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Jacky Lumarque talks about skills-based volunteering

October 19, 2010 By

Jacky Lumarque points Symposium participants at this article as the starting point for his presentation.

Ten days after the earthquake, Quisqueya had organized a volunteer system. First the medical students set up in a tent on the parking lot. They were supervised initially by their teachers, then by a team of Slovak doctors who arrived with medicine and equipment looking for somewhere to work. Then the students set up a mobile clinic. After that came fresh water distribution points. The engineering and environmental students went out into the streets, helped people organize themselves into committees to manage the improvised camps as well as introducing work on zoning, sanitation and waste management. The university became a giant volunteering machine!

… I said to them: “The street is your university now”.

At the weekend students gathered with their teachers to formalize the non-formal education they had been getting during the week, or to put theory on the practice. We are working on a system to give them academic credits for this work. It changed the paradigm of education for them. They realised that further education doesn’t have to be one-way, that it doesn’t have to take place within four walls with an all-knowing teacher dispensing knowledge. With the volunteering initiative, knowledge is acquired in the street and the teacher accompanies the process. We are de-institutionalising knowledge.

EduInfo. (2010). Jacky Lumarque: Haitian university rector, innovator and agitator. Retrieved October 18, 2010 from UNESCO Website: http://www.unesco.org/en/education/dynamic-content-single-view/news/jacky_lumarque_haitian_university_rector_innovator_and_agitator/back/9195/cHash/b31a5338b7/

Filed Under: Highlight, Projects

The Challenge for Haitian Higher Education

October 11, 2010 By

In the preface, Dr. Louis Herns Marcelin, describes the goals of the report on The Challenge for Haitian Higher Education as:

“The goal of this study is to contribute to a national and international dialogue and to recommend solutions to the higher education challenges facing the nation. We identify deficiencies of the current system that obstruct high student enrollment and high-quality research in Haitian universities. These challenges include the high concentration of universities in the capital, the lack of an effective overarching governing body to regulate university accreditation, low investment in scientific research and training, as well as inefficiencies in university administration.

The report documents the condition of the higher education institutions after the January 12th earthquake that leveled most of the major institutions in the Port-au-Prince metropolitan area. It cannot be overemphasized that higher education be a priority for Haiti’s rebuilding strategy. Haiti has one of the youngest populations and there is a critical need for young, skilled professionals to rebuild Haiti in the years and decades ahead. As we redefine Haitian society, we must reform higher education institutions and protect them from the politicization that has hindered scientific inquiry and effective collaboration between these institutions in Haiti.

The nation has suffered an irreparable loss of heritage and human capital. Many universities will likely never be rebuilt. The need for additional studies of the impact and implications of this disaster cannot be overstated. The recommendations of this report urge decision-makers and donors to consider short and longer-term investments that reflect the urgency of higher education as a tool to create leadership for Haiti’s future on par with other priority areas including agriculture, health, and economic development. Strategic investment with smart policy reform in the higher education system will ensure Haiti’s longer-term recovery and development goals.”

The Challenge for Haitian Higher Education: A post‐earthquake assessment of higher education institutions in the Port‐au‐Prince metropolitan area
 (2010). Port-au-Prince, Haiti: Interuniversity 
Institute 
for
 Research
 and
 Development
 (INURED). Retrieved October 3, 2010 from INURED Website: http://inured.org/docs/TheChallengeforHaitianHigherEd_INURED2010March.pdf
Filed Under: Highlight, Reading

Michèle Pierre-Louis Talks about the Importance of Rebuilding

October 7, 2010 By

Michèle Pierre-Louis

Michèle Pierre-Louis

Mme. Michèle Pierre-Louis describes the importance of rebuilding Haiti’s education system and of incorporating Haitian voices and Haitian culture in the international reconstruction efforts:

“I’ve been an educator for part of my life, and I think education is very significant. Rebuilding the education [system] is rebuilding the future of Haiti. Disaster preparedness should start in schools with the kids. They have to know that we are on a fault and that anytime again there can be another earthquake. They have to know that there can be mudslides because of our environment. They have to know that we are in a hurricane path, and they have to know what should be done when there are hurricanes. They have to know how we should care about the environment. These are vital sectors. …

