The flight from Providenciales into Cap Haitien was fine. Immigration consisted of filling out a form and getting our passports stamped. Rather than using a carousel or carts, a young man takes your baggage claim ticket, finds your bag, and brings it to you; you tip him a dollar a bag. I'm very willing to pay for this.
It was at this point that we were greeted by our intrepid and wonderful hosts, Lauren and Sarah. They work for two separate aid organizations: UMCOR and UMVIS, respectively. They have been amazing, and it's too bad that we only overlap for one day (they're based in Port au Prince). They have both lived in Haiti for years, and were only too happy to share insight about Haiti, Cap, and Tovar. They are both clearly in love with this country.
As we were landing, I saw what must be part of that reason: Haiti is beautiful. Even with all of the ecological damage done (nearly complete deforestation to make charcoal), it's lush and green, with mountains and passes. I was thinking about the intensity and vibrancy of the colors when I realized I still had my sunglasses on; when I took them off, everything popped. One of my favorite cities is Seattle, which similarly has hills, mountains, and a large body of water. When it's sunny (which does happen) Seattle really comes to life in color, but it has nothing on Cap.
Outside the airport we make our way to our car (a Toyota Land Cruiser) and were immediately implored for money, but not in a hostile way. What stuck out, though, was the scene around the airport: a bazaar. A bar called God is Good Bar. Women selling plantains. Every other woman walking with a load of something on her head, as naturally as I might walk with a backpack. Tropical and pastel colors are everywhere. Streets are chaos, but not in a bad way. We saw our first UN presence; a soldier standing up in the middle of a UN vehicle, armed with an assault rifle. It seemed oddly out of place, and it is (as I learned later).
Oh, wait, I forgot customs, but that's OK because so did the Haitians. I did see a door marked Douane, but it was closed.
Our driver is Anatol, and he's knowledgeable and friendly and managed to drive this enormous SUV (seats 8) through crowded streets. The thought occurred to me that 24 hours earlier, I was in Charlotte politely merging onto the freeway, and later in the day was in a country with apparently no traffic lights, just roundabouts, (and where they drive on the wrong side of the road, and now I was in the Third World, where concepts like traffic laws and lanes just don't apply.
Motorcycles are not personal transportation; I saw four young men on one, but three was probably the norm. These are just motorbikes, not built for passengers. Traffic flowed (although that's not the appropriate word) in any and all or no direction simultaneously. I think in the short drive to our hotel, Anatol used his horn more than I have used a horn in my entire life (and I don't think I'm exaggerating). We didn't go far, and didn't go fast. The motorcycles were the fastest, although they performed death-defying stunts with apparent ease. Bicycles probably were the second-fastest. There are few actual cars here; it's all trucks: Pickups and SUVs, and none of the "crossover" SUVs that are more like cars. There's a good reason, too. The roads are almost entirely unpaved and unmaintained.
The hotel is beautiful Caribbean art deco, with several first-floor lounges. The rooms are nothing exciting, but clean and with reasonably comfortable beds. Oh, and no bed bugs. In-wall air conditioners, but if you aren't moving, it's just hot and muggy outside; it's not blistering. Not much of a breeze. We dropped our bags and began the slough to Tovar.
Along the righthand side of the road there was a drainage (sewer) ditch. It was incomplete in some places, and businesses had sturdy-looking concrete walkways over it. There are tiny businesses on the ground floor of nearly every building, and most of them seem to have uncertain purposes, with one exception, the "Patience Bank", which is really a lotto; they use the New York drawings, and I'm not sure if each store is independent, or if this is centralized.
Oh, two new people in our group: Kamlesh and Louisa. Kamlesh is also based in Port au Prince and works for UMCOR, while Louisa runs programs for teens who come to do work like help build new buildings.
On the streets there are people everywhere doing lots of different things, and a lot of nothing. Sarah noted that the unemployment rate is 80-85%. The government claims that 300,000 people moved to Cap after the earthquake, which has put a strain on already limited resources. The other effect in Cap and across Haiti is much different building practice; concrete walls are reinforced with heavy rebar. Few buildings are more than one story, and a much smaller number go to three levels. Homes seem to be a single small room. Running water? No. Electricity? No. There is not much of a grid, and it's unreliable, and it certainly wouldn't extend this far outside of Cap.
I asked how the Haitians afford food with such massive unemployment, and the answer is partly that the family unit is much larger, and one employed person would be responsible for funding a large extended family.
