A Message in the Sky

My interest in religion had taken on an interesting direction lately with a new interest in the relationship between science and religion. I like to think I have a foot in each camp; I am getting my Masters of Science In Internet Information Systems, while also serving as a religious person working at a religious mission in Haiti. Right now there is a raging debate between the scientific and religious communities, a debate that I feel is plagued with many fundamental understandings. I won’t go into too much detail, but I can petty safely say that the god the New Atheists don’t believe is in a god I also don’t believe in.

In an ideal world, I would love to have Richard Dawkins, Samuel Harris, Lawrence Krauss and all the New Atheists sit down with Francis Collins, Ian Hutchinson, Alister McGrath, and all of the scientists who hold strong religious convictions, and have an open discussion. I’ve seen conversations like this in the past, and though both parties are sitting down and talking, I don’t know how open either side really is. Most parties in this debate are well entrenched in their view point, and don’t have much incentive to secede any ground to their opponent on national television. I do think there is one place that this conversation could happen and might yield some positive results, the roof of the mission here in La Croix.

The roof here is flat and can seat thirty or forty people. I try to go up twice a day, once when the sun is setting and once when the stars are out. When the sun is setting the mountains seem to be painted with the red and purple rays of the setting sun, and every night the sky is lit up with more stars than I ever seen. The mission is the largest building within a few miles, so the roof of the looks out for miles on end, giving you a perfect view of the entire sky and surrounding landscape, and there are no electrical lights, so the stars shine brighter than I have ever seen. I’ve been up to the roof to see the sun rise as well, and its pretty breath taking, but sun rise is also when the bugs come out so its only breath taking until you’re surrounded with mosquitos.

The scenery on the roof is overwhelmingly beautiful. I’ve stayed up there for half an hour just looking around, losing all sense of time, intent on just absorbing the landscape. The surrounding land is a mix of fruit trees, open fields, and small plot farms. Every plant and animal rustles in perfect harmony; the herds of goats and cows trotting with a steady beat, the birds humming to different tones, and the wind playing out a distinctive melody through the leaves of the trees. The landscape plays like a natural symphony, with miles of mountains in the background, their color ever changing in the setting sun.

The stars create a deep sense of wonder to anyone looking at them. Groups will commonly go up to the roof to discuss the events that transpired that day. Sometimes the groups will have lively conversation, but sometimes the conversation drifts apart because everyone is to busy gazing above. The moon, whether its waxing or waning, shines enough light to make the rest of the roof visible while keeping enough sky open for the stars to shine through. At first glance, only a few stars are visible, but once one’s eyes adjust, the entire night sky lights up. The Milky Way looks like a brush stroke across a blue and black field littered with tiny stars. Every now and then a shooting star will fall to earth, gloriously ripping through the sky.

Whether an Atheist, scientifically minded Christian, or Evangelical Creationist, the Haitian night sky will give ignite anyone with a sense of wonder. The utter brilliance of the natural scenery cannot be described with words, and no matter how long you look at it, it ceases to convey a feeling of wonder and amazement. The New Atheists would describe the sky as a combination of cosmic events, and the natural scenery would be a result of Darwinian evolution. The Creationist would describe it all as an act of God, the author and creator of the universe. There are many others (including myself) who feel that each viewpoint has a unique truth ascribed to it. Yet no matter what you believe created the heavens and the physical matter around us, in the awe of the scenery around La Croix, the only feeling that comes to us is one of astonishment and admiration. The story of creation, no matter who’s telling it, seems less important than the stars or mountains it created. I would like to think that if an Atheist, a Creationist, and I were sitting on the roof, and we discussed the origins of the earth, we might focus less on who’s right and who’s wrong, and focus more on how great that creation is. Our concern will shift away from ourselves and on to the greatness around us.  

I don’t want to say that we should disregard the arguments between creationism and materialism. In order to progress, we must understand how the cosmos came to be and how humans evolved into the creatures we are today. That conversation though should not end with one side dominating the other. Neither Religion nor science has a monopoly on truth, and assuming either does degrades the value of both. Darwinian evolution doesn’t exclude the need for God, nor does the Book of Genesis discount the Big Bang Theory. Both science and religion are concerned with understanding the world around us, but today much of the conversation has shifted toward arguing one side as right and the other as wrong. Maybe, just maybe, if we were to take a step back and look at the world around us, look at the beauty alive in nature’s creation, we might find common ground where religion and science can complement each other rather than destroy each other.

