Frandy Calixte is an 11-year-old boy who lives in a small village on the drought-prone island of Lagonav, Haiti. Sitting outside his house with his mother and teacher, he tells me he wants to be a nurse when he grows up, but his mother corrects him.
"Doctor," she says, and he amends his answer.
Almost everyone here is a small farmer; higher education is virtually unheard of. But Calixte is bucking the trend by going to a different kind of school: The Matenwa Community School, just down the rocky road from Calixte’s house.
Matenwa is also bucking the norms of Haitian education. At the start of an all-school assembly, students stand up and share what’s good and bad — a lesson they enjoyed, or how they didn’t like the behavior of other students or even teachers. In class, students sit in a circle, following the school’s philosophy that children should be seen, heard and treated with respect.
Frandy Calixte with his mother, Madame Frantz Calixte, outside their home. Credit: Amy Bracken There's another essential part of the school's method, the staff says: Teaching in the students’ native language, Creole, instead of French.
Only an estimated five percent of Haitians are fluent in French, but it's still the language of government-funded textbooks. “When I was in school, I never really learned French,” says Calixte’s mother, who calls herself Madame Frantz Calixte. When I ask how she succeeded in school, she laughs. “I didn’t really pass my exams,” she says.
But of her sons? "They’re learning better than I did," she says.