A School Fights for Life in Battered Haiti

Deborah Sontag

In mid-October, when fresh-faced girls in starched uniforms skipped through the gates of the Collège Classique Féminin to start the first post-earthquake school year, their desire to seek sanctuary inside was palpable.

Dashing off a street clogged with vendors hawking car mats and phone chargers, they reconnected with hugs and squeals. They cheered the absence of the stifling tents in which they studied last spring. And they all but embraced an administrator's warning that strict discipline would be reinstated after a lax period when "we all were traumatized."

Still, nothing felt normal. The school's door bore a frightening scarlet stamp, slapped there by government engineers who consider it unsafe. The semi-collapsed central building loomed menacingly over eight portable classrooms that clearly would not fit 13 grades. And the all-girl student body had dwindled to almost half its pre-disaster enrollment.

Posted by Jim Zellmer at November 18, 2010 2:05 AM
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