A Girl Named Lovely

by Catherine Porter

  Although the country’s constitution promised free education for everyone, it funded very few public schools. Around 85 percent of the schools in Haiti were private, charging annual fees of anywhere from US$60 for a modest school to US$10,000 for a spot at the Union School, where the country’s elites and expat children went. For most parents, who earned less than US$2 a day, the average cost of US$135—including books and uniforms—was more than two months of their income. It was no wonder that as many as one in four little kids didn’t go to school and less than half the population was literate. Education was a luxury, like an all-inclusive vacation.

  Even worse, the state didn’t have the means to monitor the private schools and ensure they were safe and providing quality education. The government openly admitted there was little to no oversight. Entrepreneurs opened schools in their homes or yards all the time—typically as businesses, not community development projects—and most would not qualify as anything beyond abysmal day cares.

  Advertisements for schools were splashed across the gray concrete walls that shouldered most streets in Port-au-Prince—as many as four per block. They had impressive-sounding names like Collège Le Méridien. But when I asked my latest translator—a young man named Dimitri Bien-Aimé—to call a couple of the numbers, the people who answered the phone couldn’t speak French, which was one of the primary languages of instruction. How could the schools possibly be legitimate? I wondered.

  The locals had a name for these schools. They called them lekòl bòlèt—lottery schools. The wisdom held that kids had as much of a chance of earning an education there as their parents did of winning the lottery.

  I glimpsed many of these problems firsthand when I enrolled Lovely’s cousin Emmanuel in school. He approached me after Lovely’s birthday party in April and handed me a two-page handwritten letter, shyly asking to send him to school. Emmanuel was short and thin, with coal-black skin and red eyes. He looked about eighteen, but he was twenty-five. He had dropped out of school in grade eight after his father died, and he was working as an apprentice carpenter, supporting his mother and little sister, who lived elsewhere. “I loved school anpil, anpil,” his letter said, adding that he dreamed of being a journalist or policeman. He seemed old to go into grade eight; he’d be at least ten years older than many of his classmates. But he rightly explained that being overage was not a big deal when it came to school in Haiti. When their parents were broke, children would often miss a year of school to work.

  I agreed to help Emmanuel with all the arrangements. I met him halfway up the two-lane highway to his mountain home, in the town of Thomassin. From there, he led me to a house on a crowded street with a double sign out front: College Univers Fraternel de Thomassin and Fleur Rose Kindergarten. The combination of a high school and kindergarten struck me as odd, but no odder than schools running out of houses. The principal greeted us and led us inside into what felt like a messy storage closet.

  There were two wooden desks, both cluttered with papers, and an old-fashioned metal handbell to ring at the beginning of class, but no computer or electrical equipment of any type. Looking up, I noticed there was no overhead light, either: the room was simply illuminated by the soft morning light filtering through a window that held no glass. The school’s filing system consisted of just one shelf, jammed with papers, and an assortment of plastic bags hanging from nails in the yellow walls, each of which was decorated with passages from the Bible, scrawled by hand in green marker. J.C. is the same yesterday, today and eternally, one said.

  The principal explained that he’d been operating the school for seven years. Before that, he’d been a civil engineer. I didn’t know enough at the time to quiz him on his qualifications as an educator. Coming from a world of regulations, it hadn’t dawned on me that schools might be openly running underground. I never learned if this one was sanctioned by the government or not. But I came to think of many schools in the country as “make-believe.”

  I paid the US$200 tuition in cash. The principal filled out Emmanuel’s student card and stamped it with his school’s crest with the same flourish that the secretary at Lovely’s school had used. I felt uneasy. From the little I’d seen of the school, I wouldn’t send my kids there. But who was I to say, as an outsider with so little knowledge of Haiti? Emmanuel was the one going to school. He was an adult, and he had specifically picked this one. The last thing I wanted to be was an overbearing Westerner who claimed to know better than the locals about their own system. Haiti was overrun by those, roaring around in their white rented SUVs. Still, uncertainty crept inside my mind: What if Emmanuel only got a make-believe education? What good would that do him? I guessed it would at least help him get to a make-believe university: the vast majority of the country’s postsecondary institutions also operated without state authorization.

  “Make-believe” seemed to describe a lot of Haitian infrastructure. The few stoplights in the city were ignored by drivers, who plowed right through the intersection when they flashed red. They were make-believe stoplights. Even so-called orphanages weren’t always what they claimed to be. Many kids had parents who simply couldn’t afford to pay for them. The parents would visit regularly, and the administration had no plans to offer these kids up for actual adoption; they just hoped to get funding from foreign aid groups to keep them there, like low-end boarding schools. They were make-believe orphanages.

