Sunday, September 20, 2009

Off to Virginia!

I leave on Thursday morning for my brother Bobby’s wedding in Virginia. I’m so excited to see everyone and to enjoy a weekend of relative luxury. I’ve already planned my first meal when I arrive at JFK Thursday afternoon … an iced coffee and a salad with chicken on it. I can’t wait! Then on to Virginia Beach for wedding festivities and a shopping trip to Target. I realized that my red strappy sundress will absolutely need a little sweater on top of it since I have some fairly ridiculous sunburn lines on my neck and arms. And my always exposed toes are crying for a pedicure. And before flying back here, I’ll pick up all kinds of essentials (and some treats!) to bring back to the volunteers. I figure they’ll probably end up covering my classes while I’m gone, so I may as well make it worth their while! All this and a WEDDING too? What a great weekend!

A Three Shower Day

I had one of those days today where I did nothing that I thought I’d do, but didn’t waste a single minute. I guess that’s an experience lots of people can relate to, but the particular nature of my weird Saturday will especially resonate with people who have spent any time in the developing world. My plan for the day was to get lots of schoolwork done, read a little, go for a run (around the soccer field) and make dinner. A good plan for a Saturday in Haiti.

I woke up at 6:45 and was pretty delighted that I had managed to sleep in. It’s hard to do that here usually. I gathered up my laundry, the soap, some bleach and my hundred Goudes (about $2.50) to pay the lady who would wash my clothes. After my first attempt at washing my own clothes a few weeks ago I gave up in favor of the ladies who can do it about a hundred times better and faster than I can. Anyway … breakfast was at about 7:15 and we had my favorite tasty, absurdly sweet oatmeal. Yum. After breakfast I caught about 15 minutes of Internet time, then decided to go out to the back basketball court to run and work out a little. In the early morning sun (about 8:15) I can last running for about ten minutes. Then I pretty much die so I seek shade and do whatever new exercises I can think of using a resistance band and playground equipment. I’m getting pretty good at it! After my thirty minutes, I took shower number one. Those are the showers when I love not having hot water! So far, that’s exactly what I planned to do today.

At 9:15 we had a volunteer meeting that lasted until about 10:30. The fun part of that meeting was passing around the bag of Snickers that one of the board members had brought from the states! It’s totally normal to lick the wrappers of bite sized Snickers bars, right? Anyway, when that meeting broke up is when my day got weird. Since one volunteer wasn’t feeling very well, I told her I’d take care of her turn at the compost pile. I’ve been here six weeks and somehow have never had to deal with the incinerator or the compost, so I decided it was my turn.

Maybe you have a little compost bucket in your kitchen or backyard, and if you do, I think that’s awesome. I hope to do the same when I return to the States. But wow, the compost pile for the food remains of 400 people who eat three meals a day here … now that’s really something. It’s in two side by side concrete enclosures that are about 6 feet by six feet each, and when we started shoveling it, the pile was well over 18 inches deep at some spots. The task is to move the whole pile from one side of the pit to the other side so that the contents mix up which speeds up decomposition. Today we had the added bonus of sifting the compost which means that every shovel full gets put onto a wooden sifter with a mesh bottom. Two people then shake the sifter back and forth over a wheelbarrow to loosen any of the good soil that has formed, and then toss the remaining compost contents onto the new pile. Aside from being physically demanding work for Peter and me, and aside form the fact that it was in the 11 am sun, the most unpleasant part was that it smelled very strongly like baby vomit. Well, at first it smelled like baby vomit, but as we got to the bottom of the pile where the material was more dense and wet, it started to pretty much just smell like shit. And my other favorite part was that as we shook the sifter over the wheelbarrow, pieces of wet dirt and whatever else fell through the mesh landed all over my feet. Tasty.

