The Hungry Children

January 2011. Twelve children — six girls and six boys, all between nine and twelve, none of whom had ever set foot in a classroom before. A young teacher named Borno. A borrowed afternoon classroom in Anse-à-Galets, on the island of La Gonâve, lent to us by another school director after his own day was over. New uniforms. Brand-new notebooks. And for the first few days, the kind of excitement I remembered from opening week at any school I had ever taught in — children sounding out their first letters, copying their names onto the top of their pages, eyes bright. For the first time in their lives, they were students.

The excitement didn’t last.

Within about a week, I started noticing something wrong. By the middle of the lesson — sometime around two or three in the afternoon, the hottest part of the day — the children would begin to fade. Heads down on desks. Eyes glazing over. Answers that had previously been quick were now coming slowly or not at all. Borno was working hard, but he couldn’t hold their attention no matter what he tried.

I thought it was the heat at first. Then I wondered if it was boredom, or fear of getting something wrong, or simply the strangeness of being in a classroom for the first time. It took me longer than it should have to land on the actual answer.

The children were hungry.

Once I started asking around, the picture came together quickly. Most of our students were eating one small meal a day, usually in the evening, but sometimes not at all. They were coming to class having had nothing since the night before, or having eaten only a piece of bread at breakfast. By the time we got to the afternoon lesson, they were running on empty. Their bodies were doing what bodies do when they’re being asked to function without fuel — they were shutting down the non-essential systems, and learning new letters in a new room apparently qualified as non-essential.

It sounds obvious now. I’d spent my whole career as an educator, and I’d never had to factor hunger into a lesson plan. My own children had never missed a meal before school. In Palo Alto, this wasn’t something you had to think about. In Anse-à-Galets, it turned out, it was the thing you had to think about before anything else.

So I changed the schedule. Every day, before Borno began the lesson, we would feed the children. Nothing elaborate — rice and beans with some meat sauce, whatever we could put together — but real food, enough to fill them up. We worked out the logistics with Max’s cousin Carol, a local cook who began preparing the daily meals. We adjusted the budget. We started the new routine within the week.

It made all the difference. Almost immediately the afternoon slump was gone. The children came alive through the whole lesson, energy sustained from the first letter on the board to the last exercise of the day. They asked questions, they volunteered answers, and they stayed engaged.

And something else shifted too, though it took me longer to understand it. They began to trust that they would be taken care of. They knew that when they came to class, there would be food. That small certainty seemed to free them up for everything else.

— — —

That’s when I started to understand that a school, for these children, couldn’t just be a place of instruction. It had to be a place of care. The two weren’t separate concerns. You couldn’t teach a hungry child to read, and pretending you could was just a way of letting yourself off the hook for the part of the problem that wasn’t strictly pedagogical.

It’s been fifteen years since that first week of failed lessons. Pi Gwo Byen now has its own building, its own teachers, and a full program of levels that has carried 202 children through to graduation. A great deal has changed. The meal hasn’t. Every morning, before any teacher writes anything on a board, the children eat. Bread and cheese in the morning, a hot meal at midday. Carol still cooks.

I wouldn’t change it for anything. It’s the foundation everything else rests on.

— — —

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.