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Thursday, April 1

Pilot Group in Place
About a dozen people have been meeting on Thursday afternoons from 3:00-4:00 p.m. to do Refleksyon Bib la. Abelard and I took turns leading the first few groups, but now the role of facilitator rotates to a different person each week. This way, we’ve all agreed, each person will eventually feel confident to start their own group if he or she wants to. Of the dozen or so people involved, I think about ten denominations are represented. Denominational fragmentation (in large part thanks to missionaries, I suppose) is strong and sometimes bitter here. So we’re hopeful that this can break down some barriers, that this can be useful within Episcopal, Catholic, and conservative Protestant congregations. It’s weekly nourishing for me to sit in a circle with these sisters and brothers to hear their insights and to share in reflection and prayer.

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Thursday, May 18

New Groups Born
Four new groups have been started by participants of the Dabòn pilot group—spread out in the Dabòn area, up to a forty-five minute walk away. Excitingly, a few of the groups have illiterate participants; we were hoping this approach would open up Bible study to those who can’t read, who make up about 60% of the adult population. This was what we envisioned, but we had to wait and see what people wanted to do. One advantage of this approach is that there isn’t money or construction or big infrastructure involved in this project, so its both economical and we can pretty quickly find out who is interested and who isn’t. We can’t manipulate “demand” with money, because our “supply” is something simple and without a proprietor. It’s not that I don’t want money and jobs to rain down on Haiti. I do. So many people are excruciatingly poor. But for that very reason, money has enormous power (well, it does everywhere, right?) and one has to be extremely wise or it is easy to do more harm than good.

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Thursday, June 3

Expanding the Guide…with Permission
Not many people here have Bibles, and Bibles in Creole are especially uncommon though it’s the primarily language of everyone except the bourgeois elite. (Unfortunately, French Bibles are more common though those who aren’t highly educated usually don’t understand French well [click here for more details].) Weekly typing and copying a Bible passage for the group has quickly become laborious, when functioning printers and copy machines aren’t always easy to find. So I’ve expanded the brochure to include a dozen Bible passages, taking a sample of Psalms, Old Testament prophets, Gospels, and Epistles so people become familiar with using the method with various parts of Scripture. The idea is that a group can easily start with a brochure and have everything they need to function (if they meet weekly) for three months. After that they can find Bibles, which we may try to subsidize so they’re affordable. I went to downtown Port-au-Prince to ask for permission to use the passages from the most recent Creole translation, whose copyright is owned by the Haitian Biblical Society. I asked the couple of guys managing the store what I could do. They said, “Just use it. You don’t need permission.” I suspected that was true and was tempted by their offer…but have enough experience here to keep pushing till they told me where I could find their boss. Upstairs, the immediate response was, “Yes, you need permission!” But, fortunately, the director saw me, looked at our guide booklet, liked what we were doing, and had a letter typed up for me immediately. Relief. This kind of bureaucratic step can happen here either way, faster or unbelievably slower (70% of the time) than in the U.S. Got both lucky and encouraged this time. We continue to test this guide booklet and hopefully can refine it and do a large print run in early fall.

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Monday, June 7

It Goes Horribly Wrong
On invitation from a pastor I had met, myself and two Haitian colleagues went to an evening Bible study/leadership training at a local church near our office to introduce a group of twenty-five people to Refleksyon Bib la. Twenty minutes in, someone in the group interrupted the flow of conversation and asked boldly: “What churches do you attend?” One of my two colleagues is Catholic. The actual study we did went fine, but the debriefing afterward was a negative, charged affair in which some of the participants were angry about whatever our hidden “ecumenical” agenda was and that a Catholic was involved. I don’t understand all the tension, but clearly we’ve run smack into the bitter wall that often divides denominations here. After, the pastor was apologetic to us. But clearly we need to work on how to present this to very conservative Protestant churches, because in theory the method should be as attractive to and useful for them as anyone else. We want each church to be able to use this within their congregation, though in some ways the suspicions of our accusers tonight were right: we wouldn’t mind if this broke down some of the dissention between various denominations.

