I wrote the article for the June edition of the THP newsletter about the graduation of the class of 2010, who named themselves “Odyssey.” The article will be published later in June (so is written in the past tense about an event that hasn’t happened yet … but you get the idea.) I think it came out well, and tells a good story about some special people. Here it is …
The LCS class of 2010 made a particularly appropriate choice this year in choosing their class name, Odyssey Class. Truly their years at LCS have been just that. They came to Santo 5 as eleven year olds in September of 2003, and after the chaotic failure of the government in February of their sixieme (7th grade) year, and a violent earthquake in January of their philo (senior) year, their graduation on June 6 was a particularly joyful celebration of the accomplishments and future of these 41 men and women. But these graduates don’t dwell on the two great tragedies that dominated their first and last years at Louverture Cleary. They focus instead on their many happy memories, their wonderful friends, teachers and mentors, and the mix of joy and sadness that they feel as this chapter of their lives comes to a close.
Stecy Naika came to LCS as an eleven year old, leaving the home she had shared with her aunt since the age of three. To get Stecy to her primary school, and herself to work on time each morning, her aunt, Marie Kettly, had to wake Stecy at 4:30 am. When she heard about LCS from a friend at her church, Marie Kettly knew that her niece was intelligent enough to get in, and she loved the academic rigor and the discipline of the school. As she sat reminiscing last month, Marie Kettly explained in Kreyol that “Stecy was so timid as a little girl. Now she is confident and loves to talk with everyone.”
Truly, Stecy is one of the most gregarious of her classmates, and as her favorite class has always been English, she expresses herself with flair in her third language. She hopes to go on to University to study International Relations. Like all Louverture Cleary students, she has so much love for her country, and the hope that she and the rest of the Louverturians will be the leaders who will make a brighter future for Haiti. She explained that her happiest memories of LCS are of “the many people who think about a better world, and work for it, like Mr. Moynihan, Mr. Zamy, and Mr. Pierre.” She knows that it is their example and the discipline which they provided that have prepared her to “work hard and face the mean world.” She smiled as she added, “I’m not scared of anybody because I don’t have to worry about what the world thinks. I can be myself.”
In the days and weeks after the January 12th earthquake, these Philo students stepped up to leadership that would never be demanded of most students their age. As the staff and volunteers were occupied with preparing meals, and clearing debris, and coordinating with THP in then US, it was the philo students who facilitated the orderly distribution of meals on the soccer field, and the cleaning of dishes. They led the morning prayers, and organized both work projects and games for the younger students. Their leadership was essential in those days, and it is exactly this hard work and leadership that Haiti desperately needs at this critical moment in its history.
Stecy’s eyes filled with tears as she talked about her feelings on graduation day. She mused, “I am turning a page of my story and beginning a new chapter, and I am happy, but also sad to leave so many friends.” Her Aunt smiled as she echoed those same mixed emotions, explaining, “I am proud of Stecy and happy that my work as a parent is done.” She paused before adding, “but I know that my work is not really done.” As they smile for pictures and hug friends and teachers goodbye, Stecy and her Odyssey classmates know too, that their journey is only just beginning.
Tuesday, May 25, 2010
Poetry Out Loud
Poetry Out Loud
At PHA, one of my favorite new traditions is the annual “Poetry Out Loud” competition. Poetry Out Loud is a national poetry recitation competition for high school students, and a PHA sophomore has been the Massachusetts state champion for two years in a row. The purpose of the competition is to encourage a love of poetry – of all different styles – in high school students. The idea is that the best way to demonstrate deep understanding of a poem, is to memorize and recite it, so that a student’s own unique interpretation of the poem will be communicated through her performance. It’s fun every year to watch the kids who don’t say much in class shine as they perform a published poem, and to discover new interpretations of poems that I thought I had understood before.
LCS kids love to perform, and they love to compete, so I thought that maybe some of them would rise to the challenge of memorizing and performing a poem in English. Sure enough, they did. I chose poems that I thought they could access – Shel Silverstein and Langston Hughes and a few other lesser known poems – and also invited them to write, memorize and perform an original poem in English. Sure enough, we had eleven participants who did an incredible job performing the poems. The winner was a seconde (10th grade) student named Caleb who wrote a hilarious poem about mosquitoes, and the second and third place finishers both performed the Shel Silversetein poem “Whatif …” The other kids cheered like crazy, and I think next year there will be even more participation. There are a few videos here – of Caleb the winner, Vanessa the runner up, and Olibirs, a philo student who wrote an absolutely hilarious poem – an ode to the incinerator.
