We Went to School to Change Haiti… But Then Were Scattered like Dust

We, who had the privilege of an education in Haiti, all grew up with the same, mostly unspoken, promise. From kindergarten to philosophy class, we were made to understand, sometimes explicitly, often simply by the very air we breathed, that we were the generation that would repair Haiti.

​We are the generation that came just after a dictatorship fell in 1986, then an unprecedented, historic, popular election was held in 1990, then, twice, boots of coups d’état and foreign military occupations trampled the fragile new sprouts of Haitian democracy, justice, development, and sovereignty.

​We were naive. Brilliant, but naive. We believed the Republic was waiting for us. We learned to write, count, argue, and debate, as if our school notebooks were already the first blueprints of a national reconstruction. We told ourselves that one day we would become engineers, doctors, lawyers, professors, diplomats… not for ourselves, but for a country that was awaiting us. We imagined returning, offering service, opening a school, launching a project, creating an institution, giving back. We had hope that we would be Haiti’s saviors.

​Today, when I take stock, I see a cemetery of dreams — an immense invisible mass grave where lie the doctors who wanted to reform healthcare, the engineers who wanted to rebuild roads, the sociologists who wanted to repair society, the lawyers who wanted to regenerate justice, the teachers who wanted to save the youth, the artists who wanted to heal the collective soul, and even the dreamers, the poets, the gentle ones, the sensitive ones.

​The hardest truth — the one we swallow in silence, the one that burns our chest even when we breathe calmly — is that we were prepared for a country where we could not apply our intellectual endowment.

​We were told: “Study, discipline yourselves, become someone — Haiti will need you.” But the ferocious clash between the forces fighting for Haiti to be reborn and those seeking to prevent that rebirth grew so intense that it became impossible for us to engage in rebuilding.

​We are the children of a broken promise, the heirs of a national illusion, the graduates of a stillborn dream. We spent two decades of our lives preparing for a future that evaporated beneath our feet. And that leaves invisible scars that do not bleed, but that change the way we walk, the way we love, the way we trust, even the way we breathe.

​Look at us today. All dispersed. All fractured. All exiled. All amputated from a part of ourselves. Scattered across Miami, Montreal, Paris, Chile, Brazil, New York, the Bahamas, the Dominican Republic…

​Each in a corner of the world, not out of global ambition, but through forced exile, insecurity, a country in collapse through what is coldly called the “brain drain,” but which in reality is a human tearing-away. And I confess, sometimes… it breaks me. It makes me furious, cynical, bitter, distrustful, skeptical, and burning. There are days when I am calm and centered, and others when I am on the edge of the abyss — tense, exhausted, anxious, overstimulated, too lucid to afford the luxury of ignorance. Because deep down, we all carry the same question: What was the point of surviving all this, if we no longer even recognize the country we wanted to save?

We are the children of a broken promise, the heirs of a national illusion, the graduates of a stillborn dream.

​People talk about the “diaspora” as if it were a social category. But for us, it is a geographic wound, a longitudinal fracture in our identity. We live in different time zones, but in the same solitude. We work in countries that do not know our history, while carrying a country that no longer recognizes our faces. We are simultaneously powerful (because we survived), terrified (because we have nowhere to return), exhausted (because we carry a grief without a grave), and lucid (because we know exactly what has been lost).

​The diaspora is not a flight. It is a forced extraction. Surgery without anesthesia. An emotional ripping-away.

​We did not leave: we were expelled from our own future.

​Society likes to talk about “brain drain.” I talk about heart drain. They tore away our childhood friends, those with whom we learned to say “sak gen la, blòdeu” (How’re you doing, brother) and learned to dream while drawing Haitian flags on school benches.

​We grew up together in the same playgrounds, did the same homework, dreamed the same dreams. Today, when we look around, there is no one left. No childhood friends. No reunited graduating classes. No reunion parties. No big class photos 20 years later. Because the entire class is in the diaspora, scattered like seeds blown far from native soil by a violent wind.

​They stole from us: birthdays together, spontaneous evenings, sidewalk conversations, midnight confessions, our first collective projects, even the simple feeling of belonging somewhere.

​Today, we live in a world where no one around us knows our earlier stories, our original wounds, our adolescent secrets, or our promises for the future.

​That loss is a slow extinction, an emotional genocide with no identifiable executioner.

​We are alive, but amputated. And yet, despite collapsed morality, a phantom state, a society in pieces, insecurity, violence, diplomatic humiliations, elite betrayal, foreign domination, the shame of being the most educated generation yet the least useful, we cannot abandon or renounce Haiti.

​Even when we are furious, tired, broken, at the end of our rope, ashamed of our powerlessness, even when we no longer know what to do… Haiti remains there, like an impossible-to-erase memory, like a sacred responsibility no one asked for, but that we all carry.

​That is what it means to be Haitian: a loyal pain.

​And the saddest part?

​Even when we want to come together for Haiti, we cannot. Each of us is trapped in another system, another country, another life, another administrative burden. We speak on WhatsApp, Instagram, Facebook, but we know that distance kills cohesion.

​We walk with the dreams we once had, the projects we were never able to realize, the friends who disappeared, and the versions of ourselves that never came into being.

​Sometimes I feel interested, fascinated, and intrigued by the strength that we still have despite everything. Sometimes I feel mortified, ashamed, humiliated by the way an entire country can turn its children into nomads. Sometimes I feel courageous, determined, fearless, ready to overturn the world. And other days I feel like nothing, as if exile has erased the gravity of my existence. But each time, I return to the same conclusion: We are not a lost generation. We are a stolen generation. And there is a difference.

“You will be the generation of change.” in the end, we became the dispersed, broken, atomized, exported generation.