After about an hour and a half we were done and spread the disappointingly small amount of dirt around one of the gardens. We put away the tools and I looked down at myself … and decided that the next part of my day would be dedicated to washing all of the clothes and shoes I was wearing. Too bad my laundry lady was already done with the rest of my clothes! Shower number 2 then took place at about 12:15, and even though I was physically clean at that point, I just couldn’t get the faint smell and taste of baby vomit out of the back of my throat for hours. Lunch however – chicken avocado salad - was delicious. And my sneakers are now better looking than they were when I got here!

I spent the next 2 hours washing my clothes and scrubbing my sneakers with a toothbrush and rinsing them in copious amounts of bleach and detergent. This task really shouldn’t take 2 hours, but I’m incredibly bad at it, so it did. Another afternoon meeting, followed by dinner prep which included a near catastrophe in the making of rice for 25 people, followed by Mass and a delicious dinner then led to my third unexpected shower.

During dinner, it started pouring. POURING. Rain here is serious business – it comes on fast and strong. As I took my first few bites of the very tasty dinner we had made, I heard the first sprinkles and ran outside with a flashlight to collect all of my clothes off the lines outside. I managed to rescue most of it before the real downpours, but by the time I made it back inside and sat down again, I was pretty wet. As we ate and listened to the pouring rain and thunder, the roof overhead started to leak a bit. Since I was already soaked, I didn’t really care that there was water dripping on my head, so I just kept on eating. It was a nice little pseudo-shower. Finally, after dinner I headed upstairs to put away my laundry and do some writing … when I remembered it was my turn to clean the bathrooms. Damn. So now, it’s about ten and I might go enjoy shower number 4 before going to sleep. So much for my plans for the day. I guess the schoolwork will have to wait until tomorrow?!

RIP – Bef la



Last Friday I walked out to the soccer field to play with the little kids from the neighborhood and there in the corner was a cow. At first I thought that somehow a cow had wandered onto the property, but one of the LCS students assured me that this was totally normal. Every few weeks, the school buys a cow, slaughters it, and all 400 of us eat if for lunch. Okay. So as the bef wandered the field chewing on grass, the kids played soccer around him and I cracked jokes about whose team he was on and why no one was passing the ball to him. That weekend we found out that the cow would be slaughtered on Monday morning, and a few curious volunteers planned to be up in time to watch. I decided I’d watch from a distance, but I wanted to get a picture of our friend the cow before he met his demise. So, I wandered out to the soccer field at about 5:45 am … bummer … too late. There he was bleeding out between the two goalposts, as a man who had covered himself in the ash from the incinerator (to keep off the blood splatter) began to butcher him. That afternoon when the neighborhood kids came for lunch and to play, I asked them where our friend the cow was, and why he wasn’t going to play soccer with us again. “nou te maje li!” they happily shouted. WE ATE HIM! I guess people here have a much greater awareness of where their food comes from than most Americans do.

Elev yon an klas la




I hesitate to write much yet about kids in class because it’s only been a few days, and I know that these are just first impressions. So as school progresses, I know I’ll write more when I know them better as students and as people, but here’s what I see so far.

First of all, these kids look so good in their uniforms. Tuesday morning as I came downstairs and saw them all walking around outside, I just smiled to myself. The boys where dark green pants and light yellow button up shirts, and the girls where the same shirts with green plaid skirts, white socks and black shoes. To be fair, this particular color combination would look pretty terrible on most white people, but these kids look gorgeous in it. They wear their uniforms with a certain pride and care and wouldn’t dream of sitting on the floor or getting their uniform or school shoes dirty. In a country with so much dust and puddles, it amazes me how clean people generally look.

In class on that first day, kids were excited and nervous and chatty with each other, and realized quickly that teaching here will require all of the same kid management skills that I have collected over the years teaching in the states. They want the adult in the room to be in charge, and they very much want to learn, but they’re also kids and will take any chance a teacher gives them to do the things that kids do.

