PILH Team Creates Haitian Kreyòl (Creole) Alphabet Poster
Everyone remembers singing the ABC song growing up. Now, maybe you’re teaching it to your kids or grandchildren. Learning the alphabet is an educational building block. For children in the U.S. and around the world, learning resources abound, but children in impoverished countries don’t have access to the wide array of learning tools that most do. Among the many groups who lack these tools are Haitian children.
Due to the devastation of the earthquake in 2010 the Na Rive School, located in Puerto Plata, on the northern coast of the Dominican Republic, was working to provide an education for displaced Haitian children after the earthquake. One of its challenges is language. Although they share an island, the languages and cultures of the Dominican Republic and Haiti are different. The Haitian Kreyòl (Creole) language includes elements of French, African, English, and others while the language of the Dominican Republic is Spanish.
The leaders of the school identified the need for an alphabet poster for the Haitian Creole language. Unable to find an existing resource, Martin Blampied, secretary of Na Rive, turned to Dan Linginfelter, co-founder of Outside Source, who had visited the school last year on a mission trip. Linginfelter seized the opportunity to create something original and meaningful for the students. One of his senior designers, Brian Noble worked with Linginfelter to sketch unique drawings for each letter of the alphabet. “We had a lot of back-and-forth discussions and field testing to get the right image with the right letter. For instance, to illustrate the letter B, we chose a whale (baleine). Our whale looked more like a fish to them, so we went with the boat (bato) instead. We wanted to make sure our images were ones the Haitian kids would relate to without confusion,” he says.
Linginfelter also has been working to raise funds to get the first charts produced. One hundred large wall charts (about 3’ x 5’) and 1,000 smaller work mats were printed on special vinyl with UV-protected inks due to the tropical climate. The goal is to have the posters and work mats ready to start the school year that fall.
Inquire about ordering Haitian Kreyòl (Creole) Alphabet charts below. “Please reference “Dan, and Alphabet Charts” in the Question box.