It works well because it is simply an exercise in 'say-what-you-see'. There are 3 ways in which we learn. Auditory. Visual. Kinesthetic. Most of us use 2 of these 3 ways and not everyone learns in the same way.
Another good idea is to try and get students to understand how to use mnemonics. (Memory Needs Every Method Of Nurturing It's Capacity).

Once students understand HOW they learn, then they can achieve better results. I was a young teenager before I realised that telling me how to do something (even 20 times), was futile. But show me once.....bingo!

Just to digress for a moment..

It's interesting that you're in Haiti. Not long ago I saw a list of the 20 richest and 20 poorest countries in the world (by average annual salary). Of the 20 poorest, Haiti was number 20 with an average annual salary of $1846 US dollars per year. This was only $10 per year more than number 19 - Uganda.

By contrast, the richest was Qatar with an average annual wage of USD$146,012 per year.

Just in case anyone is wondering, China was not on the list of either rich or poor countries. However, it did come up in another one.

Since many of my students will go abroad for further study, I decided to give them a few lessons in basic economics. The idea was to try to get them to understand the simple fact that 1 x USD = RMB6.5 essentially means nothing. In other words, they KNOW what RMB6.5 will buy them in China, but do they KNOW what USD$1 will buy them in America? So once we travel around the world with just $1 in our pockets and see that in Russia $1 will buy us a kilo of apples, but in Switzerland it will buy only 1 apple, they started to get the picture.

We then moved onto the cost of living in various countries, along with average salaries in those countries. Using the USA as '100%' it was easy to demonstrate the differences in buying-power.
For example - Australia came in at 163% - so essentially 63% more expensive than the USA. (Australia has kept it's status of being the most expensive country in the world for the last 4 years). China, on the other hand, was 55% - essentially 45% cheaper than the USA. This means Australia is 3 times more expensive than China.

So an annual salary of $1846 in Haiti relates only to the cost of living in Haiti.

It was pretty interesting stuff to be honest. Incidentally, there was only ONE country in the world where US$1 would buy you NOTHING. - Norway!

There's a website you can check out that shows you the cost of a Big-Mac in every country in the world (except North Korea of course). Norway was the most expensive at just over US$7.00