The Issue of Agency

I’m currently reading 1491, a fascinating book by Charles C Mann about the civilizations in the Americas before Columbus came in 1492. The book brings up an interesting term, agency. Though the term is applied to the native populations, I feel it also applies quite well to my work in Haiti. Agency, as used in 1491, is the idea that people and societies have the ability to make rational decisions, think for themselves, and function properly without oversight from another person. Agency is something American legal system embraces; we give our children almost full agency at age of 18. We believe that 18 year olds can make their own decisions, purchase property, get married, vote, and engage in formal contracts and agreements without the supervision of their parents or any other governing body. Culturally we also embrace this idea. We feel that after high school kids are mature enough to leave home, go to college, and start to make their own decisions.

The current day histories of Native American populations, the history lessons I was taught in high school and middle school, focus on the atrocities committed by the white settlers against the native populations. The narratives vary, but the general idea is that the Natives Americans were living peacefully off of the land until the European settlers came and forcibly drove them out of existence. These histories are true in fact, everything they report did happen at one time in history, but this focus on the atrocities committed by the European settlers creates an unfair historical stigma against the native populations; it denies their sense of agency. The current narrative of early America assumes the Native Americans did not have a sense of agency. Charles Mann writes the current narrative of early America paints the Native Americans as noble savages, people with good intentions but not capable of forming adequate societies that were capable of responding to European Settlement. The Native American societies I was presented in my history classes were described as small bands of nomadic hunters and gathers with little central organization, which is why the Europeans were able to come in and push them around. Though the European settlers did push the Native populations around quite a bit, the native populations were not simple savages, they had as much agency as the European settlers. The Native American tribes were quite well organized and just as capable of creating prosperous societies as the Europeans were. This historical denial of agency is not intentional, but by focusing only on the atrocities committed by the settlers, we create an image of the Native American as being brutish rather than sophisticated.

The same denial of agency is done by some of the volunteers who come down to Haiti. Now before I go further, I want to be clear that I don’t mean this to be a condemnation of any of the volunteers who come down here. No one, not the historians who write about early America in our textbooks or the volunteers who come to La Croix, intentionally deny a group of people agency. This is a natural occurrence that happens to everyone, it even happened to me. When anyone initially comes to Haiti, he or she is thrown into a storm of humanity. Right when you get out of the airport you are instantly surrounded by dozens of Haitians competing for your attention, causing you to feel totally overwhelmed. This overwhelming feeling persists, and you begin to think, “if I can’t think straight after only having been here for a week, how can these people possibly get anything done, no wonder they’re so poor”. We attribute the poverty to be a symptom of the chaos.

Though Haiti is chaotic, the chaos does not imply people’s inability to function on their own and act in a competent manner. The market place, one of the most chaotic places in all of Haiti, has a distinct logic that creates an emergent order, and that order guides everyone in the marketplace to function almost as efficiently as they would in an American supermarket. Though Haitian societies seem more chaotic on the surface, the Haitian people who compose those societies are just as capable of making their own decisions and guiding their own paths any American is. (For more on the emergent order seen in the market, look at my posts about the market I wrote in February)

This denial of agency is an easy mistake to make, I even make it from time to time, but it comes with distinct consequences that can hamper a volunteer’s ability to help the community. When we assume that people can’t act rationally, the initiatives we pursue inherently take on a paternalistic tone to them that conveys the message “I know what’s better for you than you do”. Not only is perspective unhealthy for forming relationships, but it leads to initiatives where the community ends up being hurt rather than helped.

