Growing up in Haiti, I was fascinated by computers and eager to learn how they work. My dad, who was the person I was closest too, knew how much I loved anything related to technology, so he would let me play with broken radios and other things to try to fix them. Unfortunately, I had no computer and, on very rare occasions, access to a barely working flip phone belonging to my dad. It seemed like an impossibility then, and a dream come true today, that I am now a collegiate student-athlete majoring in Computer Science at Franciscan University in Steubenville, Ohio.
I was born into a struggling family of seven brothers and sisters. No one in my entire family has ever had the opportunity to go to college. Most of them didn’t even graduate from high school. Tragically, when I was 16-years-old, my father passed away. I lost an influential part of myself when my father died. It affected me a lot, and I was very depressed. Any little thing could make me angry, and that was emotionally affecting those that were trying to support me. I spent three months trying to figure it out. Eventually, I found a way to escape that state of mind and focus on what I still had. It was through tennis and poetry that I finally found my escape and my peace after my father’s death. Tennis and poetry, two things I found, that with focus and energy, I could excel at and not only change my life, but the lives of those around me.
