always reunited the whole family every Sunday, and we went to a different church each time. After, we visited family and friends and had dinner at one of their homes, as was customary Haiti. Dad’s cousin Lucane, an engineer, and his wife Bernadette had a lovely house perched up in the hills on the side of cliff in an exclusive area called Black Mountain, with a view looking down onto the city of Port-Au-Prince below, and we had a couple of Sunday dinners there complete with music and good times. Uncle Lamartine and his wife Aunt Patricia, the American missionary whom he had married many years before, also had a beautiful house that they shared with their three daughters, Peggee, who was my age, Leanna, who was Betty’s age, and Jacqueline who was a few years younger. Uncle Lamartine was a tall, elegant man with a very calm, almost regal demeanor. I never saw him get angry or even raise his voice once. We went to their home a few times for dinner, and Betty spent a few nights there since she was around the same age as Uncle Lamartine’s girls.
As we visited family and friends all around the city, I was struck by how well my family and friends lived in comparison to the impoverished people all around us. A minority in Haiti were very rich (like the corrupt politicians, some business people, and entertainers) while another minority, such as my family and most of our family and friends, were in Haiti’s version of the middle-class, which meant that we lived very comfortable lives. This left the unfortunate majority of the population as very poor. In later years, after the start of my airline career, as I traveled to other developing countries like Brazil, Mexico, The Dominican Republic, and India, I observed the same dynamic in differing degrees: a very small middle class, an even smaller wealthy class, while the majority was poor. I would come to realize that in the developed countries, such as the US, Western Europe, and some parts of Asia, the majority of people were in the middle class. They were the ones working, paying taxes, and acting as the backbone of society. I wondered when my little Haiti would be that way.
The days and nights that we did spend at our own home were like a dream. Just like at Uncle Moliere’s house, breakfast, which was prepared by our maid, greeted us on the table whenever we decided to wake up. Our house at Delmas 65 was closer to the center of town than some of the houses of our other family members were, and the balcony had a view that encapsulated the class divisions in Haiti and the gulf between rich and poor. It looked out over a dry river valley full of little aluminum-roofed shacks, where many of Haiti’s poor lived. On the other side of the valley and along our street, were big, beautiful houses even larger than ours. Most of the maids and watchmen who lived in those small shacks in the valley worked for families such as ours. Many of the maids, watchmen, and other domestic workers were illiterate and sadly had been working since childhood. My mom and dad always paid them more than the going rate for domestic help and always gave them a little extra when they were leaving to go back to the US. That day finally came again, and it was time to say goodbye to our family, friends, and to our “Haiti Cherie” (dear Haiti). As we boarded our plane back to New York, I wondered when I would visit my birthplace again.
As we left our little palace of a home at Delmas number 65 in poor little Haiti, I thought of how ironic it was that although we were going back to the rich US, we would be returning to our little apartment in the projects. Here in Haiti, we had been living in the virtual lap of luxury in our own large home complete with a maid and a watchman, while on Staten Island, we had no house to call our very own. Mom and Dad later told us that our trip to Haiti, when they had to bring us back to that little apartment in the projects, brought on a new sense of urgency in them to buy a house. Although they had been saving for many years towards that goal, they kicked their plans into high gear as soon as we returned home late in the summer of 1989, and by February 1990, our family’s dream and the dream of many immigrant families had finally come true: we owned our own home. It was located on a quiet tree-lined street on Staten Island, the house number... 65.
“College” and flying magazine
Spring 1990 brought with it my 17th birthday in April and the realization that I would be starting my senior year of high school in the fall. In a year and half, I would be starting college, where I would finally start learning to fly. I was still a regular visitor to my school library’s research section, where I tried to learn all I could about collegiate flying programs and about the lives of airline pilots. My school guidance counselor, with whom I had been meeting periodically since starting high school, was doing her best to help guide me along the path to finding schools where I could get my Bachelor’s degree while also getting my FAA pilot licenses. I did well on the PSAT that spring, and as I started my senior year in September, prepared for the real deal, the SAT, which I was planning to take it in November.
Most of the students in the Scholar’s Academy had much more conventional career goals, planning to enter fields such as medicine, law, business, and the like. I was the only one in the Academy and to my knowledge, my whole graduating class of nearly five hundred, who wanted to go to college to learn to fly. In those pre-internet days, the main sources of information regarding colleges were, unbelievably... books! My guidance counselor and I poured through reference guides like Peterson’s College Guide and the US News and World Report College Guide looking for information about where I could get a Bachelor’s degree in aviation while learning to fly. Whenever one of my classmates went to the guidance counselor looking for advice on colleges to apply to, she had dozens of suggestions for them. For me, she had a grand total of one. It was a school called Dowling College in Long Island, New York. I appreciated her help, but I soon realized that I would be on my own in finding a school that fit my career goals and met my idea of “college”.
Over the years, the word “college” had come to mean a place with history and cobblestone streets, walkways with little lampposts, brick buildings with ivy on the walls, football games, basketball games, parties, and many hot girls. My idea of college had been shaped by dozens of movies about college life I had seen over the years, such as Animal House and Revenge of the Nerds and television shows, such as A Different World, as well as by my own research into historic colleges and universities around the country. I wanted a picture-perfect postcard campus, a great academic, and aviation program, along all with all the fun that those movies and television shows had primed me to expect in college. I promised myself that I wouldn’t stop looking until I found it, even if that meant I had to transfer colleges. A senior year class trip to the University of Pennsylvania campus only served to cement the idea about the kind of college experience I was looking for. It was my first time visiting such a large campus that stretched for blocks and blocks with seemingly hundreds of buildings. The College of Staten Island campus, with which I had become familiar while my mom was attending, seemed like nothing more than an overgrown high school by comparison.
In addition to the previously mentioned requirements, I was also looking for an aviation program that didn’t require me to take any in-depth calculus or physics. Over my years of high school, as the math had grown increasingly difficult, I often found myself wondering what the point of learning all of it was. I did not want to be a math teacher, and I did not want to be an Aeronautical Engineer. I enjoyed reading and writing and could whip out an essay or a book report with no problem with the results usually being A’s, while I had to study long hours and fight for Bs and Cs in trigonometry, calculus, and physics, and that was only on the high school level. I knew that a basic knowledge of physics was required to understand the physics of flight. But I also knew that learning to fly an airplane was much more hands-on and practical, as opposed to theoretical. However, as often happens in life, the things we fear the most often place themselves squarely in our path for us to overcome. I was unwittingly setting myself up for a collision course with those two dreaded subjects, and they would be the final two obstacles standing in the way of me finally earning my Bachelor’s degree and moving on with my career plans.
Another very important criterion for my college was that it be away from home. I loved my family dearly, but my wanderlust and desire to explore would not allow me to go to a college near home. I wanted to go away to college and to live in a dorm. My guidance counselor’s suggestion of Dowling College certainly did not meet that requirement, as it was in nearby Long Island. Simply put, I didn’t want to go to a school where
