Lasagna twa kwizin

Tonight was one of those awesome “this doesn’t happen in my normal life” experiences. It was a crazy day. Class in the morning, helping with the little kids’ meal program and play time around 2 pm, then cleanup hour with 24 LCS kids from 3:30 to 5, then it was time to start making dinner. Monday night is lasagna night, and my cooking team and I have a lasagna factory that’s a pretty well oiled machine. But we were getting a late start, and I knew the water would take forever to boil on our little stove top, so I knew we would never have dinner on the table by six. Then we discovered that we didn’t have any gas for the stove in our kitchen. Normally we’d just use the school cafeteria kitchen in that situation, but there’s actually no stove in there. Everything they make for the kids is made on burners in giant pots. So …. We prepped the sauce in our kitchen. Boiled the water for the pasta in the Moynihans’ kitchen across the street, made the sauce in the school kitchen (because the stove at the Moynihans wouldn’t be big enough for two big pots of water and a big pot for making sauce.) One person watched the water and cooked the pasta while three others made the sauce. Then we walked it all across the street to put it all together and bake in the Moynihans’ oven. In the end we were only thirty minutes late and 30 people enjoyed 4 lasagnas and a side of leftover rice from Saturday. Three Kitchen Lasagna was an unexpected success.

A dirty problem

I find myself thinking about trash a lot here. At home I sometimes marvel at how much trash I could produce in a week, but then I’d just put out the barrels and the recycling on Tuesday morning and by Tuesday afternoon they’d be empty again, ready for me to refill. Where does it all go? I guess it goes to a landfill somewhere, but I have absolutely no idea where, or what it looks like, or who manages it, or what it smells like. I also have no idea how much our system of waste management costs. I guess that’s what property taxes are for … but I really don’t know.

Here, the trash problem is unavoidable. At the school it is a very tightly managed process. Metal, glass, compost and burnable trash are separated. The metal cans need to be crushed with a shovel and thrown with the glass into the metal pit in the corner of the playground where they will stay for … eternity, I guess. The compost is added to the pile, turned every few days, and sifted every few weeks. Everything else – including plastic – is thrown in the incinerator and burned every few days. We’re even working on saving certain types of plastic and metal that can be recycled. Within the school walls, this process works well, and it is rare to find a piece of trash out of place.

Outside the walls of LCS it’s a different story. Trash is everywhere. On the drive from the airport to the school one passes piles and piles of trash on the side of the road. Sometimes the piles are on fire with thick black smoke drifting into the air. In the neighborhood around the school there is trash littering the gardens and yards and roads – from plastic bags to metal cans to plastic bottles. What the heck are people supposed to do with it? I know they burn their own trash near their own homes, but there’s no public sanitation system. There are few public trash cans (and these are only in the city, not in the surrounding towns.) I really can’t figure it out.

We’re working hard with the kids to get them to take a real responsibility for the neighborhood around the school as well as for the school itself. We’ve started taking little groups of kids out in the afternoon during cleanup hour to pick up the trash in the neighborhood and bring it back to the school’s incinerator to burn. The hope is that after it’s clean, we can install some public trash cans, and teach our neighbors to use them, and to bring them into the school to be burned when they’re full. But wow, these first few days of this project have been hard. It reminds me of the most challenging PHA community service day ever. Try to convince a bunch of teenagers to pick up trash with their hands, when they know that these are just a few streets in all of Haiti, and that they will probably just look the same tomorrow. Seriously, it’s like getting PHA kids excited about raking leaves in a Somerville park in October when there are still tons of leaves on the trees overhead. Feels a bit like shouting into the wind. But after a few days, when the kids started to see progress, their attitude started to shift from feet dragging and whiny to cautiously optimistic to genuinely proud of their work. The best part was when the little kids from the neighborhood joined us, because if this is going to work at all, it’s going to be because those same little kids get their parents to use the trash cans instead of just dropping their trash in the street.

Then yesterday we took a small group of the oldest students out of the neighborhood onto the national road nearby. It’s one of the reasonably well paved roads (thanks to the US army corps of engineers back in the 1920’s) but it is lined with piles of trash up to the ankles. We went out with shovels, pickaxes, wheelbarrows, buckets, some diesel fuel and matches. For two hours kids, teachers, staff, and volunteers raked the trash into piles, pulled out and crushed the metal cans, and lit the piles on fire. I know, it’s gross. Burning plastic is dangerous and the fumes were kind of gross. But like I said, what else are people supposed to do? And maybe it is just a few streets in all of Haiti, but I guess we have to start somewhere.

