Precious degrees don’t ensure jobs
PORT-AU-PRINCE, HAITI— Last spring, Fabienne Fils became the first person in her family to graduate from college. To fund her education, her parents cut meals, walked instead of taking the bus, sold their good linen. In August, Fils proved it had been worth the struggle: she was one of 18 in her class to pass Haiti’s licensing exam for nurses.
Since then, Fils has spent her days helping her mother do housework. “It’s so boring,” she says. “In Haiti, it’s very difficult to get a job,” she continues. “You need a marenn or parenn.” That translates to godmother or godfather. In Canada, we would call them contacts.
It is a refrain you hear constantly in Haiti: that in the all-important quest for a job, references come first, brains and ability a distant second. It’s even the stuff of popular Carnival songs, released every year before the street festivals.
Star readers put seven students through college after the 2010 quake. But finding work is often about connections
“If you want to have a job in this country,” the band Zatrap sings, “you need a marenn or parenn.”
Fils, now 26, believes this so strongly that after years of studying and starving and hustling, she’s resigned herself to sitting passively at home and waiting for a miracle: a job. FILS FINISHED COLLEGE because of Toronto Star readers.
After the earthquake shattered this country in 2010, felling many schools and most universities and colleges, Star readers sent me cheques, asking that I subsidize students who were by then attending classes beneath tarps.
The path to reconstruction in Haiti, they figured, had to include education. Otherwise, who would rebuild the country long-term?
Even before the earthquake, the country’s education system was ragged. Forty per cent of the population never attended school because of the prohibitive cost, and most who did left before Grade 6.
Post-secondary enrolment was even more abysmal: less than 1 per cent of Haitians, aged 18 to 24, were in college or university. Those few lucky, brilliant graduates? Most of them used their degrees as passports to leave the country. Haiti has the second worst case of brain drain in the world, after Algeria, according to the World Economic Forum’s latest Global Competitiveness Report.
It’s no wonder, then, that the country was in shambles even before the 7.0 earthquake. There were very few educated people to lead it, and even fewer educated citizens to keep those leaders in check.
With the money Star readers sent me, I subsidized 176 students in and near Port-au-Prince: primary school children, women in night school, a few high schoolers and seven college students. The total bill was $17,000, but the tuition for those seven ate up $7,000 — around $1,000 each — which is why so few Haitians, earning an average of $2 a day, ever get to college.
All seven had been directly affected by the earthquake. They had lost their homes, their alreadymeagre family income and their health. One lost a limb, another was badly burned by electricity from a fallen wire. They had all shouldered huge expectations from their families as tickets out of poverty, which now they were unlikely to fulfil. All told me they had expected to default on tuition payments and drop out before Star readers arrived. Three years later, I tracked them down to see how they had done. Here’s what I discovered: all seven have graduated with top marks. Three of the four nursing students have passed the national licensing exam, with the last one, Lucie Johanne Altidor, planning to write it this summer. That’s a 100-per-cent success rate. How many development programs, particularly impromptu ones, can claim that? These students proved themselves exceptional investments. Take Nelcie Joazard, who now works as an emergency-room nurse at a Port-au-Prince hospital. That is a huge accomplishment in Haiti, particularly for someone like her. She lost her left leg at the calf after the earthquake. The nursing school had collapsed, crushing her leg, and by the time doctors saw it, it was gangrenous. Walking with a prosthetic presents huge difficulties in Haiti, a country with few sidewalks or smooth roads. But the societal challenges are graver. Historically, disabled people have been terribly ostracized. Many companies have refused to even interview them. The earthquake started to change that, Joazard says. She considers herself an ambassador for amputees. Instead of hiding her prosthetic leg, she announced it on her first day of work. Then there is Pierre Olsonne Guichard, 32, who graduated with an electrical mechanics diploma last summer. He now works as a systems manager at a high-end beach hotel two hours north of the city, making more money each month than a doctor at the general hospital. He was so excited that I’d called after three years, he sped down to the city with gifts. “My life is much, much better,” he says. “The road to success has started.” But they are the only two who have found jobs. The remaining three who are qualified to work are still unemployed. Yet another, Jonise Acao, has gone back to her college for a fourth year, to train as a future professor there. But she says she’d rather have a job in her field of information technology. She’s sent out five CVs.
“I don’t have any hope,” says Guichard’s classmate, Isaac Moise. “I’m just sitting on the concrete. I’m waiting for calls.” He graduated with the best marks in their class at the prestigious Canado technical college.
“Where is the work?” PART OF THE PROBLEM is Haiti’s emaciated economy.
The country’s gross domestic product per person has flatlined at $738 since 1990 while that of neighbouring Caribbean nations has grown, on average, to $12,000. Foreign investment expected after the earthquake has not arrived, in part because the government hasn’t had the money to invest in infrastructure needed to make business possible: roads, electricity, security, education, health care. (Most of the aid was sent to international non-profit organizations, not the government.)
Haiti ranked third last in the recent Global Competitiveness Index of 144 countries, behind Sierra Leone and Burundi.
There simply aren’t many salaried jobs — maybe 250,000 for a labour force of four million, according to Haitian economist Kesner Pharel. That’s one job for every 16 people. “It’s a big problem,” Pharel says.
You’d think in such a small market, companies would be flooded with applications. Strangely, that’s not the case. Take Digicel, a telecommunications firm whose red banners blanket the country. The company has 1,100 employees. Each summer, it offers a handful of internships to university students.
“Sometimes we get no applications at all,” says Bryan Gonzalez, the company’s director of human resources.
