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Abner Sauveur has been Co-director of the Matènwa
Community Learning Center since it was founded in 1995. He is 49 years
old and has been a teacher all of his adult life.
Abner is a truth-seeker and he acts on what he discovers.
He has always believed that schools should be places where students
learn how to improve their lives and serve their community. Haitian
education, characterized by sing-song group repetition in French,
along with corporal punishment as basic discipline have never been
that way. He sees the Matènwa school as one example of the
way a community with few resources can discover ways to pull themselves
up by their bootstraps.
He told me that he has never taught a school class that didn't
also have a garden. "You can always find a tiny piece of dirt
to plant something in," he says, "and if you are careful,
you will find that you can water it with water you would otherwise
throw away."
A dozen years ago, a volunteer who stayed a few years in the community
built a tiny two-room house on Abner's property. Abner has reserved
that house for visitors and that is where I stay when I visit Matènwa.
So in many ways I am a member of Abner's extended family.
In the four years that I have been visiting Matènwa, Abner
and I have agreed that my travels wouldn't really constitute an
"exchange" until my visits have been reciprocated and
I have an opportunity to share my community, my customs, and my
language.
Like Afelene, Abner is interested in agriculture and reforestation,
so he will be visiting and working at farms and vegetable gardens.
He's looking for conversation opportunities and ways to improve
his English. Maybe you or someone you know would like to spend a
little time with him.
Abner is also available to speak to groups interested in his work,
his experience, and his ideas about third-world development.
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I met Afelene in 2003 when she was relatively new at
the Matènwa Community Learning Center. She taught preschool
and was active in the Women's Group Famn Kouraj. My language skills
weren't all that great, and our worlds were so very far apart, but
we shared a mutual enthusiasm about becoming friends somehow.
She's a musician, a songwriter, and she wanted to learn to read
music and play the school's little electric keyboard, so we worked
together on that a little bit.
We lost touch when she went to Port au Prince for extended Montessouri
training, and I didn't really spend a lot of time with her until
last year. In the intervening three years, it seemed to me she had
changed from an enthusiastic and dedicated teacher to an energetic
unstoppable force with an I-can-do-anything attitude.
When I shared that observation with her, she agreed.
"At the beginning, I was here and knew this was where I wanted
to be a teacher. I love working with preschool children. At the
same time, though, with Famn Kouraj we were going out into the community
and telling people that women and children have rights and deserve
respect, while there I was living with a man who didn't respect
me. I was so enthused about my work, but we would just have fights
when I spent extra time on school activities. He would accuse me
of having affairs with other men. Sometimes he hit me.
"In the process of sorting all that out--realizing that with
my job I could rent a house for myself and my two children, take
care of myself--well, I just realized how capable I am. I have so
much energy. There's all this important work to do, and I can do
it."
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When I visited in March of 2006, she was all caught up in the question
of restavèk. The word translates literally as "stay-with"
and refers to the common practice of a family giving up a child
that they cannot afford to care for. That child then goes and "stays
with" another family, often a relative, who is a little bit
better off. However, due to the desperate conditions in everywhere
in Haiti, these children are seldom nurtured and often become virtual
slaves--abused, forced to work exhausting hours, and denied an education.
Along with other members of Fanm Kouraj, Afelene organized the
first-ever "Children's Festival"
in Matènwa. The idea was to raise people's awareness
of the rights of all children by getting as many kids as possible
together to have a good time. There were food and games. Afelene
led an open-mike talent show where kids came forward from the audience
to sing and tell jokes or stories. The children looked at and discussed
pictures of family life. The Fanm Kouraj sang and performed a play
about restavèk.
The Fanm Kouraj were trying to get a handle on how widespread the
problem is in the area-how many children needed help and which ones
they were. When you converse with someone for the first time, it's
natural to inquire about who their parents and brothers and sisters
are, Afelene explained. "I'm a teacher. It's part of my role
to talk to all of the kids. You say, 'Hey, now that we're getting
to be friends, I'd like to meet your mother.' It starts to break
the silence surrounding the restavèk issues. Sometimes
the child doesn't have a mother, or the mother lives far away and
the child is here with a relative."
If the child is not being fed, Fanm Kouraj try to find some extra
meals for him or her. Sometimes they dip into their pockets to buy
a child school supplies or a new pair of shoes. I sat in on a Fanm
Kouraj meeting about how to set priorities and focus their limited
resources. The discussion grappled with the issues of an entire
social service system.
Like all of the teachers at the Matènwa school, Afelene
worked long and hard to get the community garden established. She
planted a garden at her house for the first time this year, and
joined a women's gardening
group that had just completed its first tentative season. Typical
of her energized style, she told me "Hey, I'm joining that
gardening group. They need me. I'm strong. I don't like to sit around.
I have experience gardening already at the school. Plus, I have
a house and I want to make a garden there, too. If they need anything
from the school I can get it for them. When's their next work day?
I'll be there."
Reforestation, environmental stabilization, and ecosystem recovery
go hand in hand with gardening in Haiti. Citizens of LaGonave don't
debate like we do about whether deforestation and environmental
collapse could occur with extraction at present rates. The gig is
up in Haiti. The environment has collapsed and, especially in the
countryside, the interest is in restoring it.
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