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universal literacy for haiti
universal literacy for haiti
Helping Young People Create New Worlds
and Partners' Power of Good
Feeding Education.
The Haiti and New Orleans Never Seen on Airports' Screens
Today we report on activity and progress by
Sticking Up For Children's Partners among the Lèkol Toupatou class in Cayes Jacmel; among Students and Staff at College Canapé Vert and the Ecole Foyer Espoir school and the Foyer Espoir Pour les Enfants orphanage in Port-au-Prince; and among the Kuumba Youth Academy at the Ashé Cultural Arts Center in New Orleans.
We also begin today, June 3, 2025, with a broadening of SUFC's Mission. We wish to address the threats to children's security and freedoms that are again--as in 1939 and 1914--rising across Continents. We want to present Alternatives that stress Shared Humanity and Models of Genius, Generosity and Compassion special to Human Beings. One first project in our expanded Mission we call: Five + Five for 2077 into Infinity.
That is, we'll begin this month to ask Supporters of SUFC to fulfill the following Assignment. Please tell us Five Persons within your personal acquaintance whom you admire and why you admire them. Tell us also, please, Five Public Figures whom you admire and why you admire them.
Do you get the idea? Each Supporter's Five + Five of admired individuals (or groups) creates something like a Tree with 10 Branches that may themselves grow and extend. Each Supporter's offering will of course be imbued with good and various reasons for admiration. Each Supporter's Set of 10 will be selected with a view toward Models that may best improve children's future in 2077.
Sticking Up For Children will publish the Five + Five for 2077 into Infinity on this Website and through other Media.
We look forward to the Adventure and the Illuminations. Growth of Models seems to us a Process unstoppable in its independence ad multiplicity. Everyone loves to extol their models. Everyone can dig into possibilties for expression through multi-media.
Very soon, we feel, Forests from the first several offerings of Modeal will be growing
on every Continent--a free force for Good that can only to our imaginations and well-being.
Sticking Up For Children is expanding its reach and services in 2025.
You may gather our intentions from elements in the SUFC Card for this year. Because we see that children are ALMOST EVERYWHERE
threatened more and more with a future which devalues human beings and which promotes censorship, ignorance, racism and segregation, we want to offer more of Culture and Models and Progress exemplifying abilities of every human being to readily advance and uplft through our 21st-century tools and our shared heritage of generous examples.
Our base and foremost hope remains Haiti. Haiti is birthplace of my wife, Maryse Philippe Déjean, and her aunt, Marie Marthe Balin Franck Paul (the Principal of College Canapé Vert and founder of Lèkol Toupatou--School Everywhere), and birthplace of our SUFC Partners MarieJo Poux of the FEPE Orphanage and Jonanthand Saintiné of the EFE School.
Below, you can see photos of Students at EFE; in the southern coastal village of Cayes Jacmel; and at College Canapé Vert from left to right across top row of the SUFC 2025 Card. Next to them are the transcendent Haitian artists Toto Bissainthe and Ti RoRo.
Represented in the accompanying row of images are the painter Joan Mitchell; the poet, prophet, and painter William Blake; the painter Georgia O'Keefe; and writer Johann Wolfgang von Goethe.
These four might easily be replaced by another quartet of compassionate visionaries from different centuries and Continents as examples of the models and inspirations that SUFC intends from hereon to present in multiple Media.
Our world and our past are both a-flowing with bright life and boundless possibilities (none of them robotic) in 2025!
All of the above said, let's get into today's Spring into Summer Update from our Partners in Haiti and Louisiana, May 27, 2025.
Lèkol Toupatou, Cayes Jacmel
You may remember Students in the Adult-Literacy Class taught by Marie Yolene Desiral in Haiti's coastal village of Cayes Jacmel--about
10 miles East of the arts center Jacmel. 18 women were traveling regularly to Yolene's makeshift classroom and learning to read and write in Summer 2024.
You may remember their earnestness--and their "Lékol Toupatou" song!
During Autumn 2024 and Winter 2024-2025, 12 of the Students evolved a
Business. Its names is Pwopte Toupatou. Pwopte means "Clean Up" in Haitian Kréyol. Toupatou means Everywhere. And so: Clean Up Everywhere!
The women knew many neighbors and others along Haiti's southern coast still sought cleaning-liquids in the enduring blockage and shortages across Haiti.
So they made their own.
Voila et Voila! Vwala epi Vwala!
And they bottled their hand-made Pwopte Toupatou in containers that were also gathered and improvised.
Thus the first Batch. Since Autumn of 2024 the group has produced three Batches. Their Cleaning-Product is a big hit. They now used standardized
bottles. They have now a Logo available to use if they like.