I am incredibly impressed by their Spanish skills. I’m teaching the oldest kids who have had Spanish for three to six years already, and even the youngest of them are quite capable of asking basic questions, expressing simple ideas, and understanding me pretty well. I thought I’d have to review lots of basics with them, but I really don’t think I will. They know what they’re doing … on to the subjunctive! There were moments when I just had to laugh to myself at the sight of ME speaking my second language to a group of Haitian children speaking their fourth language. I’m so accustomed to the mistakes and broken accent of English speakers’ Spanish, but it will take me a while to get used to the grammatical challenges and unique accent of Kreyol speakers’ Spanish. In each class we mostly spoke Spanish, but when kids couldn’t express something clearly in Spanish, they used English, and when they didn’t know how to say it in English, they looked it up in a French dictionary first. And I threw around French and Kreyol when I could to check their understanding. The whole thing blew my mind.

I discovered quickly that my teacher personality seems to work here. A good mix of structure, insistence on listening when other people are speaking, lots of smiles and lots of jokes … by Friday I had more kids listening to each other and raising their hands to participate. But the actual stuff I do in class every day will be wildly different from what I normally do. My reliance on paper and print materials will not work here. I’ll let you know when I figure out how to deal with that.

From Zero to Three Hundred Fifty



Sunday night before school started, we were all ready for the real action to begin. Enough painting and cleaning and planning and talking and adults. We were ready for some kids. Well, Monday morning, there they were … all 350 of them! They arrived mostly by foot and tap tap with their parents. Most were carrying small bags, thin mattresses rolled up, small buckets and backpacks. They ran around greeting each other and stood in little groups all around campus while their parents waited in line to register them. It was the first of many times this week when I’ve smiled to myself with the thought that kids really are just kids – no matter where.

Mr. Hubert, the principal, had told us that there would be a parent meeting in the morning at 9 am on the basketball court. In the back of my mind I wondered where they would all sit, since I had never seen more than about 30 chairs anywhere in the school. At around 10, when the meeting finally started, I had my answer. Who needs to sit? They all just stood and huddled around one of the round cement tables under the big mango tree while Mr. Hubert stood on top of the table and projected his voice so that most of the people could hear him. Of course, that’s exactly what a parent meeting in Haiti would look like!

After the kids got settled in their dorms and cleaned up the campus and played lots of soccer all over every single cement and grass surface in the place and ate dinner, we had a whole school meeting during which, surprise, the kids all stood on the basketball court and whoever was speaking stood on the round table under the mango tree. They heard from the principal, from Patrick (the director of the project) and from 2 board members (one Haitian and one American) who came to be present for the start of school. What I loved was that this meeting wasn’t about rules and logistics. It was about who these kids are expected to be as human beings. They talked about hard work (inside and outside of classrooms), about putting others before themselves, about studying not just for its own sake, but to be better able to serve people around them and the world as a whole. I don’t know, maybe the kids are jaded having heard it all before, but I felt pretty inspired to get to work!

And then the kids dispersed to their dorms, the lights were cut out at 10 pm, and it got eerily quiet again … until Tuesday morning.

The Schedule

Many of you know of my obsession with school schedules. I spent MANY hours this past summer working on the whole PHA high school schedule, and it became something of a Holy Quest for Perfection in School Scheduling. Well, perfect it was not, but it ultimately worked. Why am I mentioning this …? Because I finally got my LCS schedule on the Friday before school started, and it’s sort of fascinating / hilarious to note some of the similarities and differences between school here and school there.

Similarity # 1: The schedule is a source of anxiety and stress and pitched battles over what’s really important in the life of a school.

Similarity # 2: The schedule is never done on time. I’ve watched teachers – especially brand new teachers – practically go insane because they don’t have their class schedule yet for so many years, and this year was no different. Somehow they think that this whole mystery and complexity of teaching will be made magically easier by the piece of paper in their hands that tells them in what order and in what rooms their classes will meet. “How am I supposed to plan my classes if I don’t even know when they meet?” My somewhat jaded response … “ummmm …. It doesn’t actually matter that much. You just think it does.”

