House of Zathras

It’s been an experience getting to know my new student from Haiti. Anybody know much about Haitian culture? I require my students to be polite and use good manners. However, this little boy doesn’t say ‘ma’am’. With his accent, it sounds like he’s saying some kind of ‘yeah’…but it might be the normal polite reply. I’m not requiring him to say ‘ma’am’ because I worry that it would be subservient in the Haitian culture (due to the history of slavery there). He is polite in all other aspects, like saying ‘thank you’ when he gets something.

When the class came in from PE today, another boy had been apparently talking to ‘Henri’ about Haiti. My American student told me that Henri’s mother had died, but not in the earthquake. I asked Henri if he wanted to talk about his mother (since he had already said something to this boy), and he said his father told him not to. I did ask why, and he said because then his mother would come into his dreams.

Wow…talk about cultural differences. It also shed a whole new light onto a news clip I saw last week about a young Haitian mother who had lost three children. The stupid news reporter asked her if she had buried her children. She replied, ‘No…I just tossed them aside. I go on living’. At first I thought it was the shock making her so callous. But now I believe it’s something to do with their belief systems about death.

This is so different from the American view of ‘talking it out’. I worry that this boy is feeling lost and scared but won’t say anything because of his upbringing. I’m not trying to change his upbringing…I just don’t want him to feel alone.

But if anyone knows anything or a resource I can use to understand the culture, please let me know. Thank you.

This entry was posted on Thursday, January 28th, 2010 at 6:24 pm and is filed under School Stuff, kids. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.