This also brought up the issue of schools. As you might suspect, there is no national education program, although there is a bureaucracy defining curriculum at a national level. Schools have to scramble to find space, equipment, books, and qualified teachers, who rarely get paid on time. Most schools charge tuition, along with an annual entry fee, a uniform fee, and a book fee. These can easily add up to $300 dollars, which is about half of the mean wage for an adult. Our driver, Anatol, is paying for school for his brothers' children; again, the larger family unit.
Sarah told us that about 50% of Haitian children never step foot in a classroom. Wow. We're a few hundred miles from mainland US, and here's one of the poorest nations in the world. They WANT education, but they are wary about paying for it (seemingly contradictory, but it makes sense if you put it in the economic perspective that an educated person is not particularly likely to be employed at all, and even less so employed in a way that requires an education). It's beginning to be obvious that this country is a mass of contradictions, and I'm going to have to accept some cognitive dissonance in order to make some sense of what I see.
One example is money. This is a poor, poor country; more on that below. However, it's not a cheap country. We're paying Western hotel prices ($120 for single occupancy). Our driver is getting paid $100/day, and our translator, who will start tomorrow, is getting $60/day. One driver is the fact that these people are supporting large families, but the other is that it seems as though all of the money in Haiti is eventually exported.
As the drive became more rural, there were fewer and fewer people, and buildings became scarce. There were some larger and nicer houses, but I later learned a simple and shocking lesson: everyone in Haiti is poor. There is little middle class, and their hold on middle class status is tenuous. The one house that looked like it might belong in the US turned out to be owned by Haitian Americans.
Lauren followed this up with the statement that poverty does not necessarily mean unhappiness. The Haitians are generous. Children play with their friends and eat dinner wherever they happen to be (if there's enough food). The Haitians "live for today"; tomorrow is foreign country (to borrow from Hartley) when today's dinner is uncertain. You get by. There is little rivalry or jealousy because no one has anything. There is some crime, but it's unclear how much; Sarah told us that 80% of the people in jail have never been charged with a crime or seen a judge. To paraphrase one resident, this is one of the many mechanisms that the ruling elite (the 3% who own 97% of the nation's wealth, a group that includes a certain former president who has since returned to the country, if not to power) use to keep control on society; the contradiction is that they allow crime to happen to keep society in chaos and prevent anyone from moving up.
There are three levels of rural poverty, all of which are genuine poverty beyond what we would see in the US or in Europe since the collapse of serfdom. The worst is to live on and work land that someone else owns, and you pay rent, and only get a portion of the crops. The second is to live on and work land that someone else owns, but you only have to give them part of the crops. The best is to own your own land. Lots of small farming. Avacados are just great. There is little rice business (the US put them out of the rice business for good), and there are lantains (which are usually fried or mashed).
The orphanage was another eye-opener. It's a walled-off compound. It's a new orphanage; the founder is still the director. They have running water, showers, and flush toilets. The classrooms have backless benches with worktables above, and they also have blackboards. Only about 70 students are resident, there are 400 more who come from Tovar and Grison Garde, as the orphanage is between the two.
We then found out what we feared, which is that education is done in a mix of Creole and French. Creole is derived from French, although written phonetically. French used to be the only language used in education, and is still dominant, which means that schoolchildren were rarely taught much about their native language. This will make my language instruction researcher friends very unhappy; if you don't master your native language, it's very hard to be good at a new language. English is not taught at any of the two schools in Tovar or the one in Milot.
Sarah gave us the good news; Creole is an easy language to learn (much simplified grammar relative to French). There are books, CDs, and computer programs to help. This might be an area we can work in. More importantly, we can give students at least the rudiments of Creole; Renada has students who are from Haiti and who may help us learn Creole, too. We probably cannot teach them enough to teach in the language, but possibly enough to be useful. Direct instruction by our students for the Haitian kids seems to be unlikely, but that's not surprising, and not our only avenue.
A quick walk around the grounds: there are several dormitories, and while they are dark and grim (without anyone in them) they are clean and fresh and not dilapidated. I would be happy to have stayed there had they only had air conditioning, or it were a cooler season. The dorms are places to sleep, and nothing more; the darkness keeps them cool.
The classrooms are clean and maintained, but have no equipment. Power on the site is generated, and all with fossil fuel (not sure if it's diesel or gas). I would love to get a grant to bring some green tech down here, as it would eliminate the fuel cost. This country is a great place for things like windmills and solar cells; they have no local source of energy (trees for charcoal are just gone, although I guess bamboo sort of works), and they have no grid. They have to import all of their energy, and they can't afford to do this.
The site also has a kitchen and a cafeteria, and an enormous shop where vocational education takes place (for older students, not specifically those living at the orphanage).
