Yayi and Kaki

I’ve wanted very badly to share this picture of Yayi and Kaki ever since I took it a few weeks ago. They are from Upper Glo, the steeply sloping collection of small clusters of homes across the road from the wealthier cluster, or lakou, I live in.

The boys say that they are good friends. When I asked them what that means to them, they thought for a minute. Then Kaki, who’s on the right, said “Si m wè yon moun k ap bay Yayi yon kou, m ap tou antre.” That means that if he saw someone hitting Yayi he would jump right in. I have mixed feelings about the sentiment. I’m glad that they have each other to depend on, but I’m sorry that fighting was the first thing that popped into Kaki’s mind.

Fortunately, that’s not generally what they’re doing when I see them. I see them when they come down to the water source by the great mapou tree in front of our lakou. Fetching water is an important chore around where I live. Larger kids and adults will come to the source with five or seven-gallon buckets. Littler children come with gallon jugs. The smallest bring one jug, larger kids bring two or three, until they are big enough to carry a bucket instead.

As important as the chore is, it does not tend, for the children, to be very business-like. They’ll spend a good deal of time at the clearing just playing before they fill their jugs and head home. One of them might have a ball or a handful of marbles or some elastic bands. These are toys of choice. But an upripe grapefruit or a bundle of rags can substitute for a ball, and games like tag can be played without any equipment at all.

The other place I see them is in our lakou, where they will do small chores for various of the households. They might get a couple of pennies for their trouble, but they are more likely to just get a thank you and bite to eat, which seems fine with them. They might sweep or carry small loads of sand or rocks for construction, and though they can often be counted on to get their little tasks done, they are no more serious about their work here than they are under the mapou. Kaki in particular is quite the clown, and he seems to like nothing more than to make Yayi – and anyone else who is willing to look at him – laugh.

As I was thinking about this photo, I began asking myself why it seemed so important to share it. I wanted to figure out something that I could say about it. The fact that the boys are cute hardly seemed reason enough. After all, it doesn’t really seem to have anything to do with my work.

But the more I thought about Yayi and Kaki, the more I realized that their relationship to the various bits of work that they do sheds light on my relationship to mine.

Two facts have pushed me towards thinking about my relationship with my work these days. On one hand, I have a truly outstanding colleague at Shimer who has decided to take a leave of absence from teaching because, at least in part, he would like to be able to make his non-working life more interesting. When I say that the person I’m thinking of is “outstanding,” I mean the word literally. My colleagues at Shimer are all very good, but this one stands out for his thoughtfulness, his diligence, and his openness to learning. He’s a model. On the other hand, I’ve been in conversation recently with a group in the town where I grew up that is willing to have me come and speak to them about my life in Haiti. That group seems at least as interested in the life I live among my Haitian friends and colleagues as it is in the particular educational work that I came to do.

The latter point was, at first, a little surprising to me. I think of myself as a classroom teacher. It’s true that a lot of my activity in Haiti has more to do with helping other teachers establish conditions within which they can work in a classroom – the collaboration with Fonkoze is only the most extreme example of this – than it has to do with any direct contact between me and students. Even so, helping shape classrooms is the heart of what I think I do.

At the same time, I’ve always taken the name that Frémy and I gave our project quite seriously. We call it the Apprenticeship in Alternative Education, and though “apprenticeship” is slightly misleading as a translation of the Creole word, “aprantisaj,” that Frémy initially chose, it succeeds nonetheless in putting emphasis in the right place. I am in Haiti, first and foremost, as a learner. It is because I am learning that I think I can help others do the same.

But when I think of what I am learner here and how and in what situations I am learning, then the line between what I might, according to some conventions, identify as my work and what I would identify as my private life begins to blur. It loses its meaning. Because surely I’m as much of a learner in conversations with people like Yayi and Keki as I am when I’m trying to figure out an essay by Piaget with colleagues at the Matenwa Community Learning Center or when I’m helping to work out a budget for educational programs with colleagues at Fonkoze.

And I have the good fortune to be able to make the same claim the other way around: Just as I can see my everyday life as part of my work as a learner, I can also see what might conventionally be called my job as a part of my everyday life. I do not leave my home life to go to work, nor do I leave work to go home. It is one life.

Concepts like “time off” and “overtime” and “vacation” only make sense if you are selling your time to someone who’s assignng you to do something you’d rather not do. Make no mistake: I know perfectly well that there are lots of reasons why someone might choose to or might have to do this. But, at least right now, it’s not something I have to do.

My work in Haiti has a lot in common with the trips to the water source that Yayi and Kaki make. It’s very had to distinguish it from play, and I can’t think of any reason that I should.

Over the course of the last weeks in January, it began to seem increasingly likely that there would be an election in Haiti.

This is an odd claim for an American to make. The regularity of our own democratic processes means that the question as to whether they’ll be an election never arises. We can tend to be apathetic as election season rolls around. We might be happy or unhappy with the way elections go. Our candidates might win or they might lose. We can distrust an election’s results; we can even doubt the democracy of our democracy. But no one ever has to wonder whether an election will take place. On Tuesday, November 4, 2036 – just to pick an example – I’m pretty sure that Americans will be voting for a president, a set of representatives, and some senators. Nothing like that is really certain this far in advance, but it is pretty likely. There’s even a chance that I’ll participate.

But Haiti has no such history of regular elections. That’s not to say that there haven’t been elections. There have. Presidents have come and gone, some of them elected. Few, however, have completed their constitutionally fixed term and handed their authority over to an elected successor. The country has endured over thirty violent changes in government in the 202 years since it won its independence.

The latest occurred at the end of February 2004, when Jean-Bertrand Aristide was removed from the presidency for the second time. He had been overthrown once early in his first term, in 1991, but returned from exile in 1994 to complete the term. He then handed his office over on schedule to Rene Preval, who was elected to replace him, in 1995. In 2000, he ran again and won.

Exactly what then happened in February 2004 is a matter of controversy. What’s certain is that there were heavily armed groups of irregulars violently approaching Pótoprens from the countryside – Haiti has no regular army – and that demonstrators had taken to the streets in Pótoprens. President Aristide went into exile in South Africa, where he remains. This is true though he also remains a popular figure – perhaps the most popular figure – in Haitian politics.

Since he departed, Haiti has been governed by a Provisional President and Provisional Prime Minister whose constitutional mandates – to organize new elections within three months and then step down – expired over a year ago. Elections had been scheduled three times since last November, but each time they had been cancelled and a new date set.

