Pep Talks & Other Thoughts on Teaching in Haiti

By: Lea Graham

This last Friday, Bowser and I were invited to speak to an Agriculture class at the American University of the Caribbean here in Les Cayes. The Dean of Agriculture, Dr. Willam Cinea, extended the invitation when we had met with him the day before. While his overall goal, he told us, was to teach students to understand the “larger view of conservation,” he asked us to come in to his class with a more general goal: “Inspire them!” Bowser and I laughed when we realized that our NY taxi driver, Bill, (mentioned in a previous blog post), had indeed predicted at least part of our time here, we were essentially giving Dr. Cinea’s students a “pep talk”!

The classroom was bare, dim, and cool in typical Caribbean fashion. There were student desks, fans, a large desk at front, and a chalkboard. The only thing that hung on the wall was a picture of the potato plant, fully labeled from the “mother tuber” to the “inflorescence.” We had access to a projector so that Bowser could show slides from his time spent in Mauritania to his current work with students, and the “eel project,” at Marist. He talked to the students about his own hopscotched path towards his career as an environmental scientist, interspersing his talk in English with French to help the students, who have been matriculated in French even as Creole is their home language—and the language predominantly spoken throughout the country and officially recognized since the 1980s. The students seemed grateful for the relief from English, even as Dr. Cinea, continued to encourage us to speak in English. Since this university is the only institution in Les Cayes (in Haiti?) that follows U.S. curriculum and requirements, he hopes that his students will be able to write grants to obtain funding for their agricultural or environmental projects in the future.

I spoke to the students about writing “narratives.” What makes a good narrative—even if you are writing about empirical data? As I gave them a breakdown of the components, I asked them to write a short narrative about what brought them to study agriculture at the American University of the Caribbean? Who or what inspired them? When and where did the decision get made? Who were they, as the speaker in this narrative?

One student, Dupuis, volunteered his educational narrative. The son of a hard-working farmer, he started out wanting to be an astronaut at ten years old, and then, as he got older, a bio-chemist. When he couldn’t find a place in Haiti to study bio-chemistry, he made a decision to study agriculture as a way to manage an organization that might help his community in the future. We discussed how Dupuis’s narrative enacted all of the parts of narrative, and how persuasive that might be to potential funders.

As a writer, I think in comparisons. Teaching this class, I often felt as if I was back in my own classrooms at Marist: a cell phone went off, students listened attentively, a few of them offered their tentative thoughts, a few wandered in tardy, they all seemed to take copious notes, some seemed interested, others not so much. Yet, I wasn’t. Despite the fact that we are all Americans—in the large, historical sense of that name—there are a lot of differences. Jan Davis, the Academic Dean at AUotC, made clear that that most of these differences are material. The school has a total of ten computers for student use, for instance. The students that Bowser and I taught used the paper we had brought with us for just this circumstance, asking for a clean sheet when we moved on to a different topic. Still, some of these differences are much larger in scope: politically, historically, pedagogically, philosophically. Students in Haitian schools learn by rote memorization. They study in French even as their home and national language is Creole, a mixture of French, English, and Spanish with a structure that is closer to West African languages. They have, given the nature of the national situation, more concrete goals for their education. Some of the students I spoke with were obviously concerned with their own economic success, but often mentioned the desire to help their community through that success. I am still processing the similarities and differences between us, the richest people in the Americas, and the poorest. What do we have to learn from each other? How does our shared history and geography inform us about who we are? Who is the other? How might their example inspire us as we work with them to help towards a more vibrant Haiti?

Je Wè Bouche Pe: The Eyes See; the Mouth Is Silent
By: Lea Graham

We have been in Les Cayes for four days and nights. I am writing this on a Friday afternoon from
the second floor patio of Pastor John Beaucejour’s house where my colleague and
co-author, Chris Bowser and I have been staying along with the rest of the
group: Elisabeth Kennedy, the founder ofthe H.E.L.O. orphanage and school, her friend and second-in-command, BelindaGould; four of our Marist students, Katie Brewer, Katherine Saso, Kit Stebbins,Kim Mead, and Marta Koscielniak; and four builders from Colchester, CT; Al
Laflamme, Rick Gortler, Pat Bellanger, and Deacon Michael Tuscas, who are here
to roof the second building for the school and church at the orphanage. This has been a busy week in which there hasbeen little time to sit at the computer, even as we have taken copious notes.

