Adventures in School Mapping

The first week I was in Gressier, Megan and I discussed a project that she wanted me to take on this summer; a school mapping project. The idea being to map out all of the schools in town and find out some basic information about them in order to have an idea of the education situation in Gressier. I thought this sounded great as I’m prohibited from working on my research project and set to work finding a decent map of Gressier.

Turns out Google maps has a pretty good street map of town. Google blows my mind. They know EVERYTHING about EVERYWHERE, right down to mapping out the streets of some random town in Haiti. I wonder who got the job of making the Gressier map... Anyway, so I sent the map to a friend in the States who would be coming down with the team from BR who blew it up at Kinko’s and brought it to me (shoutout Holly!).

Once I got the map, I had to hit the ground running fast as there was only one official week of school left in the year. So hit the ground running I did. Each morning, I would put on my village explorer outfit (pale orange fishing shirt and khaki shorts) and a lot of sunscreen, grab some gourde for water bags and head out with Sophi to look for schools. Sophi has been an incredible translator and fellow village explorer with me. We’ve had some pretty excellent adventures and found some Gressier hotspots. We now know where the chicken-fighting arena is, all the great river laundry/bathing hotspots, found a well-stocked mini-mart by our old house, checked out the new Gressier community center, and happened upon a great little soccer field right next to the sea amongst other things.

Sophie at the new community center on the other side of town.

And, in addition to the bonus of getting to know our community a little better, we of course found schools. LOTS of schools. We visited an average of 4 per day by just happening upon them, asking people on the streets if schools were nearby, or just following kids in uniforms (not in a creepy way of course :). In a little over a week, we were able to cover most of the map. We found 21 schools and counted over 4,000 students! We also have a pretty good idea of what the average price is to go to school in the area. That is one thing that kept weighing on my mind as we visited schools – every kid in school pays to be there. Pays a considerably high price that bars many children from going. We are SO fortunate to have FREE public education in America. And don’t get me wrong, it’s a flawed system (I could expound upon that for days), but its existence is a huge feat. I’m so thankful for the ministry of Respire Haiti and Respire Haiti Christian School reaching out to children who can’t afford to go to school otherwise with a free education.

And on top of that, Respire offers a free education from solid teachers in appropriate sized classes. The variation in school conditions that we saw in Gressier was interesting. Some schools were in small, one-room churches with kids packed onto worn looking benches. Some schools had pretty nice facilities. My favorite school had classrooms built out of containers that were painted bright colors built by the Digicel Foundation. Some teachers and administrators seemed very engaged and bright, we saw others that I couldn’t help but wonder what they were even doing in a school…

Super School Mappers!

The connections that we made in the community were a great first step in getting to know the culture of education here in Gressier. We’re also hoping in the future to use this information and these connections to bring together educators in the area and facilitate their communication and learning together.