This paper proposes to study Algiers’ makeshift housing neighborhoods—bidonvilles—as an important site of encounter between European women and Algerian families in the 1950s. What do these encounters reveal about mid-twentieth century Algerian society? To what extent do these women, and the Algerian families they met, confront the power dynamics of citizenship and social class that permeate their interactions? To answer these questions, this paper examines the personal trajectories of three women from metropolitan France, Marie-Réné Chéné, Nelly Forget, and Monique Fichet, who participated in social hygiene and basic medical interventions in the bidonvilles around Algiers. Through their interactions with Algerian families, and especially with Algerian women, these outsiders came away with a better sense of how poor, illiterate, and disenfranchised Algerian families lived on the margins of colonial Algerian society. Drawing on both archival and oral sources, this paper meaningfully contributes to Algerian social history. The three women under study came to the bidonvilles before and during the Algerian War of Independence. Invited by a local European priest, Marie-Réné Chéné came to Algiers in 1950 and quickly began working in the bidonville “Boubsila.” Nelly Forget came to Algeria as the secretary for an international pacifist organization, the Service Civil International, and began working alongside Chéné in 1951. Monique Fichet came to the bidonvilles to complete a nursing internship in 1958 through a program run by the French High Committee for Youth. These French women’s experiences in the bidonvilles led them to reckon with the iniquities of French colonialism in Algeria and to call for structural changes within Algerian society alongside the Algerians that they met. This paper examines how these cross-cultural relationships evolved throughout the 1950s, especially once close interactions between Europeans and Algerians were criminalized during the Algerian War of Independence. This paper offers an individualized and ground-level view of the bidonvilles as a space where French women and Algerian families grappled with the colonial context of their encounter, and attempted to get to know one another and trust each other. I argue that the extent, frequency, and intimacy of these encounters demonstrated that both parties were curious about each other and eager to set new terms of interaction, even though Algeria’s political fate was still unclear.