So it was hard not to retain a degree of skepticism as February 7, the most recently established date, approached. And when we got to the polls at about 6:15 AM, fifteen minutes after they were supposed to open, and found them still closed, and when 7:00 and then 8:00 came and went and they still hadn’t opened, one had to wonder.

My colleagues’ polling place was in Zetwa, roughly a two-hour hike down the mountain from Matenwa. At 3:30 AM, the Matenwa school’s conch sounded. The conch has great value as a symbol in Haiti. The slaves who were organizing themselves into what would become the successful war of independence from the French used the conch to announce the beginning of their uprising. The famous statue of an escaped slave in Pòtoprens shows him with a large conch in hand. In Matenwa, a small boy called Ti Youyout had been asked to blow the school’s conch to awaken prospective voters so that they could prepare to hike down the mountain. A group of us had agreed to meet at the school at 4:00 and to set out together. Folks were anxious to get into line and vote, and I wanted to walk down with the voters and take in the polling place ambience.

The voters’ enthusiasm was striking. If someone had told me six months ago that the Haitians I know would be so determined to vote, I wouldn’t have believed them. Most of the people I was talking to back then were professing a lack of interest, and I couldn’t really blame them. What many said was that they had elected the president they wanted – Aristide – and that he had been taken from them. They didn’t see the point of choosing their own president if their choice could then be reversed by powers, within the country and abroad, that were looking after their own interests.

As plans for the election unfolded, voting only seemed to get harder, in at least two ways. First, acquiring the new national identity card that doubles as a voter ID turned out to be a nuisance. One had to stand in a long line – perhaps hours long – both to apply for the card and then to pick it up when it became available. For folks in the countryside, there might be a long walk just to get to where application for a card could be made. Production and distribution of the cards was slow – this was one major reason that elections were delayed several times. Even now, there are those who never received their cards.

Second, a decision was made to minimize the number of polling places. It was argued that this would maximize national and international observers’ ability to keep an eye on things, to assure that voting was both fair and safe. But it also meant that many people would have to walk for hours to cast their votes. Our two hour walk from Matenwa to Zetwa was typical on Lagonav. Plenty of people had to walk farther than that.

And when people started picking up their registration cards, many discovered that they had been registered to vote a long way from their home, even if there was a polling place nearby. For example, most residents of Zetwa, where my friends voted, had been sent to vote in Zabriko, a long uphill walk for them. Most of my neighbors back in Ka Glo had been sent to Fermat he, either a hard two-hour hike along mountain paths or an even longer trip down into Pétion-Ville, where one could get transportation up the Fermat he road.

But people seemed really determined to vote. They put up with the long walks, the waiting. They ignored their own skepticism. When our group got to Zetwa at 6:15 or so, long lines had already formed, and the lines did not noticeably diminish as the first hours passed without a sign that the polling stations would open.

Finally, all but one of them did open. The organizers decided that the best way to reduce the number of voting sites would be to set up multiple polling stations at single sites. So there were eight separate sites in Zetwa all in the same school, and by 9:00 all but one of the lines was very slowly moving.

The eighth station hadn’t opened by 11:00, and we were really beginning to wonder. A rumor was finally spread by the candidate-appointed observers on duty that they had refused to allow the station to open because the election officials in charge of the station had already signed their stack of blank ballots. This, the observers felt, could easily be a first step towards stuffing the ballot box. It was almost noon when more important election officials arrived from some more central location backed by heavily-armed Argentinean UN soldiers. They marched into the closed ballot station – the local officials had barricaded themselves in – and in a few minutes voting started.

Throughout the day, the atmosphere was festive. Children ran through and around the lines. Friends spoke with friends whom they might rarely see. Vendors sold snacks: cookies and crackers; peanut butter on bread or cassava; fried sweet potato, plantain, and fish; plates piled high with beans and rice; and drinks of various sorts.

It was after 2:00 when all my friends from Matenwa had finally cast their votes. Mèt Abner, the Matenwa school’s principal, was the last, because he simply refused to push or be pushed in a line. He was willing to stand in line for almost eight hours to exercise his civic duty, and that long wait was preferable to any sort of jostling. It’s a sentiment I very much admire.

On the way back up the hill, under the hot tropical sun, we talked about what might come of the election, who would win and who would lose, which races would come down to run-offs in March. It was a slow, dusty trip. There’s been very little rain since early December, and dust covers Lagonav’s roads. It’s several inches deep in places. I spent most of the way chatting with Gertrude, grandmother of my newest godson, born February 3. Gertrude supports her children by walking to the various markets around Lagonav and trading. She rarely misses a day of work, hiking to distant markets nearly every day, so the walk down to Zetwa and back up to Matenwa was nothing remarkable for her. She was dressed up in her best Sunday dress, hat, and shoes. Like Abner, it took her a long time to vote, but she would not be denied the opportunity.

It’s encouraging, but also a little embarrassing to see the commitment to voting that Haitians showed. Consistently low American voter turnout, in a place where it really is easy to vote, belies the “of the people, by the people, and for the people” rhetoric that seemed so important at the beginning of our republic. One wonders what possibilities for change would be open to us if we could learn to engage in the electoral process as Haitians do.

I’m worried about Jhony.

Before I go on, I should add that, though my proofreading skills have fallen on hard times, “Jhony” is not an error. That very American name is common in Haiti, but to Haitians the “h” appears to make little sense. They know that it’s there, but they don’t know where to put it. It precedes the “o” as often as it follows it, I think. I don’t suppose it matters.

And “Jhony” isn’t even Jhony’s name. His name is actually Makenson. Like many Haitians, the name he really uses is a nickname. Though he says that he’s called Makenson in school, I’ve never heard him addressed that way. In Ka Glo, he’s Jhony Bebette. “Bebette”, his mother’s nickname, is used to identify him when his own nickname is not enough. There are, in fact, other Jhonies and Johnies in the area.

I’ve known Jhony Bebette since I began coming to Ka Glo in 1997. He was seven or eight at the time, but already working hard for his mother in all the spare time he had. She sells bread, homemade coconut candy, and ground coffee from a basket she sets up along the road as it turns uphill towards Mabanbou, the cluster of homes just down the hill from where I live.