Similarity # 3: The schedule includes nasty compromises all over it. At the end of making the PHA schedule this summer, I felt kind of gross for having to compromise on many details that I know aren’t best for kids or teachers, but which were simply unavoidable given the limited resources of minutes, humans, and classrooms. Some of the compromises that the LCS schedule makes, however, would be almost unthinkable to PHA folks. Here are some of my favorites:
1. I have three double blocks in the week. All three have the first period in one room and the second period in a different room.
2. Many teachers see one section three times in one day, two times another day, and that’s their five periods of class for the week.
3. There are classes scheduled to meet outside in the tables y the basketball court. (which makes the old PHA “annex” seem kind of luxurious!)
4. One volunteer just discovered that her section of biology only meets 4 times a week while the other teacher’s section meets five times. It is now up to her to go fight for that last hour.
5. When a teacher is double booked – supposed to teach two classes at once – another teacher is assigned to cover one of the sections. (OK fine, to be fair, that DID happen once in the PHA schedule this year ….)
6. There is absolutely, unequivocally, no such thing as anybody “owning” a classroom. My 16 class periods meet in 5 classrooms.

Some other fascinating things about the way school works here …
1. There are 11 40 minute periods each day. Oh ... and everyone doesn't get a personal copy of their schedule. It's posted on sheets of paper in one location in the school, and the kids have to go and copy it down. And it's also not posted as a weekly grid, but as a list of classes each day. A little harder to follow!
2. Each quarter, there’s a whole week for exams, and students expect a week of review. That leaves about seven weeks of teaching each quarter. This one exam counts for 50% of their grade in each class each quarter.
3. School goes from 7 am to 3:25 pm, and is followed by an hour of school cleanup in which all 350 kids are at least loosely engaged in a work activity
4. Kids are often late for class after their lunch period because about 15 kids in each lunch block are assigned to clean the dishes. I have recently discovered this is also a very common excuse for why kids might be late to class in the period after their lunch ….
5. Every night the kids are required to be in a classroom (or hallway near a classroom) studying from 7:30 to 9:30. I love it! More on that later …
6. Lights are out at 10. And when I say lights out, I’m not kidding. They cut off the generators to the dorms. It gets very quiet all of the sudden!

Saturday, September 12, 2009

Want to help?


I appreciate the e-mails and blog comments and especially the actual letters and cards that many of you have sent in the past month. It’s wonderful to know that you’re enjoying my stories, that maybe they’re giving you something different to think about, and that you’re keeping me and the school in your thoughts and prayers. Now as the start of school is a few days away, I thought I’d ask if you are willing and able to make a small financial contribution to Louverture Cleary School in order to help get the year off to the best start possible. This school operates entirely on the generosity of others – who give their time, treasure and talent in different ways. Just last week we received the amazing news that a single donor will be buying the school a new Land Cruiser so that more students can get out into the community to work with the Missionaries of Charity, and so that all of the volunteers can actually go somewhere in one car! Such extraordinary generosity in difficult times is truly remarkable and a wonderful testament to the fact that people who know this school well believe completely in its mission to rebuild Haiti through the education and formation of one child at a time. I don’t expect any multi-thousand dollar contributions, but it doesn’t take much to make a huge impact here. It costs $7 to educate, house and feed a child here each day which means that the annual cost of each child’s education, room and board is less than $1,000. As you’ll read in the next few posts, nothing is wasted here, so you can be sure that any contribution you make will be getting to the people who need it. If you’re interested, please click on the Louverture Cleary School link on the right and click on “make a donation.” If you’d rather write a check, there are instructions on how to do that too. Thanks in advance if you decide to help – either now or at some point in the future.

