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For tent cities of Haiti, school is now in session

Posted on | May 5, 2010 | 2,449 views | Comments Off

In the aftermath of Haiti’s devastating earthquake, Ohio State Mansfield professor Terri Teal Bucci is helping get communities back on their feet — and back in the classroom

By Julia Harris

The earthquake that devastated Port-au-Prince on Jan. 12 killed an estimated 230,000 people and destroyed 250,000 residences, leaving 1 million inhabitants homeless.

While the upheaval and chaos of the first weeks after the disaster have mostly subsided, the ripples of the displacement continue to be felt. Roughly eight miles to the northeast of the capital, in the village of Croix-des-Bouquets, thousands of refugees have taken up residence in sprawling tent cities.

There are the obvious issues of providing adequate food, water, sanitation and shelter — some of these tents are not much more than sheets strung over wood framing.

And then there are the not-so-obvious issues of schooling and caring for the hundreds of displaced and traumatized Haitian children.

There’s where Terri Bucci comes in.

The associate professor of mathematics and director of the Haiti Empowerment Project — a program designed to bring educational reform to Haiti’s schools — recently returned to Ohio from a week-long visit to Croix-des-Bouquets, where she worked with local leaders to begin the work of setting up an education system.

“There are three communities there; two of them have about 3,000 people each and one has about 1,000,” she said. “I’d say there are probably 800-1,000 primary school kids in each of the first two and in the third, probably 400.

“We met with the leadership groups of each of the communities and talked about their vision for the children in their city. Some talked about basics, like food and sanitation and things like that, but some of them talked about writing and providing activities for the kids and ways for them to relieve stress.”

Bucci and her two team members — Pam Sweeney, a teacher at Weinland Park Elementary School in Columbus, and Linda Stauffer, a consultant for the Ohio Department of Education — spent time in each community before bringing all the key players together for two days of creative problem-solving. One of the primary goals, Bucci said, was to get all the leaders and teachers used to the idea of working together and sharing their ideas.

“Using the word ‘share’ is kind of interesting, because here ‘sharing’ is about sharing resources, and these people don’t even have enough for themselves,” Bucci said. “We were talking about sharing ideas, sharing customs, so that by sharing experiences with each other, everybody wins. By the end of three days, they were really getting it.”

The reality, of course, is that these three tent communities actually don’t have a lot of the resources we typically think of as necessary when it comes to conducting school. There are so many issues to think about, issues of having enough space and shade and even finding teachers to teach when there is no money with which to pay them.

So Bucci and her colleagues taught the participants how to teach with no materials at all.

“You don’t have to have books and paper and pencils to be able to teach mathematics, science, language arts and stories,” she said. “You can do it with what’s outside, with sticks and seed pods.”

Or leaves, as Sweeney demonstrated. “When we talked about science, we talked about how they could gather five different leaves in their hands and compare the size and shape,” she said.

The team had also brought down some American-style games and equipment, including a deck of cards, an Uno game, a soccer ball and a football.

Bucci had the privilege of leading the participants through their very first game of American touch football. “It was so much fun, and something they could do with their kids, because one thing everyone talked about was wanting to relieve stress for their kids,” she said.

The team also brought down a set of children’s storybooks written in Haitian Creole, the native language of Haiti. Many of the group participants had likely never seen a children’s literature book, Bucci said, considering that most families only have a Bible by way of written material in their homes.

“The people are very spiritual,” noted Sweeney, who first went to Haiti with Bucci back in October. “That really spoke to me. They’re so resilient and thankful for whatever they have, and it is so rewarding to see them start to sustain their vision and goals. I can’t wait to go back down and help them expand that vision even further and give them more to work on.”

She’ll have her chance later this month, Bucci says, since they’re planning to return to Haiti the last weekend in May. She hopes to be working on a new literacy program for Haiti that would put small, inexpensive children’s books called KEEP books into the hands of schoolchildren across the country.

“These books have a documented ability to teach people to read,” she said. “And in Haiti, where typically only one or two children are sent to school per family, these books could have a huge impact. One child could take them home and use them to teach the other siblings, parents, grandparents, whoever is living in the home.”

How to help

Donations to the Haiti Empowerment Project will go directly to support work with tent cities in the development of community-run education and in the area of teacher education in Haiti. They can be made online by going to giveto.osu.edu and searching for Haiti Empower Project Fund.

Or you can mail contributions to:

The Haiti Empowerment Project
The Ohio State University at Mansfield
c/o Carol Freytag, fiscal agent
1760 University Drive
Mansfield, Ohio 44906

Visit the Haiti Empowerment Project website at:  mansfield.osu.edu/Empowerment/index.html

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