She roasts and grinds the coffee herself and makes the candy at home. She buys the bread down the hill in Petyonvil, so she’s got a roundtrip to make on foot each day. That trip, the time it takes to make the other things she sells, and the work around her house take up a fair amount of time, time she can’t spend sitting at her basket, making sales. So her children sit there for her. From a fairly young age, they learn to sell the stuff she offers, to keep track of money, and to make accurate change.

She’s even created a way to do business that works with little children in charge. Everything she sells goes for the same price: a Haitian dollar, which is the usual way to refer to five gourdes. Whenever prices have risen, she’s adjusted the quantities she provides at that price, but she doesn’t adjust the price. That way, making change is, very literally, child’s play.

And so I got used to seeing Jhony sitting by the basket, selling his mother’s wares. Or coming to the mapou tree to fetch water. Or, as he grew, walking down the mountain to Malik, where he would meet her as she headed home from Petyonvil, to help her carry her load. He was a cheerful but serious boy and, in his mid-teens, he’s become a serious but cheerful young man.

The year before last, he finished sixth grade at Mèt Anténor’s school, the nearby public primary school, and he passed the national primary school graduation exam. He was fortunate enough to secure a place at the public high school in Petyonvil. A good thing, too, because his mother could certainly not afford to send him to a private school. Even a cheap one. The public high school is almost free. He was nervous his first year in secondary school. Things were so different. Different teachers for different courses instead of a single teacher all day long. Much larger classes, filled with kids he didn’t know. But he worked hard, passed comfortably, and started his second year with more hope than fear.

In November, he became ill. I don’t have all the details, but it went something like this: He developed a rash and, at roughly the same time, began experiencing moments of dizzy weakness. The last time he went down to school, in November, he was so dizzy by the end of the day that he had to lie down, and he passed out. By the time he awoke, it was dark. He tried to start the hard uphill hike back home but he couldn’t. He just didn’t have the strength. Fortunately, he saw our neighbor Toto, driving by in his boss’s 4-by-4. Toto put Jhony in the back seat, finished some errands he had to do, and drove him home.

It was a week or so later that I heard about it all. I was away almost all of November, working in the provinces. I immediately asked what the doctor had said, but was sorry to learn that Jhony hadn’t been to a doctor. His mother didn’t have the money to take him, and, even if she did, it’s not certain she would have done so. She and her children belong to a charismatic group of Christians who meet in a home near where her business is, and they had determined that Jhony’s problem was not medical. They believed it to have been caused by the devils who live uphill from them.

These “devils” are the vodoun practitioners who live in Mabanbou. Conservative Protestants tend to be extremely hostile to vodoun, inclined to accuse vodoun practitioners of all sorts of wickedness. Jhony explained to me that he had been told that his soul had been taken to offer as a sacrifice.

Or something like that. I still have a hard time following such stories. I want to be very clear, though: This is nothing more than my very rough rendering of what Jhony told me his church’s leaders explained to him. So instead of taking Jhony to a doctor, they had him move into the church building. There, he could be prayed for constantly and intensively.

And this is where I got involved. At the time Jhony looked awful: thin, downcast, a little lifeless. And the rash was driving him nuts. I spoke to him, and then to his mother, respectfully about the prayer that they were using to heal him, but I also suggested that a doctor might have some good advice. I gave Bebette money to pay for the appointment and for tests and medicines if such were required, and left Ka Glo for another week.

I came back to discover Jhony still living in the church and not going to school. They had indeed been to a doctor, but when the doctor asked for lab tests, Bebette decided to return to the church with Jhony and follow prayer instead. I have no idea how they spent the money, but Bebette is raising five children, so I’m sure there’s no lack of need.

By that point, Jhony was feeling a little better. He had gotten the rash under control with some calamine lotion that I brought him. He was anxious to get back to school because he had already missed out on a lot and the second-quarter exam period was approaching, but he was afraid that he didn’t have the strength to go down to Petyonvil and then return each day on foot. So I gave him the money he would need to take a truck between Petyonvil and Malik, and I left for another few days.

When I returned this time, I was discouraged to learn that Jhony still was not going to school. His mother and their pastor didn’t think he was ready to leave the church. He was starting to look a lot better, but he seemed to be feeling increasingly discouraged. Exams were starting, and he would not be in school for them. If he were to lose a whole set of exams, he would have a hard time passing for the year, and this would have serious consequences.

Generally speaking, it’s not that unusual for a Haitian kid to fail a year of school and to have to repeat it. But slots at the public high school are so desirable that its administration does not let kids repeat grades there. Fail and you’re out. For Jhony, failing school this year could easily mean that his education is over, after a very promising start. And he is very clear about this. As his health and strength have returned to him, his frustration has grown. He thought he was ready to go down the mountain to take his end-of-term exams, but his mother was unable or unwilling to give him either the twenty gouds that roundtrip transportation would cost each day or the fifty gouds to pay the examination fee. With the Haitian goud at about 43 to the dollar, the sums are equivalent to roughly 47 cents and $ 1.16. Though her income is small, and she has a lot of things to manage with it, it doesn’t seem like a lot of money. But this is an extremely difficult claim to judge.

I would have given him the money myself. It wouldn’t be much money for me, either. But I couldn’t convince myself that it would have the effect I was looking for. I have already given his mother money for him. She didn’t use the money I gave her for medical care to pay for medical care, and she didn’t use the money I gave her to pay for his transportation to school and back to get him to school. I do not believe that I should be making decisions for her and her son, but I can’t see myself simply giving them money for I-don’t-know-what either. It’s complicated.

And it gets more complicated in surprising ways. I visit Jhony in the church every chance I get. It’s nice to talk. But if the pastor’s there, he is certain to remind me none too discretely that I said I would buy several sacks of cement towards the construction of the church. This is false. I said no such thing. The truth is that he asked me to buy cement, and I didn’t say “absolutely not”. I said that I would consider the idea. I didn’t want to say “no” outright because so much of Jhony’s immediate future seems to depend on him.

I don’t want to paint Pastor Narcisse in a bad light. He’s taken responsibility for Jhony and for a small church where a growing congregation meets under a woven palm-leave roof that sits on a shaky frame. It would mean a lot to him to get a real structure built, so he would be crazy to let my visits pass without trying to convince me to help him out. At the same time, I’m just not that interested in financing church construction. I have, as they say, other fish to fry.

