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Portable Schools with Musical Beds

EFE students, FEPE orphans at 3D-printin

Bright eyes and smiles ... A gathering of students and Principals in Port-au-Prince, Haiti for a Sticking Up For Children-sponsored 3D-Printing Workshop, November of 2017. Many of the students are survivors of the 2010 earthquake. They persevere in their progress even when their

brick-and-mortar schools are blocked from opening. Photo by Maryse Philippe Déjean. 

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Senior graduates of College Canapé-Vert, June 2018.

Young graduates of Ecole

Foyer Espoir, June 2018.

Portable Schools

Crises can produce creative solutions. Sticking Up For Children's youth-education partners in Haiti are finding new ways to convey lessons to students who are blocked from going to school. Their methods may have universal benefit.

 

You may know that Autumn 2019 was especially difficult across Haiti. From early September to early December of 2019 anti-Administration protests blocked streets. Literal walls went up beside burning tires. Students could not attend school. Still, Principals, teachers and students found ways to communicate and to continue education. 

 

Now four instituional partners of Sticking Up For Children in Haiti are embarked on a solution whose transformational uses could be global. In November Madame Marie-Marthe Balin Franck Paul, Principal of College Canapé-Vert and a former Mayor of Port-au-Prince, had the idea that mobile-phones and the WhatsApp application could be combined to convey print and audio lessons anytime, anywhere. Jonathand Saintiné, Principal of the Ecole Foyer Espoir (EFE) school and Marie-Jo Poux, founder of the Foyer Espoir Pour les Enfants (FEPE) orphanage, embrace this new method of continuing education. Both Marie-Jo and Jonathand were already working with parents and students to advance education despite the closure of schools.

Madame Marie-Marthe Balin Franck-Paul as

Madame Paul was mobile-

phone provider Digicel's Entrepeneur of the Year for Education in the earthquake

year of 2010.

Jonathands of EFE with donated trombone.

Jonathand Saintiné with

trombone donated by Hungry for Music. He's seen EFE grow from 147 to 258 students in three years.

Marie-Jo and orphans outside FEPE circa

Madame Marie-Jose Poux, a former Hospice Nurse in Ohio, founded the FEPE orphanage two months before the 2010 earthquake struck Port-au-Prince. Here Marie-Jo is with orphans and students outside FEPE in 2011.

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Students at the FEPE orphanage,

Christmas 2019. How they've

thrived testifies to them and their

teachers. Support HFHCF!

A Curriculum with Musical Beds

Pieces fit together perfectly for advancing Portable Schools in 2020. Madame Paul is the author of a textbook in four languages (English, French, Kréyol, and Spanish) that's distributed to first-year students across Haiti. It's titled Mon Livre Unique. You can see it below. It's ideal for teaching a second or third language. It also offers instruction in Citizenship, Experimental Sciences, Mathematics, Music, and five other Subjects. Madame Paul and her "team" have already recorded seven Lessons for dissemination through mobile-phone and WhatsApp.

Sticking Up For Children's supporters among musicians and writers offer further tools for teaching. Science has shown that music enhances learning. David Amram ('One of the most skilled and versatile musicians has ever produced'--Washington Post ), for one, has given us his Duos album to draw on. Jean Hervé Paul, a teacher of music for 30 years, is giving classes at College Canapé-Vert that students from EFE and FEPE will soon join. Sarah Elizabeth Charles, Alex de Grassi, and William Parker will also contribute. See SUFC's Music page for more of our supporters.

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Mon Livre Unique  ... is Madame Paul's illustrated textbook in four languages for first-year students of Languages, Mathematics, Experimental Sciences, and seven other Subjects. The book is mainly meant for speakers of French and Haitian Kréyol. It's 8.5 x 11 inches and consists of 25 Units and 243 numbered pages. It's the basis for many hours of audio teaching. It provides a model for teaching across any pair or set of languages.

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David Amram, composer, conductor, multi-instrumentalist, and Sarah Elizabeth Charles, Alex de Grassi, and William Parker are amomg the contributors of music to enhance the Portable Schools.

"A Teacher Never Dies"

Marie-Jo Poux said the above statement in relation to Marie-Marthe Balin Franck Paul. Madame Paul was Madame Poux's teacher when Marie-Jo was a Mademoiselle in Port-au-Prince. Marie-Jo says now that she founded the FEPE orphanage with Madame Paul's example of service in mind. "We all modeled

our behavior on her."

The idea of Portable Schools with Musical Beds that arose from schoolchildren's needs in Haiti. It, however, you may readily see is a model that may be transferred to other nations and other languages and across borders. It can work along the U.S. / Mexican border, for example. It can work for immigrants everywhere. It can also serve as precedent for indepedent exchanges of helpful and even illuminatimg information among masses of people. Please help us make this model and precedent a greater reality.

Visit our Gifts page. You'll see there pieces that artists such as Big Queen Cherice Harrison-Nelson, John Bukaty, Dr. John and Idris Muhammad have contributed to Sticking Up For Children to help us raise funds. Click to jump to our Store.

Or you can donate through Stripe or Paypal to help with this great expansion of means by which Haitian children--partners with Sticking Up For Children--and indeed all people can learn. We aim to raise $22,000 to buy 160 mobile phones and 160 132-gigabyte jump-drives for s160 tudents over he first three months of our Portable Schools with Musical Beds. 

 

Please be sure to include your email, if you like, so that we can keep you informed of progress through video, audio, and photos.

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Jean-Hervé_Paul_with_trumpet_from_Eddie

Music-teacher Jean Hervé Paul with the Eddie Gale signature trumpet donated to

SUFC by Dennis Kyne of Veterans for Peace.

Madame Paul's birthday is celebrated

in Port-au-Prince.

SUFC logo lettering on gold April 2016 v
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