By Jean H Charles
Jean Hervé Charles LLB, MSW, JD, former Vice-Dean of Students at City
College of the City University of New York, is now responsible for
policy and public relations for the political platform in power in
Haiti, Répons Peyisan. He can be reached at: jeanhcharles@aol
The Republic of Haiti has set itself to become an emerging nation by
2030. This will not happen by that time unless it takes steps now to
deal with these three most important issues.
1. The complete degradation of its ecology;
2. The intergenerational and endemic misery of the majority of its population; and
3. The lack of sense of civism and the sense of appurtenance linking one citizen to another in a shared heritage.
Starting with the latest issue, the lack of the sense of civism and
appurtenance, it is the gangrene that is ravaging the world today. The
United States has just spent more than a trillion dollars to pacify and
reconstruct Iraq after Saddam Hussein in the last ten years, but because
not enough policy thinking and funding was earmarked for the issue of
nation building, meaning injecting the sense of civism and appurtenance
within the different sectors of the Iraqi population, the Shiite and the
Sunnis, the situation is almost as explosive as ante.
The successful nations of this world have no other magic formula. Before
implementing any institution or infrastructure building they have given
themselves the task of infusing the sense of civism amongst the
different ethnic or geographic groups of their nation. Failure to do so,
each citizen will try to take its own brick from the national edifice
preventing any incremental unified construction. I am afraid it is the
story of Brazil in spite of the buzz that Brazil is now an emerging
nation.
Haiti, in spite of its original role of pioneering nation-state, has
enjoyed very few years of nation building experience. Its founder Jean
Jacques Dessalines was assassinated two years after independence, as he
was enforcing the doctrine that the state patrimony must be shared by
all. Henry Christophe tried the same formula as King Henry in the
northern part of the country, but fifteen years later, the whole edifice
crumbled as the laissez faire doctrine of Alexander Pétion took hold
nationally and survived until today.
The different economic and social initiatives have all failed because
they are not cooked with the oil of the sense of appurtenance. The
benefits of social engineering have remained, as the Haitians have
baptized with their natural wit, á l’oral, meaning without the expected
outcome. The doctrine of the sense of appurtenance according to the
Renan dictum, the bible of the concept of nation building, is the first
ingredient to institute a nation state for any government that has the
ambition to do so.
It is the belief and the practice that all the citizens, whatever the
confines of their geographic location or the shade of their color or the
status of their parents, will receive the same appropriate services of
sane institutions and adequate infrastructure. The child of the city as
well as the child of the countryside can aspire and can achieve his
greatest dream if he appropriates enough diligence and enough
creativity.
This is not the story of Haiti. Cumulative governments have accepted
that 90 percent of the population lives marginalized, either in the
country side without schools, health care and roads and economic
incubation, or live in the slums of the city with the same indifference
to the basic needs of that segment of the population. Different
international organizations with social intervention in Haiti have
either mimicked the culture of the government or have engaged in make
believe initiatives that have compounded the problem. Canaan, one of the
largest slums in Haiti if not of the Caribbean, has been built with
design, concept and funding from Food for the Poor.
To conclude this topic, the Haitian government must take steps to
incorporate the education of civism in the curriculum of the grammar
schools, the sense of ethics in the secondary schools and at the
university. Through affirmative action, it must make sure that those who
have been discriminated against for the past two centuries receive
their share in the patrimony. This must be done with the consent and the
assent of the elite as a natural obligation that each brother owes to
his brethren.
Once this step is taken, it will be easier to attack the second issue,
which is the intergenerational misery of the majority of the population.
The spectacle is the same whether in the capital, in the small towns or
in the countryside, hordes of men and women are idle or engage in
makeshift commerce where the return is so small that it is a
psychological endeavour to continue the business of staying alive. The
grandmother the mother and the child all inhabit the same hut with no
prospect of a better tomorrow. The grandmother, who barely knows how to
read and write, the mother with only a grammar school education, and a
child in an underfunded school, ill nourished and doomed to quit school
before achieving the Baccalaureate (high school).
With such a large population with no formal education, it is difficult
to apprehend the policy that Haiti is open for business of the
government. Very few global businesses will entertain opening shop in
such an environment. There will be some, but they are so inimical to
good business practices that the population will regret that they were
let in in the first place. The Haitian government should instead
initiate a policy of Haiti seeking for business. Using the natural and
creative talents of the majority of its population, Haiti must
concentrate instead on value added products, using art as an addendum to
machine-made pieces.
Best Western hotel has just built its first major facility in Haiti.