Soon, enough though, I’ll have to decide whether and what I want to do about Jhony. It seems to me possible, though not certain, that his family is now hoping that I will simply take over his school expenses for them. The interest I’ve shown in him over the course of a couple of years, but especially since he became sick, could very easily have created such a hope. Not deciding anything is not an option, because it would be exactly the same as deciding to leave well enough – or unwell enough – alone.

We sat in the meeting room at the top of the school in Matenwa with ten little stones, a pen, and a pile of scrap paper. I was trying to determine whether he knew his numbers, one-four.

He could write them on paper. “2” gave him some problems, but he was even able to write a perfectly good “6” at one point. It soon became apparent, however, that the fact that he could write the various digits did not mean that he knew what they meant. He did not seem to connect a “1” with one thing or a “2” with two things or a “3” with three.

Jantoutou joined Vana’s third-grade class this year. He’d been friends for years with other kids in the class, but hadn’t been going to school. He is what Haitians call a “bèbè”, a deaf-mute, and such children generally miss out on the chance to go to school. There’s just no place for them in a traditional Haitian classroom, where the emphasis is on recitation of memorized texts. There is, for example, a deaf-mute who lives in Nankonble, just a little way down along the hill from where I live in Ka Glo. He’s a full-grown young man, big and muscular, and he makes a living working for the masons and carpenters who build houses in the area. He does the heavy work: mixing and carrying mortar, lugging rocks or cinder block or planks, digging holes. But he didn’t get to go to school. His ability to communicate is limited.

But the Matenwa Community Learning Center is different from almost all other Haitian schools. Teachers there focus on creating classrooms where children can work together to discover the world. The children work individually, in small groups, and in large groups to teach one another and themselves to read, to write, to appreciate and improve the environment that surrounds them, and to learn math and the other skills and information they’ll need as they grow.

And the freer, more participative approach the school takes leaves plenty of room for students who would not traditionally find their ways into Haitian primary schools. I’ve written before of the adult women who attend classes with the Matenwa kids. These women are only the most obvious example of students who would not be in primary school were they elsewhere in Haiti.

Jantoutou is an example of a very different kind. Vana is happy with his presence in her class. He is growing socially, integrating himself increasingly into the class’s activities. As long as he has something to do, he is hard to distinguish from the other kids. Only when he feels lost does he tend to misbehave. Naturally enough, I suppose. When the kids are writing or drawing, he works closely with another student, copying whatever she does. And so he is getting better at drawing, and he can write some words.

But Vana has been increasingly concerned at the difficulty of determining exactly how much Jantoutou is learning beyond how to behave in a group. It’s hard to be certain what the drawings he creates or the words he copies mean to him. The example Vana cited when I spoke to her was straightforward: He seemed to understand addition problems some of the time, but not always. She knew that he probably needed more individual attention, but with twenty-something other students to worry about, and without experience or training to help her know how to work with a deaf child, she was a little bit stumped.

I certainly don’t know any more about working with deaf children than Vana does. If anything, I know less. She is, at least, an experienced and successful teacher of kids. But I’d become fascinated during my monthly visits to the school as I got to see Jantoutou working in her class, and I was curious to see what doing some math with him would be like. So I asked her whether I could work with him for a few minutes, and she quickly agreed.

I started by making three piles of stones: one with a single stone, one with two, and one with three, and I wrote the appropriate digits under each. I used pointing in an effort to associate the digits with the piles. We then spent about twenty minutes alternating between two games. In one, I would put out one, two, or three stones, and he would have to write the correct digit. In the other, I would point to a “1”, a “2”, or a “3” on a sheet of paper in front of him, and he would have to choose the right number of rocks.

It soon became clear that he had not really been associating the digits with the quantities. He seemed to be choosing digits more-or-less at random. That is, in fact, why I know he can write a perfectly good “6.” He wrote at least two of them that I can remember, though he never had six rocks in front of him at once.

Slowly, his answers became more and more regular, more and more correct. It will take a lot more practice for me to be able to be certain that he’s getting it. I just don’t know what I’m doing. If nothing else he seemed to be having a great time.

I hope to make sitting with him a part of my daily schedule when I’m in Matenwa. Abner Sauveur, the school’s principal, spoke to me about the activity later that day, and he plans to start spending time with him as well.

My work here in Haiti is an apprenticeship. I think of myself as learning all the time. Working with Jantoutou will be a new challenge. I don’t know what he’ll get out of it, but I am very sure I’ll learn a lot.

The photo above was taken in Madanm Anténor’s dining room on January 1st, 2006. It’s room a know well because it’s what I called home in Haiti from 1998 to February 2005, when I moved into the house that Byton built. January 1st is Haitian Independence Day, the anniversary of the 1804 declaration of independence from France and Haitians everywhere celebrate it by feasting on soup joumou.

Soup joumou is pumpkin soup, and the story goes that when the French still controlled Haiti it was consumed only by slaveholders, never by slaves, so that when independence was declared former slaves decided to celebrate by consuming what had, until then, been forbidden goods. It came to be known as independence soup. When Jean-Bertrand Aristide was elected in 1991 after years of dictatorship and oppression, he called it democracy soup.

So it is a meal that means a lot to Haitians. And it also tastes great. I’ve grown fond of all sorts of Haitian foods, but love none as a love pumpkin soup.

The photo was taken midmorning, about 10:00, and so lots of soup had been consumed by the time it was taken. Andrelita and Myrtane, Byton’s sisters, had borrowed and alarm clock from Byton the night before so they could get up at 3:00 and start cooking. Their soup arrived in my house as I was finishing my coffee around 6:00.

So the fact that so much soup had already been consumed and the quantity still sitting on Madanm Anténor’s table requires some explanation. In fact, only one of the bowls on the table has any remnant of the soup Madanm Anténor herself had made that morning. Each of the other bowls contains a generous portion of soup, prepared in one of her neighbors’ kitchens: Madanm Clébert, Madanm Willy, Andrelita and Myrtane, Madanm Frénel, and Merline, Madanm Jean-Claude’s youngest daughter.

Because that’s what happens all through the morning of January 1st. Children weave through the neighborhood, carrying bowls of soup from one home to another, sent with good wishes for the year to come. Adults circulate around the neighborhood as well, wishing one another a good year and good health and that they will always continue to live together as neighbors just as they do now.

It’s a practice the merits careful attention and, perhaps, imitation: a whole neighborhood of friends and relatives that eat together once a year, celebrating their friendship, their sense of community, with the meal most meaningful to them all.

