Depilye
Port-Au-Prince, Haiti
Port-Au-Prince, Haiti
“Oh, Hold My Hand”
My mother has a path she wants to trace through my life, and that is the path to school. She tells me it is the legacy she will keep for me... for me to share it from generation to generation...Every morning my mother holds my hand, on a road that has no equal, so that she can take me to a school that has no equal. It's hopscotch I'm playing, with the mud and the potholes, so that I can get to school. God has made sure that I know how to play hopscotch; if I didn't know how to play, I'd arrive at school with my socks and feet all dirty. Despite all that, I never forget to clean my shoes before I go out onto the street, and by the time I get to school they are always dirty again, and after all that, my mother pays a shoeshine 5 gourdes to clean them for me. On that road! You can see cars that go every which way, into the potholes in the road, onto the sidewalk, and there are other students playing hopscotch, too, so they can get to school. There are some who are just little babies, and their parents carry them piggyback, there are some who are children like me and it's their parents who hold their hands, and there are some who are adults, and they go to school on their own. On this road I take to school, you see all kinds of things: young women and young men who should be in university or in high school, who are just taking their pleasure with no regard for the consequences, you see little children playing in the mud. When I see that, it hurts me, because that could be me, if I wasn't lucky enough to have a mother who believes in education, who shows me the road from being a little nothing to becoming someone without limits...
One of the things that makes me happiest is that my mother braids my hair so nicely, puts me in my pretty uniform--pretty backpack, pretty barrettes, pretty plastic gogo in my hair, pretty socks, pretty shoes--and after all that, she comes and says, "Now I'll take you to school, oh oh, how pretty you are!" Everyone who sees me recognizes me and my mother, they say, "You look nice! That uniform looks nice!" I reply, "Thank to my mother who made me look nice like this!" I don't only want to look nice in my uniform--that's why I agree to play hopscotch every morning with my mother, so I can make my mind beautiful, too, and get good knowledge. I sit on that bench so I can learn to read and write. I know it's not easy, but--all of you who are parents--try to be like my mother.
“The Best Opportunity of his Life”
If Peterson’s mother had never sent him to school, he would never have achieved what he has today, for him to have this big store. School was the best opportunity of his life. I can say that there isn’t anything more important that exists than school. It is thanks to education that he received what he needed to be useful to himself, useful to society, and more useful to his country. Thanks to education, he is the image of his neighborhood. I can say that every single item in his store represents the fruits of his knowledge and his study.
Tibebe
If, however small they are they have done it; we, humans, we can do the same. Let us imitate them, take them as examples and don’t let our society die.
Don’t they show us how to behave in our society?
Life takes us on its frantic course: We care about ourselves, bring food home and earn a lot of money. We forget that we live in a country—who, like a slave needs us and who’s thirsting for freedom. But who cares about him? Who thinks of him?
We feel like the gods; while small animals, ants for instance, possess qualities that we are still looking for but cannot have yet because we are too ambitious. An author said: “Living in large groups, each ant performs selflessly its role, not for its own benefit but for the benefit of all the other ants. Each ant performs a specialized duty that is necessary for the survival of the hive as a whole.” How amazing is this kind of leadership!