According to the corporate executives, Haiti has added a touch of art to
each one of its rooms and each one of the walls of the Best Western
Haiti is one of a kind piece of jewelry, tooled and retooled by hundred
of artisans who were given a free hand to use their creative talents.
The Haitian government, to employ its masses of unemployed and
underemployed people, must incubate hundred of creative centers where
any modern flat screen TV can be transformed with carved mahogany frame
into a picture setting. The replicate of this model of art imitating
nature and nature imitating art will be extended to all home furniture
including the toilet cover. This is the forte where the Haitian people
are best. They will find themselves useful to themselves, useful to
society and useful to the world.
The Haitian government can also use its mass of agricultural workers to
produce organic and nostalgic fruits and vegetables for its Diaspora in
the United States, Canada and France. The free zone should serve as a
receiver for the packaging, and the dispatching of fresh produce to all
corners of the world, bringing back precious foreign exchange money into
the country. With a culture of export oriented nation, this
intergenerational misery will come to an end and progressively the
culture of wealth building will become part of the fabric of the
society.
The degradation of the ecology is a component of the misery of the
population. Unable to wait for the tree to grow it has taken into the
habit of eating the seeds. Haiti’s vegetation was once destroyed by the
rapacious colonial practice of cutting its entire forest of hardwood
trees, such as mahogany, cedar and chain for the construction of palaces
in Europe. But nature has been so generous to the country that the loss
was replenished with a vengeance, with the help of good soil and
abundant rain. The population to feed was only around 500,000 people at
that time.
It is now 10 million people. Charcoal made of carbonized wood in a pit
is the preferred ingredient used by the rich and the poor for cooking.
It would have been sustainable if the wood was only the discarded ones.
But, the peasants deprived of any other cash commodity are now
indiscriminately using avocado, mangoes and all type of fruit trees for
making coal for cooking.
Inundation, flood, and construction in a fragile environment have also
contributed to render Haiti a land so vulnerable that any constant rain
of one or two days will cause disaster of biblical consequences. It
follows if Haiti plans to enjoy the status of an emerging nation by 2030
it must first hold onto the land that it already has before the whole
structure goes into the sea. It will have nothing to enjoy as it seeks
to become an emerging nation.
The government has declared 2013 the Year of the Environment but so far
it has been as most programs introduced in Haiti, big propaganda with no
result and no outcome in the end. The minister of environment has
failed to engage the public in a massive conservation culture, where in
each home vegetable residue is put into a pit to produce organic manure.
The seeds of each eaten fruit are saved to be transformed into a
seedling for planting later.
Haiti has also failed to engage into the carbon exchange mode where it
will use its mountains to partner with the pension fund of say New York
or California State to invest into massive plantation of mahogany, cedar
and other precious wood. This investment will bring high returns to the
foreign retirees, to the nation and to the Haitian citizens while
facilitating the cooling of the atmosphere.
These are the steps to be undertaken to bring Haiti into the path of
progress and development. They represent the groundwork upon which
education, infrastructure, tourism and health can be tacked upon to
deliver a true emerging nation well before the targeted date of 2030.
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CROIX-DES-BOUQUETS, Haiti -- Teenagers in blue-and-white uniforms pour out of classrooms of this boarding school at the edge of Haiti's capital, chattering in their native language of Creole about the science test they have just taken.
"Eske ou te byen konpoze?" asks one boy in the campus courtyard. In English, it translates as "How do you think you did?" "I'm not so sure," a girl answers back in Creole with a shrug of her shoulders. "The exam was really difficult."
The students don't speak much French at the school, although it remains the primary language of instruction in most Haitian classrooms. In fact, less than 10 percent of the country's 10 million people speak French fluently, and in most schools, even the teachers don't understand it very well although they're asked to teach in it.
The private Louverture Cleary School has already broken from that linguistic tradition and is instead emphasizing the Haitian Creole children speak at home. The school is also introducing students to Spanish from other parts of the Caribbean and the English they will likely need in the future.
"It is a practical issue," said Deacon Patrick Moynihan about the Creole language-based curriculum at the boarding school. "It really is about being part of this region."
Elsewhere, students struggle using French text books and coping with what largely remains a foreign language in a country once colonized by France, but more and more under the sway of the powerful economies of the United States and Latin America.
In many schools, children copy French lessons by rote from the chalkboard, understanding little.
"I really have to work hard, because I don't speak French at home. My parents don't speak French at home," said 14-year-old Alexandra Julien, who attends another school, as she walked to class one recent morning. "They speak Creole."