You wouldn’t think …


It would be hard to give away food to children in a starving country, but it turns out that it was. At lunch each day in the school cafeteria, the cooks dish up HUGE plates of beans and rice and the special sauce of the day. We watched day after day as kids who were at school to work on cleanup and maintenance projects ate about half of their plate, then scrape the rest into a big container. And most of us couldn’t even remotely finish a whole plate! We wondered what was happening with the leftovers. After a while we confirmed that workers were taking those leftovers home to feed their animals. While we all certainly appreciate the animals’ need to eat, it just seemed the height of absurdity that animals were getting our leftovers while there are a hundred children within a half mile radius of the school who don’t get enough to eat every day. We decided to start collecting the leftovers and then inviting the neighborhood children in for a meal. Good idea, right? Well, we made a few critical miscalculations. All of the leftovers ended up in one bowl (even though we DID ask people to scrape what they wouldn’t eat off their plate before they started eating) and we brought the bowl out to serve in lots of little bowls to the kids. Therein lay the problems. First, it looked to some people like we were serving all the scraps from plates AFTER people had eaten. Second, it’s considered somewhat uncivilized to eat rice out of a bowl here. Bowls are for soup or cereal, rice is served on plates. So on our first effort at feeding hungry kids, we ended up instead with some angry, offended parents. Not what we were going for.

Your first reaction to this story may be outrage – and it was definitely many people’s first reaction here too. How could these parents of hungry children be so foolish as to turn down perfectly good food? Can “beggars” really be choosers? No wonder this country’s so screwed up if people will let something so minor as bowls vs. plates get in the way of feeding their children? I think there’s some merit in all of those arguments, but this experience was also an incredibly important reminder about basic human dignity. No matter how poor and desperate a person is, she has the right to defend her own dignity – however she chooses to define that, even if I think it’s absurd. And if she perceives that our gift of food – no matter in what spirit it was offered – was presented in a way that disrespects her and her children, then she absolutely has the right to refuse it. It feels kind of gross to us – entitled, arrogant, ungrateful – but would you let your children eat food that you thought had been thrown away? Of course not.

So after our hurt feelings subsided a bit, we went back to the drawing board. Instead of serving the food from one big bowl, we plated it ahead of time, and made sure that each plate looked nice. Instead of just inviting the children in, Christina went to their parents first – and she wisely chose the ones who had made the biggest fuss last time – to make sure they understood that these were leftovers taken off plates before people ate rather than after. Since our first failed attempt, every afternoon for the past two weeks we have fed about thirty children lunch. They come in together, sit down, share plates, drink as much clean water as they want, the big ones help the little ones eat, and then they help clean up before going to play at the playground. We haven’t figure out how this will work logistically once school starts, but at least we know now that we can do it, and that our efforts are appreciated by the children and their families.

Community organizing 101: you need to actually get the community involved in the organizing, or it might not be appreciated the way you think it should be! And if at first you don’t succeed … go back to the drawing board!

Teeth 2 – Franzi

Remember the story about the little baby from the Missionaries of Charity with the dental abscess? Well, here’s an amazing follow up. No, this is not the story of the miracle cure of that particular child. We haven’t been back since our first, visit, so we don’t know what happened to her. But about a week later, a little boy from the neighborhood came in to the school with a swollen mouth, fever, and terrible pain. Corey, the future dentist, took a look at him and confirmed that he too had one totally rotten tooth, and a terrible infection. Luckily, this one wasn’t as far along as the little girl at the orphanage, so Corey was able to scrape out the decayed inside of this kid’s tooth. He gave him some Tylenol, and his parents said they’d watch it for a few days and if the swelling didn’t go down they’d try top take him to the clinic to get the abscess drained.

Then a few days later when we were serving all the little kids lunch, this one little boy kept following Corey around smiling at him. He didn’t even recognize the little boy, who’s name is Franzi, because his face had been so swollen when they first met. Four days after Corey’s little procedure, the swelling was gone, his pain was gone, and his fever was gone. He just looked like a totally gorgeous, happy ten year old.

Don’t cry over spilled paint


In these last weeks before school starts, everyone’s busy painting classrooms, fixing desks, and cleaning and painting dorm rooms. Much has been made about the need for staff to model good work habits for kids, and one of those that kids often don’t do so well, is taking good care of tools and conserving resources. I had all this in mind as I organized a little group of five girls to clean and paint the inside of a particularly grimy looking classroom. As they washed the walls down, I was carefully moving a table so as to prevent paint from dripping on it. Of course, in the process, I completely knocked over a totally full bucket of paint. So much for my lesson in preserving resources! As the girls asll gasped and gathered around, I looked and them and asked, “uh oh, what should we do?” Luckily, I think maybe they’ve spilled a can of paint or two in their day because the oldest one, without even blinking, just said, “start painting!” So they started dipping their brushes and rollers in the giant paint puddle on the concrete floor, and started throwing it up on walls. Then I went and found a dustpan, and one of the girls and I cleaned up pretty much the whole big puddle. Two hours later, the room was all painted, the puddle was all cleaned up (hooray for acrylic paint and cement floors!) and we all had a quick thinking lesson in improvising when things don’t quite go as planned.