The situation we are in today—we cannot think of getting out alone. We don’t have the resources, whether human, financial, or material. It’s difficult to come to terms with that, but we have to face reality. That’s what reality is, so we need the international community; we need the donor countries, and we need the bilateral and multilateral institutions like the World Bank and the European Union that already are stakeholders in Haiti. But I think Haitians should be deciding what kind of society they want to build in the future. It’s our responsibility, and I don’t think we should run away from that. If we run away, it’s going to be a disaster, too.”

Excerpted From: Pierre-Louis, M. (2010, May 1). A Long Road Ahead — Leveraging Culture in Haiti’s Reconstruction. Harvard International Review. Retrieved October 11, 2010, from http://hir.harvard.edu/women-in-power/a-long-road-ahead
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Michel DeGraff Describes his hopes for MIT and Haiti

October 3, 2010 By
Michel DeGraff

Michel DeGraff

MIT Prof. Michel DeGraff describes his hopes for MIT’s involvement in helping to rebuild the educational infrastructure in Haiti.

Most Haitians I know have a precise and often tragic story about what they were doing when the earthquake hit on Tuesday, January 12, 2010, at 4:53PM.

In my case the story is not so tragic, yet it seems relevant to the agenda of this symposium:   I was in my office at MIT on a long-distance phone call with Haiti, talking with my dear friend and linguistics colleague Professor Yves Dejean (“Papa Iv”). Like many previous conversations with Papa Iv, our conversation that day was about various efforts to improve education in Haiti and break down the country’s language barrier whereby French, spoken by a small minority of Haitians, is used as an instrument for “élite closure” to the detriment of the vast majority of Haitians—those who speak Kreyòl only. Our conversation was abruptly interrupted. At that time I just thought it was a bad phone line or faulty signal. I tried to call back several times, then I gave up and went to pick up my son Nuriel at afterschool. When I came back home with Nuriel, I got a phone call from another Haitian friend, calling from New Jersey with dramatic news of the earthquake.

And it took me a couple of weeks to have a full account of the losses and damages incurred by my family, relatives, friends and colleagues in Haiti. At 82 years of age, Professor Dejean himself fared well–his life and the lives of his household members were spared and his home still stands. But their lucky fate stands in sharp contrast with that of so many in Haiti. And when it comes to education, most academic establishments in Port-au-Prince crumbled.   As for Haiti’s main linguistics institution, the Faculté de Linguistique Appliquée (FLA), its building in Port-au-Prince totally pancaked in the earthquake, killing more than 200 affiliates, including the dean of the linguistics faculty, the vice-dean, alongside professors, students and staff. The FLA is the institution that has been hit the hardest among the academic units of Haiti’s State University, and this is an institution that myself as a linguist I had and still have many ties with.

Photos Courtesy of Michel DeGraff

Also lost in the rubble is most of the FLA’s library, its precious archives and documentation, its computer labs and so on. Our linguistics colleagues in Haiti are still grieving, but they are already on their courageous way toward building a better linguistics program on new grounds (literally and figuratively).  It’s been an inspiration to witness how our FLA colleagues, along with other compatriots, are already working on curriculum reform, faculty development, new infrastructure and library resources, partnerships with universities abroad, etc. They dream, and are working hard toward, a  linguistics program that will be better than the one that existed before the earthquake. The FLA linguists—professors and students alike—are hoping that the reconstruction of their institution will allow it to leapfrog into the 21st century. And similar hopes prevail throughout academic institutions in Haiti.

I am optimistic that the leapfrogging of Haitian schools and universities into the 21st century will have a major impact on the socio-economic landscape of the country as a whole. As for Haitian linguists, they have a key role to play in the future training of educators, teachers, language planners, etc. By and large, FLA linguists have a deep understanding of Haiti’s socio-linguistic situation and how language attitudes and language policies affect educational and economic opportunities. So they have much to contribute to efforts that enlist Haiti’s linguistic and cultural assets toward a level-playing field—one where Haiti’s national language of Kreyòl can become an effective instrument to promote socio-economic progress for the general population.