One example of this paternalism is seen with food distribution. Some of the volunteers I’ve met come down and pass out candy to every kid they see, and in other cases they will pass out bags of rice at random to people in the community. A few weeks ago we had an organized food distribution effort, but we had too much food so the group just ended up giving food out at random. Most times when I question why they’re giving out food, I get the same response, “these people are so hungry and it’s our job to feed them”. The volunteers assume that the Haitians don’t have enough food so it’s our job to give them food. Though some Haitians do suffer from malnutrition, that doesn’t mean it’s our job to just give them food. If we are going to give out food we have to target to a certain population and distribute it in a way that doesn’t hurt the rest of the community. When we give away candy indiscriminately to the kids at the school, the kids begin to assume that we are here to just give them stuff. When groups come and just give out candy the kids won’t interact with the volunteers who don’t give candy. When the groups begin to just give stuff out people come to us only looking for free handouts. I would try to interact with the kids or the adults, but they would only interact with me if I could give them something. Kids would come up to me saying “give me candy, give me your sunglasses, give me food” and when I denied them, they moved on to the next volunteer.  They had developed an expectation; the volunteers are here to give us food, if you ask enough of them you’ll be able to get something. This made everything else we did quite difficult. We thought that we were feeding the hungry, but in reality we were creating a complex that assumed that hampered the rest of our work.

I don’t want to be too critical of the volunteers who come down. Every single person who has come to the mission has come to serve, they unfortunately sometimes get the wrong idea of how best to do that. In the US, caring for someone and serving someone are usually synonymous, but in places like Haiti that take on very different meanings. When we deny people their sense of agency, we lose sight of their own abilities; we lose sight of what they can do for themselves. The Haitians are capable people, service to them should focus not on what they need, but what good they can do, and how we can help them do more of it.

Taking American Online Classes in Haiti

When I came down to Haiti last fall I was nine credits (three classes) away from finishing my Masters of Science in Internet Information Systems. After I took my final last night I am now only one class away. The courses in this program are eight weeks long, and I just finished my second to last class. I could have taken two classes this semester but the class I declined to take would have involved about an hour a night of online research, and would have required me to connect to a server back in Pittsburgh about twice a week. This would have really worn down the limited internet we already have at the mission, and would have been a total pain for me, so I decided to wait to take the course until the summer.

Taking online courses in Haiti was really interesting. I’ve taken a few online classes previously, and the ability to learn something in an online class totally depends on your willingness to engage in the material and the professor’s ability to format that class in a way that it is teachable. I’ve taken some courses online that are a mess and don’t really teach as much as force the students to memorize facts, and I’ve taken some that are fascinating and been very informative. This most recent course focused on network security and I was really able to learn a lot about network security and how to prevent hackers from accessing your network system. I was even able to apply some of the knowledge I learned in the course here at the mission. The professor for this class did a really good job managing the class and was available to help us when we needed help. He put ample resources up online and structured the assignments well. I don’t know if I would qualify myself as an expert on network security, but after this class I would feel confident working in a position that required knowledge of network security.

Previously when I’ve taken online classes my performance has been directly related to how well I can structure my time. Last summer I took two online classes and struggled with both of them because I didn’t structure my time appropriately. The past two classes I took online however, I did quite well because I forced myself to focus. Focusing on network security or object oriented programming (the two courses I took in Haiti) as one of the most difficult things I’ve done in Haiti. To begin with, there are plenty of distractions here. I don’t have the most vibrant social life here, but at any hour of the day or night I can go up to the roof and look out on to the mountains or up at the sky and be amazed by what I see. I have a bunch of books here and a few DVDs as well as a full music library. In addition to all of these distractions, the biggest time commitment here is my responsibility for the mission. I don’t have a strict nine to five job, but I have a daily list of activities I have to work on. Much of the work I have to do for the mission is done on my own. I enjoy what I am studying, but pushing through a practice exam or a homework assignment seems much less important than anything I do for the mission, and after a while is much less interesting than reading any of the books I have here.

Another issue I faced was the flakey internet and the electrical situation. Last fall the power would go out pretty frequently, so I had to take advantage of the power when I had it and be able to quickly focus on my work when the power would come back after being out for a while. This spring the power situation was fixed, but for the first half of my course the internet usage was not functioning properly, so studying anything online would go pretty slowly and uploading anything was a bit of a gamble. Fortunately the internet has been fixed, so I was ok the last few weeks of the course. The internet here is not like in the US. There is a limited amount of data we can use, and there is an even more limited amount of bandwidth. The limited data meant that there was a limited amount of internet activity that could be done everyday, and the limited bandwidth meant that the internet was pretty slow. In the moment these challenges were a pain, but I am glad that I had to experience them. They made me a better student, they made me more patient, and they made me much more grateful for the internet capabilities I have at home. 

