31 October to 3 December 1929 · Haitianspan
215 students walk out of Damien and the country follows them
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The American Service Technique ran a Central School of Agriculture at Damien to train agricultural teachers, and it recruited from elite families who had no intention of touching a shovel. To make the course tolerable each student drew a monthly allowance of twenty-five dollars, and hired peasants did the farm labour while the scholarship holders did the reading. Coffee failed in 1928 and everything failed in 1929, so Dr Freeman cut two thousand dollars from the ten thousand set aside for those allowances, moved the money to peasant students at Hinche and elsewhere, and ordered the remaining boursiers to work the ground themselves. On 31 October at three in the afternoon all 215 students walked off the property with their Haitian instructors behind them. Within ten days the law, medical, engineering and normal schools had joined them, and Roumain and Pradel were making the strikers into heroes. At Jacmel the students marched under a green serpent on red, the banner of Danbala. On 3 December Russell told Washington the Garde could no longer be relied on.
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