If you’ve walked into the Writers House lately, you’ve probably seen them. Photographs hanging from the walls - of third-world poverty and nameless children. Kids in bright shirts sent from the West. And a landscape of rolling hills.
Taken by College alumna Rebecca Sherman, the images capture daily life in Fondwa, Haiti, a poor mountain village 40 miles southwest of the capital, Port-au-Prince. Like much of Haiti, Fondwa suffers from deforestation, a lack of drinking water and virtually no healthcare.
But 18 years ago, a Roman Catholic priest used American donations to help Fondwa form its Association of Peasants. This rural cooperative worked to solve local problems, resulting in the 2004 founding of a university.
The University of Fondwa now enrolls more than 20 students, who learn business, medicine and agriculture. The University employs 15 staff members and owns six computers, which remain on for three hours per night, using gas-powered generators.
It’s a small operation, but one aimed at making a big difference. Because the idea is not merely to educate students, but to empower them to return to their villages and help.
“The philosophy is that they will go back to their home communities to help promote development,” Renate Schneider, the university’s German-born rector, told the Chronicle of Higher Education last year. “You have to do development in the rural areas before you can solve the problems in Port-au-Prince.”
It’s a radical model - and one that American universities should look to when dealing with surrounding communities. Obviously, students at Penn don’t come from ramshackle homes without water. But just as small towns in Haiti could benefit from what Fondwa’s students learn, so too could West Philly benefit from the skills Penn students develop.
Of course, in Fondwa, the university uses donations to pay for all students’ tuitions. Here, where most of us contribute to tuition costs, we feel we have the right to choose how to use our education.
But perhaps, then, we might learn from Fondwa’s professors. Some of them are Americans who elsewhere could earn far more than their current $400 a month. But they don’t go elsewhere.
They stay and they sacrifice and they teach, in the hope that their knowledge will spread to 20 students who’ll each spread it to one home and, ultimately, one village. It may be slow, but it’s a way to pay education forward - to give learning a life of its own - and keep the chain of benefit going.
It would be nice if we could all say the same of own education. Realistically, though, most of don’t share, or even act on, what we learn. I certainly don’t.
But in the next two weeks, at the very least, we can be small links in Fondwa’s chain. Tonight at 6, the Writers House will hold a reception with Sherman. On Nov. 7, the International House will screen a short documentary, “The Road to Fondwa.”
And those photographs I mentioned earlier are for sale - with all proceeds going to the University of Fondwa.
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