By Maxine Lowy
Clerina didn’t dare venture out alone without her husband. Her 11- and 9-year-old children went everywhere with her to translate for their mother. Like many Haitian immigrant women, she was apprehensive and felt vulnerable in the strange and sometimes hostile land of Chile.
That was five years ago.
Today, Clerina, who grew up in a rural household of eighteen people, helps other Haitian immigrants navigate the public health system. She assertively affirms, “Ya no necesito traductora” (I don’t need a translator anymore) and dreams of becoming a lawyer, “to defend our rights.”
What changed her outlook – and her life – is a Spanish language program developed three years ago by the EPES Foundation. The language program is based on the popular education methodology that is the organization’s hallmark. It is said that communication opens doors, but this program, designed with Haitian women in mind, does much more than teach a language: it empowers.
On August 17, Clerina and twenty-five other women graduated from the current course which lasted five months, imparted at the EPES Foundation’s building in the municipality of El Bosque, south Santiago. She was one of several who participated in last year’s course, and enrolled in the advanced group that meets simultaneously with beginners in a one-room schoolhouse style.
A cacophony of voices fills the hall, adorned with colorful banners hailing “Migrar es un derecho” (Immigration is a right), “Niños con derechos sin fronteras” (Children with rights with no borders), and “Las personas migrantes tienen el derecho a la salud” (Immigrants have the right to health).
Photo by Maxine Lowy
The EPES Foundation has more than forty years of experience forming community health monitors to advocate for the right to health in low-income communities across Chile. Its historic territory is south Santiago but during many years had an office in Concepcion, and has worked in Iquique and Valparaiso, strengthening working class neighborhood organizations. EPES also gives courses on participatory community strategies primary care staff. Before 2019, working with immigrant communities or offering a language class had not been in their plans.
Government discourse saturated with discriminatory views towards immigrants in general and Haitians in particular prompted EPES to examine how that policy affected access to healthcare.
The study concluded that public health facilities are permeated by cultural bias, and that the language barrier is a major factor shaping the care that Haitians receive.
EPES then produced informational materials in Haitian Creole to explain health care rights to the Haitian community. Some immigrants were unaware that neighborhood clinics provide free services to everyone, regardless of immigration status.
EPES made what its executive director Sonia Covarrubias describes as “a political decision” to work with Haitian communities because profound cultural and language gaps compounded by racism leave them susceptible to abuse. The focus on Haitian women emerged upon ascertaining that many tended to remain at home, dependent upon their male partners who are more fluent in Spanish because they arrived a few years earlier in Chile and their jobs require them to spend the greater part of the workday interrelating with Chileans.
From the outset, the EPES team posed that it would offer far more than a Spanish language class. That is reflected in the program’s name: Tejiendo Conversaciones y Derechos (Weaving Conversation and Rights). Each weekly session was divided in two segments. The first half focused on vocabulary building, grammar and pronunciation. After a break for healthy refreshments, in the second hour, participants divided into conversation circles to strengthen spoken Spanish while exploring various broader subjects: What is it like to be a Haitian woman in Chile? What are your dreams?
Photo by Jorge Olivares
Participants also took field trips – riding public buses to learn the routes- to various municipal offices to become acquainted with available services.
Consistent with Paulo Freire’s concept of popular education, which is the hallmark of EPES methodology, these women learned to analyze and to reflect on the challenges they face both individually and collectively in their daily lives. They acquired tools that extend beyond the Spanish language, enabling them to envision their future in Chilean society. This is an integral learning model that differs from many language courses designed for immigrants “The immigrant experience entails much emotional pain,” Sonia Covarrubias notes. “You are far from your country, your culture, your family. The popular education methodology creates trust that enables immigrant women to gradually feel at ease.”
“Bonjou! Koman ou ye?” (Good morning! How are you?) This is how EPES staff member Macarena Villaroel greeted participants one Monday morning in early June.
After practicing verbs in the past, present and future tenses, the women divided into four groups. During the next hour, they planned imaginary business or work projects, prepared a group CV, and role-played job interviews.
Three weeks later, members of Soy Alma Negra, an Afro-descendant pride organization, arrive carrying a large bag of bright scarfs, soon transformed into headwraps and turbans on the heads of every participant. Commonly worn in rural Haiti, headwraps here were reclaimed as powerful symbols of cultural identity. Rooted in the Ghanan, Nigerian, and Senegalese heritage of enslaved women, the various different turban styles of folding and wrapping the scarfs around their head represented subtle gestures of resistance.
These activities reflect the two complementary dimensions of the EPES approach: integration without assimilation into a cultural melting pot and the development of the confidence and skills needed to navigate Chilean society, while remaining conscious of their rights.
Each class- even the final session- contemplated experiential learning. Prior to the graduation ceremony, the students evaluated the program and offered suggestions on how to improve it, thus strengthening language and critical thinking skills. The graduates themselves, several accompanied by their young children, presented the certificates to fellow classmates, transforming the ceremony into a moving experience of public speaking and comradery: “Not only receive this certificate: keep learning!” “This is not just a piece of paper, it’s to remind you how you learned to speak well at EPES,” “Keep on moving forward.”
Photo by Jorge Olivares
After graduation, the women may return to EPES for a series of programs and workshops that will continue to hone their Spanish language fluency, as well as their confidence to engage in Chilean society. These will include the international day against violence to women and the international immigrant day.
Central to this process was the cultural facilitator and EPES staff member Pharayou Borgella, who arrived from Haiti in 2017. “Without Phara, this course, with its intercultural challenges, would have been impossible,” Sonia Covarubias says. Phara not only interprets between Spanish to Creole while also helps define course’s pace and suggest subjects for group discussion.
Having traversed a similar path herself, Phara understands from personal experience the difficulties Haitian immigrant women face. She also knows that with persistence they can be overcome. She has become a role model for the Haitian women she supports, yet she insists, “I learn so much from these women. All of us have become aware of the rights we have. EPES has opened a new world for me and every woman in this program.”
