A radio story about a child servant becomes a school

Maurice Sixto was a Haitian comedian whose stories in Creole were broadcast widely on radio. One of them, Ti Saintanise, was among the first pieces of work to force public attention in Haiti onto children placed in other households as servants. Its subject is hypocrisy. The story describes a household run by a professor who teaches human rights to the public and who comes home in the evening to a small girl, Ti Saintanise, whom he treats with scorn. The Swiss organisation Terre des Hommes took the story as a prompt and in 1990 founded the Foyer Maurice Sixto, a school for these children. Haitian literature had long been written by the bourgeoisie and had treated child servants as figures of fun or as morally suspect. Fernand Hibbert wrote a boy servant as immoral. Rene Depestre wrote a girl who is raped, is held responsible for it, is thrown out of the house and ends in prostitution.

Through the autumn of 1992 nobody in the exiled Haitian government would say publicly what should happen if negotiation failed. Calls for armed resistance came mostly from people at a safe distance. Foreign military intervention was the one proposal nobody would make aloud, though debate at the United Nations was moving toward it. Nor did anyone suggest cutting off the money Haitians abroad sent home, which ran to 250 million dollars a year and was the country's largest source of foreign exchange. Aristide worked the constituencies open to him, speaking at rallies in Central Park and with the Congressional Black Caucus. Bill Clinton, campaigning for the presidency, called himself appalled that the Bush administration was sending Haitian boat people home. On 3 November 1992 he won. The Caucus counted for more in a Democratic administration, and Clinton had promised to change the refugee policy. One Haitian in four now lived outside Haiti. Who ruled in Port-au-Prince had become a question that American voters could be asked.

Through February 1990 the Haitian opposition assembled a common front. Eleven parties signed a declaration calling on General Prosper Avril to resign, among the signatories Marc Bazin, Louis Roy, Hubert de Ronceray, Rene Theodore, Sylvio Claude and the priest Antoine Adrien. Shops shut, schools closed and crowds filled the streets. An eleven year old girl was killed by a stray bullet while she sat studying. The American ambassador, Alvin Adams, then asked Avril to meet him. Adams reminded the general of Richard Nixon's resignation and told him his accounts in United States banks could be frozen. Avril agreed to go. At twenty minutes to three on the afternoon of Saturday 10 March 1990 he was driven to his house in Petionville, having issued no public statement. Twenty minutes later the acting army chief of staff, General Herard Abraham, appeared on television to announce the fifth change of government in four years. The army would hold power for seventy two hours while a Supreme Court judge was found to serve as interim president.

Ertha Pascal-Trouillot trained first in mechanography in 1969, then took her degree at the law school of Gonaives in August 1971. The school had just introduced a required final dissertation, and she was the first student to defend one, on the legal status of the Haitian woman in social legislation. She was sworn in at the Port-au-Prince bar, argued before the justices of the peace, the civil courts, the court of appeal and the court of cassation, and specialised in labour, family and civil status cases. She sat on the bar council from 1977, became the first Haitian woman judge of the Port-au-Prince civil court in January 1979, the first at the court of appeal in September 1985 and the first at the court of cassation in November 1986. From that seat she was called to the presidency of Haiti, which she held from 13 March 1990 to 7 February 1991.