a lack of understanding is a probing intellect that can point us all on the route to discovery. But I suppose that the mathematics in front of us seemed just a little too strange.

When the small group work was done, we had three opening questions on the wall. One group wanted to know how numbers are useful. Another group, picking up on a claim made in the text, suggested we start by asking whether multiplication is the same as addition. I don’t remember what the third question was. Suzette opened the large group discussion by simply asking which question the group wanted to start with.

One interesting aspect of the conversation that ensued was that it had little to do with the questions that the small groups proposed. Though a small amount of time was invested in the first few minutes trying to figure out a couple of puzzling passages in the text – including the one that seemed to some of the women to suggest that addition and multiplication are the same – there was one theme that dominated the first half of the discussion. To explain that theme properly, I need to say something more about the group.

The women are a very mixed bunch. They range greatly in age. Some of them are in their late 50s, but many are in their early 20s as well. They also range greatly in their educational levels. One or two are entirely illiterate, while others are high school or university graduates.

Generally speaking, however, someone meeting with them would have a hard time telling how much education each of them has. There is one named Solange, whom I know to be illiterate because I see other group members opening her book each week to the appropriate page. But there are also two professional nurses. The way the women speak to one another makes such distinctions hard to trace.

On the other hand, the mathematics text was different. For the first part of the conversation, things were very much dominated by the younger, more educated women.

This might seem unsurprising. One might have assumed that a more academic text would be more accessible to the women with more academic training. But that assumption would have masked what was really happening, because the main point that the younger, more educated women were interested in making was that they are much worse at math than their uneducated mothers, aunts, and neighbors are. One after another, they marveled at the calculations that the illiterate market women who raised them are capable of. They were trying to understand how their education could have robbed them of arithmetic skills.

I’ve done math with enough Haitian school kids over the years to have some thoughts about this. One way to put things would be to say that the kids have been taught to use fixed procedures rather than their good common sense. For example, kids I work with will regularly give answers to subtraction problems that are greater than the numbers they begin with because they get confused when they need to borrow. They’ll come up with something like 10,000–9999=11,111. Another example: The other day, I was showing a fifth grader named Mackenson how to simplify fractions. In the course of working out one problem, he had to divide 108 by 2. He wrote that 108÷2=513. It turned out that he had misplaced a remainder somewhere in the middle of the problem, and that this led him to his surprising result.

The point is that Mackenson gave me the answer with a straight face. As soon as I asked him whether he thought that his answer could be true, he looked at it, smiled, and found his mistake. But before I asked, it did not occur to him to consider his answer and ask himself whether it made sense. He had learned a certain procedure, though he hadn’t learned it well, and he wasn’t going to let his own intelligence get involved.

What the more educated Kofaviv women were noticing was that they cannot do as much with the math they learned as their mothers can do with an arithmetic that seems second nature to them. And I think it’s because their education has encouraged them to detach mathematics from the good common sense that – as we say – God gave them.

Eventually, Suzette pointed out that only the younger, more educated women were talking, and a short silence followed. That silence was broken by Solange. She said that it was only natural that she could do math in her head. Often enough, she said, she had been down to her last 50 gourds – about $1.30 these days – needing to somehow feed her children for a day. That meant figuring how much rice to buy, how much cooking fuel, how much oil.

Solange’s remark opened the door for the rest of the older women. Almost all are businesswomen. They buy and sell various inexpensive items in and around their neighborhood markets to make the money they need to run their lives. They each talked about the kind of calculations they’re making all the time: profit, expense, income, and loss. And, like Solange, about how to divide up the money they have to make sure their children are fed. One woman, also named Solange, spoke at length of how she got discouraged and left school in her earliest years because she was always getting grades in math like 30% or 40%. She went on to explain how easy she found it, even as she was failing in math class, to keep track of the expenses and profits in the small business she started as a little girl.

The conversation went on for an hour and a half, thirty minutes longer than we had planned. Towards the end, the group’s head nurse, Kerline, who is the most educated of them all, said that what she had learned was that real math is not at all what she had learned in school. It is, she said, a way of thinking that’s natural to all people. Others wanted to conclude differently. They preferred to talk about how a text they had expected to be remote from their experience turned out to raise issues quite central to their lives.

Suzette just wanted to smile. Once again she had discovered that she and her classmates could make good use of a text by just letting their own experiences take center stage.

Saturday, I had a second chance to watch Suzette work, this time near her home in Douya, a neighborhood on the northern edge of Site Solèy, Pòtoprens’s most notorious slum. Her discussion group consists of about a dozen girls and women, ranging in age from twelve or thirteen to 60-something. The only “man” in the group is an infant who spent much of the meeting nursing at his shockingly-young mother’s breast.

Just finding their meeting place promised to be a challenge. Most of Site Solèy consists of clusters of beaten-up one-room homes, stuck together cheek-by-jowl, with winding corridors no wider than three or four feet leading around them. Suzette was able to explain to me how to get to her neighborhood, but there was little chance she’s be able to explain how to find her home. But when I got off the back of a pick-up truck on the main road, just past the UN tank keeping watch over the area, my questions were answered. A pack of children I had never met started yelling “Steve! Steve! Steve!” They were Suzette’s look-outs, and they led me straight to her.

The group sat in an eight-by-ten foot entrance in front of one woman’s home. There were no chairs, so we all just sat on the floor, leaning against the wall. The ground rules for discussion that Wonn Refleksyon depends on were written in chalk in a clear and careful hand on one of the walls.

Initially, the women crowded very closely together to give me as much space as possible. As small as the place was, I had several empty feet on each side of me, but they were nearly on top of one another. I asked whether they were shrinking from me because of my smell. Then they laughed, and spread themselves more evenly around the room.

