Being the social scientist that I am, I am fascinated and always amazed at the environments the kids in my student learn in. Like most developing countries – there are the standard crowding, lighting and circulation issues, but each school has these issues in so many different ways. To illustrate, I’ll compare our two mamba schools; Henri Christophe (HC) and Oasis.
First, what these schools have in common. Every student in every school wears a uniform. Each school in Cap-Haitien has a different one in order to tell which kid goes where. The uniforms for HC are blue checked shirts with blue pants. Oasis has orange pants and beige shirts. The school day starts at 8 am and goes until 12 pm. There is one recess. Subjects taught include geography, science, math, French, Creole and history. Three times a year students take week long tests. The grades they receive on these tests dictate whether or not they pass and move onto the next grade. This is for all schools. Now onto the differences.
Oasis is one of our largest schools in terms of enrollment. There are roughly 600 students in the school with just over 300 participating in the study. Each grade has two classes and there are also the preschool and kindergarten versions. Every class has between one and two teachers, plus there is two administrators and two groundskeepers.
The school is private, part of Baptist church in the area. This means that families pay a larger tuition for kids to attend. While almost all schools will have a tuition, private schools are more expensive but often offer better teachers or other perks like sports, school lunch, English classes, etc.
The school is located just on the outskirts of downtown Cap-Haitien. It’s on a busy road that leads to the market so there is always traffic. Just outside of the school are vendors selling snacks, food and other household items. There are three buildings which make up the school. Two are within the school’s gates and one is on the other side of the road. There is electricity, a water pump, and three flush latrines for the students to use. The classrooms are decorated with paintings and posters.
HC on the other hand is a public school located in Petit-Anse, a low-income neighborhood on the outside of town. There is no tuition for students at this school because it qualifies for a new government program in an effort to start free education nationwide. There are just 140 kids in the school – 110 are in the study. There are five teachers and one administrators for six grades. There is also a groundskeeper who will help out with repairs around the school.
Here’s the kicker. HC is a modern-day one room school house. The entire school is open to each other so there are no barriers between the classes. There is no water source and there is a hole in the back corner for kids to use for their latrine. The front of the school is a bridge over an open sewer. And there isn’t much in front of the school and only one lady selling any sort of snack or food for the kids.
So there’s some huge differences. Oasis is adequately staffed and HC isn’t. Oasis has separate rooms for classes while HC has every class hearing every other class, causing huge distractions. One of schools has water – for drinking (especially when schools get hot) and washing their hands and one doesn’t. There are latrines at Oasis so students are able to go to the bathroom cleanly while HC basically uses a spot in the back of the school. Not sanitary. One school benefits from being in a high-income area while the other is in the middle of one of the poorest areas within the metro area. Big differences.
While all of the schools in my study are lacking many things that ‘we’ (North Americans) think are vital to have in order to have a positive, effective, nurturing school environment they don’t have them here and still kids learn. And they love learning and they love being in school. I guess I am just amazed at the resilience of these kids and that they will sit in a hot, crowded, noisy room every day without eating or drinking anything just to learn some grammar.
Friday, April 12, 2013
Out of Our Control
There are many barriers to implementing and research project. In studies such as the one I am working on, you want to be able to control for as many things as possible. Control basically means keeping things as equal between the groups as possible. This includes factors inside and outside the school; number of students at the school, economic position of the students’ families, number of boys vs. girls, ages of the students. But in real life, there is very very little you have control over in your own life and even less in a study such as this. Take a little thing like Mother Nature…
Snow days. Every child’s fantasy once that temperature goes down and the days get shorter. For kids up north, hardly ever realized because as much it may snow, there exists plows, salt, and the infamous two hour delay. But every once and a while, out of sheer volume of blizzard-like proportions there’s a snow day. Here in Haiti, it’s rain.
And not just your lazy Sunday morning rain, sip a pot of coffee all day long rain, read a few chapters, knit a few scarves rain. No. More like monsoon rain. I’m talking rain that pours and pours and pours for hours on end. Rain that creates flash floods, mud slides, gorges down the mountains. Lots of rain. And what happens the next day? Cap-Haitien literally becomes an island in itself. There’s nowhere for the water to go except downstream. But what happens when that stream gets back-up or cut off from the ocean because of construction, trash and debris? It floods roads and more importantly, people’s homes. They can’t go anywhere or do anything until the water eventually recedes. This can take days.
And schools close. If teachers don’t want to brave the flooded roads – or can’t find transportation to take them through the flooded roads, they can’t teach. If parents can’t – or won’t send their children out into the flooded street to go to school, they can’t learn. If the school itself is under water, creating a breeding haven for mosquitos (which carry malaria, dengue and other horrible shit) it can’t be open.
This doesn’t just happen once or twice a year, but drastically affects the amount of school days that are actually open. Haiti has two rainy seasons. The big one is in October/November and comes with hurricanes. This school year, for nearly two months the kids had maybe a week or two of school because there was just that much rain. Which seriously hindered our ability to begin our project and in fact, delayed the start of the distribution until after Christmas break. This shortened the project from the original length of the school year (none months) to just five. Ugh. Now, April and May – the second rainy season. Although smaller, the rain is now unpredictable. It can come at any time and no one knows for how long it will rain. It could be for twenty minutes like two nights ago. Not a big deal. Or, it could be for four hours like this past Saturday, flooding everything. A big deal.
