Feels like coming home: Returning to Cap-Haitien for the start of Educator and Leadership Institute Year 4

This afternoon our team of Canadian educators returned to Cap-Haitien, Haiti for Year Four of the Educator and Leadership Institute. There are 30 of us this week who will be supporting 600 Haitian teachers and principals as well as 200+ children in a STEAM camp and 50 university students in an English as a Second Language program. It will be the largest ELI since we started.

As we took an old school bus from the airport to our hotel, a number of Canadian participants commented on how much it felt like coming home. And it does. There is a feeling of connectedness to the area. Deep relationships have been established.

And yet we really are not coming home. None of us live the life of our Haitian colleagues. For the most part we don't live in a fragile context where political protests can take over a street, where the value of a $1 a year ago is worth 1/2 that today, or where we are unsure that we are going to get paid at the end of the month.

Yet, we can feel a sense of home - not because we live or can fully understand what it means to live in a context like Haiti - but because we share common ideas of home: A place where we feel welcomed, where relationships exist, where we feel special, and where we can have uncomfortable conversations.

This does describe my/our relationship with Haiti. There are many, many aspects of this country that I will never understand. There are many aspects of my own country - and my own community - that I will not fully understand. Yet, it is still home. So too Haiti is home.

Tomorrow we build on the work of the past four years in an afternoon of planning with our Haitian partners. This year, Haitian and Canadian instructors will be supporting each other in teaching the courses. This is a first for ELI and will support the transition of ELI from a predominantly Canadian led experience to one that has shared leadership. This is what happens in homes too ... leadership transitions. Stay tuned through the week as I hope this will be a re-occurring theme!
 

Steve and Jhonel, two of ELI's leaders