In some ways, Suzette ran the discussion the way she had run the one with her Kofaviv colleagues earlier in the week. She read the text aloud – this time a little folktale about some mice that steal some cheese and run into trouble because they can’t figure out how to share it – and then asked group members to spend a few minutes thinking about it. She sent them into small groups, asking each group to settle on a question. When the groups were ready with their questions, she asked the class as a whole which one they wanted to start with. Someone chose one, and we were off.

But in some ways her leadership was very different. Whereas on Tuesday she had behaved as on group member among many, controlling the activity only in the sense that she led us through the steps in the procedure she had chosen, on Saturday she was a forceful and very active presence all through the dialogue. She wanted to make sure that all the women spoke up, so she spent the whole class pushing the quieter ones, asking their opinions, insisting that they respond.

The difference in her approach was only natural, reflecting as it did the difference between a group that’s been meeting together, in one form or another, for several years and one that was in its third week of work.

What will be interesting to track is whether and how Suzette’s leadership of her Saturday group changes as the group’s experience grows. Will she remain its dominant figure even as other members grow more accustomed to the work, or will she be able to let go of her central role and share leadership of the group with its members? If she can let go, if the group can take shared responsibility for its work, then there is no telling how far they can go together.

Suzette and two of her look-outs:

Suzette and two of her lookouts

Brother Robert Smith used to talk about a very simple first principle, a rule, that he thought teachers should follow: “Start where the students are.” That rule has been the idea most important in shaping the way I work, in Haiti and elsewhere, so I want to write a little bit about it.

The idea sounds simple, even obvious. But I am convinced that it is neither the one nor the other. Most of the time, I think we start where we want students to be, making their acquisition of to-our-mind-important skills or bodies of knowledge our priority. We can be right about the importance of such skills or such knowledge. And starting where students are doesn’t necessarily force us to give up those thoughts. It does, however, require patience and time.

Starting where students are means, first and foremost, doing more listening than speaking. I’ve seen a beautiful example of this over the last couple of days at the Matènwa Community Learning Center, watching a teacher work with her second graders.

It’s the beginning of the school year, so there’s a lot of reviewing going on. Millienne was reminding her kids how to set up addition problems. They all remembered the horizontal method, 1 + 2 = , but she was trying to remind them of the vertical method as well.

She could have simply stood at the board and shown them how, but that’s not what she did. She asked the children to suggest ways of setting up their problems. Each time one of them suggested a way, Millienne and her class looked at the suggestion, trying to figure out whether it was a clear way to write an addition problem down. There were more suggestions than one might imagine, and they were more varied. Kids had numerals and addition and equal signs scattered across the blackboard in various configurations.

As class was coming to a close, it was becoming clear that they would not suggest a really good way to write problems down, much less hit upon the traditional horizontal method. Millienne made it a homework assignment. The children were to go home and write down as many different ways of organizing additions problems as they could think of.

And rather than simply counting on one of them to come back to class the next day with something really useful, she told them a story. She said that when she goes to the spring to get water, she fills her five-gallon bucket. She’s perfectly able to carry the bucket, with its forty pounds of water, back home on her head, but she can’t actually lift the bucket off the ground and place it on her head. That would take strength in her arms that she doesn’t have. What she does, she said, is ask someone to lift the bucket onto her head for her. Facing a task that she is unable to do by herself, she asks for help. She told the children that they should do the same thing: They should ask older siblings or parents or neighbors to show them ways to put addition problems on paper. They were to bring whatever they came up with back to class the next day.

The next day, she started math class by asking the children how many different ways they had been able to come up with. The most popular answer was four, but one student even said eight. She asked one of the ones who had four possibilities to write them on the board and the girl who had eight possibilities to do the same.

It turned out that each had misunderstood the assignment in a different way. The girl who had discovered eight ways, actually only had thought of eight different addition problems, all of which she wrote horizontally, one problem beneath the other. The girl who had four ways copied four vertical problems out of her notebook: an addition, a subtraction, a multiplication, and a division.

Millienne asked the class to look at what each of the girls had written, first one then the other. It didn’t take long for the class to recognize that the one girl’s eight ways were really one and the same. Looking at the other girls four ways was, however, a little more challenging. But Millienne simply asked the children to read what each written problem said. By insisting they explain the details, she was able to get them to see that only one of the vertical problems was a clear example of addition.

And so she got what needed. She quickly asked each child to write down any five addition problems, and to write each of them in two ways. Most of the kids were able to respond easily.

It may be that Millienne’s method was less efficient at delivering information than some might like. The whole thing could probably happened in 30-45 minutes if she had taken a more traditional role.

But the result would not have been the same. Her kids had to come up with their own ideas, and then analyze those ideas. They had to work together. She, her Matènwa colleagues, and I have read enough Piaget together to be convinced that it is in their interactions with one another that children – maybe I should say “that all people” – develop the discipline of thought. Her students were learning how to be learners, how to teach themselves. Mastery of the content of the lesson was important, but it was not the only thing.

I could not help but think of Brother Robert as I watched Millienne work. In some respects, two people could hardly have less in common than he and she. Last year was his 70th year as a teacher, Millienne has been teaching less than ten. He earned a doctorate over fifty years ago; she hasn’t been able to finish high school. She’s almost a head taller than he and more than sixty years younger. She grew up in rural Haiti; he in Berkeley. And then there are the more obvious differences like gender and race.

Brother Robert died a couple of weeks ago, a few hours after I saw him for the last time. But as long as there are teachers like Millienne practicing their craft, I know that something important about him will remain.