Origins:

     I was born on February 1st, 1982 in Port-au-Prince, Haiti. An interesting thing about my birth is that my mother was very sick during the pregnancy and I was born prematurely. In addition to this, my mother had to remain hospitalized for a while after I was born so my father is the one who took care of me during my first few weeks of life.

Childhood and Education:

     I traveled a lot as a child because my father used to work for UNICEF for quite some years during my youth.

  :   When I was six years old UNICEF sent my father to Zaire (now known as the Democratic Republic of Congo) so we moved to Kinshasa and stayed there until September 1991 when a combination of economic depression and lootings force all foreigners to leave the country. At that time, Jean-Bertrand Aristide (the then-current President of Haiti) got overthrown in a military coup d'�tat led by General Raoul C�dras, so my mother and I could not get back home and I ended up stuck in New York for one year; hence this is where and how I learned to speak English.

  :   After about a year and a few months I returned home to Haiti to finish the 5th grade and then I did the 6th grade at Quisqueya Christian School while my mom and I waited for my dad to get transferred from Zaire to Togo. And in September of 1994 my dad's transfer finally went through and we moved to Lom�. I loved life in Lom�, and even though I was not a native of the area I felt more at home there than I ever had in Haiti or in any other country, so it wasn't the best of feelings for me when my father decided to quit UNICEF and go back home to Haiti to work for MSH. However, there wasn't much I could do about it so I returned home on December 31st 1995 to finish the 8th grade and stayed in Haiti until I graduated from Quisqueya in June of 2000.

  :   In mid-August of 2000, I finally left home to go to college in a little town called Slippery Rock in the middle of rural western Pennsylvania. Fortunately, my tenure as a student at Slippery Rock University has come to an end---I graduated with a Bachelor of Science in Biology on Saturday May 7th, 2005 so now I am officially an SRU alumnus.