Airwaves to courage: in troubled Haiti, community groups are working with women to create radio plays that raise awareness of life-threatening issues.

• Author: Regan, Jane

"Men who beat their wives."

"No hospitals."

"The state doesn't fulfill its responsibilities."

The women nod their heads in agreement. Roosters crow outside, cheerful shouts from a nearby football game punctuate the afternoon discussion, the bright Caribbean sun streams through the windows, but nothing distracts them. They lean over their work at the table.

"Poor nutrition."

"No doctor at the clinic."

Yolene Ceyard, a twenty-two-year-old mother, writes the words around a drawing of a tree.

Usually farming a rocky hillside seven hours away, Ceyard was one of thirteen women at a workshop in the hills high above Port-au-Prince, Haiti's capital, during the hottest clays of July 2003. She made the long journey because, in addition to being a mother and a farmer, she is also a volunteer at her local community radio station. The workshop was aimed at helping Ceyard and other women radio reporters and producers turn their knowledge and their concerns into theater.

Despite unrest in the streets and deepening poverty at home, she and the other women came from all over this devastated country, which always seems to teeter on the edge of yet another uprising of natural disaster.

Indeed, as the women met, hundreds of unions, civic groups, student associations, and others were taking part in a nonstop mobilization against then president Jean-Bertrand Aristide. A paramilitary banal of ex-soldiers and disenchanted police officers were training across the border in the Dominican Republic. Within months, Aristide had left the country in what he described as a "modern coup d'etat" and yet another interim president had taken his place. It was to be Haiti's thirty-third violent change of government.

But while newspapers and radios blared ominous warnings about Haiti's future, Ceyard and her friends continued to address the trials and tribulations much closer to borne, often within [heir homes.

That hot summer day, the women created a tree of women's problems, specifically the problems that lead to one of the gravest threats they face: death during childbirth. More than 520 of every 100,000 Haitian women die giving birth in this country of 8 million. That's more than twice the number in the neighboring Dominican Republic, and over sixteen times the Cuban figure.

Where the tree's roots should have been, Ceyard and the others wrote out the reasons Haitian mothers die. At the top of the tree's bare black branches hung the heavy fruits. For the children left without mothers, the consequences are equally grave.

"Street children."

"Rape."

"Restavek." (The word means "stay-with" and is used to designate Haiti's child slaves. Children from poor rural families are often sent to work as domestic servants with better-off urban family members with the expectation that the children will be provided education and housing. In reality, the families often use the children as domestic slaves, giving them inadequate care and nourishment, denying them access to education, and often abusing them physically and sexually. UNICEF estimates there are about 175,000 child slaves in Haiti.)

Ceyard and the other women were painfully aware of how many of their friends and neighbors have died while giving birth. And the consequences for the children concerned them even more.

The facilitator in Ceyard's group was a woman who leaches first graders during the school year. Vana Edmond, thirty, is a member of Fanm Kouraj, a group of young women activists from the island of La Gonave...