​It must be said: history humiliated us. Not individually, but generationally. There is a generational trauma that no one has yet had the courage to name. A dull, almost shameful pain. A feeling of having been betrayed by our future before we ever had the chance to enter it.

​We were raised in a heroic narrative: “You will be the generation of change.” And in the end, we became the dispersed, broken, atomized, exported generation.

​We became the product of an exile we never chose. Improvised intellectuals, nomadic survivors, professionals in emotional exile, citizens without an inner territory.

​And the cruelest pain of all?

​It is not only that we lost Haiti. It is that we lost one another. We lost schoolyard confidences, 20-year friendships, emotional reference points, the community that gives life meaning, possible reunions, collective projects, necessary illusions, and the future we imagined together.

​There is a silent shame in all this. Not the shame of having left. But the shame of not having been able to do otherwise. We live a silent, chronic, normalized trauma. A trauma that has never had a name. It is a trauma familiar to dispersed exiles from all countries ravaged by war, invasion, oppression, and exploitation.

​How do you explain to a non-Haitian that we cannot even organize a simple dinner among childhood friends, because one is in Montreal, another in Paris, another in Miami, another in Boston, another in Barcelona, another in Port-au-Prince trying to survive, and another is dead? How do you explain that a country can steal a generation’s emotional geography?

​It is not only poverty that tears us apart. It is the absence of human continuity. It is the feeling of being everywhere and nowhere. It is the shame of not having been able to stay. It is the guilt of having survived. It is the sadness of no longer belonging. It is the humiliation of seeing our degrees useless where they should have been tools of reconstruction. It is the loneliness of being awake in a sleeping world.

​And sometimes, in my darkest moments, I ask myself: Are we a generation or a memory? A force or a dispersion? A promise or a failure?

​But despite all the weariness, the nervous exhaustion, the controlled rage, the elegant despair, the refined bitterness, despite the vertigo, the distance, and collective burnout, despite fear, uprooting, geographic solitude, and suspended dreams, despite exile, which has made us simultaneously fragile and invincible, something remains. An ember. A breath. An obstinacy. A refusal to die. A visceral loyalty. A shared memory. A duty. A country that never stops calling us, even when we have tried everything not to hear it.

​And I believe one thing: Haiti will not be saved by those cynical, greedy, brutal forces who destroyed it. It will be saved by those who were destroyed by those forces (and I mean not just the educated) but refuse to give up. For nations are never reborn through the hands of those who are comfortable. They are always reborn through the hands of those who have suffered enough to say: “Never again.” And that day… you will see: we will save Haiti.

perhaps it is precisely from this shattered diaspora that the force which Haiti never managed to gather will one day be born.

​And in the void left by the absent state, something has emerged: a generation that is no longer afraid. When you have not been protected, you no longer fear loss. When you have not been defended, you learn to become a weapon. That is why this generation — scattered yet awake, silent yet incandescent, exhausted yet undefeated — is the only force in Haiti that no one has managed to control.

​Yes, our dreams were broken. Yes, many have died. Yes, some were crushed before they even took shape. Yes, we lost friends, futures, illusions, paths. But we still have one thing that no one will ever be able to crush: consciousness, memory, lucidity, and the intimate conviction that, scattered or not, we remain Haiti’s last hope.

​And perhaps our strength is not where we thought it was. Perhaps our strength is precisely this pain, this distance, this lucidity, this noble anger, this demanding nostalgia, this fidelity to our nation and the ideal it embodies.

​We are a dispersed, fractured, wounded generation, but we’re not dead. After our heroic ancestors who founded our nation, we are the second Haitian cohort in history raised with a collective dream, then thrown into a world where everything had to be rebuilt from scratch.

​Perhaps our role is not the one we were promised. Perhaps we must invent another way of serving Haiti— a transnational, decentralized way, intellectually armed, emotionally lucid, and politically mature.

​Because one thing is certain: even dispersed, even far away, we remain a generation that never stopped wanting to change Haiti. We are the burned generation, but we are also the generation of fire.

​One day — whether history wants it or not — we will finish what we began in those old classrooms. And perhaps it is precisely from this shattered diaspora that the force which Haiti never managed to gather will one day be born.

​We are the generation that saw the state die, leaders betray, the United Nations fail, NGOs enrich themselves, elites sell out, politicians conspire, foreigners manipulate, innocents die, the honest go into exile, mediocrities govern, and criminals rise.​

We are witnesses to an end of a world but also bearers of a beginning. For when a system rots, it is not its masters who overthrow it; it is its angry victims.

​We have a new spirituality that no longer obeys hallowed, hollow institutions, NGOs, politicians, priests, ambassadors, imperial dictates, or hypocritical moralities.

​Our spirituality is that of those who have nothing left to lose. It says: “Only truth deserves our lives. Everything else can die.”

​We have returned to the gods of origin: those who do not fear chaos, those who see destruction as a passage, those who know that light never arrives without fire.

​The greatest danger to those who profit from chaos is not violence. It is clarity. And we are a clear generation — clear in our anger, clear in our pain, clear in our vision, clear in our mission.

​We no longer have the luxury of being naive or indifferent or of fleeing forever. One day and that day will come sooner than they think — the scattered children will return. Not with weapons. With something more dangerous: a collective will. And when that will aligns, it will be not only a revolt. It will be a rebirth.

​Yes, we are tired, wounded, and scattered. Yes, we sometimes feel shame. Yes, we are afraid, fragile, and broken inside. But we are still here. We still breathe, think, dream, hope, write, and resist. And as long as we exist, Haiti is not dead. It waits. It bleeds. It calls. It demands its children.

​And we, despite everything we have lost, everything we have suffered, everything we have buried — we will return. Not to save it. To recreate it. Because this is the final truth: we are the generation that lost everything, and that is why we are the only one that can rebuild everything.