Thread: Immigrant Wants to Heal Haiti by Bringing Students to U.S.

"Never let a crisis go to waste...."


Immigrant wants to heal Haiti by bringing students to U.S

By Nicole Young • THE TENNESSEAN • May 29, 2010

It's been nearly five months since Casimy Sejour, a Haitian immigrant living in La Vergne, lost six family members in the earthquake that devastated his hometown of Port-au-Prince.

Every day since the quake, the rest of his family in Haiti — two sisters and a half brother, now homeless and living in tents on the streets of the ruined capital city — has struggled to survive.

"I've been crying every day," Sejour said. "It's hard to talk on the phone with my sister when she says she can't take it anymore, that she wants to die because she can't see a future."

Sejour, a quality control specialist at AO Smith in Cheatham County, and his wife, Carlyne, have sent about $8,000 home to help, but it isn't enough, they say.

The couple moved to Nashville in 1994, three months after they married and adopted two children from one of Sejour's sisters.

"There are no schools, no buildings," Sejour said. "This is a country that before the quake had 7,000 doctors for 8 million people. They don't have anything now.

"How are they going to get an education and change things?"

With the help of a local nonprofit, Tennessee Haitian Voice, Sejour is trying to start rebuilding Haiti. He wants to bring Haitian students to the United States so they can attend college and return home to become the country's next generation of leaders.

Next month, Sejour and Phidomise Leveque, president of Tennessee Haitian Voice, will return to Haiti to take the first steps in seeing that dream become a reality. They plan to stay for four days.

"We have several plans that we're working on," said Leveque, a Smyrna resident who also is a Haitian immigrant.

"One is to send kids to school in Haiti. We're looking for kids on the street with no other means to go to school. Our other plan is to identify smart kids who could be leaders in the future Haiti.

"That plan is premature right now. There are a lot of legal and immigration aspects we have to work through. We want to make sure that when we do this we want to do it right."

Leveque, originally from L'Artibonite, Haiti, hopes to get sponsors for students who are chosen to study in the U.S. So far, she has been approached by one would-be sponsor and has traveled to Haiti once, in March, to try to find candidates for the study program.

http://www.tennessean.com/article/20100 ... nts+to+U.S

LOL


most of them would never leave and would remain in the country competing against us in the job force and studying in our schools at our expense.

yep i wouldn't leave , who in their right mind would ever willingly go back to that hell hole ... most of their country is deforested because they cut down all the trees for cooking fule ... and AIDS is completely rampant ..

they can go to haiti and build a school strong enough to withstand a quake,
like the ones built in california

Haiti has teachers, we don't need the students here.

In the early days, Americans educated our children in our homes, under trees or in shacks. We didn't send them out of the country.

Dixie