n January of 2011 retired Saugerties (NY) English teacher Nancy Lanni visited Haiti, with a construction team helping repair the damage. While there, she was invited to teach as a substitute, where she observed first-hand the emotional as well as physical damage to the young children on the remote island of La Gonáve, a primitive land where people still live in stone huts and use donkeys for transportation and farming. Schools in Haiti are not free, so only about 50% of children attend one in this impoverished land. Ms. Lanni decided to continue teaching in Haiti, learning Creole, the language of Haiti, and also began raising money for a school on La Gonáve where currently all six grades are taught in one room of a community church. Using local labor and materials paid for by money Ms. Lanni raised in the U.S., a new, earthquake-resistant, six-room schoolhouse is about to open at the start of 2015.
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