At the same time as the poetry competition, the kids were putting on their annual language competition, known in French as la genie. Each class chooses a team of six to compete against the other classes in a competition full of questions in French, English and Spanish. There are translations, vocabulary, spelling and the hardest of all, idiomatic expressions. It was amazing to watch their facility with juggling three foreign languages at once, and also to witness the passion of the participants and their classmates. They cheered and roared when someone spelled a hard word correctly as if it were a world cup match. The winners got to choose a book from some extra books from the library, and all participants got “tickets” to redeem at the language store (where they can buy school supplies and other little goodies.)
As the school year winds down, it has been delightful to watch the kids enjoying some of these simple traditions and embracing new ones with such enthusiasm.
At PHA, one of my favorite new traditions is the annual “Poetry Out Loud” competition. Poetry Out Loud is a national poetry recitation competition for high school students, and a PHA sophomore has been the Massachusetts state champion for two years in a row. The purpose of the competition is to encourage a love of poetry – of all different styles – in high school students. The idea is that the best way to demonstrate deep understanding of a poem, is to memorize and recite it, so that a student’s own unique interpretation of the poem will be communicated through her performance. It’s fun every year to watch the kids who don’t say much in class shine as they perform a published poem, and to discover new interpretations of poems that I thought I had understood before.
LCS kids love to perform, and they love to compete, so I thought that maybe some of them would rise to the challenge of memorizing and performing a poem in English. Sure enough, they did. I chose poems that I thought they could access – Shel Silverstein and Langston Hughes and a few other lesser known poems – and also invited them to write, memorize and perform an original poem in English. Sure enough, we had eleven participants who did an incredible job performing the poems. The winner was a seconde (10th grade) student named Caleb who wrote a hilarious poem about mosquitoes, and the second and third place finishers both performed the Shel Silversetein poem “Whatif …” The other kids cheered like crazy, and I think next year there will be even more participation. There are a few videos here – of Caleb the winner, Vanessa the runner up, and Olibirs, a philo student who wrote an absolutely hilarious poem – an ode to the incinerator.
At the same time as the poetry competition, the kids were putting on their annual language competition, known in French as la genie. Each class chooses a team of six to compete against the other classes in a competition full of questions in French, English and Spanish. There are translations, vocabulary, spelling and the hardest of all, idiomatic expressions. It was amazing to watch their facility with juggling three foreign languages at once, and also to witness the passion of the participants and their classmates. They cheered and roared when someone spelled a hard word correctly as if it were a world cup match. The winners got to choose a book from some extra books from the library, and all participants got “tickets” to redeem at the language store (where they can buy school supplies and other little goodies.)
As the school year winds down, it has been delightful to watch the kids enjoying some of these simple traditions and embracing new ones with such enthusiasm.
Saturday, May 8, 2010
New website!
Check out the new website for the Haitian Project! It's beautiful and full of so many great pictures, as well as all of the updates since the earthquake. You can sign up to receive weekly updates, and make donations online.
http://haitianproject.org/
http://haitianproject.org/
Felisitasyon Klas 2010
Graduation for the Louverture Cleary School class of 2010 will be on Saturday June 5, the scheduled graduation day since last August. I think these might be the only kids in Port au Prince graduating on time, and I’m really proud to have been a part of making this small miracle possible. They’ll still have to prepare for their national exams, which unfortunately will not take place until the end of August, as opposed to late June. But we’ll celebrate the accomplishments and futures of the class of 2010 with the community and their families on the regularly scheduled day. That really is a small miracle.
This week I had the privilege of taking the official class picture, and the individual cap and gown photos for each student. These will be printed in the US, and presented to the kids as a gift on their graduation day. The kids are struggling a bit with the fact that their philo (senior) year was without many of the fun traditions and celebrations that they have watched other classes enjoy for the past six years. They didn’t get to plan the all day party in April which usually marks the school’s birthday. They’re not going to have the traditional weekend retreat in May. Even the food at their graduation dinner is going to have to be a little different this year. All of these changes are necessities, based on the lost academic time, the unique financial requirements of the year, and the shifted focus of many staff members. So, given their quiet disappointment about all of this, it was really a pleasure to take them through a process that was so totally joyful. They were positively giddy as they posed for their class picture, and tried on the white gowns and red caps and did their hair and posed for their portraits. I’ve never taken formal portraits before in my life, and really, I’m not that good at it. But they didn’t care. It was all so much fun.