In a related vein, one constant theme across conversations with university colleagues at the FLA and at other academic institutions in Haiti is the need for technology-enabled tools for easier access to course materials, research documents, etc., and for collaboration with overseas partners. It’s ironic that Haitian Creole is among the best studied Creole languages, and Haitian Creole data have been used for some rather spectacular and momentous theoretical claims about the human mind’s capacity for Language. Yet many descriptions of Haitian Creole suffer from substantial empirical gaps and theoretical fallacies.  This state of affairs can be improved with more active contribution from the Kreyòl linguistics experts at the FLA.  These are  the linguists who have most intimate and reliable knowledge of Kreyòl linguistics structures. Yet it is ironic that Haitian Creole still holds little academic respect in Haiti and that the FLA linguists themselves have had relatively little opportunity to contribute to the Kreyòl-related scientific debates in international research journals.

So here’s another silver lining to the current tragedy in post-earthquake Haiti: The use of innovative educational technology and open resources—partnerships of the sort that we will discuss at the MIT-Haiti symposium—will create productive partnerships between MIT faculty and Haitian universities.  These partnerships will help bridge the gap between FLA linguists and the global linguistics research community.  The latter has so much to benefit, in scientific terms, from the FLA linguists’s first-hand empirical and theoretical insights on Haitian Creole.  In turn, these partnerships will help endow Kreyòl with much increased cultural and scientific capital—of the sort that may increase its value on Haiti’s linguistic market and help further undermine Haiti’s language barrier.

Such partnerships would thus constitute one beautiful example, among others, where working with Haitian universities through collaboration based on mutual respect holds great promise for the common social and scientific good—across the North-South divide.

Filed Under: Highlight, Projects

Patrick Attié Tours Haitian Universities and Describes their Needs

September 30, 2010 By

In the video, Patrick Attié shows the destruction at the Faculty des Sciences, Université d’État d’Haïti and at L’Ecole Supérieure d’Infotronique d’Haïti (ESIH) just after the earthquake. He also describes how they are working on three fronts: access to capital to rebuild (an interim site), managing the transition so students can continue their studies, and rebuilding the campus itself in a new location.

Filed Under: Highlight, Stories

OCW & Haiti: Bringing Renewable Energy to Haiti

September 30, 2010 By

Shigeru Miyagawa, chair of the MIT OpenCourseWare faculty advisory committee and professor of linguistics, describes how OCW has aided reconstruction in Haiti.

“Just one of the stories of OCW use that has moved me recently is that of Jean-Ronel Noel and Alex Georges, entrepreneurs working to bring renewable energy to communities throughout Haiti. Through their company, Enersa (enersahaiti.com) they planned to create solar panels to serve the needs of their country, but in their research and development process, they required guidance in electrical engineering. Noel found the materials he needed on MIT OpenCourseWare. “I was able to use the OpenCourseWare to learn the principles of integrated circuits. I found out that I could use an existing integrated circuit to make things more efficient, and I wanted an explanation about how it worked. I was able to learn this through the MIT OpenCourseWare.”

Enersa’s work has been supported by the non-profit Appropriate Infrastructure Development Group (AIDG). AIDG Executive Director Peter Haas describes how Noel and Georges leveraged OCW to build a successful business. “I was immediately impressed by [Noel], an engineer who taught himself the electrical engineering he was missing by using the free online engineering resources of MIT OpenCourseWare,” said Haas. “Also, after seeing the dramatic bootstrapping JR and Alex had done in starting their business, it was clear this team was different.” [www.aidg.org/incubation/enersa.htm]

Jean-Ronel Noel, a mechanical engineer by training, describes why OCW was his resource of choice: “It was much better than any other information I found on the Internet, since the other sites were written by electronics experts who assumed that it would be read by other experts. I didn’t want to just copy the circuit without understanding it. MIT OpenCourseWare was different because it explained things step by step. Using the OpenCourseWare saved us a lot of time and money.”

