Both Oars In Graduation Where It’s Not So Common

Jun 5, 2009

I have had the privilege to work with some of the rarest high school graduates in the world. I say this with pride as well as sadness since few children in Haiti have the opportunity to attend school, let alone graduate. In fact, a child in Haiti is more likely to die before turning five than graduate from high school. In the United States, even incarcerated youth have access to education, which is good. In Haiti, a perfectly well-behaved elementary student might never be given the opportunity to continue onto high school. This is deplorable. Given the odds, I feel lucky to know 44 more graduates this year!

Fortunately, I spend most of my time in Haiti with the exceptional community at Louverture Cleary School, which is located northeast of Port-au-Prince, Haiti’s capital city. LCS is home to 344 students, all of whom come from the most impoverished, overcrowded neighborhoods in our hemisphere. Many of their families live on less than a dollar a day. At home, sanitation is minimal and nutrition is limited to one meal a day at best. The under-age-five mortality rate in these neighborhoods fluctuates between seven and fifteen percent. The fact that LCS students have survived at all is testament to their resilience; the fact they are in school is a testament to their will.

Counting anything accurately on the national level is not easy in a country that has had as many as four presidents in a year. [Of note, one of those four was a woman – Haiti is not last in everything.] Subsequently, statistics on education in Haiti vary. However, reports by international organizations focused on education suggest that no more than one out of three children enters elementary school and possibly as few as two percent of those who enter school complete all thirteen years. Although I enjoy boasting about our graduates, I am not exaggerating when I say I work with some rare individuals.

The success of LCS students stands in sharp contrast to the national average on testing. Haiti has four national exams along the way to graduation. None of them has a high national pass rate. If a student fails an exam, he or she has to repeat the exam until passing in order to continue to the next grade, or quit school. Seventy-five percent of the students who entered LCS seven years ago with the class of 2009 made it through all four exams and all the way through secondary school—which is pretty rare. LCS is fortunate that over 98 percent of its students pass the final national exam, which is even rarer.

People who accompany me to Haiti often ask how the country ended up so behind the times. They perceive Haiti as mired in the past. The noticeable lack of a functioning educational system certainly contributes to this perception. But I think it is the lack of electricity and the pot-lakes in the roads that really inspires the question. In our minds, broken things are synonymous with the past.

However, we must be careful not to lose appreciation for the fact that Haiti is much older than the U.S.—that it is in fact the birthplace of the Americas. It has flourished and floundered several times. It is easy to regard Haiti as behind us, but what if it has actually gone ahead of us into the deconstructive future? That sobering thought makes me an adamant supporter of public education, social welfare, and the elimination of personality cult dictators in every country.

Despite Haiti’s isolation and periodic lapses into chaos, LCS students learn to speak, read and write four languages, Kreyol, French, English and Spanish, a skill that is rare even in countries with ubiquitous education. They graduate and go on to college. Some become doctors, which are rare in Haiti as well: Haiti has less than three doctors per 10,000 people. By comparison, the U.S. has over 250 doctors per 10,000 people, or 100 times more. It may seem like we wait a lifetime in doctors’ offices, but in Haiti you can actually go a lifetime without ever seeing one. Fortunately, over 96 percent of LCS grads stay in Haiti to make a difference.

What makes Louverture Cleary graduates most uncommon is their dedication to serving others. Each student has amassed over 3,000 hours of community service by the time they graduate. As first year students, they start by cleaning their school and neighborhood. By the time they are ready to graduate they have spent a year volunteering at a local orphanage, and another year teaching children from the school’s neighborhood how to read, write, and do math in LCS’s student-run afternoon literacy program. Students teaching students is pretty rare, too.

Diamonds are produced in high pressured, superheated circumstances. There’s no question that the tough circumstances of Haiti motivate our students to succeed, but it is the self-imposed pressure to change those circumstances for others that creates the heat which turns LCS students into the brilliant, rare gems that they are.