Gangs have taken over Haiti. Schools must educate anyway.
| Port-au-Prince, Haiti
Neighborhoods in Haiti’s capital and surrounding metropolitan areas are turning into ghost towns as gang violence grows.
After decades of political turmoil, insecurity, and repeated devastating natural disasters, Haiti is no stranger to crisis. It hasn’t had a presidential election in seven years, and the former prime minister was forced by powerful gangs to step down in March.
Why We Wrote This
Haiti has dealt with decades of political turmoil and natural disasters. Although there hasn’t been an uninterrupted academic year since 2017, schools here embody hope for a stabler future.
Despite these real challenges – and the constant refrain that the Caribbean nation has hit rock bottom – Haitians are adept at meeting crises head on. One need not look further than the country’s primary and secondary schools to understand the extent of Haiti’s troubles, as teachers and administrators scramble to educate a generation otherwise lost to insecurity.
“I wanted to do something that could have a tangible positive impact on the lives of Haitians,” says Ralph Ganthier, director of Collège Florian Ganthier. The private school has been operating for more than four decades in the Port-au-Prince suburbs but had to revamp its education services amid a spike in gang violence this year. “I deeply believe that education is the way.”
Route de Frères is a major artery connecting the heart of Port-au-Prince with nearby suburbs, typically flanked by open-air markets, crowds of students making their way to school on foot, and a cacophony of bumper-to-bumper traffic.
But on a sunny morning this spring, the thoroughfare was eerily empty – slowly becoming the new normal.
It’s just one result of gang violence that has spiked since 2021 and spiraled since the spring, forcing entire neighborhoods into lockdown today.
Why We Wrote This
Haiti has dealt with decades of political turmoil and natural disasters. Although there hasn’t been an uninterrupted academic year since 2017, schools here embody hope for a stabler future.
After decades of on-again, off-again political turmoil, insecurity, and repeated devastating natural disasters, Haiti is no stranger to crisis. It does not have an elected leader and hasn’t held a presidential election in seven years. In March, the former prime minister was forced by increasingly powerful gangs and loss of support from the United States to step down. Interim Prime Minister Garry Conille, appointed by an interim presidential council, took office in late May.
Despite these real challenges, Haitians are adept at meeting crises head on. And one need not look further than the country’s primary and secondary schools to understand the extent of Haiti’s troubles, as teachers and administrators scramble to educate a generation otherwise lost to insecurity.
“We are no strangers to interruption,” says Ralph Ganthier, director of Collège Florian Ganthier (CFG). The private Christian K-12 school off Route de Frères is running one month later than the school calendar to make up for the weeks of canceled classes due to violence this year. “We haven’t had an uninterrupted school year since 2017.”
A history of crisis
Haiti is home to the first successful revolt of enslaved people, which led to its independence in 1804. Since its emergence as the first Black republic, Haitians have struggled to establish a state that lives up to its promise of liberation. This includes facing external economic pressures such as an indemnity to France for recognition as a state, and internal failures of the elite economic and political classes to embrace democratic principles. The U.S. invaded Haiti in 1915 and ran it until 1934. From 1957 to 1986, the father-son Duvalier dictatorships dominated political life.
The most recent security crisis in Port-au-Prince began in 2021, following the assassination of President Jovenel Moïse. Since then, armed groups have strengthened their control of the capital and parts of the nearby Artibonite department through kidnappings and homicides, and by driving people out of their homes with threats. Some 580,000 Haitians are displaced across the country, according to the International Organization for Migration, a 60% increase since March.
In neighborhoods like Pétion-Ville, where CFG is located, makeshift barricades made of sacks of sand have been erected to deter unwanted groups from entering the area. In late March, a bloody gunfight took place near the school between police and their citizen supporters, and armed groups. Two popular gang leaders were killed.
Florian Ganthier, Mr. Ganthier’s father, founded CFG in 1980. In the four decades since, the Ganthier family and the school have navigated multiple complicated political and social emergencies with resourcefulness, creativity – and urgency.
The younger Mr. Ganthier recalls that when he was a child in the early ’90s, the international community imposed a trade, fuel, and arms embargo on Haiti after its army ousted what was considered its first democratically elected president, Jean-Bertrand Aristide.
Because of fuel shortages, public transport took a hit, and “most schools had to shut down,” says Mr. Ganthier. “But my parents found a way to keep the school running by adopting a three-day week.”
