My Life In Creole | Translation

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The following English translation was generated with the assistance of artificial intelligence. 

[Daniel Alarcón]: This is Radio Ambulante. I’m Daniel Alarcón.

Sandrine Exil was born in Bogotá, surrounded by mountains, but her first memories are of the sea.

[Sandrine]: I love the sea and the beautiful thing about Haiti is that you have that combination between mountain and sea very close together.

[Daniel]: In 2000, when Sandrine was three years old, her parents and she moved to Port-au-Prince, the Haitian capital.

[Sandrine Exil]: As a little girl I remember a lot, especially Sundays, which was like the fun time, and, let’s say, we would go down to the central part of Port-au-Prince and be able to eat ice cream and well, I would take photos in the Champ de Mars where the National Palace was located.

[Daniel]: Jean Mary, Sandrine’s father is Haitian, and had moved to Bogotá in 1992 to study medicine. And Ruby, her mother, is Colombian, from Ibagué, and is also a doctor. They met while studying, fell in love and in time Sandrine was born. Since Jean Mary had a practice in Haiti and needed to attend to it, they decided to move. And Sandrine, being small, had no problem adapting.

But she did notice a difference with the other children around her.

[Sandrine]: IShe was like one of the lightest-skinned. And they always saw me as a weirdo, so to speak.

[Daniel]: Her father is Black, her mother white, and, in Haiti, Sandrine is considered mixed… She has a lighter skin tone than most people in the country.

[Sandrine]: In Haiti the color of skin goes very much combined with social class and always, let’s say, when there’s a mix it’s because, well, a Haitian married a white person, so there’s this mix, you know?

[Daniel]: She stood out because there weren’t many people from mixed families in her school. And if you have white relatives, many times people assume you have money. In perspective, yes, they were privileged. They didn’t live with too many luxuries, but they did live comfortably. And for Sandrine, being the weirdo wasn’t negative.

[Sandrine]: It was more like, well, let’s play princess. So Sandrine is the princess. For obvious reasons she’s the lightest so I said Okay, sure.

[Daniel]: She didn’t think about it too much. It was a good life, peaceful. But permeated by a strict rule.

[Sandrine]: My dad somehow had forbidden me to speak Creole. So, we only spoke French. I couldn’t communicate with the lady who cooked for us unless it was in French.

[Daniel]: Even though the lady didn’t understand it very well. Because besides skin color, another thing that differentiates people in Haiti are language barriers. It’s also a class issue.

On paper, the country has two official languages: French, the language imposed by 17th century European colonization, and Creole, or Haitian Creole, a language unique to Haiti. It’s a language that was born in the colony, from contact between the French and the African slaves brought to the island.

And while, constitutionally, those are Haiti’s two languages, in practice, it’s very different. Creole is the language of the street, what’s spoken with family, with friends, but education is given, in its vast majority, in French. And this extends to other things: institutional procedures, for example, are also in French. A person who only knows Creole is excluded from many spaces and, consequently, from possibilities of economic advancement.

So, at home Spanish was spoken, and outside French. No Creole. The justification that Sandrine’s father always gave was the following:

[Sandrine]: For my dad it was super important and it’s something I remember he always said was that I had to learn French first. I mean, we already had Spanish at home, but the second language had to be French, yes or yes. If I learned Creole first, I was never going to manage to learn French. That was his theory, you know?

[Daniel]: It was as if he was afraid that Creole’s dictions and words would become a habit in French. That they would contaminate it, in a certain way. Her mother agreed with Sandrine’s father. She had just arrived in Haiti, everything was new, and it was Jean Mary who knew the context. Besides, at school they also prohibited it.

But Sandrine felt that this rule was unfair. It was the language she heard whenever she left the house…

[Sandrine]: For me Creole was like I heard that everyone spoke it, well, it was like a fun language, you know? I mean, what was trendy for me.

[Daniel]: She tried to speak it secretly, with her friends or with the domestic worker of the house. And meanwhile, she thought that maybe, when she finally spoke perfect French, she could learn Creole. And with Creole she could then talk to others without problem, feel less like the weirdo.

But, suddenly, in 2004, Haiti’s political situation broke everything Sandrine knew.

[Daniel]: A coup d’état plunged the country into violence and Sandrine’s parents decided to leave. The issue of the Creole prohibition would be forgotten, but years later it would return to redefine Sandrine’s identity and the most complicated relationship of her life.

We’ll be right back.

[MIDROLL 1]

We’re back. Our senior editor Luis Fernando Vargas tells us the story.

