Haiti, six years later

The coordinating committee celebrates philippine.

Boxes for the votes.

The children head up to the choukoun

Fresnel helps Judy negotiate course.

Timoun Tèt Ansanm children in choukoun dance.

Our mission as Religious of the Sacred Heart in Haiti began in the year 2000 as a celebration of the two hundredth anniversary of our congregation.  We believed that a foundation in the poorest country in the Western Hemisphere would bring joy to the heart of St. Madeleine Sophie, our foundress.  The years since then have been full of surprises and discoveries for us, as we have entered little by little into the reality of the Haitian people and their culture.  They have been years of great personal growth for each of us too, as we have learned to appreciate and reverence our very different gifts and temperaments, each of which has helped us to put together our present life and ministry.

We began in a little house on the other side of town, amid friendly people who helped us learn such essentials of life as how to go to the market, what to wear to funerals, and how to cook traditional dishes, as well as stories about lougarou, zombies, and the workings of voudou.  Little by little we began inviting into our house the children who passed by several times a day with buckets on their heads on their way to or from getting water. From these beginnings, our program, Timoun Tèt Ansanm, developed.  Literally, this means “Children Heads Together” – or Children United.

Two years later, we moved to the larger, more solidly built house where we are now. The parish let us use some land to build a center for Timoun Tèt Ansanm. We have two large underground resevoirs which should give us water well into the dry season, except when someone leaves the water running!  We have a big choukoun in the middle, a kitchen, storeroom, and a room for the watchman.  We have latrines, showers, and down by the lower wall, pens for chickens and a pig.  We’ve planted hundreds of trees which should give fruit, shade, insecticide, and remedies for various illnesses.  Come and see it!

We made some major changes in the program for Timoun Tèt Ansanm last year, making it more organized and with clearer educational objectives.  About 120 kids between the ages of seven and twelve are coming every week, getting a good meal and learning very basic things that children need to know if they are to do well in school, or in anything else.  Through games, songs and dances, they learn their numbers, days of the week, colors, parts of the body, and how their various senses help them to communicate with others.  They are pretty basic pre-school kinds of things, but it's amazing what even the older children don't know!  Attendance is close to 100%, which says that it meets a need and they like it.

The monitors who are responsible for the children’s program meet every Friday for a trial run of the songs, games and explanations that we’ll use the next week.  Everyone a chance to ask questions and make suggestions, and this builds a great esprit de corps. 

The aides form another part of Timoun Tet Ansanm.  They are teen-agers who have 'graduated' from the children's program, but want to remain part of it.  They have to meet certain criteria or they can be asked to leave.  These kids not only help with certain aspects of the work we do; they also receive formation specific to them. The aides learn things that kids that age need and want to know:  about relationships, sexuality & sexually transmitted diseases, and also things like how to set up a small business and all that is part of that.  They are now putting together budgets, figuring out what materials they will need, how they will market their products, where they will sell them and how much they need to charge to make a profit. There are three groups, and they’ll be selling soft drinks, seedlings they have grown in their little nursery, and cookies made in the solar ovens.

It moves my heart with wonder and gratitude to see the older aides.  When we started five years ago, several of them were completely undisciplined, and couldn’t sit near anyone else for more than a minute without pinching them, kicking them, making an unkind remark, grabbing the paper they were drawing on…. You get the idea!  Now, one of these, Dieuquifait, tall and thin (of course), with a captivating smile, has, as he puts it, decided not to be a vagabond any longer.  (That word is used here to describe a child who has been neglected, is usually dirty and hungry, and can be expected to lie, steal, and generally cause problems wherever he or she is.  That is how they survive.)   He’d said that before, but never with the kind of behavior changes that he started making last year.  I’m really proud of him!

The other day he and I sat behind our house and he shared his musings about life and the importance of being responsible and thinking about other people besides oneself. “That is the trouble with this country,” he said. “If I become president, I will do things differently.  I will take care of everyone. Everyone will have enough to eat. If I become mayor of Verrettes, I will make sure that everyone has water and electricity.  The people in Savanne Bourg have no water.  They have to walk a long way every day to get water.  That isn’t good.”  You can tell that elections were right around the corner, but also that he was thinking about life, and about death.  He says he will live a long time because he has no parents, so God has to take care of him.  Dieuquifait and the others are one of the rewards of life here.

A third part of our program is formation for our monitors.   One Saturday each month, we invite an expert in a particular area to talk to the group, helping them to understand the importance of what they are doing within the context of Haiti’s educational system, Haitian history and its culture.  Our theme this year is communication. 

We’ve given the program a name:  Sant Fòmasyon Pedagojik Sakre Kè Jezi a – or, Sacred Heart Center for Teacher Formation, and have invited the teachers in the Verrettes schools to join our monitors for it.  Many of them, especially in the primary schools, have only a secondary education, and no training as teachers.  Classes are supposed to be in French, but they never learned it well (because their teachers never learned it well), and now their students are at risk too. Linda and Sylvain, God bless them, have added French classes to their schedule to help the teachers who have signed up for the program.

 Mécène, Fresnel and Judy Vollbrecht are working on this program.  We brought flyers to all of the schools, but only a few teachers came.  So we had a meeting with the directors of the schools to explain how our program began, what we’re doing and why.   One of them came to the last session, and was impressed.  He had pictured a classroom with rows of chairs and a teacher in front, not people sitting around in a circle in the choukoun, breaking into small groups for animated discussions on questions about solving problems of communication between teachers and students, husbands and wives, parents and children.  If the directors of the schools get involved, there’s no telling where it might go.  All of this takes time and a lot of long meetings, but it’s exciting, and gives people positive things to do and dream about!

Judy Vollbrecht rscj and the community of Verrettes, Haiti