They each have become entrenpreneurs. From sales of their Pwopte Toupatou, each is now offering micro-loans to vendors along Haiti's southern Coast.
That is, each Student has in less than the two years since Marie Yolene Desiral began her instruction in Cayes Jacmel:
1) Learned to read and write through Modules of Madame Franck Paul's Mon Livre and the Video-Lessons of Lèkol Toupatou;
2) Begun a collective business with her fellow Students; and
3) Helped others to begin self-sufficiency through their own businesses.
The whole process may seem small and primitive, but my simple sympathies find it to be like a Light into boundless successes ... that need no Robots ... though Robots, should they materialize along Haiti's
southern Coast and wish to be sincerely helpful may be welcome!
Should they develop appreciations of Sunsets, Robots may even become good company for humanity, good "buddies", in this Arrondisement of Haiti.
The photo below of Sunset in Jacmel, 2015, is by the artist known as Jika--Christian James Cadet.
More of The Haiti Never Seen
on Airports' Screens
College Canapé Vert in Port-au-Prince
12 young women in CCV's 'Philosophers' Club' met this past February in the College's Miche Balin Déjean Auditorium.
Eight young men of the Philosophers' Club.
Names of all 20 in the Club, flanking a Galerie de Philosophes: Saint Thomas Aquinas, René Descartes, Plato and Socrates.
Addressing the Group.
Madame Marie Marthe Balin Franck Paul, who turned 89 on April 19, younger sister of Miche and founder of the College in 1974 and author of more than 20 books, receives thanks from Students.
The FACEBOOK Page of College Canapé Vert.
Sticking Up For Children's ally for more than one decade, the Hungry for Music organization headed by Jeff Campbell, connected again in March and May of 2025. HFM has passed along
MORE THAN 30,000 donated instruments since Jeff and partners began it in Washington D.C., 1994!
Check out this interview with Jeff from April 2021 and Links to the HFM website HERE. HFM is like JAMBAR--JAMBAR with its support of more than 20 philanthropic Partners and its more than 3000 energy-bars donated to students' sustenance in Haiti--another greatly giving part of our times.
HFM and Jeff this past March and April gave a whole Band's worth of instruments to the Kuumba Academy of New Orleans' Ashé Cultural Arts Center. Kuumba and the Ashé are partners with Sticking Up For Children since our first year, 2013, and we've enjoyed many Music & Arts Days within the block-long Ashé Builidng. Ramona Graham now heads Kuumba. You can see Ramona happy on May 2 with the Trumpet, Keyboard, Snare Drum and four Trombones that HFM added to the budding Brass Band
among students at the Kuumba Academy.
Again, much more about Hungry For Music and Jeff Campbell can be found HERE.
An early-morning THANK YOU to Hungry For Music and the Kuumba Academy and the Ashé Cultural Arts Center.
The Ecole Foyer Espoir (EFE) school and the Foyer Espoir Pour les Enfants (FEPE) orphanage maintain their missions in the Delmas district of Port-au-Prince, educating and matriculating Students despite recurrent blockages and shortages.
Below is a Student you may remember from five years ago, when her mother gave her to Marie Jo Poux, founder of FEPE, for sustenance, as the mother needed to seek work in the Dominican Republic. Amarie Rose, the name given this near-infant by Marie Jo and Maryse Philippe Déjean and Amarie Rose's particular benefactors in New Orleans, Ken and Melba Ferdinand, became the charge of Jean Baptiste Olivier. "Olivier" was himself orphaned into FEPE immediately after the 7.0 Earthquake of January 2010.
You may recall their history from the 'Care Makes Care' Page on this site from late 2023.
You may also recall Olivier's progress as a photographer and videographer from our 2024 year-end review of EFE and FEPE.
Students at the FEPE orphanage who also attend school at Ecole Foyer Espoir.
Amarie Rose is now a Graduate of the first Form at EFE. You may see how both she and Olivier's skills as a photgrapher have grown.
College Canapé Vert celebrated Haiti's Flag Day on Friday, May 16.
Students very young to teen-aged once more spoke through a microphone to the whole 400+ enrollment of the College.
Musicians with Recorders from Hungry for Music in 2020 accompanied speakers.
Madame Marie Marthe Balin Franck Paul, the Principal who founded College Canapé Vert in 1974, with one of her chief aides, Mme. Meirelle Cherie Antoine.
One speaker.
More for the future--2077 and beyond.
Ladies of Lèkol Toupatou in Cayes Jacmel sent along, through their Teacher, Marie Yolene Desiral, an accounting of how their now-thriving Business in Cleaning Products, Pwopte Toupatou,
(Clean-Up Everywhere, you may remember from the article above) has used funding from Sticking Up For Children ... so that now these Ladies are themselves funding others!
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