[Archive soundbite]

[Aristide]: I will try to be brief, as I said once we have a coup d’etat, then we’ll have death.

[Luis Fernando Vargas]: The one you just heard is Jean-Bertrand Aristide, Haiti’s then president, in an international press conference a little more than a month before the coup d’état against him. He says: “I will try to be brief, once we have a coup d’état, we will have death.”

The coup finally occurred on February 29, 2004 and was led by the political opposition and ex-military and supported by the governments of Canada, the United States and France. Haiti was in a serious economic crisis, they accused the president of corruption, violence in the streets was increasing and, in circumstances still not very clear, Aristide left the country.

Aristide had won the elections by an immense majority. He was a popular leader and the situation had been tense for weeks. Many of his followers were in the streets. There were confrontations between those who supported the president and the opposition, but in the midst of instability crime also began: looting, kidnappings, assaults… And with Aristide’s departure the violence became overwhelming.

[Luis Fernando]: For Sandrine, who was a 6-year-old girl and didn’t understand all that, the coup was lived in a very concrete way: being at home. Always. School had been completely suspended. They didn’t go out unless it was strictly necessary. But even so, it was impossible to ignore what was happening.

[Sandrine]: Sometimes at night, you could hear a lot of noise, like screams and protests in the street.

[Luis Fernando]: And although she didn’t understand much, it scared her, because she did sense something: it was dangerous. Especially for her mother, when she had to go out. Being white, they were afraid they would kidnap her.

[Sandrine]: She had to live like hidden, you know? So if we went out to do grocery shopping my mom had to recline the seat all the way down so they wouldn’t see her. All my dad’s brothers took charge of accompanying her like bodyguards so nothing would happen to her.

[Luis Fernando]: And it wasn’t unfounded fear. In the end, despite the precautions, violence shook the family. They didn’t kidnap Sandrine’s mother, but they did kidnap an uncle. It was two months of anguish until they decided to pay the ransom. They let him go, but they decided the best thing was to leave. Sandrine’s younger brother was two years old. They told her they were going to Colombia, she thought it would be a vacation…

[Sandrine]: When we arrived here, well, yes, I realized that we were already planning to look for a house, look for school for us. So I saw like maybe we’re never going back.

[Luis Fernando]: They enrolled Sandrine in the French Lycée, in Bogotá, for her first grade of elementary school. There she received most subjects in French and was even more advanced than the other children in her class. The complicated part came from another side.

[Sandrine]: It was hard for me maybe the first months, yes, to have friends. And because of what I’m telling you, like this person arrives who they say is from Haiti… Haiti has always had a very strong stigma and it’s like well, it’s the poorest country in Latin America and one of the poorest in the world. And I feel like they saw me with that, like oh, poor thing, she doesn’t eat, kind of that vibe, you know?

[Luis Fernando]: It was summarized, again, in the color of her skin. If in Haiti Sandrine was white, or at least mixed, in Bogotá she was only Black. And the Afro-descendant population in Colombia is one of the most unprotected groups with the highest poverty rates in the country. There’s stigma, especially in a school where, largely, wealthy people went, like hers.

In the end she managed to integrate. She never received direct aggressions or explicit discrimination within the school, but she did experience more subtle violence…

[Sandrine]: We played on an airplane, where some were passengers, I don’t know what. Sandrine, you’re the flight attendant. We played house, I don’t know what. Sandrine, you’re the maid. We played princesses I don’t know what and no, well, how come there are no Black princesses Sandrine, so well, you have to. No, you clean for us.

[Luis Fernando]: The story repeated itself.

[Sandrine]: What I remember a lot is that I didn’t feel strange because I had already lived feeling strange in Haiti, so there I was very light and people wondered many things. Coming here to Colombia I was very dark and people wondered things. At the time I maybe didn’t think much about it, because it was part of my life. In neither of the two sides had I felt that I belonged.

[Luis Fernando]: While Sandrine grew up, things in Haiti deteriorated even more. Her father constantly returned to the country to resolve business matters, but Sandrine and her mother only went during summer to a country house and didn’t leave from there. Haiti felt distant.

But everything started to change in 2010, a devastating year for the country…

(Archive soundbite)

[Presenter]: Good evening, a few moments ago an earthquake of 7 degrees on the Richter scale lasting more than a minute, shook Haiti today, the poorest country in the American hemisphere.

[Luis Fernando]: In January, an earthquake left more than 200,000 dead and the infrastructure of a large part of Haiti in ruins.