Out and About: Cold Coke and Sugar Cane


Very exciting news … we officially have permission to leave the front gates of school and walk about twenty steps down the street to a little shop that sells cold Cokes and cookies and stuff like that. It sounds absurd, but this is a good sign that things are really quite calm here these days, because there have been years here that weren’t so calm when volunteers have never been allowed out – even twenty steps away – unescourted. I enjoyed my first cold Coke in a glass bottle immensely the other day.

I also went for a walk with Christina into the neighborhood, which people simply call “the zone.” Christina has lived here with her family off and on for about 12 years. Her kids have run around and played with all the neighborhood kids, and so everyone knows her, and she knows everyone. We walked to the market, stopping along the way to say hello to everyone who was just hanging out. That’s one of the strangest things to get used to about life here – the people just sitting around. So few people have jobs (in the way we think of a job – a place you get up in the morning and go to every day.) So as you walk around the neighborhood, there are just people sitting on the side of the road, in front of their houses etc. We met an elderly lady who is the smallest adult human I’ve ever seen. Just a tiny, frail woman, but totally with it. She sat inside her little house, with all of the women and children in her family sitting around outside. We stopped to bounce some babies and talk to the ladies. Christina asked one lady if her husband had work, and she said no. She followed up by asking her what he does all day. Her response is indicative of many people’s lives here, “Li chita, li mache.” (He sits, he walks …)

Our last stop was the vegetable market to buy some food for our dinner. We found wonderfully huge avocados as well as some eggplant (which made it into our lasagna this week … very tasty!) Then I spotted a man with long stalks of something purplish and I asked what he was selling. Sugar Cane! I have to pause here for a little history lesson.

In my ninth grade world history classes at PHA, I teach a huge unit on revolutions – the American, French, Haitian, and Latin American revolutions. Critical to the story of the Haitian Revolution, of course, is sugar cane. The French followed the Spanish to Hispaniola first in search of gold, but once they had exhausted all of those resources, (and most of the native people were dead) they looked for new ways to make money. The obvious answer was sugar. The French built a brutal and wildly successful plantation system based on West African slave labor working to produce one of the island’s natural products. The life expectancy for a slave imported to Saint Domingue (as the French colony was then known) was less than one year since the labor and living conditions were so horrific. Meanwhile, this tiny half of an island became the jewel of the French empire and the envy of the other European powers … until 1791 when the slave population of the island organized the first and only successful slave revolution in history and became the western hemisphere’s second independent nation.

Unfortunately the rest of the story doesn’t end happily ever after, but that’s for another day. I tell this part of the story now because I had never even seen, let alone tasted, sugar cane before. In my lessons on the Haitian Revolution at PHA, I have always relied on the kids from the Caribbean to describe the look and taste of sugar cane. First of all, it’s much thicker than I thought it would be. It’s probably about an inch and a half in diameter. It has a purplish skin on it, that requires a machete to peel and it’s the color of the flesh of an apple inside. I asked the man for one, and he spent about five minutes peeling the skin off, then chopping it into about five pieces about five inches long each. I thanked him, paid him about 25 cents and went on my way. To eat sugar cane, you bite off a piece, and chew it, suck out all the juice, then spit it out. It has the texture of an apple, but it’s so fibrous it would be gross to swallow. But the juice is … pure sugary deliciousness. As I stood on the street and walked along chewing on the sugar cane, I kept thinking about this country’s sad, proud, complicated history … and it all began with sugar cane.