Incidentally … one of the other small miracles of this year is the fact that two days before coming back to Haiti I made a total impulse purchase and bought a really nice digital SLR camera. I had enjoyed taking pictures so much in Haiti, and I was getting frustrated with my little point and shoot, so on January 8, I bit the bullet and bought the fancy Cannon. However, as soon as I was back in Haiti, I had major guilt about it. How had I just dropped 600 dollars on a toy when people here don’t see that much money in a year? Well, two days later, as I found myself taking detailed pictures of cracked columns and fallen plaster and dangling concrete and sending them to engineers in the US who were working to determine the structural integrity of our buildings … I realized that my impulse to buy that camera wasn’t entirely my own. That camera has been essential in sharing the LCS story with our friends in United States, and I couldn’t have done it with my little point and shoot. Hooray for impulse buys! I’ll keep that in mind next time I’m coveting an expensive pair of shoes …
Soup Joumoun
We weren’t in Haiti on January 1st to celebrate Haitian Independence Day, so we had plans to celebrate it with the Haitian and US American staff together on the first weekend after we returned in January. Well … other things happened … and we just never got around to it –until today!
Haiti celebrates its independence from France on January 1 each year, because after expelling the last French troops in November of 1803, Jean Jacques Dessalines, the revolutionary leader and first president, declared that independence would be proclaimed and celebrated on the first day of the new year. That day, in Cap Haitian, the city on the north coast with the citadel from which the last French ships had sailed the previous November, Dessalines proclaimed the Haitian Declaration of Independence. Somewhat ironically – or maybe tragically – the document was written in French, the language of Haiti’s colonial oppressors, since the descendants of Africans from so many different places did not share a common language of their own. It’s a shocking document, both for the striking resemblance it bears to the language and sentiments of the American Declaration of Independence written about thirty years before, as well as for the very un-Jeffersonian anger and violence which permeates it. Promises to “swear to the entire universe, to posterity, to ourselves, to renounce forever to France, and to die rather than to live under its domination,” are followed by the not so veiled threat to “pursue forever the traitors and the enemies of [our] independence.” Needless to say, after fifteen years of the most horrific violence, this declaration of independence was not sealed with handshakes and the flourish of a quill pen. It was sealed with blood and promises of retribution.
Along with the official pronouncement of independence, Dessalines led the people in a symbolic reclaiming of their rights as free people. That morning, he ate squash soup, the French delicacy long refused to the slaves, and invited the people gathered to do the same. Since then, the tradition in Haiti and in Haitian homes in the US is to greet the new year not with champagne toasts and wild parties, but with family and friends gathered around an early morning breakfast of squash soup. For years teaching in Cambridge, I have heard Haitian kids talk about their unique New Years tradition, and have occasionally enjoyed a Tupperware bowl full of squash soup leftovers on January 3 when school begins again, and I have always wanted to try making it myself.
This morning Benoit and I met in the kitchen at about 4:15. Unfortunately the electricity was out, as it often is at that time of the morning after the batteries have run out of juice and before the sun has come up to get the solar power going again. He chopped open the GIANT green squash, which looks like an orange pumpkin inside, and scooped out the guts. I got to work washing, peeling, and chopping sweet potatoes, regular potatoes, turnips, carrots, onions and garlic. As we worked, more helpers appeared, we drank two pots of coffee, and listened to Wyclef Jean. We boiled the squash, then pureed it – skin and all – in a blender. Benoit had prepared the meat before in the traditional way – by soaking it in citrus juices, then boiling it with garlic and scallions. We then boiled the pureed squash, and added the veggies, meat, macaroni, and lots of salt. (It wouldn’t be Haitian food without lots of salt!) By about 6:45 we were ready and a much larger than usual crowd gathered for an early Saturday morning breakfast. We had so much food that we were able to share it with some of the neighbors – men who were on campus to help with a building project, and some of the women who come to wash the clothes of those of us who are utterly incapable of doing so ourselves. We wished each other Bon Anè, and declared it the new year of 2010 ½ … and frankly, given all that’s happened here since January, it felt kind of good to turn the page of the calendar, even if it was to an imaginary new year.
Haiti celebrates its independence from France on January 1 each year, because after expelling the last French troops in November of 1803, Jean Jacques Dessalines, the revolutionary leader and first president, declared that independence would be proclaimed and celebrated on the first day of the new year. That day, in Cap Haitian, the city on the north coast with the citadel from which the last French ships had sailed the previous November, Dessalines proclaimed the Haitian Declaration of Independence. Somewhat ironically – or maybe tragically – the document was written in French, the language of Haiti’s colonial oppressors, since the descendants of Africans from so many different places did not share a common language of their own. It’s a shocking document, both for the striking resemblance it bears to the language and sentiments of the American Declaration of Independence written about thirty years before, as well as for the very un-Jeffersonian anger and violence which permeates it. Promises to “swear to the entire universe, to posterity, to ourselves, to renounce forever to France, and to die rather than to live under its domination,” are followed by the not so veiled threat to “pursue forever the traitors and the enemies of [our] independence.” Needless to say, after fifteen years of the most horrific violence, this declaration of independence was not sealed with handshakes and the flourish of a quill pen. It was sealed with blood and promises of retribution.
