Education that goes beyond reading and arithmetic
Alongside the regular Haitian curriculum, children at all three schools learn about human values. The aim: children who know what they are capable of, and have an answer to the street.
Today’s lesson
- Truth
- Right conduct
- Peace
- Love
- Non-violence
These five values run through every lesson. Through stories, conversation, games, music and simply doing, children discover what is already inside them: self-confidence, and care for one another.
Teachers learn it first themselves
Together with the European Sathya Sai Education Institute, Bon Timoun has run training in the pedagogy of human values. More than 180 teachers and young people took part. Until 2020 Katinka travelled to Haiti several times a year for this. Now the training runs online from Europe, and a Haitian team delivers it in Creole to school teams and parents.
Saturday Club and summer school
On Saturdays there is the Human Values Club, for pupils and children from the neighbourhood: sport, games, music, stories and conversation. And in the summer the schools stay open – this summer for more than 450 children in four places. That keeps the children off the streets, and they still get a meal every day.
Why this is so needed
Haiti became independent in 1804, the first country founded by people who had freed themselves from slavery. Today it is the poorest country in the Western Hemisphere. After the 2010 earthquake and the political crisis of recent years, gangs control large parts of Port-au-Prince.
Gangs stop the tap-taps, the local minibuses, and rob people of whatever they are carrying, down to a toddler’s lunchbox. More than one in ten Bon Timoun children has lost a parent to the gang war. There, a school T-shirt is more than clothing: a child in uniform is more likely to be left alone.