I tried to create incentives for myself, rewarding myself every time I completed a section of one assignment, I tried to use specific study habits that would make it my work seem to go by faster or would help me absorb the information faster, but at the end of the day there were two things that worked: good music and determination. Self-made rewards systems, giving yourself candy or something nice after you finish your work, have never worked for me. Why would I wait to eat the piece of candy? Its sitting right in front of me. I tried to use certain study tricks but those always ended up confusing me, any mnemonic device I created made me forget what the lesson was actually teaching. What worked the best for me was putting on a good album, and just working through all the work I had to do. It wasn’t fun, but it worked. These online classes were hard, but I am so glad I did them. I had a full academic experience, I learned about a subject that I was previously unfamiliar with, and I learned to be more focused, and an overall better worker. This was one of those situations where I didn’t enjoy it while I was doing it, but the second it ended I was so glad that I did it.

Many of the Haitians I have met here are quite determined, especially when it comes to their education. Despite their very limited materials, they are incredibly committed to their studies. I can’t help but think about the potential online education might have in Haiti. It would need to be structured properly, and would have to be in Creole, but with enough grit and determination, and enough luck, I could see online education giving Haitians opportunities they could have never before dreamed of having.

Sewing Class

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I realize that when I talk about the vocational program I’ve focused the majority of my attention not the masonry program. There are a few reasons for this, the big one being that I have a pretty good relationship with pastor Wisner. I felt guilty about this though, because the other trades are still very important and moving along quite well. Today I sat in on the sewing class today. The sewing class is pretty interesting. It is under the jurisdiction of the vocational program but it is different in a few ways. The program got started a few months before I came down and was one of the programs that I based my original plans for the school.

One of the biggest differences in the sewing curriculum is that over half of the student body is made up of women. Most of the vocational trades are all male. This is not just true for our situation Haiti but in the US as well. When I was researching the trades last summer I discovered that over 95% of all tradesmen are men. This is not too surprising, the trades are quite physically demanding, and jobs like that are generally more appealing to men (though not always, I don’t want to promote any stereotypes). The classes are about 75% women and 25% men. The men train to be tailors and the women train to be seamstresses.

The program has a pretty interesting structure. The students have lessons on the theory of sewing, but lectures can’t teach very much to the students without any hands on experience, so pretty early on the students begin to sew. Most of the lessons the students have now are done through on the job training. When I went down today, I arrived about five minutes after the classes began and the students were already getting to work tracing fabric and working at the sewing machines. The sewing machines they use are not the electrical machines we all used in Home economics class, but they are mechanical machines used over 100 years ago. They have a foot pedal the students have to press to move the fabric along and sew. You might be thinking that a school that uses mechanical sewing machines is a school for luddites, but it’s the most productive technology available for sewing.

The electricity in Haiti is pretty inconsistent. The electricity is off right now. This past weekend we had a little bit of power on Saturday, and then the power didn’t come back until Tuesday afternoon. We had a little bit of power last night and now the power is back off. Fortunately we have solar panels that charge a battery pack so we have a little bit of power when the Haitian power isn’t running. Most places in Haiti however don’t have this luxury and have to learn to live without electricity for multiple days on end. A seamstress or tailor has to function in an environment where electricity is scarce and inconsistent, making a mechanical sewing machine the most logical piece of equipment for any tailor or seamstress.

The work that the tailors and seamstresses do is not meant to solely serve as a teaching instrument but has a productive value to it. The seamstresses and tailors sew most of the uniforms worn by the school children. When they started the course back last spring the students were just making the uniforms for the La Croix School, but since then the mission has gotten contracts with other schools in the area and now the seamstresses and tailors make the uniforms for multiple different schools in the La Croix area. This is a very lucrative business. The uniforms have to be replaced on a regular basis, and they have to be fitted for every school bound child. Though not every child goes to school, there are over 3500 children in the La Croix School alone, and even more out in the other communities, and these uniforms have to replaced about once a year. Making student uniforms can give the tailor and seamstress students a great first job and help them start their career. Sewing uniforms also saves the mission money and can bring in a little extra income.

