Education in Haiti

This morning as Santo and I were riding in the taxi to run errands in Cap and then to pick up Christine, our newest volunteer and American midwife, the first thing I noticed was that Haitian children go to school on Saturday even though they only go half days all week.  Santo was shocked when I told him that American kids HAVE to go to school 5 days a week, all day long from age 5 until they're old enough to drop out of high school or until they graduate at age 18.  The second thing I noticed was that a man who had to have been in his 50's was wearing the same impossibly, impeccably pressed uniform as all the school-aged children around him.  I say "impossibly, impeccably pressed" because Haiti has a ridiculous amount of dust and dirt around yet their whites are SO WHITE and everything is ironed so well they could give the US military a run for their money.  I usually feel like a slob when I pull a shirt out of my drawer and throw it on knowing full well I have wrinkles all over and my patients who eat just once a day come to see me in their Sunday best with not a wrinkle or speck of dust on them.  Anyway, back to the man going to school: He stood on the side of the road with kids 1/5 of his age waiting for a tap-tap to take him to school and it hit me that he is probably finally at a point in his life where he can afford to get an education! Maybe he came from a poor family with several children and was never able to go to school or at least not able to complete his education.  Many of our staff members have an elementary education because for whatever reason their families couldn't afford to send them to school.  From what I'm told, the cost of education goes up depending on which school you're in (Kindergarten, Primary or Secondary school) so this could be part of it, but Lucien told me it would be about 300-500 Haitian dollars per year for a student to go to school.  This amounts to between $38-$63 US dollars per year.  Our education system in the US, though it definitely has its faults, along with so many things I see here in Haiti, make me so glad that in the US we HAVE to go to school.  It also makes me so glad that we HAVE to pay taxes so we don't have craters in our roads the size of Texas and trash in our oceans and streams and on our roadways like they do in Haiti.  I know we all complain about paying our taxes, especially with April 15th looming, but maybe the next time you catch yourself complaining about it you'll remember this man and realize that if he had been born in the US, he most-likely wouldn't be going to school on this sunny Saturday.

Thanks for reading,

-Dokte Sarah