April 2007
Go fly a kite
What a trip! If you’re over 50 you need to try it again.
If you’re under 50, it may be the first time but try a real
life experience—go fly a kite. I really don’t think
virtual reality would be quite the same. Kite flying in rural
Haiti is a pretty tame experience. The bare mountains create some
strong updrafts and there are no trees, telephone or electric
wires. City kite flying in Port-au-Prince is quite different.
Sharyn and I are now teaching educational technology and agriculture
at the Episcopal University in PaP. A college homework assignment
started this whole story.
Our students’ educational abilities vary dramatically.
The majority of students come from lower economic levels. Although
their parents sacrificed terribly to send their kids to school,
many of the elementary and high schools were not nearly as faithful
in educating the students. Almost across the board, the rural
students are academically weaker than their city cousins. Kids
coming through schools with lower tuition are not as well prepared.
And the skinnier they are and the more slovenly dressed, the less
focused and able to compete they are. You can theorize, strategize,
or rationalize it; I’m just reporting what we see.
As un-provable as the theory of gravity or that thing about the
earth being round is the generalization about the difficulty Haitian
students have with creative thinking and problem solving. Our
students—rural or urban, skinny or skinnier—have come
through 12 to 15 years of rote learning as their educational background.
Manipulatives, hands-on experiences, labs or research papers have
never been part of the package. Both Sharyn and I are teaching
third- and fourth-year college students, and most have spent less
than ten hours in their life in front of a working computer. And
those who have, that was their only lab course ever. Thus, university
life doesn’t offer a whole lot more opportunities for learning
how to solve problems creatively. Since the university doesn’t
have sufficient funds for electricity and staff salaries, there
is nothing available for teacher materials. Well, that is not
entirely true. For each three-hour class I am given a reusable
rag for an eraser plus two pieces of white chalk. The point is,
creative thinking is necessary to set up an environment to learn
creative thinking.
As a precursor to creating a business plan for a course on starting
small agricultural enterprises, the students were asked to make
a case study on kites. In Haiti, kites are toys for the really
poor, mostly homemade from bits of trash with a discarded plastic
bag often the main sail. Kites are all over this time of year.
Imagine doing research for such a target market or studying the
competition. Better yet, it’s a seasonal spring industry
with some real distinctive demographics. I thought the homework
assignment was pretty straightforward: “Write a page or
two about lessons learned from studying the kite market.”
Many students did nothing. Several scratched a few numbers in
incoherent form that showed they too had done essentially nothing.
A larger number of students complained they couldn’t figure
out how to begin. A few wrote how they wanted to sell $5 commercial
kites to penniless street kids.
One student wrote about flying kites. He talked about trying
to locate on a tall building (they all have flat roofs here).
He wrote how this minimized risks, got above the competition,
and eliminated threats from older kids or power lines stealing
the kite, making better use of resources of string and wind. He
even had a goal of making the kite disappear in the clouds. He
said all that was necessary using the common local materials was
to attach a lighter weight string and he could touch the heavens.
His response was not what I had envisioned; but it was far beyond
my imagination. This slight shadow normally sat in the back of
a fairly arrogant, self-assured noisy classroom. Rural, skinnier,
and more slovenly dressed than his classmates, he surprised us
all. One never knows when generalizations or belief systems are
about to be rattled. When I asked him how he knew so much about
flying kites, he said he had done it himself.
He made my Easter story this year. He was someone no one expected,
using what he found available, doing what others couldn’t
imagine in a format that rephrased the essential question. As
with Easter, sometimes the answers come from the most unlikely
places.
A few days ago after paying far too much for a neighbor kid’s
secondhand kite, I took it up on the roof of our apartment building.
Four stories high, there were no wires or trees competing for
my breeze. It wasn’t all that easy at first but it served
as a great conversation starter. You’d be surprised how
many people you can find on a rooftop in Haiti gazing heavenward.
My brief market study revealed a mass of advisors but not many
veterans. Wonder if that holds true in other “markets”?
Rodney and Sharyn
The 2007 Mission Yearbook for Prayer & Study, p.
49 |