Through Enersa, OCW touches lives well beyond Noel’s and Georges’. Enersa employs 18 full-time solar technicians drawn from the communities they serve, and Enersa’s products affect the daily lives of thousands of Haitians. Enersa produces residential and commercial solar systems and solar chargers for smaller items such as cell phones and lamps, but their signature product is a solar street lamp. In just two and a half years, they have installed more than 500 of these in 58 cities and remote villages in Haiti. Enersa’s activities were briefly interrupted by the January 12, 2010 earthquake, but with an emergency loan from AIDG, they are back to full operation.”

Excerpted with permission from: Miyagawa, S. (2010, September). MIT OpenCourseWare: A Decade of Global Benefit. MIT Faculty Newsletter, Vol. XXIII No. 1. Retrieved September 28, 2010 from MIT Faculty Newsletter: http://web.mit.edu/fnl/volume/231/miyagawa.html
Filed Under: Highlight, Stories

ESIH Student Interviews

September 27, 2010 By

ESIH, Pre-Earthquake

ESIH, Pre-Earthquake

Ecole Supérieure d’Infotronique d’Haïti interviewed students about the continuation of their studies after the earthquake.

Alain David LESCOUFLAIR, 3ème année, Sciences Informatiques (L3):

- How are you re-adjusting to your studies at ESIH? How do you feel to be back in the classes?
At first I thought it would be harder but I find it quite easy. I thought I would have problem getting ready for the exams and it’s kinda difficult sometimes to stay focus but it’s nothing if you know what you want. I’ll find a way and do my best. Focusing is not a problem. I just need a little rest. No one do really focus well after more than 2 months from sleepless night. I don’t have sleeping problem but it is only recently that dad accept to sleep inside the house and not in the yard because of a increasing insecurity problem. I’ve been the watch guard and going to school and not sleeping much doesn’t really mix.
I don’t really know how to feel about going back in class. I’m happy to see everyone, be in a group , maybe help around if I’m needed and also excited for some new classes but sometimes I don’t really know. I feel that somethings is missing and I don’t really know what. Well as long it doesn’t stop me, from being happy and from studying, it’s not a problem. When I look at the big picture, it’s nice to be back.

- Have your goals or dreams changed as a result of the situation in Haiti? What are your plans and how do you envision your future?
It’s really hard to say exactly. I do ask myself the question these last day. I’m certain that I want do a master 1 and 2 degree (maybe doctorate degree depending some life situations) in Artificial Intelligence. That’s the first thing I wanted to before I started.
I love creating, I love the new and exploring things, but now I don’t know if I should. I don’t really know if artificial intelligence is a dead field to study and I’ve been asking myself what I will come to do with it in Haiti. I realize, that someone has to bring new things around anyways so it wont matter to come back with a AI major. My problem is if there’s any other field that evolves creating and bringing the new. I don’t want to study things I can’t do anything with later. I always saw myself with a doctorate degree… Now I don’t know yet. A master 2 degree at least. I’ll know for the doctorate degree in the future. I’m thinking of finding a scholarship to help me pay for tuition and I don’t really care if I have to go all the way to Japan. My dad went to Germany and didn’t know much at all in dutch and still he did good. If he can, I can. Even if he couldn’t, I would have do it. Nothing can stop me from trying to do what seem unreal if I want to. People thought that making something that fly was unreal and crazy but the Wright brothers prove them wrong.
I don’t know in what field I’ll will have my master degree though. It may involve programming in it.
I also know I’ll have my own enterprise and with some of my spare times, I should do somethings with little kids. I love been around them and I discovered that when I was teaching taekwondo a long time ago. I should mix my love of kids with my love of computers to do something for them. That would be away to give back to the country I guess.