In January 2010, a devastating earthquake hit the capital. It caused an estimated 300,000 deaths, displaced more than a million people, and damaged nearly half of all structures in the greater Port-au-Prince area. CFG was severely damaged, forcing the school to move to the concrete building it currently occupies.
“Reopening was nearly impossible,” says Mr. Ganthier, who had returned to Haiti only three days before the 2010 quake after working and studying abroad for four years. “We were unable to pay our teachers. It took months to find an alternative plan and negotiate a deal with our [staff] that could help us resume classes,” he says. The school finally opened three months later, in April 2010, a better outcome than that of many educational institutions in Port-au-Prince.
Chipping away at progress
The earthquake has had long-lasting consequences for Haitian politics.
“You need to go back to the 2010 earthquake and the 2011 presidential elections that followed it” to really understand what’s going on in Haiti today, says Vélina Élysée Charlier, a political activist and member of Nou Pap Dòmi (We Will Not Sleep), an anti-corruption collective.
The international community pressured Haiti to hold elections before it was ready, when much of the country was still under rubble and in survival mode. Haitian experts warned the nation wasn’t ready to “hold well-organized and fair elections,” says Ms. Charlier. That external push brought to power a party with ties to the country’s former dictatorship, and for the past 12 years, it has pillaged state coffers, armed and funded gangs, and weakened Haiti’s institutions.
The government was “never designed to serve us in the first place,” says Sabine Lamour, professor of sociology at the State University of Haiti and currently visiting faculty at the Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies at Brown University. “A crisis implies that what is happening is abnormal, an out-of-the-ordinary unstable situation with impending change. But we are in a society where political troubles and instability have been the daily lives of Haitians since 1806.”
Mr. Ganthier, who took over CFG in 2010, says despite the school’s staying power, the country’s recent instability has chipped away at his family’s work.
Before 2021, for example, fewer than 5% of CFG students failed state exams. Last year, the number was 31%, according to school records.
“The [security] situation has had a major psychological effect on the children. They’re not at peace. The child can’t do their homework because they are always in a state of anxiety, so we have to be understanding of ... the trauma that exists,” he says.
Education “is no longer a right, but a privilege” in Port-au-Prince, says Christon St. Fort, director of the Federation of Protestant Schools of Haiti, a network of 3,000 schools to which CFG belongs.
“Each school tries to address the challenges. ... Some schools have no choice but to shut down,” says Mr. St. Fort.
“Education is the way”
In October 2022, the U.S.-backed interim government requested a multinational security force to combat Haiti’s deadly gang violence. After a year of back and forth, the United Nations Security Council approved sending a Kenya-led foreign mission to Haiti, which has yet to materialize.
Over the past three years, calls for a locally led, Haitian political solution have grown. Yet the international community has not been receptive, Dr. Lamour says.
Haitian schools, tasked with educating the nation’s future leaders, have been left to improvise. So far this year, due to security challenges, CFG students were only permitted on campus for two weeks in January, and then the school shuttered for six weeks straight between the end of February and April.
“Online teaching does not solve the problem,” says Mr. Ganthier. “Most of our students come from underserved neighborhoods and usually can’t afford a reliable internet connection; when they can, they are dealing with electricity” cuts.
As a temporary solution, CFG teachers prepare homework packets that families can pick up from the school secretary, Mr. Ganthier says. Students then turn in their work via the messaging application WhatsApp.
But this implies a relatively stable home and family life. When armed groups started displacing entire neighborhoods in downtown Port-au-Prince, CFG received new students whose families fled to the suburbs in search of security. But they’re losing families, too.
“When students leave, we simply stop seeing them. We don’t know they’re gone until we receive a call from another school requesting their transcripts,” says Mr. Ganthier.
The enduring nature of Haiti’s unrest raises concerns about the country’s future.
“All the things that made me love Haiti when I was a kid – traveling, the beach, friends – are less accessible to” my children, says Ms. Charlier. “It makes me worry about their connection to our home. And makes me think that they will choose to leave one day and never want to return.”
To Mr. St. Fort, what’s at stake is the very future of Haitian society. “If schools close, more young people will join the ranks of the gangs. Now more than ever ... we need to protect Haitian children’s right to receive a high-quality education.”
Through it all, what keeps Mr. Ganthier going is his profound sense of duty to his country and his family.
“I wanted to do something that could have a tangible positive impact on the lives of Haitians,” Mr. Ganthier says. “I deeply believe that education is the way.”
This story was produced with support from the Round Earth Media Program of the International Women’s Media Foundation, in partnership with Woy Magazine.