And, as I said, the soup is great. I’m not the only one that thinks so. Madanm Anténor can’t get enough of it. The photo below is of Valouloun her youngest daughter, who loves it perhaps even more than Madanm Anténor and I combined.

Happy New Year.

There’s good news.

In September, I wrote to many of you that Jacob had been killed. He was an artist-entrepreneur who had been building an arts and crafts workshop in Site Solèy, Port au Prince’s most notorious neighborhood.

Jethro

He was murdered by a gang that was jealous of his connections to foreigners or of his growing business or for other reasons that I don’t understand. His wife and children had to flee, as did the group of young people who were building the workshop with him. The workshop was destroyed, along with all its recently acquired equipment.

The workshop’s destruction was a disaster for many of those who were involved. It was the way that some of them paid for school for themselves or their kids. Some depended on the work for more than just school. It gave lots of young people work to do in a country where unemployment is said to be at least 70%. It would be hard to exaggerate the importance it had.

I thought that the story was more or less over, but it wasn’t. Soon after the crime, I learned through a mutual friend that Jacob’s wife and children were safe in hiding and that at least some of the members of the workshop were ok as well. They had gone out to the countryside to escape and to grieve.

Wisly

Some time later, I heard that two of the workshop’s members, Jethro and Wisly, would be coming to Port au Prince. They had things to do and people to see. They had determined to try to re-open the workshop, and while they couldn’t safely return to Site Solèy, they could not accomplish everything they would need to accomplish from the countryside where they were staying. I let them know though our mutual friend that if they needed a safe place to spend a few days while they were in Port au Prince – someplace close enough to allow them to run their errands in the city but far enough to be out of harm’s way – they could come to Ka Glo. I soon got an e-mail from them in the countryside letting me know that they liked the idea and would come.

That was a few weeks ago, and since then they’ve been living in my house. I can’t really say that they’ve been living with me, since I myself haven’t been home more than a few days since mid-November, but they’ve been in the house, with Byton making friends in Ka Glo and getting to work. To see photos of them as they work, click TheArtists.

In the meantime, they are creating their wonderful cards again, and looking for ways to sell them. They are business people, and want to get their business running again.

Some of you have seen their work, so know its value. Here are a few photos that can give one at least some sense of what they do:

We hope that very soon their website will be running again and that they will therefore be able to accept regular orders directly. Meanwhile, orders can be placed by e-mailing me at [email protected]. The cards are ninety cents each, and the price includes an envelope. 100% of the sale price goes to the artists.

They have lots of different designs, but it’s not right now possible to accept detailed orders. Please specify, however, whether you would like religious or secular themes – if you have a preference.

Please order by January 10th. Delivery will take place in early February.

I had heard that one of the thirty-something candidates for the presidency of Haiti is a woman, but I had yet to see her campaign posters. But last week her posters appeared all over the place and all at once. Her name is Judy C. Roy, and her slogan is pretty straightforward. “Vote fanm nan” means, “vote for the woman.” It says nothing about her professional experience or her opinions, but it does set her apart. All the other candidates are men.

The other slogan that has caught my attention during these last weeks belongs to Simeus Dumarsais. He’s a Haitian-born American billionaire, and banners proclaiming his candidacy read “Yon lòt chemen ak milyonè a.” That means, roughly, “A different path with the millionaire.” He has decided, in other words, to identify himself as both different and rich. Here’s the banner itself:

I have been careful to stay out of electoral politics in Haiti. It’s not that I see my work as apolitical or as neutral. I’m not sure that any public activity either can or should be neutral. And my activity is, perhaps, especially political: The only appropriate basis for public decision-making is dialogue, and building the skills and habits that make constructive dialogue possible is the central goal of my work. But it would be improper for me to enter into discussions in favor of any of the parties or candidates that are running for office. Foreigners, especially Americans, have wielded too much influence in Haiti for much too long. Not only that, I couldn’t contribute competently to such conversations even if I wanted to. I just don’t understand things well enough. I don’t know what Haiti needs from its government and I don’t know what the various candidates might be able to offer.

The preliminaries leading up to the election are fascinating, though. So I follow news when I can, and I listen to any conversations I come across.

Perhaps the most interesting story in this election thus far has centered on the candidacy of Dumarsais. He’s been in the States, making his fortune, for something like forty years. And he has American citizenship.

And that’s the curious point, because the Haitian constitution seems to proclaim rather clearly that anyone with dual citizenship is ineligible. And the provisional government and its electoral council proclaimed Dumarsais ineligible.

But that’s not the end of the story, because Dumarsais sued and the Haitian Supreme Court, for reasons I don’t understand, declared him eligible after all. The government responded by creating a special committee whose charge was to evaluate the citizenship of each of the candidates. The committee declared that Dumarsais and two other candidates are not Haitian citizens and, so, it invalidated their candidacies. The matter seemed decided and ballots were ordered printed.

But last week, the matter opened up again. The Supreme Court re-affirmed, still for reasons I don’t understand, that Dumarsais’ candidacy is valid. Surprisingly, the government fired the justices – actually announced their retirement. This although the Haitian constitution does not appear to give it the right to do so. Within days, the government arranged to swear new justices in, but the apparently-though-illegally fired justices and their supporters blockaded the ceremony. A few days after that, the government swore in its new judges, but installed them in offices in the Presidential Palace rather than in the White House.

It’s hard to guess where this all might lead, with a first round of voting scheduled for January 8th and ballots already printed. If someone had wanted to undermine the possible legitimacy of the election, then the manner in which Dumarsais’ candidacy has unfolded would have been a clever way to do it. If the Electoral Council is forced to include him, over their objections and over the apparent letter of the Constitution, then the election will most likely have to be delayed, again, because ballots will need to be reprinted. And we are already near two years of a provisional government whose constitutional mandate would have been to hold elections within three months. If he is excluded, it will be at the price of ignoring the Supreme Court.

Whether the coming election can be legitimate under any circumstances is a serious question. One possible candidate was blocked from participating by his arrest. The electoral council ruled him ineligible because he could not deliver his candidacy papers personally. At the time he was, and in fact still is, in jail. Not that he’s been charged with anything. His imprisonment could easily appear to be a strategy for excluding him from the ballot. And it might just be that.

Voter registration was problematic. Distribution of voting cards to those who did register continues to be difficult.

