Kindergarten Graduates

This post has nothing to do with medicine.  There, you have been forewarned.

What it does have to do with is the two and half hours I spent on Sunday at a promotion ceremony for the school one of the children here attends.  A promotion ceremony for kindergartners.  Now, to be fair, kindergarten here is three years long. But still.  Two and half hours?  The ceremony was held in a church nearby, which was packed to the gills with families in their best.  The kids were also all dressed up, with the graduates themselves in flashy matching suits and white dresses with green sashes and ribbons.  There were ten of them.

We started the whole shebang off with a song and prayer and introduced the master of ceremonies.  To my surprise, the whole production was in French.  Now, I know that the parents of the child we were going with don't speak French, although the mother understands a lot of it (very helpfully for us volunteers with bad Creole).  So I'm left to wonder how many of the parents really knew what was going on.  The children performed various songs, dances, and poems - all also in french with occasional verse of English (and once, Spanish).  Every single one of them was adorable, of course, but a couple of things struck me as a bit bizarre.  Firstly, the MC was quite talkative, repeatedly exhorting us to applaud the children saying "it's good to clap for children" or "another round of applause for that please, louder, louder!" the response to these commands was not as enthusiastic as might be supposed.  Instead of clapping on demand, the Haitian audience often failed to even half-heartedly applaud in the way American audiences usually do when feeling polite but not particularly impressed.  The second oddball thing, from my perspective, was the way in which increasingly toward the end of the program, the MC started some hardball recruiting. All throughout he had been mentioning the name of the school with an odd frequency, almost like you would a sponsor of a sporting event.  Then as we moved to the second half, in which the graduates (red-robed and crowned with mini mortar boards no less) stood on stages and sang their thanks, received gifts and diplomas (bigger, by the way, than my four-year liberal arts diploma), and very variously feted more directly; the MC moved to explicitly extolling the virtues of the school: "If you want your child to learn English well, French well, really get a good education" enroll in our school.

The recruitment push brings to the fore the fact that here, schools are businesses.  So they charge money to make money, and compete for students to fill their classes.  The whole ceremony was a surprisingly money-visible situation, with an official videographer, custom outfits the students had to buy for the occasion, gifts given, and parents and siblings all parading their best.  I felt truly dumpy in my flip-flops, skirt and polo (the most "dress-up" clothing I had).  It was a striking illustration of how Haiti continually refuses to fit into my boxes.  Yes, the children I'm working with now are desperately poor and their bodies and minds all show signs of that neglect.  But just across the way two and three story houses with manicured gardens, beautifully tiled flooring, new cars, and eight foot high rock walls topped with razor wire.  Just down the hill is Petionville - a wealthy suburb with a store accepting US dollars, several quite nice restaurants and a lovely supermarket with basically anything you'd want.  But then just up the hill in Kenscoff is a tiny shack that used to belong to the mother of three of our kids.  The other volunteer showed me pictures she took when they drove up to move her out and into a small but substantially nicer house we're renting for her.  Having lived in Africa, I suppose I expected things to be more visibly cultural.  More clearly other, more clearly poor.  I'll let you know if I find that Haiti.