Carcasse - Day 5

Saturday, 02/25/2012
I attended the teachers’ meeting at 9 am with Diana and Jack (more information on Jack’s report). I asked if I could put the books we had brought with us in the auditorium for students to read, as I was already getting so many requests from students to borrow the books. I had lent out a few, but I wanted them to be available to everyone and not have to keep track of them myself. To me, reading books for fun is one of the most important, if not the most important tool for learning, at least for languages. Students can repeat grammar rules all day, but they’re not going to stick and become intuitive until they see them applied in different sentences, and they’re only going to read for hours on end if the book is engaging. I owe my English reading and writing skills to English books read when I was young, as I went to French schools until 10th grade (except for 2nd grade, when I learned English). As far as I can tell, these kids don’t have any books at all. Just buying the textbooks are a drain on the family income, so leisure books are out of the question.
Another discussion point was the budget, and the teachers agreed to meet at 5 pm later that day to draw one up for the adult education classes, library and other expenses.

While most of the team went to Bigarous in the morning, I went to Batisse’s home(the student who had demonstrated the solar cookers yesterday) so he could try it out at home and show his family. After meeting his mother and younger siblings, we put some spaghetti in the solar cooker with at least 10 other people watching. I explained to them how it worked, and how to turn it towards the sun, and said I would come back in an hour and a half. When we came back, everyone on the way to his house (even those living blocks away) asked us “se cuit?” (“Is it cooked yet?”). The news had traveled fast.

The spaghetti was indeed cooked when we got there, and as soon as I took off the lid 10 or so kids gathered around and picked strands of spaghetti directly out of the pot, pushing each other over for a little bit of food. It was gone in minutes. I told Batisse that he could borrow the solar cooker so he and his mother could try it out, and that I’d like to know about his experiences with it in order to better help others. As a 19-year old breadwinner since his father died, a student at the school, and a choir boy who knew Father Verdieu quite well, he seemed responsible and trustworthy.
While I’m on the topic of parents dying, I should note that in the first week, I met at least four young people who told me that their parents had died. For example, I had asked one 16-year old if she lived with her parents, and she said that no, they had both died, and she lived with her husband. The average life expectancy here is pretty low – around 40 I think. I thought before this was mostly due to high infant and child mortality rates, but I’m realizing that few adults make it to a ripe old age. At 5 pm (or maybe 6, nothing starts on time here), I went to the teachers’ meeting to draw up the budget. It was only the school principal (who is also a teacher), the other teachers and me. Most of the teachers, especially the women, didn’t say much, maybe because they were not confident about their French. We started with the adult education classes – how many teachers were willing to teach and when, how many books each student would need, whether St. Mary’s could pay for adults’ uniforms (I said the money could probably be better spent elsewhere), the cost of chalk for the blackboard, etc…We then listed some basic books the library would need, and then came to the part about extra things the school would need. Some items that came up were: maps and pictures (the teachers have drawn maps themselves of the world and Haiti and pictures of the body), trashcans (there isn’t a single trashcan at the school, so there’s plenty of trash right behind the school), a corkboard for messages, a projector (I told them this required a lot of electricity and there wasn’t even enough for the computers, but we would look into it), and they emphasized that the most important item was a set of marching drums for an inter-school competition they would be holding soon.
I asked if the students had clean water to drink. They said sure, and pointed to the “aquapur” bucket, in which a clay jar slowly filters water. I asked if that was enough to supply all the kids with drinking water, and they nodded.Then I said “But there are two of these at the priest’s house and it’s not nearly enough just for his household.” They looked embarrassed and admitted it wasn’t enough. Before I came to Haiti, I figured they had enough drinkable water for the kids. Then I heard from one of the Americans that they brought a bucket of water from the stream (contaminated of course) for each classroom. But I’ve found out since then that there really is no water at all. I found that out when I asked the director if he had a little bit of water to wet the eraser to wash the blackboard. He said no, and said if I really needed to, I could take the filtered water from the Aquapur clay pot/bucket system. I
imagine that single water filter must be reserved for teachers in case of extreme thirst or important guests. I think there is one drum which is sometimes filled with stream water in the schoolyard. But I haven’t seen anything close to the latrines, and I have to assume that kids simply don’t wash their hands after using them. I’ve gotten into the habit of bringing my own water bottle, but I haven’t seen anyone else do that.
But back to the teachers’ meeting. After seeing that they didn’t have a filtration system large enough to supply the whole school, I wanted to find out how important clean drinking water was to them. I asked them if kids often got sick with stomach problems, and said good health was very important, as kids can’t study when they’re sick or hungry, not to mention it’s a waste of food when it doesn’t get digested due to illness. They said it was true that the children were often sick, and seemed concerned. But it did not seem to be one of their priorities, perhaps because they had simply accepted contaminated water as a fact of life that could not be changed and was not worth thinking about. I suggested we start a SODIS program there to disinfect the water by exposing water in plastic bottles to the sun’s UV radiation. The teachers had apparently never heard of the method, but sounded genuinely interested, and agreed to try it out.
I then naively asked if they needed supplies for the toilets – toilet paper, soap (not knowing they had no water close to the latrines). They nodded, a couple of them repressed giggles, and we continued. I later found out they don’t use toilet paper (they use sand, apparently), and obviously don’t need soap since there’s no water.
At the end of the meeting, the director asked me what the most important item on the list was for me. I said clean drinking water. He said the drums for the marching band, and he made sure I underlined that item in the list 3 or 4 times.