At the same time, it’s hard to imagine what alternative there is to at least accepting whatever the election’s results might be. The frontrunner appears to be Rene Preval, the man who replaced Aristide in 1995 and was replaced by him five years after that. He has been strikingly quiet through the campaign thus far, bearing himself like a classic frontrunner. He recently said that he would not “engage anyone in polemics.” This seems only to promise that he won’t discuss any differences he might have with other candidates.

The current government has no mandate to continue governing, if it ever had any mandate to govern in the first place. It can’t reasonably continue. And replacing it by any means other than election would surely be less legitimate than even a poor election would be.

And plenty of Haitians are engaging themselves in the current electoral process, at least in the sense that they’re willingly talking about the different candidates, both in terms of their strengths and weaknesses as possible presidents and in terms of their respective chances of winning. One hears discussions everywhere: on the streets, in the busses and trucks that serve as public transportation, on front porches, in places of work, and elsewhere. This is true even though many of those who involve themselves in the conversations will say, at the same time, that they don’t really believe that there will be an election and that, if there is, the results don’t matter because the outside world will impose whatever governance on Haiti it desires. Former President Aristide was, after all, elected.

But there are, as I said, few alternatives to hoping that the election will go reasonably well and that its result will be accepted by most. At least there are none that I can see.

I’ve been trying to figure out a way to explain the enormity of the challenge that Fonkoze faces. It’s not easy to convey.

Let’s assume I’ve already made it to the appropriate bus station. The trip to any one of them, starting from Ka Glo, is about two hours, but I’m happy to make it. It’s the price I pay for the luxury of living in the countryside, rather than Port-au-Prince, and it’s not really part of the point I want to make anyway.

Getting to Trouin from the station in Carrefour is, at least, uncomplicated. The simplest way is to climb onto a truck headed to Bainet, in south-central Haiti. The trucks that make this trip are large, open crates. They fill with cargo, stacked about seven or eight feet high, and passengers climb onto the top. If it rains, you get wet. If there’s dust, you are dusted. You hang on as best you can as you’re shaken and tossed along the road through Carrefour past Léogane up the mountain on the road towards Jacmel. You turn off the paved road at St. Etienne, and take the long, rocky, narrow road down towards Bainet. About an hour later, you hop off in Trouin. In all, it’s about four bone-shaking hours.

Or it should be. I was once on one of those trucks headed back from Trouin when an dispute erupted between the conductors and the passengers as to the correct fare. So the truck just stopped for over an hour, in a downpour, while the argument raged. I eventually gave up, got down, and walked the last hour through the rain to St. Etienne, where I got a bus back to the city. It’s the sort of thing that happens sometimes.

Getting to Baptiste from the station in Croix-de-Bouquets can be almost as simple, if you’re lucky. There are a couple of busses that make daily trips between Croix-de-Bouquets and Belladère. From there, you hire a motorcycle for the 90 minute ride southward into the mountains.

The busses are uncomfortable even on good roads, like the excellent one between Lascahobas and Belladère. You sit packed three to a bench that wouldn’t carry more than two in the States. That’s three adults: bags, backpacks, sacks, chickens, children and other luggage don’t count. If you’re on the aisle, you’ll be looking for something to do with 50% or more of your – excuse me – rear end, because it won’t all be on the bench. If you’re not on the aisle, you’ll be trying to figure out if there’s a way to add an additional joint to your legs, a way to fold them one more time, because the distance to the seat in front of you won’t be quite enough.

If you don’t get one of those busses, you’ll be taking a similar one to Mirebalais instead. Then it’s the back of one pick-up truck to Lascahobas and another from there to Belladère, where you get that same motorcycle into the mountains. It’s a full day’s work.

To get to Trou du Nord, you take a bus to Cap Haitian from the station at the base of Delmas. The ride takes six-eight hours if all goes well, cramped into those same busses. From there, it’s a twenty-minute walk to the northeast bus station, where you get an hour-and-a-half’s ride across rotten roads to Trou du Nord. It’s an hour or two longer if you need to go to Fort Libertè or Ouanaminthe. All on those busses that I’ve already mentioned.

My point in all of this is not to complain about a hard and uncomfortable job. It turns out that one gets used to such circumstances rather easily. As my friend Erik was reminding me recently, those trips can actually be fun as long as your health is good. A camaraderie can develop among passengers, and it’s an instructive pleasure to be a part of it. People talk about themselves, their family, their work, their country. All sorts of things. They exchange advice and sometimes teasing. They tell stories and they jest.

My point is rather, as I said, to talk about the enormity of the challenge Fonkoze takes upon itself as it attempts to bring banking and educational services into the countryside. I’ve written before about others aspect of Fonkoze’s challenge. I’ve written of how hard it is to prepare poorly educated women to teach other women how to read and to do so quickly and inexpensively. This would be formidable in any environment. I’ve also written about how hard it is to support such teachers through site visits because one’s presence as an observer so forcefully affects what one sees. All this apart from how basically hard it is to help a busy adult, living in a culture where there’s little reading and little to read, learn to read and write.

Fonkoze’s mission is more difficult still because it aims to reach rural women. It would be difficult enough to serve women in Port-au-Prince and a few major cities, but Fonkoze has as its goal serving women in Haiti’s hard-to-reach corners, and that’s another matter entirely.

Because the challenging voyages I just described only get one to Fonkoze’s offices in the countryside. (At least the trips to Trouin and Trou du Nord. Baptiste is somewhat different.) Getting all the way to the credit centers where educational services need to be offered can involve much more time and trouble. In other words, all that traveling still doesn’t get me into the field in any meaningful sense.

When I visited Trouin, the literacy supervisor, Rony, and I had an hour’s trip to the credit center in Meyè that we wanted to visit. And that center wasn’t one of his more distant ones. Though his office is already in the countryside, he’s responsible for centers for which site visits require overnight stays. In Trou du Nord, the supervisor, Saül, has a motorcycle to use. But he still has site visits that require an hour’s ride or more.
If you’re at Fonkoze’s Lagonav office, which requires not only between one and four busses or trucks, but also a boat, you are still a couple of hours by motorcycle from some of the more remote centers. And the roads are bad enough to make the motorcycle trip genuinely hard riding. Even for someone like me, who sits as a passenger behind the driver, who’s doing the real work.