Side point: as you might suspect, the children at the orphanage are not necessarily orphans. They are simply kids who don't have anyone to take care of them. It's clearly a good place to be; the kids get an education, housing, clean-ish water, and food. It's not clear how the kids come to be at the orphanage, since it seems that the lives of these kids are better than many other children. There is a large playground on the site, which apparently is very rare. It's a typical combination of slides, ladders, bridges, and swings; I've seen larger and more impressive in a back yard in the US. When they came out, the kids ran to the playground and went at it as you would expect kids to do; they were laughing and playing and smiling. Poverty does not mean unhappiness. Poverty does not mean unhappiness.
I finally got to see the OLPC XO computers, and they are amazing. They are slim, have a small screen, and a rubberized chicklet keyboard. One of the trainers is Adam Holt from OLPC (and a volunteer for Waveplace). Katelyn asked a good question (she's full of them): what about competition from a commercial interest?, like Dell, using netbooks. Adam threw his own personal OLPC XO from about 4 feet onto concrete, and said "try doing that with your Dell." I was sold.
The hardware is easy to fix/refurb, too. All of the laptops for this program (75, 25 for each of three schools, of which 20 go to students on a rotating basis, and 5 go to teachers) were donated and refurbed. In Uruguay, you can drop off your broken laptop at the post office and they fix it. This would be hard to do in Haiti, Adam said, since "try to find a post office". His point is that there is not societal infrastructure, and it's true. Banking is very difficult (but possible with planning and foresight). Ed: Never found a post office; sorry, no postcards from Haiti.
We had lunch at the orphanage; it was a thick corn-and-bean base (of the same consistency as a thick risotto, perhaps) with a vegetable stew and chunks of what I assume to be goat. It was delicious, so unscrew your face. I would have eaten more, but I was hot and had little appetite. The treat came when a young man brought around avacados and cut them up for us. They're the kind with smooth skin; I can't recall what they are called. Yum.
Back to class; today, the teachers from the local schools are learning. For people who have little or no prior experience with computers, they are fairly adept. eToys puts together several tools that can be used to create a storybook, with animation, when you master the features. What little experience they had with computers used pirated software, and Adam had a hard time explaining open-source and free software; they didn't understand the concept, since software is free to them. I'm reminded of Shakespeare in the Bush. What's important for me is that Powerpoint is not a way to learn about a computer; eToys can get you as far as you want to go, even into programming (it's based on Squeak, an open-source smalltalk vm).
While we were observing, Lauren and I started to hatch a plan. When asked what they want or need, the people will say money. We can't really do that, even if we wanted to. What we can do is engage them in helping build educational games for them. This is actually what OLPC wants to happen; they want on-the-ground development and adaptation of tools on OLPC done to meet the specific needs of the country/culture.
A research framework might go like this. Over time, we bring down students and faculty to work with the people of Tovar and locally-based aid workers like Sarah and Lauren. The first visits (like ours) are about getting a sense of the culture. The subsequent visits are about using participatory design to create ideas of games that would be educational, culturally appropriate, and useful. We would then develop prototypes of the games and test them in the field, using the schools as our labs (oh boy, IRB issues are going to be fun with orphans in a third world country). Later (and without having heard this conversation), Katelyn suggested the same thing.
On the return trip to Cap, we started hatching ideas, just brainstorming. Lauren and Sarah helped us understand some issues with Haitian thinking processes:
1. There is no accountability w/r/t money. It's not that they spend it imprudently, it's that financial planning and financial responsibility (again, Katelyn came up with the concept) are just foreign.
2. Logical, procedural thinking is not the norm, which means planning is nearly impossible. At a low level, this is expressed as the inability to give a driver a series of directions; they have to be given one-by-one, when they are needed.
3. Multitasking is just not done.
Just from these statements, a whole set of games become possible. We talked about Diner Dash, where the player has to manage multiple tables as a waiter. Prince of Persia: The Sand of Time, where the player is allowed to see the negative consequence of an action, and reverse time to the earlier decision point to change actions. A driving game where a set of instructions have to be remembered, and then the memory has to be recalled, extended, and edited. There will necessarily need to be some assessment beforehand and some scaffolding, but the other participants in UNC Charlotte's cognitive science group will probably be of use.
The BIG caveat is that we have half a day's experience in one town in Haiti. We don't know Haiti, we don't know these kids, and anecdotal evidence is not sufficient (although may be necessary/useful) for scientific endeavors. The idea of sustainable businesses is on the shelf while we evaluate simpler interventions.
Not bad for a first day. Now, off to dinner with our new colleagues.
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