Education in Haiti: Fondation Justima-Education in Haiti and La Releve in Our Classrooms

We have been working on issues like that since 2001. But we stopped just for the last presidential elections of 2006. Now, FONDATION JUSTIMA is geared to resume this important work and to pick up where we left off.

This La Relève in the Classroom Project is to contribute to start bringing answers nationwide to these questions in the classrooms of Haiti with lessons plans that have laboratory, video-support and fresh ideas that can revolutionize teaching in Haiti for the today’s needs of our country and its tomorrow’s demands.

This project’s purpose is to connect every idea our young are learning in Haiti’s classrooms with a fun-filled adventure and challenge of re-imagining one’s native local community in light of that discovery. So, if the young are the young of Cite Soleil, let them re-imagine Cite Soleil, a Cite-Soleil.2, a higher and different version of Cite Soleil in light of the lessons plans discovery. If they are the young of Port-de-Paix, let them re-imagine Port-de-Paix in Port-de-Paix.2, the only conditions to have a different Haiti that plays in a higher plane field, such a new Haiti Justima calls Haiti.2.

1) We are piloting this project in 40 primary and secondary level classrooms of Port-de-Paix, Léogane, Jérémie and Port-au-Prince in which we are providing each classroom with a laboratory, other equipment, and audio-video documentaries in Creole and in French that serve as teaching aids.

2) We want the teachers in these classrooms to use these laboratory and video documentaries to bring the teaching alive in our 4 main areas of concentration of interest_; a) natural and physical sciences, b) applied math, c) history and geography, and c) languages_.

3) We want the teachers to experiment with the students about no longer perpetuating in Haiti the traditional system of rote memorization of a lesson plan that the student cannot even relate to, let alone understand. We want each student to grasp each of these 4 critical areas of interest if their native locality is to secure a different future.

4) We need books, laboratory, back up power generator, telephone satellite, computer and audio-video equipment, and teaching and learning materials in these targeted fields in whatever languages they are. We need also a countless number of Haitians who know these fields well and who are or would be ready to volunteer to help us put together or record the appropriate Creole and/or the French translations and adaptations.

5) Of course we need the operational funds to deploy periodically in these classrooms people like you as La Relève and as supplemental resources for these teachers so we can make this whole experimentation work. Our foundation, FONDATION JUSTIMA is footing the bill but we want your symbolic participation as an encouragement, as a statement that you too care and that we are going to get supported because the problem is not just our problem.