And it’s not as though Fonkoze can choose to save its resources – its time, energy, and money – by not sending its staff to the more distant centers. Not only do the literacy teachers at work in the centers need support, but even just the credit operations require extensive travel because Fonkoze’s clients cannot be required to come even to the branch offices in the countryside. They do not have motorcycles, and they’re hard at work almost constantly building the businesses they’ve created with their loans. The couple of hours that a round trip to a Fonkoze office would require is out of the question for them. So Fonkoze credit agents take loan applications, disperse loans, and accept payments during visits to the scattered credit centers. And Fonkoze literacy supervisors get out into the field to coach teachers, encourage and evaluate students, and collect data.

And the fact that Fonkoze is a financial institution, and the fact that it spends money it receives from other institutions that have a range of their own reporting requirements, all means that, as scattered as Fonkoze’s branch offices are, and as very much more scattered still as its credit centers are, they all require a close, unified oversight. And there are over twenty branches, all over Haiti. Some of them are easier to get to than the ones I’ve mentioned, but many are not.

Trying to imagine how it’s all supposed to work for Fonkoze’s 27,000 clients, at all of Fonkoze’s 20+ branches would be overwhelming at least for me. So we just try to focus on getting jobs in front of us done. Sometimes we succeed.

That’s what makes all the traveling I do for Fonkoze really worthwhile. I see Fonkoze’s success in the excitement of its clients who are learning to read or to build their businesses or to talk about sex and protect themselves from AIDS. I get to talk to them individually and in groups. So I know that, even if we not accomplishing everything we’d like to do, there are lots of rural Haitian women pleased with what we are able to do.

My grandmother has been very unwell. It’s hard for me to be clear just how unwell because I’m overseas and hard to reach.

She’s 93, so I suppose it’s not surprising that she’s having problems. Nevertheless, until about a year ago the most that you could have said is that she had some trouble with her memory and that she was increasingly prone to being confused. It was not without difficulty that she attended our family’s Passover Seder last spring, but she seemed to have a great time. She’s always had a particular affinity for small children and our Seder was well-stocked with them. A committee of four very energetic little girls made sure that my sister’s house, which is where we met, was very much alive. And my grandmother too came alive in their presence.

By the time I saw her in September, on my way back to Haiti after a visit to the States, she had deteriorated. She seemed more lost, less lively, more fragile. And shortly after that she fell. She broke her ankle and needed surgery.

The surgery is proving to be a terrible challenge to her system. When I rushed back to the States in October to see her, she was miserable. She seemed to recognize me at moments, but not all the time. She wasn’t interested in eating. She was extremely confused, unable to understand where she was or even to recognize that she had broken her ankle and was incapable of walking. It was rather soon after her surgery, and I hear some suggestion that she’s making progress, but it’s hard to be optimistic, hard even to know what to hope for.

I am writing at such length about my own sad news in part because I always try to write about what’s on my mind, and my grandmother is foremost on my mind these days. At the same time, my feelings about my grandmother provide the frame within which I am trying to face the other sad news I’m dealing with right now: the decline in health of Madanm Marinot.

Madanm Marinot is my makomè. I’ve written about the word before. In its narrowest sense, it would mean that she is my godchild’s mother. By the word can have more extended meanings as well. In this case, she is my godson’s grandmother. Her son, Saül, is my very close friend and monkonpè. His son, Givens, is my godchild. And for about a year, Madanm Marinot’s been calling me “monkonpè” as well.

While she’s a good deal older than I am, she’s a long way from being old. I suppose she’s around 60. Saül is the oldest of her seven kids, and he is only 36 or 37. I used to know exactly.

But her health hasn’t been really good for several years. She’s diabetic and suffers from high blood pressure. So at the moments when I’ve seen her over the last couple of years, whether at Saül’s house in Pòtoprens or at her own home in Ench, she’s been a little bit lifeless: quiet, inactive, depressed.

Only someone who’s known Madanm Marinot can appreciate how odd this is. She was previously an extraordinarily dynamic person. Almost too dynamic. She was a hurricane. The first time I visited her home in Ench, she was dizzying: running around, shouting order after order at her own children and the other members of her household, assuring that everything happened just as she thought it should. It was a little hard to take, even though it was all being done for my benefit.

But in October I visited Ench with Papouch, and she was an entirely different person. She spent most of our visit lying quietly in a bed, in her home’s back room, as her daughters looked after Papouch and me. (See: PriviLege.) At the end of our visit, she apologized tearfully. She was upset because her health had not permitted her to receive us properly as guests, this despite the lavish hospitality her daughters had displayed.

The problem was that she had recently had surgery to removed a non-cancerous lump in her breast. The surgery had gone poorly and she wasn’t healing well. She was tired and in pain. Shortly after our visit to Ench, she went back to the hospital in Piyon, where the surgery had been performed. They recommended a new biopsy, for which she would need to come to Pòtoprens. The lab work would be done in the States. She waited for the results at Saül’s house in Pòtoprens. The news finally came in that there was nothing non-cancerous about her condition at all. She has what appears to be an advanced case of breast cancer, and it’s not yet clear whether there’s anything that can be done. Right now she’s getting painkillers and nothing more.

Of course the news has been dreadful for her family, just as my grandmother’s recent decline has been terrible for mine. My monkonpè had tears in his eyes last week as he told me of his mother’s situation.

But things are a little bit different here. Since she has no health insurance, her children are having to pay for every bit of care she gets. And though there is no comparison between the cost of medical care in Haiti and its cost in the States, there is also no comparison between the resources available to my grandmother and those available to Madanm Marinot. Her three youngest children are still in school. She, her husband, and her older kids are funding their for-them-expensive educations. The next oldest child, her fourth son, would like to return to school as soon as possible. His education was interrupted because of his own health troubles, but he’s much better now, and is anxious to move on with his life.

That leaves her three oldest sons, but the middle of them is a farmer and cattle merchant who barely gets by on his own. So she has just two children who can help her, Saül and his younger brother Felix. But there is only so much they can do. Not only are their own financial resources quite limited, not only do they already go to extraordinary lengths to support their siblings, but they are both married and both have children of their own that they must think of as well.

When a doctor suggested that they take her to a final specialist, an oncologist who could evaluate whether she’s a candidate for chemotherapy, her children didn’t hesitate. Her youngest son, a twenty-something medical school student named Job, made the appointment and took her there. But she wasn’t able to undergo the tests that would determine whether chemotherapy would stand a chance of helping her. She was too weak. And even if it could help, it’s not clear whether she, her husband, and her children could afford the expense.

