While political protests and street violence in Haiti spread almost as rapidly as the pandemic, shutting down schools and businesses in the summer of 2020, Ted Jacquet’s 15-year-old sister, Traci Lara, puzzled over her math textbooks, trying to finish high school.
Jacquet, who grew up in the Haitian city of Pétion-Ville, was in the U.S. that summer, preparing for his third undergraduate year at Earlham College, a Quaker school located in Richmond, Indiana. His sister would often call him from Haiti for homework help in another “peyi lok,” or Haitian Creole for lockdown. Like many young people, she was missing school weeks at a time because of political instabilities.
“When she didn’t understand a math topic or something like that, I’d try to explain it so that she could stay caught up in school for her exams,” said Jacquet, whose sister was about to take one of two important national tests to be able to go to college. If she failed that exam, she would need to wait another year to retake it.
“My sister is also very brilliant, so she’d find articles online to teach herself. But she lost almost two months of school,” said Jacquet, whose sister is considering studying medicine at university.
While wealthy families could pay for tutors to help students in lockdowns, low-income students could not afford such resources. Dr. Fabienne Doucet, an associate professor of early childhood and urban education at New York University, noted this problem has been ongoing. She has researched Haiti’s school systems and why educational reform has stalled.
“Since 2019 and 2020, with instability and fear, kids getting an education is just a challenge. It’s far more of a challenge than it should be,” said Doucet. “And yet education is extremely important to Haitians. They value it so highly and see it as the way that their children can get out of poverty to have a better future.”
While helping his sister, Jacquet came up with an idea. He noticed that most online lessons were not in the students’ native languages of French or Haitian Creole. That made learning remotely even harder. And the resources were audio or text files rather than videos, which may engage more students.
