Istwa Nou

Madeleine Sylvain-Bouchereau and Jeanne Sylvain ran the Foyer Ouvrier out of a room that held thirty people. They tried to turn nobody away, and they were short of equipment and short of teachers the whole time. In place of rationing they asked. The classes on offer were the classes the women coming through the door had requested, so the timetable was assembled out of what working women in Port-au-Prince wanted for their own futures in the city. That reverses how educated Haitians had approached the poor for a century, and how the American occupation had approached them for nineteen years. The standing method was to determine what the peasantry needed and then deliver it. The Sylvain sisters, both trained in social work abroad, put the question to the students and wrote down the answers. The room stayed too small. The method did not.

The Foyer Ouvrier was the League's answer to needs the Haitian government had catalogued and then left alone. It also gave Jeanne Sylvain and Madeleine Sylvain-Bouchereau somewhere to apply the social work training they had gone abroad to get, in a country with no professional field waiting for them. Read alongside the League's research into Haitian women's lives, the centre was that research turned into a place. Members had spent years documenting what women in Port-au-Prince did, earned and lacked, and the Foyer was built to the shape of the findings. Its design invited women to go around the state entirely. Schooling, training and a room to meet in are things a government provides in most accounts of what governments are for. Haitian women obtained them from other Haitian women in the capital, and the absence of the state became the space the League furnished.

Jeanne Sylvain answered the deprivation around her by starting something. In the first days of the influenza outbreak the Ligue Féminine d'Action Sociale opened the Foyer Ouvrier, a centre where working-class women could study, take technical training and get the schooling they had been denied as children. She taught there without pay. While her SHADA contract still ran she spent the morning at the office reading newspapers and writing up the rubber programme, then went to the Foyer in the afternoon to stand in front of students. Looking ahead to 1944 she told her family that she and Madeleine would divide their days between work, the Foyer and home. Set the two halves of her day beside each other. In the morning she polished the record of a scheme that was pushing peasant families off their land. In the afternoon she taught the women that scheme had produced.

The Foyer Ouvrier was aimed at a specific group: women who had come off the land into Port-au-Prince and become the urban working poor. The Haitian state watched them closely, because their movement between countryside and city could not be regulated, and provided them with almost nothing in the way of schooling or social service. The centre opened on 3 November 1943. Within a short time more than four hundred women had put their names down, and about a hundred were arriving every day. They asked for sewing and cutting, for cooking, for typing, and for lessons in French, Spanish and English, and the League's policy was to teach whatever was asked for. Note what the requests were. Women who worked all week came to learn a second and a third foreign language and a trade skill. They were shopping for exits.