Since arriving, Bowser and I have been asked by others in the group, who have been to Haiti repeatedly, ifwe have seen anything unexpected. The drive out of Port-au-Prince was much like the drive out of any major city in a developing country: congested, colorful,
bumpy and slow. The multi-passenger motorcycles, the street vendors and their bright umbrellas, the Digicel signs everywhere (the cell phone company, we’ve been told, which gave out cell phones and by doing so, drastically changed the communication system in the country for thebetter), and the crush of people all seem as if they could exist in many
different countries. Still, we could see workers clearing rocks and other rubble as we headed south on the six-hour drive to Les Cayes, and so we knew that we were in Haiti, a place still in recovery from its 2010 earthquake.

Our drive from Poughkeepsie to JFK on Monday, that began this trip, was pretty colorful. Bowser had arranged for a car for the seven of us traveling together. What the company
sent was a small-ish van that would barely hold three people and luggage. When the second van was called, we met Bill, our driver, who asked if we were going to Haiti to “give [the Haitians] a pep talk.” The rest of the ride was equally eventful with Bowser riding shotgun to make sure that Bill was both sober and staying on course, as he had earlier revealed to us that he “couldn’t quite remember the way to JFK.” There was some anxiety, but also a lot of laughter in the ride down in which we learned Bill’s story as a former truck driver. During the course of this week, Bowser and I have continued to refer to this trip and “Taxi Bill” as emblematic—we haven’t known quite what to expect.

Most of the week has been spent at the orphanage outside of Les Cayes in La Bord. H.E.L.O. , which stands for hope, education, love and opportunity, houses and schools fifty orphans in three different houses. The school-age children begin school at eight a.m. and the school runs two differently aged classes in one room supplied with wooden benches and tables, and chalkboards. The students use workbooks written in French that seemed quite challenging for primary school. I was able to observe the classes for several hours on Wednesday and found what seemed like a harmonious situation given two classes in one room without any dividers or buffers between the groups. At one point, the older students were reciting in unison. As
they grew more confident in their recitation, they became louder. The younger students on the other side of the room didn’t seem to notice and kept attention to their teacher, raising their
hands, going to the board, answering questions that I could barely hear under
the chorus of the older group. What I realized as I sat watching these two teachers conduct their classes with around 20 students each, was that despite the lack of any technology—even electricity, the teaching was interactive. Students answered questions, got up to write on the board, recited out loud individually and in unison. They were largely attentive,
but even when they weren’t, I noticed that the inattention didn’t seem much
different from that of my own college students. When I spoke with the teachers, through our translator, Edlin, during the mid-morning break, I asked them what challenges they faced. They told me that some students were simply more interested than others. Ah! The obvious physical conditions may be vastly different, but the reality of teaching seems quite similar.

The Haitian Creole proverb that titles this entry: Je wè bouche pe or the eye sees, the mouth is silent translates into “proof stops an argument.” I have been thinking a lot about what we have seen so far. How do we trust what we see to form a narrative about new places? How do we see beyond our expectations? In a place like Haiti that has been fragmented by political and natural world upheaval, how is it possible to form any kind of understanding that seems accurate—especially in a matter of days? How do we as a group try to make sense of the experience here that we’ve had together—from building roofs to playing with children to visiting the local
hospital with supplies to conducting a fish dissection class to observing
classrooms? But perhaps more than trying to find a clear narrative of this place, I wonder what argument, another word, perhaps, for “expectations,” that I have brought with me, that we have brought with us. Through seeing, will these expectations, these arguments fall silent?

Sa ou fe, se li ou we: A Haitian Travel Blog

Tomorrow morning, we leave for Haiti. In preparation for this first trip, my colleague and I have been repeatedly warned that we will need “extra tissues” for all the crying we will do. We laugh about this. I think since we both have traveled to and lived in developing countries in our pasts, we have a sense of what to expect. Moreso, we know how often the people who live in these places deal with tragic or difficult circumstances by joking, by singing. Yet, I know how callous this sounds. I also know that a small portion of our laughter in these conversations has to do with our own uncertainty. How do any of us understand the aftermath of the earthquake in 2010 that left 220,000 dead; 300,000 injured, 105,000 houses destroyed, 1.5 million homeless, and led to the cholera outbreak, according to the Disasters Emergency Committee, in which 5, 899 died and 216,000 were infected by July 2011 http://www.dec.org.uk/haiti-earthquake-facts-and-figures. The vastness of the tragedy and the way that the destruction has tendriled is difficult to wrap our heads around. And so, I think, how do we know if we’ll cry or laugh or be stunned to silence?