The seamstress and tailor programs are both very good programs and have served as a great model for me when designing the other vocational programs. I never knew the potential the of the mission to employ students and help them get their careers started. The mission has a lot of work that can be done by someone with a vocational degree, and the best people to have do that work are people the mission trusts. Right now they have about 20 students in the seamstress and tailor program, but I imagine the program could easily expand to accommodate many more students, there are certainly a lot of school uniforms that need to be made. The students in the program will most likely not spend their entire career making school uniforms, most will move on to making other garments, making room for new students to come into the program. As I continue to plan for the future of the vocational school, I will certainly be using this stellar program as a guide.

Understanding Urban Poverty

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When people think about poverty in Haiti, many times the image that comes to mind is that of a poor farmer gathering his crops to take to market. Though many of Haiti’s poorest live on rural farms, poverty is also quite endemic in the urban areas, and this type of poverty is a completely different beast than rural poverty.

In developing countries like Haiti, the urban economies are composed of two separate labor groups, a formal sector and an informal sector. The formal labor sector is made up of professional jobs that we have in the US, doctors, lawyers, business professionals, police officers, construction workers, factory workers, teachers, etc. In many Haitian cities, this formal sector is principally composed of factory laborers. These jobs are relatively well paying and offer consistent work and consistent pay. This type of labor force is not too difficult to understand because it’s what most Americans are apart of. Most of us have a job we go to on a regular basis, and we receive a predefined salary for our work. The salary may vary those paid on commission, but our output always has a predetermined salary.

The second sector in Haitian cities (and most cities in most developing countries), the informal sector, is a bit different than anything we see in the US. The informal sector is made up of jobs with no predefined salary and no predefined work agreement. The people in these jobs are not hired for the jobs, nor do they work for a specific firm; rather they act as individual agents looking for any remunerative task the city might offer. As you exit the Port Au Prince Airport, there are about fifty guys who come up to you and offer to take your luggage to your car. They are pretty aggressive and won’t stop hassling you until you walk away from them or someone else comes up. A few months ago when I was flying back to the US, one of these guys grabbed my bags without me asking, and then demanded I pay him twenty dollars. When I handed him five, he tried to grab my wallet. These guys are all in the informal labor sector. They are basically low skilled workers looking for a situation where they could make a little bit of money. These jobs are not too common in the US; the best example of an informal labor sector we see at home would be a few guys outside of a Home Depot or a Lowes looking to do some construction work for that day. The informal laborers basically sit in highly populated areas looking for something they can do to get paid. In the L’Estere market where we buy the goats, there are always guys hanging around the people selling goats, and will offer to walk your goats back to your car. They do this without any predetermined salary, but they hope they will get a tip when they’re done. There is no contract enforcing this agreement though, so there is no guarantee they will get paid. This is the sector of the urban economy where urban poverty exists. Some of these informal laborers add value to the city, like the guys who help us take our goats back to the car, but some of these informal laborers can be destructive to the overall economy. In some cities laborers in the informal sector will work as pickpockets or beggars. Though these jobs don’t really add value to the city, they can provide an income. In very unfortunate circumstances, children will go to the cities looking for work, and will join gangs to find money.

In countries like Haiti, where most of the population is located in the rural areas, regulating urban poverty is difficult. People will migrate from the rural farms to the urban areas if they think they can make more money in the urban areas than they are currently making in the rural areas. If the average expected wage in the urban areas is greater than the average wage in the rural areas, people will move to the urban areas. The problem with this, is that the majority of jobs in the urban areas are in the informal sector, which pay less than the average rural sector. So even if there are good jobs available in the urban sector, not everyone who migrates to the urban areas will get those jobs. Some people will get good work in the formal sector, while others will get shafted into a crumby job in the informal sector.