(Archive soundbite)

[Presenter]: There are those who describe through the internet that the situation is chaotic. At this hour of the night people are asking for help in the streets.

[Luis Fernando]: Nearly a million and a half people were left homeless. And almost nine months later, another tragedy…

(Archive soundbite)

[Presenter]: The tragic situation in Haiti, now the drama is because of cholera that has left so far, more than a thousand dead. Yesterday, hundreds of people took to the streets to protest the slowness of the Port-au-Prince government, the inaction to face this outbreak of the epidemic.

[Luis Fernando]: A cholera outbreak ended up killing nearly 10 thousand people. The outbreak was caused by poor waste management by soldiers of the United Nations mission that had been maintained in the country since 2004 to stabilize it after the coup d’état against Aristide.

(Archive soundbite)

[Journalist]: In Cité Soleil, the largest poor neighborhood in Port-au-Prince, the sick crowd into these campaign tents before being referred to treatment centers. There isn’t enough space to attend to them here.

[Luis Fernando]: Sandrine was 13 years old, and it was at that moment that something was activated in her. It was a discomfort: that land where she had been so happy as a child and to which she still felt tied was in a pain that didn’t end. And she couldn’t do anything.

[Sandrine]: I think it was already at the moment when I said My God, why do so many bad things happen to this country? It was during the earthquake. I thought a lot about how we could help. We collected rice, beans like food to be able to send. My dad well I heard him talking on the phone and he would tell him no, it’s that they’re selling everything you all sent. I said but, I mean, what’s happening?

[Luis Fernando]: That is, the people who received the supplies sold them, instead of delivering them to the affected people. That was the level of desperation.

[Luis Fernando]: Two years later, in 2012, Sandrine returned to Haiti after quite a while of not visiting. She found a place different from her memories. Different physically: a country in attempts at reconstruction, but also different in attitude, toward her, toward those considered foreigners. Her skin tone said a lot, always, but now more.

[Sandrine]: It was like Okay, you’re white and we don’t want you here. And being different from them started to be a threat, you know?

[Luis Fernando]: And it’s that at that moment, in the Haitian context, the whites were the blue helmets. That’s what they called the soldiers of the United Nations mission. There’s a term in Haiti: the blue helmet babies, or little minustahs, children born from rapes and other acts of coercion done by mission soldiers toward Haitian women. For example, giving coins to women living in extreme poverty in exchange for sex. Many of these soldiers were mestizo or white soldiers, who left the women alone to raise their children in very difficult conditions.

By that time, the mission had been in Haiti for almost 10 years and a large part of the population questioned whether it had done more harm than good. Besides the abuses, there were reports of violence toward civilians by the soldiers. People were distrustful.

And despite her renewed curiosity about the country, Sandrine believed that would be her last visit. Her grandmother and some of her father’s brothers had emigrated a few years ago to the United States. Another lived between Haiti and Panama. Practically only her grandfather remained, who had refused to leave. The country she remembered no longer existed.

[Luis Fernando]: The following years were hard for Sandrine. In Bogotá there was always the issue of her race, feeling foreign, but also the relationship with her father became complicated.

[Sandrine]: The relationship with my dad yes, was always very, very complex, because there are many things I didn’t understand, let’s say, at school he was very hard on me and always expected more,

[Luis Fernando]: Sandrine always felt that he expected her to be like him: besides being a doctor, he had a master’s degree in political science. If you’re Colombian you might have heard his name in the media sometime, Jean Mary Exil, because between 2020 and 2022 he was Haiti’s ambassador to Colombia. So he demanded she be better than everyone else, but he didn’t ask with tact. She felt it as a mandate: she had to stand out, nothing else mattered.

[Sandrine]: Like grades had to be the best. When thinking, let’s say, about what I was going to study, he would tell me you have to leave the country, I mean, you can’t study in Colombia. All this always from, from love, but also from a very imposed attitude.

[Luis Fernando]: When she was about to graduate from school, a complex issue began: her career.

[Sandrine]: And he tells me: And you’re going to Canada because well there you won’t lose French and you start implementing English and that’s it, well. Yes, as if it were a plan.

[Luis Fernando]: He also had decided what Sandrine was going to study. Although journalism had always caught her attention, her father didn’t like the idea. He imposed studying international relations, and she obeyed. But she was beginning to feel resentment.

[Sandrine]: It was a lot of anger because I said this man is telling me what I have to do and what I have to stop doing. And I don’t like this. And it was always with fights and I would contradict him and yes, there was a lot of resentment.