I have been reading this morning about twentieth century Haitian writers. Alongside past writers like Jacques Roumain, author of the significant 1940 Haitian novel, Masters of the Dew; and contemporary authors like Dany LaFerriere and Edwidge Danticat, I discovered a blog about a young writers’ group in Port-au-Prince, who call themselves the Konbit des Jeunes Penseurs or the Gathering of Young Thinkers. A poem that is posted there by one of the young writers, Assephie Petit-Frere is vibrant, specific, and speaks to larger ideas of love, abandonment and the complexities of learning out of grief.

From Assephie Petit-Frere’s “Lanmou Mechan” or “Cruel Love”:

You took me and you spirited me to a far-away land,

Where you became a musician and a mockingbird,

A chorus singing beautiful melodies in my heart.

You made me think you were the only sure thing in my life.

Alas, love… Poor souls who are too in love!

You told me we would just make a little love.

Before I knew it, you had come inside me.

….

That’s when I saw you would teach me

Something I never knew before.

And so I came to understand that love is like

A mountain that you climb when you are happy,

And when you come down, you come down with tears in your eyes.

And that I can say that can say now that a person should

Never, ever have faith in love.

This poem swings among the mythic and romantic role of the musician/mockingbird lover and the frank, difficult sexual/spiritual lesson, to the trip down the mountain “with tears in your eyes.” There are degrees of beauty and truth here, but also a fierce knowledge of the world that complicates the work of this young poet. The poem reveals a speaker that cannot be infantilized even if she has been victimized.

What I find particularly interesting in reading the entire blog posting—and in contrast to overall tone of the poem— is how much of it is spent discussing the joking and teasing and laughter that goes on as part of this group’s meetings. Laura Wagner, a doctoral candidate in anthropology at UNC-Chapel Hill, who works in Haiti with the Gathering of Young Thinkers, goes on to discuss laughter at length in her own blog entry, titled “Something to Laugh About: A Few Thoughts about Humor in Post-Earthquake Haiti.” She writes:

People’s personal earthquake narratives – stories of fear, survival and loss –

are laced with a surprising quantity of humor. Many people, even those who

were injured or lost their homes and loved ones, start laughing when they

describe seeing their neighbors who happened to be bathing at 4:53 on

January 12 and who fled their homes toutouni, stark naked. And they laugh

when I describe how, the first time I pulled my pants down to pee after being

pulled from the rubble, chunks of concrete fell out of my underwear, making

me hysterical as I tried to conceive where it was all coming from. My teenaged

friend Judeline, whose leg was amputated below the knee because of her

injuries, says wonderingly, laughing, “Frijolito killed so many people!” Frijolito is

the name of the lisping little boy in the Mexican telenovela that everyone was

following this time last year. It came on at 5 pm, which is why, according to

Judeline, so many people were – unluckily — indoors when the earthquake hit.

Wagner’s post makes me reflect on what we find funny and how that doesn’t go away in tragedy. Just as despair and crying don’t go away in times of security and happiness. What I wonder and worry about for us (for me?!), here in the U.S., is our relationship to emotion. We are still uncomfortable with it—even with all of the language and representations that revolve around it, post-Freud. It seems diminished. It seems devoid of anything complex or intellectual.

In my first blog posting, I mentioned a desire for a “new perspective.” I am curious about what I will learn about emotion in Haiti. I hope that some of those lessons include a different understanding that goes beyond seeing it as polarized, mere laughter or tears.

The full blogs can be read at: http://www.theworld.org/2011/01/assephie-petit-frere-writer-in-haiti/ and http://savageminds.org/2011/01/13/something-to-laugh-about-a-few-thoughts-on-humor-in-post-earthquake-haiti/

--Lea Graham

Haiti Blog, Chris Bowser, March ‘12

Hispaniola: A Tale of Two Environments

When you talk about Haiti it’s common to move to an immediate comparison with Haiti’s neighbor the Dominican Republic. “Haiti” conjures up mainly negative or strange stereotypes of poverty, corruption, disaster, and voudou, compared to the vacation beaches and baseball superstars of “Dominican Republic”. The comparison of Haiti and the DR jumps out in the environment as well. Even a tour through Google Earth will reveal sections of borderlands with sparsely wooded Haiti to the west and lush DR forests to the east.