Job, with whom I am especially close, spoke to me at length about how very distraught he is by it all. He insists that he and his family have no right to leave anything untried in their efforts to help their mother, but there is very little he can do except insist. He is not yet supporting himself, and so he’s very far from being able to contribute financially to his mother’s care. When I asked him to say, straight up, whether he thinks his mother would accept the one financial contribution he could make – sacrificing a year of med school so that the tuition money could be spent on her care – he had to admit that she never would agree.

So we are all simply waiting. Madanm Marinot now insists that she wants only to return to her home in Ench to await whatever may come. She is still entirely lucid, so unless something changes the family will probably try to accommodate her wish.

My mother and father have been forced to take full responsibility for my grandmother’s life and well-being. It’s a sad thing because my main memories of my grandmother are of a very loving woman, both capable and strong. Her grandchildren – my sister and brother and I – all live too far away to offer our help. I know it’s hard on my parents, but they have Medicare, doctors, nurses, my grandmother’s excellent financial advisor, and probably others as well working beside them. At times, the very task of managing such a scattered team must itself be a burden, but I’m glad they have access to such assistance nonetheless.

Madanm Marinot’s family is able to huddle around her in her time of need. She doesn’t lack for their time and attention, but it’s not clear what any or all of them can do.

As I said: We simply wait.

The situation was odd, but strangely not awkward. I was in the surprising position to be talking with a sixty-something-year-old mother of eight and grandmother of many about her sex life. She had lots of things to say, of various sorts, but it all started with this one fact: She told me she no longer “had relations with anyone.”

We were talking about her sex life because she had participated in Fonkoze’s educational program in Sexual and Reproductive Health. It’s a fourth-month class for members of Fonkoze credit centers. (See www.fonkoze.org.) Participants use open dialogue to work through three comic books – I suppose that nowadays they’d be called “graphic novels” – that deal with various issues related to reproductive health.

The obvious issues are there, such as family planning, HIV/AIDS, and other STDs. But there are also stories that bring out the difficult situations Haitians, especially Haitian women, face in their sexual lives. One of the most popular is about a rural couple, Sentana and Toma. The man, Toma, decides to head to a city, where he can find work to support the family he leaves behind. But both he and she end up, each for a different reason, taking up with other partners. And the story describes the difficulties that creates for them both. In an area like Lagonav, filled with women who are raising their children alone because their husbands or partners are away in Pòtoprens or farther, the story really hits home.

Haitians who read the stories love them. Not just Fonkoze clients, but others as well. I have a copy of each of the three books, and the young people in Ka Glo, where I live, are constantly borrowing them.

If the familiarity of the stories is one key to their success, then the process that produced the stories is, in turn, what assured that they would feel familiar. They were created by Kathleen Cash, who worked closely with a team of Haitian interviewers whom she trained to talk extensively, seriously, and intimately with Haitians about their sex lives. She thus learned their stories, and was able to use them to develop composites that would highlight the issues in them that seemed most important to raise.

Perhaps the clearest sign of the program’s success was the fact that Madanm Lumière and others were so open with me about their situations. One of the goals of the program was to help the women who participate learn to be comfortable talking about what are, traditionally, private matters, and for Madanm Lumière and others it had clearly worked.

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Madanm Lumière

As she herself reported, when the program first started she had hidden her books, embarrassed to show them to anyone around her, especially to young people. She had soon learned, however, how important sharing the books would be. After all, she said, as a woman no longer sexually active, sharing information with her friends and family was the reason she had chosen to participate in the class in the first place. Now she found herself making an effort to talk to young people, to encourage them to talk with one another, about their choices and to encourage condom use.

This latter point she found hard, because the class time that was spent talking about condom use was especially challenging for her. For her, those discussions became too graphic. They were, she said, “vulgar.” But she understood their importance, and now was talking about condoms with young people she knew who would listen.

Another one of the program’s participants I spoke with was taking things even farther. Her name is Brigitte. She’s also in her sixties. She’s a single mother of seven children who supports and has supported herself and her kids – the two youngest still live with her – by selling coffee and hot chocolate on a street corner in Ansagale every morning.

The program could have no greater fan than Brigitte. As I spoke with her, I couldn’t help but think of the biblical instructions to speak of God’s commandments when you walk along the road, when you lie down, and when you rise up. Brigitte has made communicating what she learned in the class a major part of her life. She can read, and so she reads the books out loud at home. Friends, neighbors, and family members come to listen. And she brings the books to her little coffee shop, too. There, her customers can read them as they sip and chat. She pushes those she reads for or with to ask her questions and to tell her what they think, and directs herself especially to the young, boys and girls alike. They are, she says, the ones who have the greatest need to learn to avoid the diseases that come from making bad decisions about sex and to avoid having children whom they are not ready to raise well.

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Brigitte

She found the story of Sentana and Toma particularly important. Readers, she says, “will learn to be careful.” Sentana and Toma, she says, “seek out disease” for themselves and, so, end up “living in a terrible situation.”

All the Fonkoze classes were run by women who are members of Fonkoze credit centers. All the participants were their fellow-members. This is in strict accordance with Fonkoze’s goal of helping the centers develop into long-term solidarity groups in which learning has a natural and permanent place. The women who ran the classes received two weeks of preparation in a workshop at the beginning of the session and on-going support from a field supervisor who had participated in the same workshop with them.

Over and over, as I talked with participants, I learned how little the program’s spread was limited by the fact that direct participation in the classes was restricted to Fonkoze clients. In fact, space in class was so limited that only a third to a half of the members of any of the credit centers could join in. Nevertheless, in every center that I visited I heard how women were committed to sharing the books with family and friends and to talking about issues like condom use, sexually transmitted diseases, and birth control.

For Fonkoze, the program’s importance is thus two-fold. In a most straightforward way, it can contribute to the well-being of Fonkoze clients and their families. And that is, after all, what all Fonkoze programs are actually for. At the same time, it is providing its members with an opportunity to look beyond their families’ and their centers’ needs and to become agents of change in the communities they live and work in.

As they share these books and talk about the issues that they raise, they are transforming themselves into community educators of the most valuable sort: Educators who live and work within their home community to improve the choices that their communities’ members make for themselves. A traveling educator, a permanent outsider like I am, can only look on in admiration and delight as these true teachers reach more deeply into their communities and teach more effectively than I could ever hope to do.