[Luis Fernando]: In the middle of her studies in Canada her parents divorced, which generated even more distance with him. So, after graduating and against her father’s wishes, Sandrine decided to return to Colombia and managed to start working in journalism. It was there where she saw a way to connect, again, with Haiti, after years of distance. She began to try to do stories when she saw the opportunity.

[Sandrine]: I started looking for contacts, my dad would pass them to me or relatives of my parents who I would tell I need more or less like this character, if they exist, send them to me. And it turns out that these people, well of course, would send me the contact by WhatsApp, but I realized that I had no idea how to communicate with this person. So they would tell me they only speak Creole and I, okay, how do I interview someone? This, yes, is very serious.

[Luis Fernando]: With the minimum she remembered from when she tried to speak secretly when she was a child and mixed with French, Sandrine would answer them. But communication was difficult and it was at that moment that the strange rule of not speaking Creole returned to the center of her life.

And it’s that it seemed that her paternal family wasn’t interested in maintaining that link with Haiti. Several uncles had left the country and none of their children spoke Creole. Neither did Sandrine’s younger brother, 6 years younger than her.

So it was then that she made the decision: she was going to learn, despite the fear of what her father would say. She found tutorials on YouTube, watched news in Creole, videos of people talking and took some virtual classes. She also used a language learning app. And as a form of confrontation, she decided to start practicing with one person in particular: her father.

[Sandrine]: To practice I would call my dad and greet him in Creole and well my dad would laugh like Why are you doing this? Like he didn’t understand very well, but he also didn’t take me very seriously, maybe to avoid conflict. The Creole thing already felt like a topic that, for him, was over.

[Luis Fernando]: For a while, Sandrine continued covering Haiti when she could from Colombia, but the country’s crisis after the assassination of President Jovenel Moïse in 2021 was too deep. Coups d’état, violence, crime, natural disasters, deadly epidemics… A list of tragedies that seemed endless.

[Sandrine]: I don’t know, I felt in my heart that I was the person who had to be there telling everything that was happening, not to be a superhero or anything like that, but yes, because I have this side that I turned off for a long time and a bit because I feel I owe this country a part of what I am too.

[Luis Fernando]: So she decided she had to return. She wanted to tell people’s day-to-day lives, see another Haiti that isn’t seen in the news. She had to live there. She knew that, but she didn’t have a concrete plan. Maybe it would only be for a while, maybe not. But she didn’t ask anyone for advice. She just informed them.

[Sandrine]: A bit what I told my dad was: sir, I’m leaving. No, what are you going to do there? I raised you to go live, I don’t know… in Canada, United States, Europe. And I told him like no.

[Luis Fernando]: No. For her, there was nothing to discuss. Her father was furious, but after a few weeks, he realized she wasn’t going to change her mind. He only told her:

[Sandrine]: Things there aren’t easy, the kidnapping issue, well, is very strong. The murders are also very strong, I hope you’re not doing it as a game or to play war correspondent. I want you to be very conscious of what you’re going to face and what you’re going to see.

And so, in March 2024, she took a plane like she did 20 years before when there was the coup d’état, but now back to Port-au-Prince. She carried a large suitcase, full, enough to start from zero, again. And, also, even though she wouldn’t admit it to herself or her family, with fear.

[Daniel]: A pause and we’ll be back.

[Daniel]: We’re back on Radio Ambulante. Here’s Luis Fernando Vargas.

[Luis Fernando]: Upon arriving in Port-au-Prince, in the car going to an uncle’s house, Sandrine encountered a country even more different from what she had seen in her adolescence.

[Sandrine]: It was like seeing a war zone. The Champ de Mars no longer exists. Since 2010 there’s no National Palace. People living in the streets and children without clothes asking for food. Everyone is asking for food. It was a completely different environment from what I had lived before and for me it was super shocking.

[Luis Fernando]: The next day she started moving. Establishing contacts, looking for work…

[Sandrine]: I arrived playing the local, believing that people were going to accept me and that everything went super well.

[Luis Fernando]: But she soon realized that things weren’t going to be easy. For others, she wasn’t local.

[Sandrine]: Everyone tells me ti blonde, ti blonde, ti blonde

[Luis Fernando]: You’re white.

[Sandrine]: Ladies telling me if I could adopt their children, that they would give me their children as gifts. And I would tell them that I live here. And they would be shocked because well I don’t have that… I mean, for them I’m a foreigner and I come from a completely favored and blessed, illuminated world.

[Luis Fernando]: Sandrine knew it was true. That her privilege was enormous. That she had been outside when the worst had happened. But even though she told them she was from that same country, it wasn’t easy to call herself Haitian in those days.