Again, it’s unpredictable so some schools on Monday could still be flooded and others not at all. And rather than a school district deciding whether to close all schools in an area, it’s up to the school director to decide. So if you happen to go to a school with a not so passionate, actually kinda lazy director you won’t have school and you won’t get mamba and you won’t be learning the same amount as other kids.
As you can imagine, this is a much larger problem than just for this study. But for us, it’s frustrating. We want the kids to be eating the mamba as much as possible – but in order for that to happen, they have to be in school. And we want every kid to be eating the same amount as any other kid, aka we want ALL the schools to be open when ALL the other schools are. When they’re not, the kids aren’t benefiting from getting an extra food source and it makes the data we collect harder to show an impact. We could have a great product here; it could be an amazing program that can seriously impact child micronutrient deficiencies. But we may also never know that because there are so many things out of our control that keep the kids from getting those benefits. A big hurdle that we have no control over what-so-ever. So while you have to accept Mother Nature’s wrath or blessing, you also have to realize what you’re giving up.
On an unrelated note, this March my study had some great visitors from Edesia, the company that makes mamba. They were able to come and visit the schools, hang out with the kids and watch as we collected our midline data. If you're interested in seeing some of the great shots their photographer snagged, check out the link to their Picasa page. Also, check out their website to learn more about mamba and other products that they make. Great people, great work and a pleasure to have worked with them.
Pictures: https://picasaweb.google.com/EdesiaGlobal/EdesiaVisitToHaitiMamba#5859271158546230594
Website: www.edesiaglobal.org
Snow days. Every child’s fantasy once that temperature goes down and the days get shorter. For kids up north, hardly ever realized because as much it may snow, there exists plows, salt, and the infamous two hour delay. But every once and a while, out of sheer volume of blizzard-like proportions there’s a snow day. Here in Haiti, it’s rain.
And not just your lazy Sunday morning rain, sip a pot of coffee all day long rain, read a few chapters, knit a few scarves rain. No. More like monsoon rain. I’m talking rain that pours and pours and pours for hours on end. Rain that creates flash floods, mud slides, gorges down the mountains. Lots of rain. And what happens the next day? Cap-Haitien literally becomes an island in itself. There’s nowhere for the water to go except downstream. But what happens when that stream gets back-up or cut off from the ocean because of construction, trash and debris? It floods roads and more importantly, people’s homes. They can’t go anywhere or do anything until the water eventually recedes. This can take days.
And schools close. If teachers don’t want to brave the flooded roads – or can’t find transportation to take them through the flooded roads, they can’t teach. If parents can’t – or won’t send their children out into the flooded street to go to school, they can’t learn. If the school itself is under water, creating a breeding haven for mosquitos (which carry malaria, dengue and other horrible shit) it can’t be open.
This doesn’t just happen once or twice a year, but drastically affects the amount of school days that are actually open. Haiti has two rainy seasons. The big one is in October/November and comes with hurricanes. This school year, for nearly two months the kids had maybe a week or two of school because there was just that much rain. Which seriously hindered our ability to begin our project and in fact, delayed the start of the distribution until after Christmas break. This shortened the project from the original length of the school year (none months) to just five. Ugh. Now, April and May – the second rainy season. Although smaller, the rain is now unpredictable. It can come at any time and no one knows for how long it will rain. It could be for twenty minutes like two nights ago. Not a big deal. Or, it could be for four hours like this past Saturday, flooding everything. A big deal.
Again, it’s unpredictable so some schools on Monday could still be flooded and others not at all. And rather than a school district deciding whether to close all schools in an area, it’s up to the school director to decide. So if you happen to go to a school with a not so passionate, actually kinda lazy director you won’t have school and you won’t get mamba and you won’t be learning the same amount as other kids.
As you can imagine, this is a much larger problem than just for this study. But for us, it’s frustrating. We want the kids to be eating the mamba as much as possible – but in order for that to happen, they have to be in school. And we want every kid to be eating the same amount as any other kid, aka we want ALL the schools to be open when ALL the other schools are. When they’re not, the kids aren’t benefiting from getting an extra food source and it makes the data we collect harder to show an impact. We could have a great product here; it could be an amazing program that can seriously impact child micronutrient deficiencies. But we may also never know that because there are so many things out of our control that keep the kids from getting those benefits. A big hurdle that we have no control over what-so-ever. So while you have to accept Mother Nature’s wrath or blessing, you also have to realize what you’re giving up.
On an unrelated note, this March my study had some great visitors from Edesia, the company that makes mamba. They were able to come and visit the schools, hang out with the kids and watch as we collected our midline data. If you're interested in seeing some of the great shots their photographer snagged, check out the link to their Picasa page. Also, check out their website to learn more about mamba and other products that they make. Great people, great work and a pleasure to have worked with them.
Pictures: https://picasaweb.google.com/EdesiaGlobal/EdesiaVisitToHaitiMamba#5859271158546230594
Website: www.edesiaglobal.org
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