Haiti's 1805 Constitution declared that tuition would be free and attendance compulsory for primary students. But the quality of education lagged through the years, and plunged during the 29-year-long dynasty of Francois "Papa Doc" Duvalier and his son Jean-Claude, or "Baby Doc," which ended in 1986. Haiti's professionals fled into exile to escape political repression, spawning a major brain drain the country has never bounced back from.
About 30 percent of the country's youth are now illiterate, according to the U.N.'s children agency, UNICEF, and only half of all children can afford to attend primary school. Less than a quarter attend secondary school.
In a 2011 report published in the journal "The Fletcher Forum of World Affairs," author Brendan McNulty wrote that 80 percent of Haiti's 16,500 or so primary schools are private, and they adhere to no academic standards. The article focused on rebuilding Haiti's education system after the quake.
Like the Louverture Cleary School, more organizations inside and outside the country are saying Haiti's educational crisis can be eased by educating the nation's children primarily in Creole, which all students and teachers truly understand, and bid adieu to French as Haiti's primary teaching language.
"We have lost, we have wasted, so many Einsteins because of the language barrier," said Michel DeGraff, a leading Creole scholar and Haiti-born linguistics professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. DeGraff led a four-day workshop in January to help Haitian teachers incorporate Creole into math and science curricula, challenging the notion that the language is not sophisticated enough for the hard sciences.
In a sign of growing interest in Creole's educational potential, the U.S. Agency for International Development last fall awarded a $12.9 million contract to the North Carolina nonprofit group, RTI International, to create a basic reading curriculum that includes the language.
The humanitarian group Concern Worldwide is also developing Creole course materials and training teachers in the language. Duke University recently held a Creole linguistics workshop for U.S. and Haitian scholars in Durham, North Carolina, that treats Haiti's native tongue as a subject worth serious academic study.
Haitian Creole, which grew out of a mix of 18th-century French and West African languages, is the nation's lingua franca, but it wasn't until 1961 that it joined French as one of the country's two official tongues.
President Michel Martelly and other government officials switch between Creole and French in public settings, depending on whether the audience is Haitian or foreign, and many speak English and Spanish fluently from years of living abroad. More English than French can be heard on the streets of the capital as Haitian teens increasingly listen to artists popular in the U.S. such as Rihanna, Justin Bieber and Lil Wayne.
But French remains the language of affluence and privilege, employed in polite society and government communiques and openly spoken in the upscale supermarkets selling brie and baguettes in the mountains high above the capital's shanties. Although used by Haitians of all social strata, Creole is seen by some as the language of the impoverished masses.
As a result, Haitian parents are often all too willing to let their children stumble in their coursework to "learn" a language that even their teachers barely speak. Children whose parents can afford tuition typically spend the first three years of primary school being taught in Creole, then move to French for the remaining years. Students often learn little, and few pass their national exams.
President Michel Martelly campaigned on promises to improve Haiti's school system, and the government says it has paid tuition at private and public schools for more than a million students though some believe the number may be lower.
Some education officials, however, are reluctant to let go of French-centered instruction.
The government has run workshops helping teachers better understand French, with some officials saying French instruction is necessary because few Creole textbooks exist.
"French remains a language that is very symbolic for Haitians," said Pierre Michel Laguerre, an Education Ministry consultant who oversees the school system's curriculum. "There is a history with that language. We have many of our authors who have won prestigious literary prizes in the Francophone world. We cannot leave French behind."
Creole advocates say that there's no shortage of Creole-language books and point to publishing houses such as Educa Vision, Inc. in Florida, which produce such materials. But they acknowledge that shipping the materials to Haiti is expensive and goods are often held up in customs.
The Louverture Cleary school, which was founded by St. Joseph Parish in Providence, Rhode Island, has a history of success in the classroom.
It serves smart children from families with modest means and says it has notched a 98 percent rate of students passing the national high school exam, compared to the countrywide average of 30 percent.
A challenge painted on a wall at the school appears not in the customary French but in Creole: "Nou pare poun rebate ayiti, e ou?" – "We're ready to rebuild Haiti, are you?"
Jeff Thomas says he is. The 18-year-old sees his new linguistic skills as more than a path to a career as a computer programmer.
"If we meet a foreigner ... in order to help him we should speak English to understand what he's saying," Thomas said in English, with a heavy accent.
Moynihan emphasizes that Louverture Cleary is only one possible model for the rest of Haiti's schools and that it follows Ministry of Education guidelines. Unlike most secondary schools, the children have already mastered written and spoken Creole, some of them in the school's morning day care program.
"What is beautiful about language at Louverture Cleary is that we know it's a bridge," Moynihan said. "It's a bridge for communicating."
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Associated Press reporter Evens Sanon and videographer Pierre-Richard Luxama contributed to this report.
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