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Mostly Cloudy One doctor pushes for change in Haiti
Eye of a Dream funds scholarships for the underprivileged
“When I was growing up in Haiti, I don’t remember feeling deprived, but we really had nothing,” said Dr. Gilberte Rosarion. Rosarion and her four siblings were raised by their parents in Gonaives, a town located 50 miles north of Port au Prince, in the back of the bodega they owned. She studied by candlelight, walked along dirt roads to school and was lucky to eat one meal per day.
“I knew when I was 6, when I was 8, when I was 10 that I wanted to be a doctor, and it has not changed,” she told the Herald. Rosarion moved with her family to New York and enrolled at City College. She only spoke French, but overcame this obstacle and later, earned a medical degree.
Rosarion now lives in Port Washington with her family. She owns a private practice in Harlem and works in the Emergency Room at Nassau University Medical Center. She could have left her cares for Haiti behind, but after Hurricane Jeanne ripped through the country in 2004, she said she had a desire to return.
“Nothing was left of [Gonaives] as I knew it as a child,” she said. “It really struck me as massive destruction and complete obliteration of things that I knew.” She returned to Haiti again, accompanied with her niece, Dweynie Paul, after the earthquake in 2010. This time, with a mission to change lives.
Structures were crumbling around them, but Paul distinctly recalls Haitians moving about as they began to rebuild their lives one day at a time. “I remember thinking, where are they going? Watching people trying to survive . . . it changes your perspective on life.”
Education is paramount in Haitian culture, Paul said. “Before you eat in Haiti, a family will put their money together to send their children to the best school they can.” With this in mind, Rosarion and Paul founded Eye of a Dream in 2011 and were able to send eleven children to private school this fall.
Rosarion said school is a safe haven for the children. “Inside a school, it’s quiet like the eye of a hurricane, and when you walk outside, you fall back into the same turbulence.”