  But the worst offender was the country’s make-believe currency: the Haitian dollar. Gourdes are the official national currency in Haiti. They come, like Canadian or American dollars, in coins and bills, most of which have drawings of past presidents or important revolutionaries on them. On my first trip to Haiti, I had stopped in a boutik to buy some water. The merchant told me the price in Haitian dollars, so I pulled out the gourdes I had in my pocket and carefully counted them out. The vendor looked at what I had laid out and flatly repeated the price. So I counted the money again and pushed it across the counter toward her. That’s when my translator jumped in and said, “Haitian dollars, not gourdes.” I dug through my pockets, looking for a different type of bill. I found only more gourdes, which, to my surprise, he picked through, adding more bills and coins to the growing pile on the counter. “That’s enough,” he said. He left me wondering why I had just paid five times the listed price.

  It turns out that the Haitian gourde was pegged to the American dollar back in 1912 at a rate of five gourdes to one greenback. That ended in 1989, when the gourde began to float. Still, on the street and even in stores, people referred to five gourdes as a “dola ayisyen”—a Haitian dollar—and often quoted their prices in it. It made absolutely no sense that a whole nation would trade in an imaginary currency, requiring mathematical gymnastics, when it could simply do what most of the world does and trade in the physical currency their national bank printed. But there it was: a make-believe currency.

  The more I learned about Haiti, the less I understood. But one thing became increasingly clear: the terrible state of the country’s education system before the earthquake was not an exception to the norm. It was the norm.

  “If we just think this is about the earthquake, that is dead wrong. The earthquake was a natural disaster on a structural disaster,” Nigel Fisher told me over dinner at a restaurant one night in July. Since our brief in the desert camp of Corail-Cesselesse, he’d agreed to squeeze me into the ends of his hectic days.

  “There is no reconstruction, rebuilding, or re-anything, because what they had before was no good,” he said.

  Nigel had spent the last forty years in many of the world’s most miserable and frightening places: Biafra, Yemen, Afghanistan. Yet he was one of the most upbeat people I’d ever met. Haiti, however, was proving his hardest assignment to date.

  With so many things broken, where did you start? There was little trust between the foreign donors, who controlled two-thirds of the country’s annual budget, and the government. There were so many NGOs working in the country, no one knew an exact number or
what many of the small ones were doing.

  When I’d first spoken with Nigel a couple of months before, he’d estimated it would take ten years to soundly rebuild the country. Already he was pushing out that time line.

  • • •

  By now, the project’s savings account was up to almost C$17,000, and the checks kept arriving, many of them with letters asking that I put the money toward a new child’s education. I had paid for all the kids in Lovely’s family to go to school. Now I had to start enrolling other children, but where? I certainly didn’t want to put them into make-believe schools. How could I be sure which ones were real, offering safe, quality education at rates that poor families could afford?

  I took it upon myself to draft some rules of engagement. Any school I picked had to be registered with the Ministry of Education and Vocational Training and follow its curriculum. The teachers had to be qualified. And the school had to serve students who were poor before the earthquake; the student body didn’t need to be entirely poor, but the school at least had to offer them tuition through its own scholarship program. I wanted to help the country’s neediest, like Lovely. But I also wanted to avoid the mistake I’d already made there by enrolling a poor child in a middle-class school. Keeping up with the Joneses was putting unnecessary stress on Lovely’s family, and I feared it was more likely to lead to her dropping out in the long run.

  Ideally, the school would be run by someone like Rea Dol, a community activist with a passion for social justice through education, rather than an entrepreneur who ran the school as a profit-making enterprise. But that, it turned out, was not common.

  I decided to also fund some college tuitions. Aid groups traditionally focus on early education, and that was certainly the case in Haiti. But if the country wanted to rebuild and become truly independent, then it would need educated workers with professional skills to do it.

  Finally, I decided that I wouldn’t choose any more students myself but give that job to the school principals instead. My worry quota was already full with Lovely and her family. I didn’t want to personally take on the problems of dozens of other students; I couldn’t spare the time or the emotional roller coaster of it. After breaking the cardinal rule that kept journalists apart from the subjects they reported on, I needed to erect some kind of wall of my own.

  My new fixer, Dimitri, became my gauge of which schools I supported and which I did not. Jean had arrived one day with Dimitri and surprised me by announcing he was his replacement in the job. The swap had turned out to work in my favor. Fixers are what foreign correspondents call their local contractors; the ones who help you “fix” things. In theory, they are supposed to be a journalist’s dream tour guide, offering not just literal translations but also cultural ones, historical and political context, and contacts. Up until then, I’d hired whomever could provide the basics—literal translation and a means of getting around. Dimitri was the first who offered more.

  Dimitri was tall and muscular and dressed like a typical hipster, in jeans, a T-shirt, and aviator sunglasses. By training, he was an accountant. The goudougoudou had destroyed the retail business where he’d worked as an account supervisor, so now he made a living in his green Nissan Patrol, just looking for a day’s wage. He was waiting for his American visa to come through; his wife had moved to New Jersey and he was hoping to join her there.

  It turned out he had a knack for the fixer’s job. He read the local papers and listened to the radio, so he could always brief me on what was happening in the country. He had graduated from one of the country’s good universities, so he had friends who worked as doctors, lawyers, and salesmen whom we called for input. He had traveled to the United States, too, so he understood what things were distinctly Haitian and could offer some cultural translation. During interviews with principals, I would often glance at him for his ruling on the school. A nod was a green light; a slight head shake meant “Let’s get out of here.”