Haiti covers about one third of the island of Hispaniola, but it’s a high, steep third compared to some of the wide river valleys in the DR. Prevailing winds from the east (think of all those hurricane track graphics you’ve seen on the Weather Channel) tend to get hung up on the central mountains and dump more rain on the DR. Both countries have just under 10 million people, but Haiti’s infant mortality rate of 42/1000 is nearly double that of DR, and the average GDP per capita in Haiti is only $1,200 compared to $9,300 in the Dominican Republic and $48K in the US.

History, or to be more precise, choices, have played a major role in the fate of the two nations’ natural capital. Some experts point to the DR’s European flavor as attracting more foreign investment and infrastructure than Haiti’s more xenophobic reaction to exploitation which led to an admirable scaling down of agriculture, but fewer and later international relations. Even with these differences, both countries have seen their share of cruel and fickle colonialism followed by ruthless multi-generational dictators in the 20^th century. Haiti’s Duvalier family literally bled the country to starvation. Dominican Republic’s Trujillo and later, Balaguer were equally damaging and violent. Nevertheless, Joaquin Balaguer’s heavy hand did a lot for the DR’s environment. Some of his policies, such as requiring fence posts to be replaced by live trees were impossible, but the ones that were enforceable led in part to the Dominican Republic’s 70-some national parks and large portions of relatively intact forest. Haiti has far fewer examples of natural capital, though one of its few gems, the Park (or “Pic”) Macaya is located a few hours outside Les Cayes in the southwestern finger of the country. The park boasts soaring cloud forests and species found nowhere else.

No doubt about it, Haiti’s environmental circumstances and political instability made for a rough go even before the 2010 earthquake. One of the most important historical lessons of Haiti, however, is that Haiti itself has risen from hardship again and again, against losing odds. These problems are ultimately fixable. Economies can be rebuilt, diseases can be checked, ecosystems can be restored. As Pete Seeger once said: “There is no hope…but I may be wrong.”

CB

This blog entries draws from both the CIA World Factbook (online) as well as Jared Diamond’s Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed.

Sa ou fe, se li ou we: A Haitian Travel Blog

By: Lea Graham

The Haitian proverb, Sa ou fe, se li ou we means “What you do is what you see.” In preparing for a trip to Haiti with my colleague in Environmental Science and a few of our students from Marist College, I’ve been thinking about travel and its meaning. Travel is a kind of “doing.” People keep asking us: What will you do in Haiti? At this point, we only have some vague ideas: teach some classes, investigate fisheries, work at the H.E.L.O. Orphanage in Les Cayes http://helohaiti.org/ , and scout possibilities for future trips with our students and faculty. But honestly, we’re still not sure.

Usually when I travel, I have a solid idea about what I’ll be doing: teaching a course, hiking a pilgrimage, visiting friends, taking notes for poems or articles I plan to write, or, once in a while, simply lying on a beach. The photographs, my journals, the collection of rocks and shells or ticket stubs from museums all compose evidence of what I was doing there. As a poet, I’m in the image business. I want objects—or language—to call up the “ there.” Last summer, I hiked 175 km of the Spanish pilgrimage to Santiago de Compostela. While walking, I thought about a writer who had recently written a blurb for my first book. He was a Canadian poet and novelist, who I had met a few times at conferences in Winnipeg. I admired his mind’s expanse and his work’s playfulness. The voice in his poems and fiction, so often joking and self-deprecating, created a camaraderie in my imagination that wasn’t actual. I also loved how his words expanded my sense of the Canadian prairies. I knew Bob had traveled to Spain and had an affinity for the country, and so I picked red and purple wild flowers outside of places like Santillana del Mar and Luarca, pressed them into my journal to send to him as a thank you when I returned home. A few days after arriving back in the States, I received a call about Bob’s death in a car accident. The flowers that I had picked are still pressed in my journal. The doing of that trip is there for me to see—recalling Bob and the loss of what might have been more years of correspondence and deepening friendship.

What will we do in Haiti? What will we see? What is the complicated relationship between action and evidence? My colleague and I keep talking about “gaining perspective” through this trip, what seems to me like our need to re-see our notions of the world, and possibly what we do in it. How does travel help us into another vision of the world? How might we—who have traveled and lived in developing countries—do something in Haiti that will be visible to ourselves and others in both tangible and intangible ways? As my mother would always say whenever we would ask her questions she couldn’t or wouldn’t answer: We’ll see. We’ll see.

LG