haitian school days

It's 7:20 in the morning, but from the looks of the traffic, you would guess it to be about 5 o'clock in the evening. The chaos only builds as the car gets closer and closer to town-- motorcycles weaving in and out of traffic, horns honking, children running, people walking. "And this is really good traffic," she tells me. The car pulls up to a two-story building, identical to the cement buildings surrounding it in this packed-tight city. I get out of the car, stepping careful to avoid the dark gray muck that fills the trench barely an inch from my sandaled-feet.

We open the iron gate, surrounded by white and red uniforms and hair bows and black school shoes and crying babies. "Bonjour! Bonjour!" One of the few words of Haitian-Creole I know... Good morning. I follow her through the small school. "We don't have power," she says, "So the downstairs classrooms are dark. But our teachers do a great job." There's the baby classroom, where big round tears roll down the 3-year-old's cheeks. There's the table and the chairs for the first graders, the wooden benches in the 2nd grade classroom, the sunlight streaming through the back window. The downstairs floor of this schoolhouse about the size of my living room and dining room back home.

Outside in the front again, I blink back the bright sunlight. Children are filing in, and we sing the national anthem as the flag raises. Footsteps pound and backpacks shuffle and babies cry as the children make their way to their classrooms. We go upstairs, the staircase on the outside of the building, stepping up the cement steps and gripping the iron railings as the street grows small beneath us. The school doubles as a church, and upstairs benches are scattered; half to one end of the room, half to the other. She dusts off the green chalkboard, dust flying everywhere. "Bonjour!" She speaks in a rush of words I can't understand, my desire to learn this language increasing with each word she speaks. This 4th grade class of 10 children pull out their notebooks with yesterday's homework. She's here to teach English, and today we're working on colors. Blue and green and orange and pink crayons roll across the benches; we match the right colors with the right words. Memorize, memorize, memorize.

Downstairs she leaves me with a room of second graders. I hold up a pencil, staring at a classroom of kids. "English?" I ask. Children giggle. "English?" I ask again. Finally the boy in the front row pipes up, "Penciiiil." he says. I smile, relieved. "Piiin." she says, when I told up a pen. We smile. I hold up a ruler to a room of blank stares. "Ruler." I say. "Ruler." they repeat. We start again, with the pencil. Teacher Jane comes back to work on words... a, at, and, an, am. The room splits into two lines, I point to the words, they read them back. He looks at my finger on the chalkboard, and then looks at me. "At," his little friend whispers from behind. I shake my head, trying not to smile. He smiles proudly as he says, "At,"

Upstairs again the 3rd graders are practicing for Monday's exam. A, at, and an, am, you, girl, boy, me the words are on the chalkboard. We practice writing them, we practice spelling them. We practice simple commands. "All boys stand up." "All girls sit down." "Raise your hand." "Open your book." The children laugh when a boy stands up at the wrong time. "Are you a boy?" Teacher Jane asks, "You fi?" laughter erupts in the schoolroom. By the end of the morning, I have learned to say, "Mwen rele Anna," Creole for: my name is Anna. And "Sheetah!" or: sit down.

The morning runs late, the lunch bell is going to ring soon. "Finish finish!" she says. The children are writing thank you cards to a church in the States who sent school supplies for the new year... notebooks, binders, pencils, crayons, rulers, pens. The church is raising money to provide electricity for the school next. Papers are collected and crayons picked up off the floor. We pack our things. "Thank you!" the children call and wave. The lunch bell rings and the children unpack their lunches as we walk down the steps, the whizzing of the motorcycles and the noise of the traffic and voices of the people rush around us.

Across the street a man cooks hot dogs, down the road the buildings turn to scrap metal. Children laugh, women hang the wash, men walk down the street. The car bumps down the road filled with more potholes than road, or so it seems at times. I look out the window, taking in the sights around me. Welcome to Haiti.