By Jean H Charles
Greta Thunberg, the young Swedish girl who challenged the world body at the 2019 conference for climate change, to stop inflicting lethal wounds unto Mother Nature to preserve its stake for future generations used the viral term: “How dare you”, to express her outrage and indignation at most international leaders who take comfort in making believe they are doing something to remediate the situation.
What Thunberg did not know; this make-believe scheme is 62 years old? I am now 73 years old. I was 11 when I felt, I have lost my innocence and my virginity. My case is no different from my brethren from the Caribbean, Africa and from most parts of what is called today, the underdeveloped world.
I was born in a small town called Grand River in the northern part of Haiti. My family by contrast to the rest of the population of the town was rather of a middle-class standing. I enjoyed an idyllic life in a grand house under the pastoral care of my parents and my grandparents until the age of eleven, when I had to leave that town to pursue my secondary education in Cape Haitian a much larger city because Grand River had facilities leading only to primary education.
Seven years later, I had to leave Cape Haitian for Port au Prince, the capital to pursue my university training and education because Cape Haitian had than no university. Upon graduation, under the dictatorial regime of Duvalier, there was future only abroad. I left for New York where with luck and scholarship I did graduate school at Columbia University.
I am one of those lucky few who should not be whining about my misery. Forty years later after a life in New York, teaching and practicing law and social work, I am back in Haiti, putting up the pieces left fifty years ago.
This story is no different from the story of the black man or woman uprooted from Africa who lives in the metropolitan setting like a home slave with the trappings denied to the field slave not contributing to the development of his homeland.
How dare you from robbing me of the affection and the protection of my kin as well as the leadership that I could have provided to my town and my nation during those fifty years?
Indeed as I have exposed in several essays published worldwide, the fact that the colonialist nations have designed a scheme after independence not only to rob the former colonies of their best minds, but they have also managed to rape the natural resources of their value, depleting their reserve for future generations.
This drama is being played today in Haiti where three generations of vulture leaders [in coo] with international concerns. First, the Duvalier regime in the sixties, seventies, and eighties forced millions of Haitian people to quit their homeland for solace abroad. It continued under the fake democracy era with the Lavalas regime clothed with a fake leftist ideology continuing to keep the diaspora at bay; and the homeland in misery during the nineties and the beginning of the 21st century.
Now in this very day, the last battle is at play to uproot the odious Parti Haïtien Tèt Kale (PHTK) regime bent on confounding vicious and rapacious personal interest with the national interest. As in 1803; In 2019, will the rag soldiers on the street, reversed the world order of fake democracy to replace it by true democracy in Haiti would be hospitable to all?
The citizens of Haiti have defied the world 200 years ago by dismantling slavery for themselves and the rest of humanity. I am utterly confident they will give another universal blow and a striking lesson to the world that we are all created at God’s image, and we should enjoy our terrestrial paradise in our own setting without being uprooted to settle in Ottawa, London, Paris, New York or Miami to enjoy life and grow our children in peace and prosperity.