The problem, then, is more complicated than supply.
I stopped in on an “entrepreneurial salon” hosted by l’Université Quisqueya, one of the country’s top universities. I had seen it advertised in the newspaper Le Nouvelliste, featuring bigwig businessmen like Sogebank’s former president, Charles Clermont, and the developer of the fancy new Oasis Hotel. The entrance fee was only $3.50.
The still-unfinished campus was decorated with white tents, each showcasing a different company — a marketer, a bank, a solar power provider. The first one featured a new “green” charcoal, started by consummate entrepreneur Philip Villedrouin.
He has manufactured mosquito coils and grown strawberries. He owns the high-end Le Montcel, a hotel in the nearby mountains, where his daughter-in-law, Stephanie Villedrouin, worked before becoming the country’s tourism minister. Particularly because the educated class is so tiny here, connections among them abound. Find someone who speaks English, and chances are good she knows the last person you interviewed.
I found Villedrouin behind the tent, chain-smoking, and asked him about this marenn/parenn phenomenon. He doesn’t advertise new jobs, he admitted. He mostly recycles his employees from one venture to the next.
“But I’ve been here for two days,” he said, “and not one of these students has had the guts to come up and talk to me. If one did, I’d go for coffee with him, and who knows what would happen.”
Contacts help in any competitive job market. But in Haiti, the concept of patronage has paralyzed initiative. Graduates like Fils are so convinced they won’t get work without an inside connection, they don’t bother applying. In the seven months since she earned her nursing certificate, she has sent out her CV just twice.
The two graduates who have found work both told me connections landed them their jobs.
And Moise, the top Canado graduate who complained about sitting on the concrete, waiting for calls? He has cold-called just two companies since graduating last summer.
“Can I count on you to be my marenn?” he asked.
“I’M NOT BLAMING them,” says Conor Bohan, in the middle of a tirade about Haiti’s university graduates who don’t work to find work. “They haven’t been taught how to do this. No one has ever explained to them how to find a job.”
Bohan runs a non-profit organization called HELP that offers university scholarships to poor, smart high school graduates. He launched the program inadvertently 16 years ago when he was a high school teacher in nearby Croix-des-Bouquets and agreed to pay the medical school fees for one of his students. That number has since grown to 170, including 50 graduates. Along the way, Bohan discovered that Haitian universities don’t offer the supports considered part of the fabric of Canadian campuses: dormitories, academic advisers, student councils, extra-curricular clubs or teams, and career service offices. That means there are no formal internships, no billboards with job postings, few computer centres in which to draft and print CVs, and no one to provide advice. Bohan’s theory: the universities were created for members of the upper class, who don’t need those supports. They have computers at home and electricity to run them. Their parents are professionals who can advise them on cover letters and connect them to colleagues. But for poor students, whose parents make up the vast informal, illiterate labour force earning $2 a day? Those are the people who need to be taught how to job search. It’s not an innate skill; it’s a learned one. “No one they know had any oppor-
“I’ve been here for two days and not one of these students has had the guts to come up and talk to me."
PHILIP VILLEDROUIN ENTREPRENEUR
tunities, so they think there are no opportunities,” Bohan says. “But there are tons of opportunities.” Bohan has filled in those gaps for HELP students. On top of housing and food stipends, they get computer and English classes — essential for landing work in most of North America. A career services co-ordinator helps with their CVs and interview skills. She posts summer-internship and job postings on a billboard by the HELP office front door. The result? “Ninety to 100 per cent of our grads get jobs immediately,” Bohan says. “Their average salary is $12,000 a year, which is 20 times the average Haitian salary. Our biggest challenge as far as employment goes is stopping the kids from taking jobs before they graduate.”
I WAS BROODING about this the next day while waiting for Ketcia Cirius in the restaurant of a downtown hotel. She is another nursing graduate sponsored by Star readers. I dreaded another conversation about marenns and parenns. Although in my I mind knew Bohan was right, my heart was hardening. I couldn’t shake my dismissive Canadian reaction. We prize tenacity, particularly when the odds are stacked against us. I was disappointed.
Cirius arrived as if for a job interview: red skirt, coiffed bob, black purse over her shoulder with her CV inside.
She always carries one, she tells me. She spends five days a week criss-crossing the city in crowded buses and dropping them off at every hospital and non-profit organization she knows of. So far, she figures, she’s given out three dozen, often lingering behind to meet the head of nursing and attempt to charm her.
“I don’t have a marenn or parenn, so I have to make efforts,” says Cirius, 29. “When I don’t have money for the bus, I walk.”
Cirius’s right hand was badly injured in the earthquake. It took two painful operations to fix, and still aches.
Her family lost their rental home in Carrefour. And her mother, a downtown street merchant, lost all her supplies. They had to rebuild from nothing. So, before class each day, Cirius sold lunch on the street to make money for the family and her tuition. She also designed and sewed clothing for her classmates.
Her mother was finally able to relaunch her business.
But last week, a car careened into her stall, leaving her with two swelling knees and destroying her merchandise for a second time.
Cirius doesn’t know what the family is going to do.
Listening to Cirius’s story, I remembered what this was all about in the first place. It was never a development program. It was a gesture of kindness and kinship, inspired by huge human tragedy.
That all seven university students managed to graduate, given their circumstances, is a remarkable testament to their tenacity.
“I don’t get discouraged,” Cirius says. “My mother tells me I need to have confidence and hope, and I will find something.
“I can never repay everyone who helped me. But I can give them my heart and love and say ‘Thank you.’ Without that help, I wouldn’t have made it.”