Along with the official pronouncement of independence, Dessalines led the people in a symbolic reclaiming of their rights as free people. That morning, he ate squash soup, the French delicacy long refused to the slaves, and invited the people gathered to do the same. Since then, the tradition in Haiti and in Haitian homes in the US is to greet the new year not with champagne toasts and wild parties, but with family and friends gathered around an early morning breakfast of squash soup. For years teaching in Cambridge, I have heard Haitian kids talk about their unique New Years tradition, and have occasionally enjoyed a Tupperware bowl full of squash soup leftovers on January 3 when school begins again, and I have always wanted to try making it myself.
This morning Benoit and I met in the kitchen at about 4:15. Unfortunately the electricity was out, as it often is at that time of the morning after the batteries have run out of juice and before the sun has come up to get the solar power going again. He chopped open the GIANT green squash, which looks like an orange pumpkin inside, and scooped out the guts. I got to work washing, peeling, and chopping sweet potatoes, regular potatoes, turnips, carrots, onions and garlic. As we worked, more helpers appeared, we drank two pots of coffee, and listened to Wyclef Jean. We boiled the squash, then pureed it – skin and all – in a blender. Benoit had prepared the meat before in the traditional way – by soaking it in citrus juices, then boiling it with garlic and scallions. We then boiled the pureed squash, and added the veggies, meat, macaroni, and lots of salt. (It wouldn’t be Haitian food without lots of salt!) By about 6:45 we were ready and a much larger than usual crowd gathered for an early Saturday morning breakfast. We had so much food that we were able to share it with some of the neighbors – men who were on campus to help with a building project, and some of the women who come to wash the clothes of those of us who are utterly incapable of doing so ourselves. We wished each other Bon Anè, and declared it the new year of 2010 ½ … and frankly, given all that’s happened here since January, it felt kind of good to turn the page of the calendar, even if it was to an imaginary new year.
Fahrenheit 451
Nobody likes the idea of burning books. I know I certain;y don't, but sometimes you just have to.
Working for so long in schools, I have had lots of opportunities to be irritated by the “donations” that people make to the “less fortunate.” They pack their boxes full of the crap they don’t want anymore, drop it off at the door of a local charity, pat themselves on the back for their generosity and take a little tax write-off. Then, the school or charity has to figure out what to do with the donations. Don’t get me wrong, oftentimes people donate wonderful, useful things to schools. But too often they really just donate the crap that they don’t want and don’t know how to get rid of. So, I’ve had to face the question of what to do with unwanted, outdated, irrelevant books. My answer is always to resist the temptation to “save them because maybe some day someone will want them.” No, if we can’t use it right now, then I choose clean, organized storage spaces over the unlikely possibility that some mythical, future teacher will find a good use for the materials that all the actual teachers of the present think are useless. At PHA, this has meant that I have often led parades of boxes of books to the dumpster, or more recently to the curb where a non-profit recycling company picks them up. In Haiti, it’s not that simple.
On Thursday, a huge truck from Food for the Poor pulled up on Santo 5 and I watched as boxes and boxes of mysterious donations walked in the door of the school. Food for the Poor donates a lot of food to LCS, and this year they also provided us with 12 gently used, well refurbished computers for the kids’ computer lab. But in exchange for all the useful things they bring us, sometimes they bring us crap. I think I’ve written about the cases and cases of tiny leather cowboy boots, and the rejected cosmetics for white people that have appeared on our doorstep in the past. This time it was about a hundred boxes of English curriculum materials from some elementary school district in Ohio. There were a few boxes of reading anthologies, fifteen copies of three different books, which will be incredibly useful for the English teachers working with our youngest students. But beyond these ten boxes, there were 90 of teachers’ editions, answer booklets, catalogues, glossy professional development guides, and lots of other propaganda for the publishers of the “Storytown” reading program. The part when I really went through the roof was when I opened the box full of cardboard sleeves that looked like they contained some kind of DVD or CD-Rom … but no … oh wait … they were all empty. Thanks for that.
