Brush with Haiti (16 page)

I asked him, with a smile, why he became a teacher. I suppose I was expecting some heartfelt response and a smile in return. Instead, he said it was not really a matter of choice. As is often the case in Haiti, a profession is chosen for you. Peter had been working in agronomy, and at some point had been asked to teach. He admitted it was difficult at first and very stressful, but he had come to find satisfaction in it. He also had initiated projects to teach community members how to create and maintain vegetable gardens. Growing one's own food can enhance nutrition exponentially. Even though he did not plan for a career in teaching, Peter seemed a natural.

Our conversation turned to agriculture. Food production gets a good deal of attention by people of various sectors in Haiti. Corinne, too, had worked in food production, I believe affiliated somehow with the Ministry of Agriculture.

She said she was often asked how a psychologist ends up in agronomy. She said she tells people that just one egg a day could ensure proper cognitive development in a Haitian child. Haitian egg production had been devastated by imports from the United States and more recently from the Dominican Republic. She described the massive truckloads of eggs coming across the Dominican border regularly.

I recalled talking with an agronomist on my 2003 visit who was then working with Catholic Relief Services. We had some candid discussions about genetically modified food. At that time there was increasing concern about GMOs among my colleagues in global education and friends involved in the Slow Food movement. But his comments were quite unexpected. First, he said that the opposition to GMOs in some circles was in fact originating from market competition between the European Union and United States that really had little to do with the developing world. When people were hungry, he reminded me, notions of long term effects on organisms were trumped by the immediate need to produce food - as much food as possible in the shortest amount of time. The example he used was egg production. If, he argued, they could introduce hens that had been engineered to lay more eggs to roam and breed among the existing poultry population, they could alter the capacity for Haitians to consume this otherwise easily produced protein. He became noticeably spirited when making his case. It looked not so much due to any political position or resentment; rather out of a genuine desire to feed people of his country quickly.

Corinne was no supporter of GMOs and I got the impression that Peter was not either. We returned to the topic of teaching science, but I could see that he envisioned the world in the long term. Teachers are conditioned to do that, for patience is everything. The fruits of one's labors often cannot be seen for a very long time.

Ventilation from the large windows
in my room helped a good deal when it came time to wash my clothes. I found a couple of hangers and did my best to keep my limited wardrobe functioning, alternating what little I had.

Each of the first few days Renate and I checked with the local travel office to see if my suitcase had arrived. We had no luck. But sitting quietly in my room set the perfect stage for thinking more about possessions. I was entering a Zen stage of life in which I considered letting go of the vast majority of my things one day soon, keeping only what I needed to get by. Having been a suburban dweller all my life made it easier said than done, for this typical American lifestyle draws more things into the picture, perhaps because we have the space to hold those things. Or perhaps we create the space to hold all the things that we have. Visiting places like Haiti and observing just what it is that people need to live provides good teaching moments, or I should say learning moments. I am the eternal student there. But not having much due to lost luggage was beginning to wear on me.

I went through computer withdrawal. Internet access in the house was rare, and Corinne did let me use hers to check my e-mail. But after some time it seemed hardly worth the trouble. It required firing up the generator and then hoping there was an adequate internet connection. Having misplaced my copy of
The Comedians,
I resorted to reading
Courageous Dreaming.
In recent years I had accumulated a number of New Age self-help books on the recommendations of friends or just browsing through Barnes and Noble. I could not remember where I got this one or why I decided to bring it along, but it was the only thing I had to read. And it intrigued me.

The author, whose name I do not remember, discussed various levels of dreaming and what it took to develop the power to dream things into being, consciously and with intention. I wondered how I might do this, or how anyone might do this, but never took the time to actively put it into practice. And now, as is the case with the content of so many books from my past, I have forgotten what I read. At the time it added to my escape from the reality that had seemed to strangle me over the previous year or so. It also helped to have a legal pad and something to write with. I was perfectly content to sit on my bed and put pen to paper.

My purpose in making this trip was to take some recent experiences in education and re-envision the basics of its intentions. To some degree, I wanted to rethink academia altogether. Over the years I had been trained to see things academically, to approach the world academically, to research relentlessly, and write on the basis of my findings. For a long time I worked with books, articles, manuscripts, primary source documents, and notes, notes, and more notes. Notes on slips of paper, notes in notebooks, and notes on note cards. My notes were recreated, parroted in the text, and cited in footnotes and endnotes. The work of the historian is generated by text and in text. To those in the humanities the text is bestowed more validity than the words of live people, for people can be biased, people can be emotional, people might speak based on something other than reason, making what they say less truthful. To acknowledge this through analysis is permitted, but only through dehumanizing the writer.

Regardless of the fact that text itself is the product of human beings, once something is in writing it is given more weight, and if it is documented and re-documented and documented once more, it achieves a level of truth unmatched by any spoken work or other kind of writing. That is the stuff of academia. To reveal to any colleagues that I had even owned a book like
Courageous Dreaming
would have been sacrilege. And to write, then and there, with a pen on a legal pad which happened to be in my bag could not possibly produce anything ofworth. A personal diary, perhaps, a journal to relieve tension, release creativity, to satisfy no one but myself. To spend time. To kill time. And, yet, all I could do was to write. Time felt immeasurable, and incapable of being killed.