This is difficult to understand on a theoretical level, so an example might help. Lets say the American government lifted the sugar tariffs on foreign sugar. This means Haitian sugarcane just would become more profitable. Cane refineries begin to open up in Gonaives (the port town ten miles north of La Croix), and the average wage of a Haitian factory worker in Gonaives would increase. For this example, lets assume the average wage of a factory worker in Gonaives triples. Now an increase in factory wages in Gonaives will increase the wages in Gonaives’s formal sector. Because the expected urban wage is made up of both the formal and informal sectors, the new sugar cane refineries in Gonaives will give people in the rural areas an incentive to migrate to Gonaives. The migration will be uneven; not everyone who moves there will profit from the new opportunities there. There will be more people migrating to Gonaives than the sugarcane refineries can employ. Everyone will come to Gonaives hoping to get a good job at the sugar cane refinery, but not everyone will. Those who don’t find work at the sugarcane refineries will then work in the informal sector. Some people might go back home to the rural areas, but most people will probably stick around hoping to work at the sugar cane refinery. Formal sector jobs are generally very good jobs and most people who migrate to the cities intend to stay there for a while, looking for that formal sector job. While they wait they have to work, so they will work in the informal sector, and remain in poverty.

This is counterintuitive, because it asserts that a rising tide in the urban areas does not lift all boats. A new sugarcane refinery should decrease urban poverty, but it ends up increasing urban poverty because it pulls more people from the rural areas than can be employed at the new refineries. This is one of the reasons that some NGOs in Port Au Prince are doing more harm than good after the 2010 earthquake. Before earthquake, Port Au Prince had some really good formal sector jobs. After the earthquake, many of those jobs crumbled away, quite literally in some cases. Because the formal sector disappeared almost instantly, there was a huge swell in the informal sector. People who worked in factories that were demolished in the quake, now had to work as bag carriers outside of the airport. After the earthquake many NGOs came and tried to redevelop the formal sector jobs that were lost in the earthquake. This was helpful for the handful of people who got the formal sector jobs in the cities, but it also maintained the huge informal labor sector initially created by the earthquake. Those people occupying the informal labor sector are the ones currently living in the squalid tent cities around Port Au Prince. They have not returned back to the rural areas because they are hoping to get one of the formal sector jobs. This is one of the reasons, that even three years after the earthquake, there are still massive tent cities outside of Port Au Prince. All those people are hoping to get jobs in formal sector, but in the mean time they are making ends meet by working in the informal sector. What might have been a more productive development initiative after the earthquake would have been to not focus on the jobs that were lost in the cities, but focus on developing the rural areas. This way there would have been a reverse migration back to the rural areas. Those working in the informal sector in the big cities would return to the rural areas because the wages there were increasing. Though this would have not rebuilt the big cities, it would have decreased the overall level of urban poverty.

I do not mean to place the blame for the tent cities solely on the NGOs. Though there are some NGOs in Port Au Prince that are creating more problems than solutions, there are also many that are doing very good work. The issues surrounding tent cities are very complicated, but urban to rural migration is a useful way to examine the incentives of the situation and explain why the tent cities are still so prevalent three years after the earthquake. This is one of the many complexities of development work. Sometimes the solution to a massive problem lies totally outside of the problem. Sometimes the best way to help the urban poor is to build up the rural areas. Though this is counterintuitive, it can be a useful guide as we try to figure out how to help Haiti. 

Women in Haiti

This is a post I’ve tried to write a few times and I haven’t gotten anywhere with it until now. It might be good, but it might really crash and burn. Let me know your thoughts.

Women in Haitian society are unfortunately delegated to a position of subservience and limited rights. Women have the same constitutional rights as men, but the social and economic reality for Haitian women is that they are seen as unequal to men. In the rural society where I live women experience a distinct discrimination. Because most of the work is physically demanding, the families make more moneyif the men work in the fields. Unfortunately this creates a disparity in the homes. Most women work in the homes and the men work in the fields. This creates a cultural disparity where men will refuse to do any work outside of the fields, including the physically demanding tasks like gathering water. Some men see their wives as equals and will help with these tasks, but in many unfortunate cases women are forced to walk two or three with large pots of water balanced a top their heads. One of the reasons Pastor Pierre tires so hard to get more wells, even in areas that have a well relatively close, is so that the women don’t have to walk so far carrying water.

