Hungry to Learn

Children playing in a tent
Displaced children in Haiti find solace in camp play area. UN Photo/Sophia Paris

Education must be a corner stone of the international effort to rebuild Haiti. Without that, there is no future.

Mine is the rare job that allows me to meet, within the span of a very few hours, both a president and a homeless mother. And each told me the same thing.
 

Three months after the earthquake that devastated Haiti, President Préval welcomed me to his offices in Port au Prince -- a modest building in the gardens behind his ruined presidential palace. Education, he said straight-off, must be a corner stone of the international effort to rebuild Haiti. Without that, there is no future.
 

Not long after, I visited a tent-city crowded with thousands of displaced families. A slender mother pushed her bright-eyed child toward me, no more than eight years old. “He wants to learn,” she told me with calm insistence. “Give him the chance.”
 

Two people, occupying very different positions in life. Yet each delivered a message that I heard again and again during my two-day stay. Haitians want and need our help. But when it comes to the work of rebuilding Haiti, they want to do it for themselves. And that work begins with school.
 

Schooling is the ticket to decent work, all the more so in a country like Haiti where unemployment is high and jobs are scarce. But there is also a more immediate reality. In the aftermath of disaster, school does more than promote learning. It gives children a sense of normalcy amid the chaos. It is a place of security and sanctuary. Above all, it offers hope for the future.
 

When people live in near-desperation -- lacking food, medicine, shelter -- such things matter more than ever. That is why the United Nations mission in Haiti, working closely with the government and international aid organizations, has worked to re-open schools as quickly as possible. Mothers and children are particularly vulnerable. After spending an afternoon in one camp, and joining a night patrol later that evening, I knew their fears and frustrations. When it rains, the ground turns to mud. Their tents collapse; they have no dry place to sleep. And of course, in the dark corners there is often violence and rape.

 

 
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