In preparation for the trip I began to gather materials about Haiti and to write down ideas, intending to contextualize an outline for my research and give it a direction. My preliminary studies helped to provide a list of topics and subtopics to keep in mind once I was able to make observations regarding Haitian education on the ground there. I began by taking notes, and more notes, paraphrasing, analyzing, synthesizing, and there it was, the beginning of something, someday worthy of publication by a scholarly press.

But the urge to write freely would not subside. During the months before that January trip, no matter how hard I tried to stop it, I churned out page after page of my earlier experiences in Haiti, my curiosity about Haiti, and my feelings about Haiti and Haitians. Yes, feelings. I put it aside, consciously acknowledging that I must have some cathartic need to do it, to get it out of my system, and mentally categorized it as some sort of self-therapy. Then I returned to my academic research. I did what I could to find sources on the history of education in Haiti.

Once in my room in Jeremie, with nothing but a few pieces of clothing hanging in the breeze at the window, two Luna Bar wrappers, a book of half-filled crossword puzzles, and a work about dreaming new realities, I wrote. I wrote and I wrote and I wrote. Donkeys brayed and rooster crowed and children played in the yard. Renate checked on my from time to time, but I assured her I was fine. After I filled both sides of every page of my legal pad, I asked her if there was a place in town where I could buy some more paper.

"Yes, you can probably buy some at the store when we go there tomorrow," she said. And we did the next day, and I wrote some more.

Later that evening, Corinne and I spent some more time talking. Conversation in English was much appreciated. She was able to get a bit of internet service, just enough to quickly check word from home. We laughed about what we took for granted in the States. Renate was out visiting with friends and I had had enough of solitude. We looked around for something to do. It was very kind of the doctor to let us use her home while she was away, but I felt a bit uncomfortable looking through magazines and such in her room.

"I found something to watch," Corinne said. She was holding a multiple DVD set of
I Love Lucy.
We set her laptop on the dresser, pulled up two chairs, and watched episode after episode. Yes, it was surreal, but God, laughing with someone is good. Thank you Corinne, wherever you are. And thank you, Lucy.

Renate arranged for me
to meet with a group of teachers and an assistant director of a small, privately funded school a short distance from where we were staying. It would be a valuable opportunity for me to learn from them. The visit centered around a presentation I agreed to make on recent trends in U.S. higher education, but I saw this as more of an exchange. That is exactly what it turned out to be. The group was small, as the meeting fell near the first of January when Haitians centered their attention on activities with family and friends. Plus it had come on the heels of a very wet spell when roads were at their muddiest and most difficult to travel. The founder of the school was away in Canada, his home country, on an educational tour, presumably with fundraising aspirations. Renate spoke very highly of his work and I could see how his vision influenced the creation of a high quality school staffed by excellent teachers.

When we entered the school grounds, the greenery was striking. We must have passed by this location before, as it was very near the doctor's house, but I could not have imagined that a school lay hidden beyond the road. Construction was underway for expansion. The original structure was limited in size but sturdy, constructed of cement block with three or four classrooms and an office surrounding a common area. The classrooms seated more students than would ever be expected in rooms of that size in the States, once more an indication that ifyou build a school they will come. The rooms were very dark, daylight inching in only through the rows of open-patterned block on one wall. The dimness was due also, I suppose, to the deep gray concrete floors, overcast skies, and dense tree cover on all sides of the building.

We pulled some desks together in the common area which, compared to the classrooms, felt more like an atrium. Light fell upon us through an opening in the ceiling, just enough to surround our circle. They apologized for the informality of our setting, but it was no less than perfect. I prefer to be seated when presenting to a small group, if the nature of the session allows. It did, and we had the most wonderful talk. We spoke about some of the challenges we face in education in our respective countries. I was in the midst of serving on the Indiana Commission for Higher Education, recently completing my time as a commissioner and having taken on responsibilities as chair of additional related committees. I used that as a framework. I had been a member of the Commission's Strategic Directions Committee and while what we addressed there might seem remote from what educators faced in Haiti, there were uncanny similarities. Though it was true that the scale of our challenges differed, the concerns remained the same.

Accessibility, affordability, accountability, college preparation, college completion, and clarifying missions of research institutions and community colleges were universal themes and easily introduced to this fertile, common ground. Those present were high school teachers and the exchange flowed with incredible ease. It has been my experience that when teachers meet with teachers, away from the demands and bureaucracy of daily work, they easily rekindle their passions and find common goals.

We spoke frankly about curriculum design and the desire for autonomy in the classroom while meeting standards determined elsewhere. In the United States those standards, at least in the public school system, are set at the state level. Working at the state level in post-secondary education matters I could see increasingly how our colleges and universities were under scrutiny in rising expectations for accountability.

Haiti's curricular decisions were centralized at the national level, in Port-au-Prince. While it made sense for a small country to rely on the efficiency that might come from coordinating efforts in the capital, the process was not always efficient. In the departments, or provinces, outside the capital the way of life and workforce development needs varied in countless ways, prompting teachers there to desire more power in curriculum development. Teachers did not object to infusing students with a traditional core of knowledge, but they wanted to enhance their programs based on local needs. In addition, what few resources were available in carrying out educational missions still were heavily concentrated in the capital.

For a myriad of reasons, Haiti did not have the capacity to build, staff, and maintain all of the schools that it needed. When individuals created schools they could do so with private donations and worked to see that their teachers were adequately prepared. This was necessary to maintain credibility and accountability to standards set in Port-au-Prince. These were not always easy to accomplish but the challenges did not deter philanthropists from erecting schools or teachers from teaching.