The most tragic consequence of this social inequality is domestic abuse. Women are all too often the victims of domestic and sexual violence and have few places to turn when the abuse happens. During Carnival or RaRa there is a reported increase in violence towards women, and there are many Vodou ceremonies that either involve or instigate some type of sexual violence. During the military dictatorships women suffer disproportionately to men and many women’s advocacy groups were targeted. Women are also victims of their husband’s infidelity. I have heard many cases where a husband will have children outside of his marriage and then leave his first wife with his the family and move in with the other woman he impregnated. Not only is this abhorrent behavior, in many cases it leaves the woman in a disadvantaged economic position, unable to provide for her children.  

Despite the gender disparity, there is one place where women are on a pretty equal footing with men, church. Pastor Pierre has preached against domestic abuse and infidelity, and firmly believes that a central part of Christianity is treating your entire family with love and respect. Church services in Haiti are much longer than in the US and are run much differently. Services last about two and a half hours, most of which are scriptural readings, testimonies, and music. The sermon is only about 20 minutes, a much short proportion of the service than in American services. Though Pastor Pierre or Pastor Evans will give the sermon every Sunday, women are a prominent part of the whole service. The choir is all women, and women always read from the lectern. The group of volunteers who run the different church activities is also made up of both men and women. The most emotional part of every Sunday service is the call to prayer, where people can pray at the altar and have other members of the congregation pray with them. This is a pretty emotional experience for the Haitians, and there is no gender disparity during this time. Women pray with men and men pray for women, all praying as equals.

Pastor Pierre says, “I am always on the side of women”. He says this in the folksy way he says a lot of things, but he is being completely sincere. He preaches about the need for men to treat their wives as equals and all of his success at the mission he either attributes to God or to his wife. During Jesus’s ministry, he viewed women and men as complete equals under God. Most scholars agree that one of the most radical qualities of Jesus’s ministry was that he treated women as complete equals. He preached to crowds of both men and women, which was unheard of in his day, and was seen in public openly associating with women, something that signified his value of women and was unseen in his day. Because our society is so different from the biblical society of Jesus, many of Jesus’s teachings about gender equality are lost to us. Luke 8:1-4 talks about how Jesus ministry was composed of the twelve disciples as well as some women, including Mary Magdalene. This is not just a contextual footnote, but rather a description of Jesus’s radical decision to make women apart of his ministry, putting them on an equal footing as his male disciples.

Since Pastor began the mission in the 1980’s, it has been cultural force challenging many of the unhealthy social norms plaguing Haiti. The Vodou practiced in La Croix when he began his ministry was rather violent. Pastor Pierre told me that when he began to work in La Croix, funerals for children were a regular occurrence because they were killed during various Vodou ceremonies. Animal sacrifices were also quite common; depleting many Haitians of their only source of wealth. Pastor Pierre has been fighting these destructive practices since he got here, and will continue to push the virtues of kindness and fairness for as long as he is here. The goal of the mission is not to just alleviate poverty, but to fight destructive cultural impulses and empower the community to care for itself. Part of this empowerment means treating everyone, men and women, as equals. The gender inequality in Haiti is an injustice to Haitian women, and on the outset seems rather bleak. Yet when I see the progress Pastor Pierre has made and the community he has empowers, I can’t help but be optimistic.

I went out on a limb with this post, and I don’t know if I’ll continue to write like this. If you liked this post or didn’t like it, please tell me: vancleve.raymond@gmail.com. Thanks!

Accountable Development

One of Pastor Pierre’s policies that seemed a little odd to me is that he charges everyone for school. Tuition is $240 a year, but only two thirds of the students pay tuition, while families in the US sponsor the other third. But every student, regardless of whether or not he or she is sponsored, has to pay an additional fee just to attend school every year. The fee is pretty small, I think its only about 500 GDS*, which comes out to about $12.50. The same is true for the English club, BMSEC (which stands for Bright Morning Star English Club). Every student has to pay 100 GDS, which comes out to about $2.50. The students can also be sponsored in the English club, and just pay 25 GDS, a little more than 50 cents.