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Friday-Sunday, June18-20

Leaders Unite
I attended a three-day conference of young Haitian leaders about how they could work toward peace in their country [click here to see more on The Experiment in Alternative Leadership]. We did a session on our Bible study method. About fifteen people participated and loved it. They saw how it was both a good spiritual tool—and also promoted the kind of listening and respectful exchange essential for a healthy society and democracy. Invitations to hold introductory seminars in Les Cayes (a city in the south of the country), Lagonav (an large island just off the mainland), and Latounel (a mountain village above Dabòn) resulted. It was encouraging to see so many articulate, passionate, intelligent young leaders coming together on how they can help their country—and also, on the side, encouraging to receive good feedback from many of them about the early direction of Living Words. Also, one school principal asked me if he thought we could adapt this so it would be useful for schools and church Sunday schools. It’s a great idea, one Abelard had mentioned before. We’ll start brainstorming about this.

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Thursday-Saturday, July 1-3

Bouncing Across the Caribbean Sea
Jude, Abelard, and I took the trip to Matenwa, a town on the island of Lagonav, to do an introductory seminar. A few teachers and the director of a unique, dynamic elementary school there [click here to learn more about Lekol Metenwa] had done Refleksyon Bib la several times and wanted us to come and do a seminar. Forty people gathered in the school for about three hours. They received us so warmly; we slept at the house of one of the teachers. The seminar seemed to go really well. We’ll see what comes of it. (Okay, now for a brief digression on the trip: To get to Lagonav, I took a ten minute hike down a mountain from our house, took one ride in the back of a pickup truck taxi, then a short walk through the city, then another pickup truck taxi, then met Abelard and Jude, then another short pickup taxi, then another ten-minute pickup taxi ride, then wait awhile in a bus, then an hour-long bus ride over jostling roads, then eat rice and beans at the port, cram into a single-engine fifteen-foot-long motorboat, bounce across the Caribbean for forty-five minutes, arrive at the port on the other side, sit and drink a Coke and wait for two hours for the next pickup truck taxi, cram in to the back of a pickup sitting on the side rail in back holding on with one arm to not fall out, with a teenager on my lap and suitcases jammed into my shins, over an hour-plus ride in the hot sun up mountainous terrain on what might be the worst dirt roads I’ve ever been on. When descending from the pickup, I almost fell because my right leg was numb from hip to little toe. By the time we arrived, I had thought a few times: I could be in Los Angeles by now, and much less tired. But we were laughing and talking the whole way, with my colleagues and with strangers—surely a manifestation of grace.)

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Monday, July 5

Meanwhile, Across the Sea
Robert, one of the smart, talented teachers on Lagonav who we were with a couple of days ago, wrote me an email to say that a group he was facilitating had just met. They’re going to meet every Monday. He asked, “Could I send him more booklets?”

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Thursday, July 22

Dabòn Pilot Group Evaluation
We had agreed several months ago to take this day to evaluate our experience to date. It was really fun. Lots of energy in the group, lots of laughing and encouragement. The four groups people have started are running well. The participants are talking about how to advance this approach more in the Dabòn area, maybe organizing another seminar. Everyone in the group has facilitated at least once, and now people no longer look at the step-by-step instructions; they just know how to do it. At the end is a quick discussion about their trip tomorrow. Unfortunately I can’t go, but six of them are taking a five-hour hike up the mountain to a village called Latounel. A couple of people who had experienced Refleksyon Bib la liked it and wanted to introduce it to their church, community, and schools. Though I’m disappointed I can’t go, I also think it’s great that we already have an instance of groups and seminars spinning off and multiplying without my needing to be directly involved.

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Friday, July 23

Up the Mountain
Five participants in the Dabòn pilot group took the five-hour hike to Latounel to do an introductory seminar for them. Fifty-seven people attended. They said it went well; they expect new groups will start immediately up there. One of the advantages of this approach is that it can spin off without our involvement. We’ve been regularly hearing of different groups that have integrated this into their functioning—which also means that we can’t know about all the people or groups that are doing this. This is wonderful for the program, but unfortunate because it would be fun to follow how things were multiplying. I would guess there are now between ten and twenty-five groups using this method regularly.

