Haitian teachers tour county schools

Thursday, May 22, 2008

Haitian teachers tour county schools

by Jeremy Hauck | Staff Writer

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Tom Fedor⁄The Gazette

Teachers from Saint Jerome parish school, located in Haiti, visited Walkersville High School on May 15. The group toured the school to observe various classes and learn about American education. Above, Walkersville junior Maria Bennici talks with Gedeus Wisline Rosier, a school inspector from Haiti.

When asked what impression he had upon stepping onto American soil for the first time in his life, Wisler Luberisse, a Spanish and English teacher from Haiti said, ‘‘Everything is big here.”

Luberisse and seven other education officials from the poorest country in the Western Hemisphere — of Haiti’s 8.9 million people living in an area slightly smaller than Maryland, four-fifths are poor — toured Walkersville High School last week.

With his thick accent and tropic-wear shirt, Luberisse stood out like a Caribbean palm in the hallways bustling with small town-America students.

From May 12 until Tuesday, Luberisse and eight fellow teachers and a priest, all from St. Jerome Parish in Haiti, stayed at the homes of parishioners of Walkersville’s St. Timothy Roman Catholic Church.

St. Timothy has had a sister parish partnership with St. Jerome since 2002. Last year, according to Father Andy Aaron of St. Timothy, the church collected $40,000 from its parishioners to send to the parish. The money pays for food to feed 1,700 children daily, some of the parish school teachers’ salaries and training for people exercising Catholic outreach.

The visit to Frederick County was the result of three years of planning and saving on the part of the Haitians, according to members of the church’s Sister Parish Action Committee.

David Williams of Woodsboro is co-chair of the committee. Williams has visited the country three times in three years, most recently in February. He said the personal relationships fostered by the partnership are more important than the aid he and his fellow church goers send south.

‘‘Their community family is now part of our community family,” Williams said Tuesday. ‘‘There’s a lot of spiritual reward for an American parish to engage in a twinning relationship. You don’t know what that is until you personally experience it.”

Although a spike in food prices has meant that the teachers have gone without pay for two months, according to Williams, the teachers are still fortunate when compared to their fellow Haitians — they make $3,000 per year, compared to the average income of less than $400.

Williams’ travels have shown him that most Haitians live in houses made of cinder blocks.

After tours of Walkersville High and three Frederick schools, St. Timothy parishioners took the Haitians on Friday to Wal-Mart, where they had about $100 each to spend, raised by parishioners.

‘‘The amazement of being in that store for the first time caused them to wander around a lot,” Williams said. ‘‘They don’t have any stores at all, it’s all open-air markets.”

Students, in question-and-answer sessions with the Haitians on May 15, were interested in the differences between their schools and schools in Haiti, according to three students who guided the Haitians in small groups to visit more than two dozen classrooms.

Juniors Maria Bennici, 16, Abby Stone, 16, and Chrystelle Muleka, 17 — all proficient in French — said students were surprised at Haiti’s large class sizes and lack of electricity and textbooks.

Luberisse told a ninth-grade government class that corporal punishment is common in Haiti, although he doesn’t practice it; he usually makes disruptive students memorize lines of text.

‘‘The more we learn about the challenges of others, the more we learn about ourselves,” David Kehne, principal of Walkersville High, told Linda Morgan, a church chaperone, during a break for lunch in the tour.