We sorted through the things we can legitimately use and then had to face that awkward questions about what we should do with the rest of it? I was a proponent of burning it, the way we burn all our trash around here. But the whole day as we sorted all the brightly colored spiral bound teachers’ editions on tables outside on the driveway, the kids were watching curiously as they passed by. They love books … any books … but especially books in English. I tried to show some that these weren’t books for reading – some were literally catalogues of additional curriculum materials. But as we started walking wheelbarrows full of materials back to the incinerator, the kids were begging us not to. So we stopped. What’s worse, giving poor kids useless stuff that will probably end up contributing to the momentous trash problem in this country, or the scandal of burning books in a school full of kids who are hungry to learn? We opted for the lesser evil behind door number 1.
So on Friday afternoon we set up tables by the front gate, and as kids were dismissed for the weekend, they took whatever they wanted. And they wanted all of it. Actually, despite our best efforts at order and discipline, they pretty much stampeded the tables to get what they could. Situations like this always make me – and pretty much everyone else who comes from cultures of wealth and privilege – really uncomfortable. When you’re so accustomed to not having anything, it doesn’t matter what the free thing being offered is – you’ll pretty much run over a kid half your size to get your hands on it because you know it’s not going to be there tomorrow.
By three o’clock the kids were gone and so were the unwanted books. We were left to burn the cardboard boxes and contemplate the weirdly complex ethical decisions that Haiti forces us to make. Sometimes the right answer is so obvious, and sometimes it’s a million shades of gray.
Working for so long in schools, I have had lots of opportunities to be irritated by the “donations” that people make to the “less fortunate.” They pack their boxes full of the crap they don’t want anymore, drop it off at the door of a local charity, pat themselves on the back for their generosity and take a little tax write-off. Then, the school or charity has to figure out what to do with the donations. Don’t get me wrong, oftentimes people donate wonderful, useful things to schools. But too often they really just donate the crap that they don’t want and don’t know how to get rid of. So, I’ve had to face the question of what to do with unwanted, outdated, irrelevant books. My answer is always to resist the temptation to “save them because maybe some day someone will want them.” No, if we can’t use it right now, then I choose clean, organized storage spaces over the unlikely possibility that some mythical, future teacher will find a good use for the materials that all the actual teachers of the present think are useless. At PHA, this has meant that I have often led parades of boxes of books to the dumpster, or more recently to the curb where a non-profit recycling company picks them up. In Haiti, it’s not that simple.
On Thursday, a huge truck from Food for the Poor pulled up on Santo 5 and I watched as boxes and boxes of mysterious donations walked in the door of the school. Food for the Poor donates a lot of food to LCS, and this year they also provided us with 12 gently used, well refurbished computers for the kids’ computer lab. But in exchange for all the useful things they bring us, sometimes they bring us crap. I think I’ve written about the cases and cases of tiny leather cowboy boots, and the rejected cosmetics for white people that have appeared on our doorstep in the past. This time it was about a hundred boxes of English curriculum materials from some elementary school district in Ohio. There were a few boxes of reading anthologies, fifteen copies of three different books, which will be incredibly useful for the English teachers working with our youngest students. But beyond these ten boxes, there were 90 of teachers’ editions, answer booklets, catalogues, glossy professional development guides, and lots of other propaganda for the publishers of the “Storytown” reading program. The part when I really went through the roof was when I opened the box full of cardboard sleeves that looked like they contained some kind of DVD or CD-Rom … but no … oh wait … they were all empty. Thanks for that.
We sorted through the things we can legitimately use and then had to face that awkward questions about what we should do with the rest of it? I was a proponent of burning it, the way we burn all our trash around here. But the whole day as we sorted all the brightly colored spiral bound teachers’ editions on tables outside on the driveway, the kids were watching curiously as they passed by. They love books … any books … but especially books in English. I tried to show some that these weren’t books for reading – some were literally catalogues of additional curriculum materials. But as we started walking wheelbarrows full of materials back to the incinerator, the kids were begging us not to. So we stopped. What’s worse, giving poor kids useless stuff that will probably end up contributing to the momentous trash problem in this country, or the scandal of burning books in a school full of kids who are hungry to learn? We opted for the lesser evil behind door number 1.
So on Friday afternoon we set up tables by the front gate, and as kids were dismissed for the weekend, they took whatever they wanted. And they wanted all of it. Actually, despite our best efforts at order and discipline, they pretty much stampeded the tables to get what they could. Situations like this always make me – and pretty much everyone else who comes from cultures of wealth and privilege – really uncomfortable. When you’re so accustomed to not having anything, it doesn’t matter what the free thing being offered is – you’ll pretty much run over a kid half your size to get your hands on it because you know it’s not going to be there tomorrow.
By three o’clock the kids were gone and so were the unwanted books. We were left to burn the cardboard boxes and contemplate the weirdly complex ethical decisions that Haiti forces us to make. Sometimes the right answer is so obvious, and sometimes it’s a million shades of gray.
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