The Catalyst

Mayas was one of the Haitians in New York working for the immigration bill; she also founded two schools in that city to help Haitians adjust to the American system. "In Miami they have the same problems. Therefore the advocates always know one another, and we can unify our work," says Mayas. "So whenever Marleine has to go to Washington, she always calls me and we meet."

Growing up in Pont Benoit, a village in northern Haiti, Bastien was sure she was going to be a doctor. Her father, Philippe Bastien, was a rice and mango farmer who, because of a gift for diagnosing and healing diseases, was also considered the town's physician. Philippe Bastien had wanted to go to medical school but his illiterate father wouldn't allow it. Instead he taught himself nursing. "Our house was like an institution," recalls Marleine, the third of eight children. "Even us kids, even our mom, learned to take care of wounds. My dad had this gift -- whenever he'd see a patient, he could tell right away whether he could help them."

If he couldn't, they had to go to the nearest hospital at Des Chapelles, about fifteen miles away. "Even now in my mind's eye I can see how they carried the sick person," she says. "Early in the morning they'd put [the patient] on a flat piece of wood and they'd walk fast along the road, two holding the front, two at the back. Sometimes later they carried him back dead, oh, they'd be crying and crying." She balls her fists against her eyes, remembering. "Sometimes they would reach the hospital, but the hospital would send them back because he was going to die anyway and they had to give the bed to someone who had a chance."

Philippe Bastien also built the area's first school, and his oldest children worked as teachers during their three-month summer vacations. Because he was known as a servant of the people, Bastien, like many other intellectuals and activists, was considered by the government to be a communist, and he was regularly arrested and jailed, according to his daughter. "The day after I was born was one of the times they got him," she says.

In the late Sixties Bastien began selling his farmland so he could send his children to Catholic schools. In 1974 the family moved to Port-au-Prince, where Marleine attended the prestigious Swiss school, College Bird. Philippe worked as a cook on cruise ships. In 1980, as Haiti grew increasingly chaotic in the years leading to the overthrow of Jean-Claude Duvalier, Marleine's father found a job in Belle Glade, on the southern shore of Lake Okeechobee, at a food stamp office. One by one his wife, Angelina Destinoble, and children left Haiti to join him. Today Philippe Bastien operates a trading business back in Port-au-Prince; Destinoble lives in Fort Lauderdale and travels back and forth to Haiti. Marleine's seven siblings have settled in South Florida.

In 1981, at the age of 22, she came to Miami to begin her college education. She assumed she would enroll in courses leading to medical school, a plan she explained to her academic adviser at Miami-Dade Community College, a white Cuban woman. "She told me that was going to be very hard to do, so I said, 'How about [studying to be] a lawyer?' She said that was even worse. She said the best thing was to become an executive secretary. I thought she really wanted to help me."

It took awhile before the "just come" (a new arrival from Haiti) understood that she had been nicely dismissed, and not for the last time, because of her skin color. "By the time I realized I had been misinformed, I thought I was too old to go to medical school," Bastien says. "Now I know I really wasn't. I also know a lot of black kids are treated like that."

Bastien reluctantly took secretarial courses at MDCC and at the same time began an expanding list of extracurricular activities. "The Haitian community at the time was very active," she recalls. "People were fighting against the Duvalier dictatorship. There were community meetings every weekend. I got right into the heart of things right after my arrival and never got out."

In 1982 Bastien started a full-time job as a paralegal and interpreter at the Haitian Refugee Center. Almost every day for five years she accompanied the center's lawyers to the Krome detention center, where thousands of Haitians languished in compounds or trailers surrounded by barbed wire fences. "There would be 30 to 50 hearings a day, but sometimes we had to wait for hours to see [the refugees]," she remembers. "Attorneys would be running from one courtroom to another. We'd chase buses, chase people to the airport when they tried to deport them without a hearing. Sometimes they'd beat up our clients and try to cover it up. I'll never forget Krome. It was because of all that I wanted to be a social worker."