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Wednesday, July 28

Women’s Group
A group of women down in Port-au-Prince have been practicing Refleksyon Bib la at their weekly Wednesday meetings for a few weeks, since my colleague, Jude, introduced it to them. I have met some of them on other occasions. They’re immediately impressive women—all who came together to form this group because, as I understand it, they had been raped or otherwise harmed during Haiti’s military coup of 1991-93. They were gracious and teasing and kind. One of them facilitated the meeting as we looked at Jeremiah 7:1-11 together. I left humbled and strengthened.

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Monday, September 27

Progress on Lagonav Island
Two Haitian colleagues and I traveled to Anse a Galets, the biggest city on the island of Lagonav (see entry for July 1-3) over the weekend to do a seminar on Living Words’ participatory approach to Bible study. We were invited by two World Vision staff members, who in turn had invited area pastors and church lay leaders. About twenty-five people attended from 9:00 a.m. to 1:00 p.m. on Saturday. It went really well. We talked about the theory and theology behind the method. We did the experience twice (and people’s reflections and prayers often touched on the ongoing suffering in Gonaives, the city ravaged by the floods of Hurricane Jeanne). One of the teachers from Matenwa (further up in the island) came down to help us lead the seminar, as well as a woman who has been leading a woman’s group with the method since she learned about it two months ago. She said more than half of her friends—the women in the group—were illiterate, and they all loved studying Scripture and praying together like this.

Participants enjoyed the seminar and asked good questions. Many in the group decided they wanted to start using it in their churches right away. There was a playful battle for the extra booklets at the end. We hope to return in a few months for a follow-up meeting—to see how they’re doing, to learn about what they’re learning, and to see if there’s any other way we can support them.

On booklets: A week ago we picked up our first big print-run of booklets. We printed 2,000 (at about 40 cents each). They’re twelve pages long, with a glossy cover so they’re more durable. They’re completely in Creole. The cover says (in Creole): “Reflection on the Bible: A Method for Reading and Praying with a Small Group. A Method for Seeking Unity in God. ‘For when two or three come together in my name, there I am with them.’ Jesus, Matthew 18:20” Then inside the booklets are a step-by-step explanation of the method, a dozen Bible passages in Creole (because Creole Bibles are relatively rare), suggestions for what passages to continue with when finished with the booklet (though the approach will work with anything in the Bible, some passages are easier in the beginning than others), and contact information for people in five different cities in Haiti.

Piti piti n ap avanse. (Little by little we’re moving forward.)

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Monday, November 16

Visiting Les Cayes
Shelly (my wife) and I headed out to the city of Les Cayes, a city on the southern tip of Haiti, about a five-hour drive away with some stretches of smooth, paved road and one long, long stretch with deep, unavoidable potholes every 10 to 50 yards.

We held the Sunday afternoon seminar outside, right next to a church. The youth group was meeting and singing inside, so we carried out six long wooden benches and arranged them in a kind of circle under a few trees. Twenty-eight people gathered, an even mix of young, middle age, and older, of women and men. About ten of the participants work for PAPE, which is Beyond Borders' partner organization for child literacy in that region. (We support 57 of their literacy centers, serving nearly 2,000 of the poorest children.)

We started by praying together. Then Samson, a Haitian colleague, and I did an introduction/explanation of this participatory Bible-study method and distributed the booklets we recently printed.

Then we seperated into three small groups to study a passage using this approach. Samson led one. Frantzie, a woman who works for PAPE and who organized this afternoon's meeting, led another. I led the third, in which we reflected on Psalm 23. In it, people talked and prayed about God's protection, about how it seemed their country was currently passing through the shadow of the Valley of Death. Yet they know God is with them.

We reconvened as a group of twenty-eight people, and everyone seemed excited about what they had just experienced:

"It's like each person gets a full meal of God's Word, cooked and prepared especially for them."

"This way, it's not just what the preacher hears God saying for us. It's all of us together listening to what God says."

"We can use this in church, in our families, in our organizations..."

"When are you coming back?"

The group invited us to return in three weeks, so that they could invite more people. I met with Frantzie and discussed adapting this approach so it could work for children. A group of us went for a swim at a beautiful beach after the meeting. It was an encouraging trip.

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