Six Girls and Six Boys

By late 2010 I had a plan, an island, and a partner. I had a teacher named Borno who was willing to try something new. I had a school director, Désir, who had agreed to lend us a classroom in the afternoons after his own school day ended. What I didn’t yet have was the children.

We had until January to find them. Twelve was the number I’d settled on — small enough that one teacher could give real attention to each child, but large enough to be a proper class and not just a tutoring arrangement. I also had a specific age range in mind: nine to twelve. My background in educationtaught me that at about eight or nine, children go through a cognitive leap — a shift in reasoning that allows them to pick up new material much faster. For kids who were starting school so late, that mattered enormously. It was the difference between having a chance and not having one.

Max and Désir helped me find families. Word got around quickly in Anse-à-Galets that the American woman who planted trees was now offering to pay for a class for children who’d never been to school, and within a couple of weeks we had our list of twelve.

I remember feeling enormously proud of that list. Then I looked at it properly and realized something I should have caught sooner.

Eight boys. Four girls.

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No, no, no, no, no.

I told Max we needed to fix this. We needed gender balance. Six boys and six girls.

The pushback was immediate.

I was told that girls had household duties, that they couldn’t be spared the way boys could, that they’d likely drop out when they started having babies anyway. Families were reluctant. I was told it was hard to find girls whose parents would let them go. I listened to all of it, and then I held firm.

If we were going to start a school, we were going to start it with equal opportunity built into the foundation. I wasn’t going to fall for the idea that it wasn’t worth educating a child because she might have a baby one day.

It took another couple of weeks, but we found our twelve: six girls and six boys, all between nine and twelve years old, none of whom had ever set foot in a classroom before. In January 2011, they walked into a borrowed afternoon classroom in their brand-new uniforms and became the founding class of what would eventually be called Pi Gwo Byen.

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Looking back, that moment with the list — eight boys, four girls — feels small compared to everything that came after. The school. The classrooms we eventually built. The teachers we hired and supported through certification. The 202children who have, over the past fifteen years, walked through our doors and learned to read.

But I think it was actually one of the most important decisions I made in those early years. Not because the difference between four girls and six was enormous in absolute terms — two girls — but because of what saying yes to the original list would have meant. It would have been agreeing, in the founding moment of the school, that the prevailing pattern was acceptable. That girls’ education was nice when it was easy and could be dropped when it wasn’t. That the people who had already been quietly priced out of an education in Haiti — and they were, overwhelmingly, girls — could continue to be quietly priced out at our school too.

I wasn’t willing to do that. Not in the very first class. Not at the very moment we were deciding what kind of place we were going to be.

The principle held. The school we built around those twelve children has been, from its first afternoon, a place where girls’ education and boys’ education aren’t different categories. It is just education. And I have to believe that the six girls who walked into that classroom in January 2011 are part of the reason.

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This blog is extracted from “Why Haiti,” the first in a series of six narrative essays charting the story of Greater Good Haiti — from first arrival to founding, to today. The full essay will be part of a forthcoming collection.

If this story moved you, please consider supporting our work at greatergoodhaiti.org/donate. Every gift goes toward the school, the daily meals, and the children whose lives we have the privilege of being part of.