28825: Stahl (comment): Student Tourism/Service Learning (fwd)

[Bob Corbett <corbetre@webster.edu>]

From: Aletha Stahl <stahlal@earlham.edu>

My institution offered a May Term course in Haiti from 2000-2003. However, due 
to liability it is institutional policy not to send students to any country 
under an explicit US Dep't of State travel warning.

For our program, we first spent time in the Haitian community in Miami, then 
moved on to Haiti, with both rural and urban homestays for the students for 
several days and guest houses for most of the time. Although my institution 
generally supports service learning, in Haiti we opted out of any such 
opportunities given what I perceive to be an overabundance of paternalistic 
NGOs offering the opportunity for do-gooder guilt appeasement and creating 
negative local competition for external resources. (I don't mean that about all 
NGOs in Haiti by any means and agree that there are benefits to both the 
"bandaid" and systemic change models. But I didn't want to leave students w/ 
the primary impression that Haitians need THEIR "help.") One of the best 
aspects of our educational program was the participation of a group of Haitian 
young people who had, like our students, participated in an orientation 
preparing them for our encounter, and who joined us for many activities and 
discussions and even hosted some of our students.

I believe that there is much to be said for taking students from North American 
colleges and universities to Haiti but that much care must be taken to create 
programs that neither feed romanticized notions of "the only country to have a 
successful slave revolution" nor paternalist ideas of how to help "the poorest 
country in the Western hemisphere".

I would also like to see more North American institutions set up programs that 
invite Haitian young people to benefit from their abundant resources while 
nevertheless questioning the myth of "the American Dream" despite that fact 
that certain opportunities "lot bo a" are vastly greater than in Haiti.

I don't have clear answers for a perfect program or exchange model and always 
welcome suggestions. (Yes, Lance, sometime I DO want students to visit your 
plant/factory and meet with leadership there.) This forum always generates new 
ideas. Thanks, Bob, for keeping it going!

Aletha Stahl


Associate Professor of French and Francophone Studies

Earlham College
801 National Road West
Richmond, IN 47374-4095
765-983-1338

stahlal@earlham.edu