Lucson and Eriguer, two of my fellow training facilitators, enjoy yucca as our ferry is about to leave the port.Steps to get to a training on La Gonave Island:
02:30 am Wake up since a truck has stopped outside with loudly-miked religious music (voudou). It stays there for about 20 minutes.
3:30 am I lift the heavy iron bar off from the outside gate of my lodgings (more Jane Austen) to let my co-facilitators in to pick up our training supplies.
3:40 am Wake up porter to lock the gate behind me. Leave hotel via pre-arranged taxi to the center of Cap Haitien.
3:45 am Taxi stops to pick up another few people along the way, so we are seven adults and one child in the car.
3:46 am The child sees me (it's dark) and says, "Blan!" (foreigner) I greet her with, "Bon jou." She doesn't respond, and her mother says, "She said 'Bon jou,' how to you respond? Come on, she said 'Bon jou.'" The girl looks at her mother and inquires, "In English?"
4:00 am Find our beautifully decorated (formerly yellow) school bus that is en route to Port-au-Prince. Using the light of our cell phones we find our assigned seats (three to a seat). While waiting, we can buy plantain chips, cell phone credit, water, etc.
5:00 am The bus roars out of town. At the top of a mountain someone calls for a bathroom break, so a bunch of people get off the bus (and go to the side of the bus). Um, this is why women tend to still travel in skirts even though in the past few years pants have become more acceptable. Since we're at a market, it's also a great opportunity to buy bananas, yucca, and peanuts from the vendors who come up to the windows.
10:30 am We yell at the driver to stop as we approach our destination, a port town. We yell again, until he finally stops. We get off and walk back to the port.
Enoch (the other facilitator) and me as we leave the "mainland."11:00 am The ferry leaves. A man in a suit takes out a (miked!) megaphone and starts yelling at us that we need to accept Jesus today or we will die. He then gets into highly controversial doctrinal issues, all at a really high volume. People respond, argue back, etc. What I like best about all this is that the evangelist really resembles Chris Rock.
12:30 pm Arrive at La Gonave island. We can't reach our contacts by phone so we eventually decide to pay someone to take us in the back of his pickup truck to town.
3:00 pm Start the training for 16 participants who represent about eight different organizations!
Here's the group of new trainers! This photo was taken at the end of the Training of Trainers 1 in La Gonave.
This trainer is presenting his groups ideas on how to obtain information from the communities in which they serve. Instead of formal (and often inaccurate) surveys, the groups suggest spending time forming relationships, talking with village elders and children, and using their five senses in observation.
In groups of two the trainers practice sharing about God's plan for us to live abundantly.
In between classes we use songs and dances to keep ourselves awake and keep the training fun. In Nicaragua I had learned one with lots of movements about planting and harvesting corn. While in Bolivia the group we trained invented a version using yucca (which has about twice as many steps!). Both corn and yucca are big crops here. So with Kreyol translation in hand, here I am leading the group in the life cycle of yucca! Haha! They had to show me the "real"movements since of course they know much more about yucca than I do.
We use a lot of sketches, too. Above you see trainers acting out the story of the paralytic and his four friends going to Jesus. We use this story to talk about key concepts in development: finding and using local resources, perseverance, love, and hope.
Here are my co-facilitators and our host: Enoch, Erigeur, Enick (our host), Lucson, and Sully (Enick's colleague). In this picture we're on a hill on the island and you can see the sea and the mountains of "mainland" Haiti in the background.