  I brought Dimitri with me to visit one of the colleges that I thought showed promise. We entered the courtyard of a private home that had been transformed into classrooms. Inside, we found students in white coats standing at tall, freshly made plywood desks and looking through microscopes. The patio was jammed with school equipment, and the administration staff sat at computers by the entrance to register students.

  The college director greeted me in her dark living room. Her name was Gilberte Salomon. She was small, with milky eyes, short, curly gray hair she hid under a straw hat, and a gap between her front two teeth that flashed when she smiled. Her right hand curled at the wrist, the effect of a stroke she’d suffered a few years earlier.

  Despite her handicap, she was still teaching. The afternoon of the earthquake, she was up on the top floor of her downtown nursing college helping a student who had stayed behind after class. The ceiling split like a halved watermelon: one side of the building fell one way and the other fell the other. She looked up and saw the blue sky.

  “I said good-bye to the earth and thanks to God,” she said. “But not even a little rock fell on me.”

  The fact that Bondye had spared her life after he had taken so many of her students and compatriots—well, she figured it was a sign.

  “My mission is not over yet,” she said, the gap appearing between her teeth.

  Gilberte’s mission was very similar to Rea Dol’s: she wanted to alleviate the poverty she saw around her in both professional and personal ways. Her home was full of orphaned children, two of whom she’d adopted as babies, raising them together with a third biological son as a single mother.

  Professionally, Gilberte had been trained as both a teacher and a lab worker. Her college, called Institut Louis Pasteur, had evolved from its origins as a collective of lab technicians. Over the years it had expanded to include pharmacy assistants and a nursing program, which became its largest. Seven years earlier Gilberte had used the profits from her college to open a Montessori school for the poor children in her neighborhood, charging parents a nominal C$64 for tuition. She named it Mutuelle Scolaire Pa Nou, which meant “education for all of us mutually.” It became Muspan for short.

  I had come with a plan to sponsor some of her nursing students. But she wanted me to take a look at Muspan.

  From the street outside the children’s school, I could make out the cartoon characters of Donald and Daffy Duck painted on the wall. Above them, a set of concrete stairs shot up into the air like a leaning chimney, leading nowhere. The concrete roof had collapsed on one side, smothering the classroom below it. On the other, it looked like a sagging pancake held up by a thin central wall. I delicately picked my way up the stairs, around smashed chunks of concrete, to the second floor. There I found classrooms that seemed like museum displays about the earthquake. They were frozen in time. Dust had settled on the long wooden desks and benches, which still sat at attention in rows. Notes were scattered on the floors. The date was written at the tops of the cracked green chalkboards at the front of the room: 12 Janvier 2010.

  Thankfully, when the earthquake struck, the school day had ended, and Muspan didn’t offer evening classes. No broken bodies had been pulled from here. Still, it felt like a mausoleum.

  Gilberte was now running the children’s school under blue and gray tarps, among the tents clogging a nearby soccer field. Peeking inside, I found kids in their green school uniforms hard at work at desks set on the dirt. They were solving problems on chalkboards and copying notes into their books. In the small kindergarten class, a teacher looked up from a pile of tests she was marking and greeted me warmly. In immaculate French, she explained that she had been trained at the École Normale Supérieure, the state university’s teachers’ training faculty.

  I looked over at Dimitri, who nodded. Green light. The tour did exactly what Gilberte had clearly intended. Right then, I committed to pay the tuition for ten students, but later I upped that to thirty—enough to cover Gilberte’s outstanding bills for the year. On top of that, I’d cover the tuition
of four nursing students.

  It seemed like an even better program than the one Ryan Sawatzky had devised supporting SOPUDEP, because in this case there was a clear end date. If I could help Gilberte get her college up and running again, she’d be able to fund her elementary school as she had before. She would no longer need me.

  I recognized that might take some time, though. Gilberte had no money to rebuild her college, and the engineers she’d hired to examine Muspan’s remains had told her it would cost tens of thousands of dollars to rebuild. She wrote many letters to aid groups, asking for help, but so far she’d received no answer. She also applied to the Ministry of Education and Vocational Training, to enroll in the government’s program to help principals cover at least some of their costs. She’d heard nothing back from them, either.

  In fact, the government had no plan for private universities. And for private primary schools they’d decided to impose standards by sponsoring students. It was essentially bribery: principals who could prove they followed the national curriculum and who agreed to send their teachers to government courses would qualify for financial support, forgoing the nightmare of chasing after parents to pay. Instead, the government would foot the bill. It seemed brilliant to me. But Gilberte didn’t think anything would come from it.

  “If it happens, it will be a miracle,” she said flatly. “I’m used to my country. I don’t have faith. Haiti really needs to remake itself. But I’m very pessimistic.”

  Gilberte picked the recipients for scholarships at both of her schools. For primary kids, her criterion was poverty. For the college, she chose four students who had been badly injured in the earthquake.