This fee is similar to the $50 dollar activity fee I paid every year at Lafayette, after paying over twenty thousand some dollars for tuition. Though most Haitians are pretty poor, $12.50 is pretty minimal amount of money, especially for what they students get in return. Not only do they get to go to school, they also get at least one warm meal a day and a uniform. If the families are especially poor Pastor Pierre will allow them to pay the fee over time, or pay in “sweat equity”, by which the parents or children donate a small portion of their time to the mission. Pastor Pierre is very lenient about how this fee is paid, but he won’t let a child go to school without the parents or students paying something. Pastor Pierre’s justification for this was that he “wanted the parents to be invested in the school”. The same logic is applied to the English club. Edvens and JR, the two English teachers, want the students to put money forward as a type of commitment. This made sense on a rational level, but there was something about it that didn’t really sit right with me.     

Today the English Club had a mid year celebration. There was no specific reason that today was the celebration, other than the fact that the American volunteers currently at the mission felt passionately about the English program and wanted to celebrate the student’s success. It was a nice party, and it brought to my attention just how dedicated the students were to BMSEC. The club is made up of over 60 students, and at least 20 of them performed a song or dance at the party. I thought the party would be packed, but it had about the same number of students that are always there. I realized that this is because almost every BMSEC meeting has perfect attendance.

The most impressive achievement of the English club however isn’t the students attendance, but their ability to speak English. Last fall I worked with the advanced students, and they were able to have coherent conversations with me about relatively complicated topics. Today they’re even better. We aren’t able to debate philosophy, but we can discuss every day topics like education, family, and their personal interests. The Friday after US Presidential election we discussed the differences between Barrack Obama and Mitt Romney. These kids can speak English better than I could ever speak French when I was in high school. 

While I was at the BMSEC celebration today, I realized that BMSEC is every American schoolteacher’s dream; it’s a class of nothing but motivated and focused students. Since I’ve been at La Croix I’ve worked on lots of after school activities, and not just academic activities like BMSEC, but recreational activities like baseball and soccer. All of these initiatives work out well at first, but then peter out sooner or later. The programs peter out not because their bad programs or because they’re poorly run, but sooner or later the kids lose interest and want to do something else. We had a great T ball league going for a while, but after a few weeks the kids lost interest and wanted to play soccer. This hasn’t happened with BMSEC. It was started last January with the help of Reeny Davidson, an American volunteer, and it has kept pushing along at full force ever since. Part of the students’ motivation comes from the enthusiasm of JR Jean and Edvens Milius, the two BMSEC teachers. They are extremely energetic and really motivate the students. But that’s only half of it. The other half of BMSEC’s success comes from the grit and determination the students put in to learning English.

I was talking with Edvens today, and he said that all of the students in BMSEC felt accountable to the club. Edvens felt that the factor driving this sense of accountability was the fee the students had to pay to the club. The fee created an expectation among the students; they invested in the club, and they wanted to make sure they got a return on their investment. Some of this return would come from JR and Edvens’ keen teaching ability, but some would have come from the students. I am sure the same principle holds for the school at large. The La Croix School has been nationally recognized as one of the best schools in Haiti. Because the parents have to invest something in the school, they expect that their children to do well. The expectation is even greater in the school however, because the parents are paying the fee, they make sure their children work hard, even if they aren’t intrinsically motivated.

This fee reminds me a little bit of the time I spent working for a start up last year. Venture capitalists invested in the company with the expectation that the company would make a profit. Their was an expectation between our company’s CEO and the investors that the company would execute the plan presented to the investors. The investors would continue to invest money in the company and the company would continue to produce profits. The parents continue to invest in the school, and the students continue with their education. Though the investment structure is different, the expectation between both parties is the same.

This is another one of those difficult lessons of development. I want to do everything I can for Haiti. I want to educate the people, and I know their poor so the last thing I think to do is charge them for the service I’m giving them. Yet even though this practice may seem stringent at first, it has unseen benefits, and those benefits are the difference between success and failure. Now my next task is to figure out a payment plan for the vocational school.   

*Don’t quote me on that number, I don’t remember the exact number but I know it’s around there.