PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti — Her eyes are wide, her smile obedient but a little forced. The questions she is asked scare her, but she has been urged to tell the truth by her teacher, so Abmelissa Louis says what she really thinks.
"I like this school better than the old," says the 8-year-old girl. She ignores the groans and rolled eyes of some classmates who remember how nice the old school was. The bigger, quieter, more decorated classrooms, the after-school activities.
"But here," she says, finally looking around at her friends, "I don’t have to be afraid when ..."
"When what?" asks her teacher.
"When the earth moves again," Abmelissa says.
The children around her — like her, dressed in pressed and fresh blue checked uniforms — suddenly quiet and retreat into private thoughts. They know what she means.
"Sometimes, the children think the earth is moving even when it is not," says Sr. Myrlene Felix, director of primary education at the Maria Dominique Mazzarello School in Jacquet, just outside the capital city.
"We have to assure them it is not," she adds. "It is just their fear."
The 1,400 children in the school, mostly girls, are reminded very day of what happened six months ago. All the familiar classroom buildings are gone, reduced to rubble. The Salesian nuns who operate the school live in tents on the grounds.
Most important, many friends are gone. More than 100 left for the provinces or their parents decided that, with homes and jobs gone, they can no longer afford the $25 monthly tuition.
And eight of the children are dead.
"She is gone," says Florina Saintloi. "I saw her the day before but now she is gone. I think of her every day. I think of her every time I come here."
Florina, 19, and DeLourdes Ferdinand, 18, were close friends and classmates at the school, which includes the first two years of college. They volunteered together at an orphanage. But, within seconds on day that six months ago, DeLourdes and her two brothers and her parents were crushed to death in their home not far from the school.
Abmelissa’s fear and Florina’s grief are not easily resolved, despite the good that happened to their school in the last few weeks.
With all the classrooms gone, an American-based organization provided portable classrooms to the school, which has educated children of Haiti’s small middle class for 53 years. They are odd sorts of structures, modular rooms open on two sides. They were designed especially for post-earthquake Haiti, with ceilings that will not collapse.
"A lot of our children cannot stay in closed classrooms closed with a normal ceiling,’’ says Elise Gelin, an official of a Haitian organization called PHARE which, with money from the US Agency for International Development (USAID) is trying to rebuild Haiti’s schools.
Little more than half of Haiti’s children attended school before Jan. 12, and 85 percent of those went to private schools. No one really knows now how many children are missing school now because of the earthquake. At this one, parents pay about $25 a month in tuition. That sounds inexpensive but, according to government statistics, 76 percent of Haitians make less than $2 a day.
Education is extraordinarily important to Haitians, says Gelin — but not necessarily to the Haitian government.
"The government has relied on private schools but not every family can afford them," says Gelin, who notes that, since 1986, only a handful of public schools were built. That was the year the Duvalier dictatorship was overthrown and, while a measure of democracy was introduced, democracy did not bring improved public services.
Gelin hopes American aid will continue to this and other schools that are rebuilding under PHARE leadership.
That may or may not happen, but to students of the Maria Dominique Mazzarello School, a small measure of normality has returned to their lives.
But only a small measure. Not only do the children still miss friends — not only do they miss the theater and the labs they enjoyed — they also are sad for another reason.
"Please, sister, aren’t we going to have it?" asks Cyndie Rene, 18, who will graduate within a few weeks.
"I don’t know," says the nun. "I don’t know whether we will have the money."
"Please, sister," the teenager asks again. "We have to have it."