Study Hours

I love watching these kids work during study hours each night. They know how to study in a way that I only dream that my American students would. They don’t just “do homework” to get it done. They study. They crowd around each other’s notebooks reviewing the day’s notes. They walk around outside reading their notes out loud to themselves. They sit alone in little corners quietly reading. And they do it with minimal adult supervision. There are adults on duty during study hours, but we’re just there to answer questions, and occasionally manage the noise level or wake up a sleepy student. But they just seem to understand that success in class requires significant work outside of class. Of course the work that they’re asked to do here is much more about memorization and regurgitation than the work that we generally ask of our kids in the States. But somehow in our efforts to structure everything so much, and hold kids accountable for every little thing, we’ve taught them that they only have to do exactly what we tell them to do, and if it’s not going to be “checked” the next day, then there must not be any work to do. I don’t have any brilliant insights on this one yet, but I’m working on it.

On the other hand … I wish the kids here had half of the critical thinking skills that my PHA kids have. In class the kids here are so good at copying notes and doing concrete tasks, but struggle so much to think outside the box or ask original questions. It’s not that they’re not capable, but they haven’t been asked to do so often enough. The oldest kids are better, because they’ve had many years of American teachers, but the younger ones’ heads explode a little when you ask them to do something that doesn’t have a right answer. Many seem scared to speak up in class for fear of being wrong or being laughed at by their peers (which happens all the time and makes me CRAZY!) I sort of miss the kids who will just say whatever they’re thinking, or play devil’s advocate or passionately defend an unpopular opinion. I guess that’s why I’m here. We’ll see if I can make any progress on that this year.

Names

The names around here are killing me. KILLING me. There are 350 kids in the school, and I teach 200 of them. But I only see each class 1 or 2 or 3 days each week, so I am struggling to learn their names. Add to that the complication that some people here go by their first names, others go by their last names, and others go by nicknames formed by combining the first few letters of their first and last names. And add to that the complication that I’m terrible at learning kids’ names anyway. And add to that the complication that all of these kids are Haitian. I’m accustomed to having about 10 Haitian kids in a class, and 7 Latino kids and 6 White kids. That makes the odds that I’m going to guess a name right a LOT better for me. I know, I know, it sounds like I’m saying all the black kids look alike. I’m not and they don’t. I’m sure I would be having the same challenge in a classroom full of 25 white kids with the same hair color. Oh, and did I mention that they’re all wearing uniforms? That really doesn’t help. It’s getting to the point that it’s kind of awkward for me to keep asking their names, since it’s probably the 7th time I’ve asked each one his or her name. Maybe by Christmas …?

Target

It was so good to be in the United States last weekend! I indulged in 4 Starbucks iced lattes in four days, ate more meat in those days than I’ve had in the past seven weeks, and of course spent more money in seven hours than I have in those seven weeks. Specifically, I spent 20 dollars on food on the plane and in JFK airport (but it was a REALLY good salad …) That’s almost as much as I’ve spent on laundry, peanut butter, cokes and cookies in Haiti since August 9. The strangest part though was Target. I love that place. I haven’t been gone long enough to have forgotten what it’s like to be in a Target store. But what was a little shocking to me was how after about 17 seconds there, I so quickly fell back into my old “shopping = entertainment” mindset. I just sort of wanted everything I laid eyes on. I found myself wishing I was going back to a cool climate just so I had an excuse to buy a cute jacket, and dreaming of an apartment in Somerville to decorate. I haven’t thought about that stuff in so long … but 17 seconds in Target was all it took. There’s certainly nothing wrong with all of that per se, but it’s been sort of nice to not always be thinking about what else I “need” all the time. Turns out I really don’t need much – but wow, those iced lattes were delicious ….

Bobby and Lauren’s wedding was delightful of course. They have a remarkably mature sense of style for being 23 years old. Their wedding perfectly fit their personalities, and their priorities and their tastes. Aside from the red shoes and the wonderful centerpieces and the tasty food, the best thing to me was their decision to forgo the traditional wedding favors in order to make a contribution to Louverture Cleary School instead. I put out some brochures about the school – and of course some donation envelopes – and lots of people took them. Who knows how many will be returned with checks inside, but I just appreciated the opportunity to invite people to think a bit more globally than we usually do at a wedding. And like I said, it was all just SO delightfully Bobby and Lauren.

Check out some pictures in my Picassa album!