Dukens LAFAILLE, 3ème année, Sciences Informatiques (L3):

J’étais sur le balcon a coté de la salle de T.F.E., je me suis allongé par terre lors de l’effondrement du building pendant le séisme.
La reprise des cours est une très bonne chose, cela nous permettra de reprendre une vie normale, bien qu’avec beaucoup plus de difficulté pour réussir notre avenir. En effet, les conditions ont empiré. Je pense qu’on devrait faire le strict nécessaire à l’ESIH et réviser à la baisse la note de passage pour cette année.
Haiti est le pays le plus pauvre de l’Amérique, je pense qu’il est temps de penser PAYS avec Honneur et Justice, avec l’homme qu’il faut a la place qu’il faut pour un lendemain meilleur. L’ESIH est l’une des plus respectueuses institutions du pays qui aura toujours le plus noble des rôles, celui d’instruire et de former des cadres pour l’avancement et la reconstruction du pays.

Antenor JUDE, 3ème année, Sciences Informatiques (L3):

1- How are you re-adjusting to your studies at ESIH? How do you feel to be back in the classes?
Sincerely, it wasn’t easy for us to restart with the courses and focus on the study after all these problems adding problem of housing that confront us, the problem of electricity and so on… But when we know that education is the key that opens all the doors we have decided to start over. we started to work in group, we help each order by sharing our knowlegde. the homeless set themselves with those whose houses were not collapsed. However, we are very happy to be back to school.

2-Have your goals or dreams changed as a result of the situation in Haiti? What are your plans and how do you envision your future?
Of course that all our plans have changed after the earthquake. we are confronting a humanitarian dificult other that we are suposed to solve, and this in the immediate. Our future depends on us and we don’t want to give up. we only require a little bit of coaching to continue with studies and that we can helpful to our country.

Nikenley SEVERE, 3ème année, Sciences Informatiques (L3):

1. How are you re-adjusting to your studies at ESIH? How do you feel to be back in the classes?
I’m doing my best to readjust my studies at ESIH. Now we are at a new address. Since the first day of class on March 15, 2010, I try to be always on time, I’m very diligent.
I feel that I become less anxious than before, and I realize if I’m alive, I have to fight to survive. For that, I have to study and to work harder than before.

2. Have your goals or dreams changed as a result of the situation in Haiti? What are your plans and how do you envision your future?
At first I was very disappointed because, in spite of my establishment which is collapsed, I lost my class’ materials, friends and so on. So I worried about how I could get back to school in the same situation. But after a few days of classes, I told myself I’m still alive, thus my goals or dreams have to be.

What are my plans?
- I’d like to pass all the exams planed according to my studies
- To obtain an education grant which will allow me to study at a great university around the world

How do I envision my future?
After my studies, I’d like to become a great computer engineer and also I’d like to be able to work, according to my knowledge in computer engineering, wherever around the world and why not, to start up my own business.

Emmanuel Willer CHARLES, 3ème année, Sciences Informatiques (L3)

Few days after the earthquake, I was lost in a world with no hope. I was always wondering if everything has also collapsed as some buildings in Port-au-Prince. About half a month when from the radio I heard the director s speech about the re opening of ESIH. A wind of hope has blown in my heart. I am happy to be back to school because I ll have the chance to round off my studies and hope for a sholarship for further level. My plans are delayed instead of destroyed because I m still alive I still have the determination even if stuff are actually different. I am ready to toil as hard as I can in order to achieve my personal and collective dreams.now Haiti needs its children.so, I am also ready to actively take part on Haiti s development. I m ready to involv on new issues about technology innovation that can lead Haiti to an economic development.Inspite of the missing ways, I am ready to give a hand to education while sharing my knowledge to the youth.

Interviews courtesy Ecole Supérieure d’Infotronique d’Haìti. Reprinted with Permission. Source: Présentation Générale. (2010). Retrieved September 30, 2010 from Ecole Supérieure d’Infotronique d’Haïti: http://esih.edu/​#interviews

Photo courtesy Ecole Supérieure d’Infotronique d’Haìti. Used with Permission.
Filed Under: Highlight, Stories

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