School - A Shaky Start

After the earthquake, the government announced that schools would be officially closed for a month. Certainly many schools were incapable of opening due to severe physical damage. Many schools lost students and teachers – some who were killed, and others who left the city for the relative safety and calm of the provinces. The government ministry responsible for education was also decimated – its physical building collapsed and many of the people inside it buried in the rubble. And of course, there was the psychological trauma that everyone was dealing with. So a mandatory closure of all schools in the region for a period of time seemed reasonable to give everyone time to pull themselves together and reorganize.

At LCS we didn’t have any classes at all for a week after the earthquake. But once engineers had pronounced most of our buildings safe, we moved forward with a “para-curricular” school program. I put my well tested scheduling skills to work and devised a shortened school schedule utilizing only the buildings we had available, with only the residential staff as teacher (not the visiting professors who normally come work for a few hours each day). The kids didn’t wear their uniforms, and we didn’t have grades or move on with the standard curriculum. Instead we used that time to get back into some kind of routine, since everything we know about kids after disasters says that the return to normalcy is the best medicine. The student population changed each week – sometimes even day to day – but we carried on as best we could with whomever was here each day.

A month came and went, and we heard little from the government about the future of schools, so we decided to “officially” open school this past Monday after the traditional holiday week of Carnaval. Sure enough, the Friday before, the government announced that schools were not ready to reopen, and that no school – public or private – should do so until more schools were able to begin again. The primary arguments against allowing some schools to reopen were based on solidarity, and equity. There is a perception that if some kids go to school again while others are unable, that it will unfairly position them for success on the state exams. The solidarity argument is simply that everyone’s in this together and needs to stay in it together. Honestly, despite the fact that I almost always support arguments based on solidarity and equity, I think this argument is absurd. By that logic, no one should begin rebuilding their house until everyone can. No one should reopen their store until everyone can. No one should stop living outside until everyone does. So we should all just sit on the rubble and wait … and wait … and wait in solidarity for the magical cure for all our problems that’s never going to come. The solutions will come when individuals – on their own or with the assistance of the government and all the international aid organizations – take those first steps toward normalcy. I’ve seen more and more people out rebuilding their walls. I’ve seen teams of people in the streets of Port au Prince wearing USAID T-shirts cleaning up trash. More and more stores, restaurants and even a few nightclubs downtown are reopening. With each of these small actions – individual and collective – people begin to see a way out. Why can’t it be the same for the schools? Young people in school uniforms are a great source of pride for people of all social classes in Haiti, since public and private schools at all levels require uniforms. They have always been a sign of hope for a better future – not just for the students themselves but for their families and for the whole country. Wouldn’t the sight of kids in uniforms bring much needed hope at a time like this?

So, we opened school anyway. We backed off on wearing uniforms so as not to attract too much attention, but our professors were willing to come back and we announced to the kids that grades were back, and that the 2nd quarter (which should have ended after the third week in January) would end after the first week in March. On Sunday afternoon at 4 pm, we had the usual gathering of all of the kids at the end of the weekend, and we had 237 students, the most we’ve had since the earthquake. There was a very normal excitement and noise level all afternoon, as there is every Sunday afternoon. The kids crowded into dorm rooms (since some of their usual rooms are in buildings that are not usable yet), and even dug out their notebooks during the evening study hours to begin preparing for classes once again. It all felt so wonderfully routine.

Then at 4:30 in the morning we were all shaken awake by the largest aftershock we’ve felt in a few weeks. ARE YOU FREAKING KIDDING ME? There were nervous screams – distinct from the screams of actual terror from the first earthquake – as kids and adults ran outside in their pajamas and assembled on the basketball court. There was no damage, and everyone was OK. Mr. Pierre the principal even joked about being careful to check for “pu pu” on the ground on the way back, in case anyone had – um – had a fear induced accident. The kids all laughed, and though we got an earlier than usual start, we went about the morning as normally as possible, despite some of that old anxiety lingering in the back of everyone’s mind.

The school day went as well as could be expected. I had to laugh to myself as I repeated a mantra in my head that has helped me maintain sanity for many years of working in a forward thinking school …”change is hard … people fear change … change is like death ….” Teachers were confused with the new schedule, and couldn’t understand why we hadn’t just gone back to the old pre-earthquake schedule. Some kids didn’t think we should be starting again at all. And of course, despite my best estimations, the schedule I devised had to be almost completely reworked for the following day. A few of the classes have more than 40 kids in them, so instead of keeping each class in one section, we had to split them into two. While this isn’t terribly complex in terms of the schedule itself, I’m not so sure where we’re going to put these new classes, since six of our classrooms are in a building that needs some serious work before it will be structurally sound enough to hold classes again. We’re working on getting classroom sized tents … or maybe for a while they’ll just have to sit under a tree somewhere. Actually, now that I think of it that might not be so bad … there are thousands of mangoes about ready to fall from those trees!

Now it’s Wednesday, and after significant aftershocks on two subsequent nights, many kids – typically at the urging of their parents – have decided to go home. We have about 160 lefft, but that’s down by almost 80 from Monday morning. It’s incredibly frustrating. I don’t mean to be melodramatic here, but sometimes it honestly feels like we’re fighting some cosmic battle between order and chaos. We’re scratching and clawing and fighting to maintain order here, and the chaos outside just keeps coming. Not chaos in the social or political sense, but in a deeper, almost spiritual sense. Despite all the rational explanations about aftershocks, people continue to insist that these two in a row must mean that another “big one” is coming. The radio spouts inflammatory rhetoric about not going back into any buildings (regardless of their structural integrity) for another month. The government insists on keeping schools closed. These kids are so smart, and after a few weeks and so many explanations and conversations about it all, they were on board. They were laughing and playing basketball again and sleeping inside and getting their friends to come back to school. Now the fear is back and the same old questions are back and lots of kids are going home where they’ll sleep outside in tents instead of inside our perfectly safe buildings. Some days it definitely feels like the chaos is winning.