A quick rehash of the day, with photos.
8am-10am: Meet with Sister Marie Francois Filogene, the head of Jean Paul VI, one of our schools. She had my survey ready and filled out, along with some great data on her school, including, drum roll please…Grades! For each student! And which student moved on to the next grade due to their grades, which students were forced to repeat their grade, and which students dropped out. Best news of all, this data is required by the Ministry of Ed here, so all our schools will have it. It sounds incredibly basic, obvious stuff, but this is the first time I’ve heard of it, and people have been working on this project for two years. We pop into a kindergarten class to say hi, I take a picture, innocently enough, and the next thing we know we’re lining up every grade in the entire school for staged photos.
2-4: What was supposed to be a casual meeting with 6 school directors who were ripe for being in our control group ends up being a romp through a Haitian jungle, mountains looming on all sides, as we crawl through rocky roads and stop repeatedly to make sure we’re going the right way. We are. Only the head director is there, which isn’t the best news, but he happens to be great, and it kills me to tell him (actually, my coworker who speaks French/Creole tells him this, but it kills me to watch him tell him this) that we don’t have the money to support his school this year, but that we’ll throw all the vitamins and medicines we can find (and we get a lot) at him if he helps us with my study. He seems okay with this arrangement, and we make plans to have a meeting with all the other directors October 2nd.
