![]() “I always wanted to go to school and get an education. Sometimes I ate cornmeal twice a day.” Attending school was not an option for Aricia. I didn’t eat well as a child sometimes I ate just once a day. Often the whole family went Aricia, her three sisters and brother would labour until nightfall in the fields and their mother would cook meals there. At the age of six or seven, Aricia went to work in the gardens and fields with her father. Our translator explains that it was in June 1958. French is the official language of Haiti’s urban educated and is not spoken or understood in rural villages she replies in Creole. ![]() I begin by asking Aricia when she was born. FIDA, Canada’s working arm of productive cooperatives Haiti (pcH), receives funding from the Canadian International Development Agency and helps to establish and support agricultural cooperatives in Haiti. I am here as a representative of the Foundation for International Development Assistance. Just beyond our feet, the narrow lip of land where we sit drops away sharply. The small rectangular building constructed of cement blocks and roofed with tin provides shelter from the wind. Typical of Haitian hospitality, cooperative members have enthusiastically dragged rickety wooden chairs behind their silo for us. It’s unseasonably cool Aricia and I and our translator shiver in the mountain air. Aricia doesn’t look like a revolutionary, but her language is passionate and beneath her calm exterior, a fire burns. Her blue skirt and red blouse have been laundered to an almost translucent thinness her white purse is child-sized. Wearing a pair of men’s dusty loafers, Aricia stands four feet, five inches tall, hardly what I’d expected. In the mountains of Cooperative Kounol near the village of Djot, Haiti, where she tends her crops, she is a hero - a woman who led a coup d’etat that ousted a corrupt cooperative president, a man.
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