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#1259: For Haitian-American students : Morse comments
From: oloffsonram <oloffsonram@globelsud.net>
i grew up with a haitian (black) mother and an american (white) father
in connecticut...i went to summer camps, prep schools and then
princeton...this was during the 60's and 70's...social issues were
quite complicated back then and i could never quite figure out where
exactly i fit in...the fact that i looked white made it even stranger
because i often heard people saying things about race that i wouldn't
have heard had they known my backround...i bounced back and forth
between hanging out with white kids and hanging out at the afro-am
societies...occasionally i would run into a haitian and they would ask
me if i spoke creole..when i said no, that was the end of the
discussion...eventually, in about the 11th grade i decided that
choosing friends based on their characters rather than their
ethnicities was what worked best for me.. coming to haiti and learning
about my haitian roots and learning creole really put me at ease...know
your roots...a tree without roots gets blown down in the wind...
learning creole, it turns out was an important part of the process...i
had a good friend here...an italian who was quadralingual...when we
were in the company of french people we would speak french, with
haitians or when just "hangin out" we would generally speak creole, but
when we were talking business,strategy or money matters we would
generally go to english..
his kids, who grew up in haiti, are quadralingual (french, creole,
english and italian)...my kids are tri-lingual, english, french and
creole...the children can do whatever our resources can provide for
them...when haiti decides to have a school seat for every haitian
child, whatever we decide to teach them (one language, five languages,
computers, engineering, physics, math, history, culture), they'll be
able to learn it...now if we could provide jobs or create an economy at
the same time and put some food on the table, that would be a great
start...my friend was a great asset to haiti, unfortunately he was shot
in the head and killed six months ago...
richard morse