FORMAL AND CIVIC EDUCATION FOR YOUTHS OF 10 TO 17 YEARS OF AGE IN THE COMMUNE OF ABRICOTS, GRAND'ANSE, HAITI

In 1975 my husband and I moved from Canada to Abricots, a small fishing village in Haiti of 1000 at the center of a county of at least 40,000 inhabitants. We established a small primary school aimed at the poorest children of an impoverished region. This school is completely free and provides books, school supplies and even uniforms to its students who would otherwise never have been educated. The school has grown from year to year and now counts 500 students, craft and woodworking shops, library, vegetable garden, reforestation section, etc.

In addition as work is scarce we have organized a variety of craft businesses which employ 400 workers, mostly former students. We are also working on a bee-raising project. Our products are mainly sold in Port-au-Prince tourist shops with a little export. From these activities has sprung a credit union modeled on the GRAMIN bank. This credit union with 500 members works very well and has consistently shown a profit due to the dynamic management of its guiding committee. We are currently finishing the implementation of an irrigation system in one the commune's plains and hope it will serve as a pilot project. It will be the region's first irrigation work.

Over the years we have been helped by USAID, UNICEF, COHAN, BND, Texaco, Catholic Relief Services, the Canadian Embassy, the German Embassy, La Fondation Partage du Canada, FAES, Guerra Contra El Hambre and numerous friends and relatives.

We trust that the above will serve to introduce us. However we wish to solicit your interest in another activity.

Back in 1991 we conceived and presented a project aimed at the formal and civic education of the youths of the Abricots Commune who live in the mountains, hours walk from the village. The latest statistics show that 65% of Haiti's population is less than 15 years of age. The commune counts at least 40,000 inhabitants. There were at the time only 8 primary schools and 7 small presbyterial schools concentrated in the communes two villages. As a result many children did not go to school at all for lack of means or because the distances were too great. Paradoxically years later, sporadic efforts are made to help them through Adult Literacy campaigns.

We planned to open ten small schools in ten different localities scattered through the commune. A corrugated iron roof on wooden poles and framing supplied by the parents, erected on land donated by the community; each school would have
but three classes, a first, a second and a third year with a strong emphasis on civic education, manual crafts, hygiene, agriculture and reforestation. Our primary goal was to give 150 youths per center those basic academic skills together with some essential notions necessary to help them become productive citizens in their own communities.

This idea lay dormant through the politically turbulent years until 1996 when the Sogebank Foundation ( Haitian ) decided to fund our project for its initial two years. We went to work.

In august of 1996, we hired thirty monitors from among the candidates presented by each of the ten localities. With the help of FONHEP (teacher training) personnel we held some pedagogical training sessions. In early October 96 we opened two first year classes in each of the centers for a total enrolment of 500 pupils, in October 1997 we held first and second year classes for approximately 1000 pupils.

Several weekend training sessions held throughout the school year, were augmented in September 1997 with a two week teacher seminar before the ten schools opened once again on October 6, as per the national school calendar. A third grade class was added in October 1998 after a new pedagogical seminar held in September as usual.

The "Education Sin Fronteras" of Barcelona came to our help and proposed the financial backing to build two classrooms with real walls, tables and benches. This had the great advantage of isolating the student from the usual distractions caused by adults and kids passing by, etc… and these are numerous. Since the students and their parents were asked to carry sand, gravel and building material from the village to the site of the schools, the completion of the ten constructions took an unusually long time. The ten schools are complete now with two furnished classrooms with cement walls and one classroom still held under a straw roof with no walls. In foresight we did not finish the tin roof as it should have been as we were hoping to add a real third classroom one of these days. We now have approximately 1400 students.

We have just been advised by La Fondation Haiti Partage of Montreal which already helps to a great degree our main school close to the village Abricots, that they are now willing and able to build a small stockroom for the canteen food for a two month supply, and to add our much desired third classroom with walls of cement blocks.

Our objective is to cover a four-year academic program with manual skills courses, vegetable growing and reforestation activities during a time period of three years. As the students are older, this should not be too difficult to attain, once the cons-truction projects are carried out and completed.

In fact these ten schools, each with two classes now and a third-grade class under a straw roof, operate as if one large school had its thirty classes scattered over the landscape. The supervisor acts as a school principal. I assist with the teacher training sessions and visit each school at least once a term. The facilities of our home school in Abricots provide a common center for school supplies, reference, training locale, pay and management. You will find in annex a map of the Abricots county showing the various sites of the schools and how they are scattered over the county.

The supervisor is an essential component of this project. He visits each of the schools once every two weeks, varying his itinerary so as to be unpredictable; he often leaves his home at five in the morning so as to reach his school of the day by eight. Each week, as I review his report book I have the impression of having my finger on the pulse of the school and can sense the beating of its heart. This year, in September 2000, we have hired an assistant to the supervisor to allow for closer scrutiny and to enforce punctuality both from the teachers and the students. Both supervisor work in close cooperation and plan their visits so as not meet in the same school.

We have been extremely lucky in obtaining from the Catholic Relief Services a school canteen which allows us to serve one nutritionally balanced hot meal to each student every day. This is quite a miracle as the rules and regulations of the Catholic relief Services forbid the obtention of a school canteen when the school cannot be reached by their inspectors' vehicles. None of our ten schools can be reached neither by car or by a motorcycle. Yet we were privileged in obtaining the food for our ten schools.

We have deliberately held expenses to a minimum and this for two excellent reasons. Yes, money, especially money for operating budgets is scarce and should be spent carefully; but much more importantly we believe that each community must shoulder its own responsibilities. The government of Haiti currently has difficulty in paying the bills for the education of 20% of the children. 100% of the total government budget would scarcely serve, following the current ministry of education pattern, to pay for the education of all Haiti's children, All this to say that, in the foreseeable future, rural communities must see to their own educational salvation. We believe that, once the schools have taken root, each locality will be able to take on the paying of the very frugal salaries we currently pay the teachers. In this vein, rather than granting the monitors a pay increase, we permitted them, as of this year, under supervision, to collect three gourdes (US $0.20) per month from the parents of each pupil.

As it is now, school has started this year on the 4th of September, as per the national calendar. The Education Ministry has added the month of September to the school calendar. This decision is very welcome, especially in schools such as ours where the activities, academic and otherwise, are many. We plan to obtain even better results for our July 2001 evaluation.

~Michaelle de Verteuil