[Luis Fernando]: But she found joy: her grandfather, Levoy Exil. Levoy is one of Haiti’s most famous painters. When Sandrine was a child, she would visit him in his painting studio. He had a class for the little ones, and Sandrine’s parents would leave her there for him to take care of her. She loved those moments when she painted and watched her grandfather paint, although they couldn’t talk much because of the language barrier. He doesn’t speak French and despite this, her father’s rule always applied. He would speak to her in Creole, she in French and that’s how they understood each other a bit. But she always felt very cared for by him and when she returned, now grown up, it was no different.

[Sandrine]: I felt incredible. I mean, I felt first… It was like opening a door I had closed.

[Luis Fernando]: Opening a closed door. Now, alone, Sandrine could practice her Creole with him and try to have the conversations she always wanted to have since childhood. And it was beautiful.

[Sandrine]: My grandfather is the funniest person on planet Earth.

[Luis Fernando]: He’s always in a good mood and singing.

[Sandrine]: Sometimes I simply call him so he’ll sing to me.

[Luis Fernando]: He tells her stories about the country and its culture in ways Sandrine had never heard. It’s been like getting to know a new Haiti, hidden among news of disasters.

[Sandrine]: There’s nothing more beautiful than being able to talk with my grandfather and ask him a bit about Haiti’s history. Because he’s not going to tell it to you like in a book, he’s not going to tell it to you like no, but in this extremely mystical way that makes sense. And I know that none of my cousins have that advantage of being able to sit with grandfather and have grandfather tell them where we come from, who we are and why we have to be sure of ourselves. Believe that we are powerful. It’s another level.

[Luis Fernando]: She had never felt so connected to Haiti as in those conversations. With Creole, Sandrine has set herself a new goal: not only trying to make the world understand Haiti, but trying to bring the world to Haitians, isolated, largely, by their language. She wants to explain to them everything that exists beyond their shores, that feels so distant. That’s why she started working with Haitian media covering the exterior. What she didn’t expect is that this professional effort would also start to heal personal matters. Specifically with her father.

It all started with the 2024 presidential elections in the Dominican Republic, which Sandrine covered in Creole for a Haitian television channel.

She sent the video to her father, to see what he said. She did it with a bit of fear, but his reaction surprised her.

[Sandrine]: My dad didn’t understand absolutely anything about what was happening. I mean, he would tell me I thought you were going to cover in Spanish. Of course, I also went to cover for Spanish, but well they asked us to do this and I said, yes. And my dad said, at what moment did you learn to speak so well?

[Luis Fernando]: Her father had no idea of the effort she was making with Creole. And suddenly, messages started arriving from her aunts, from her grandmother, who live abroad.

[Sandrine]: My dad sent it to all my family. I mean, the pride, well, of the family sent it to the chat. Everyone. Like? I can’t believe it, I thought that Sandrine didn’t speak Creole. My grandfather was completely impacted. Even my mom’s side of the family told me: I knew something had stayed in your head, how impressive that you did it like that, improvised…

[Luis Fernando]: It was a strange moment. She felt good, of course, but all her life her father had given her signals that speaking Creole was grounds for punishment. And suddenly he was proud, even sending it to all his family. She didn’t understand.

She needed to talk to him.

[Daniel]: After the break, we return with Sandrine’s father.

[Daniel]: We’re back. Here’s Luis Fernando.

[Sandrine]: Ready. Hello.

[Jean Mary]: Hello. How are you? Tell me. Well, could you please introduce yourself. What’s your name? How old are you?

[Jean Mary]: Creole or English?

[Sandrine]: Spanish.

[Jean Mary]: Spanish. Ok

[Luis Fernando]: A few months ago, Sandrine sat down with him in Bogotá.

[Jean Mary]: Jean Mary Exil. I’m Haitian. I’m a respiratory therapist by training. And I’m a political scientist. I’m the former ambassador of Haiti to Colombia.

[Luis Fernando]: Sandrine was very clear about the objective of the conversation…

[Sandrine]: Listen to his side of the story and confront him because it was a confrontation. Put him between a rock and a hard place and have him accept that yes, that he had coerced the fact that I didn’t learn.

[Luis Fernando]: She wanted him to accept, openly, that it had been a mistake not to have let her speak Creole. It’s a topic they’ve touched on in a somewhat fragmented way in recent years, sometimes with a lot of anger on her part. It’s never been easy, but Sandrine wanted to try one last time for this story…

[Sandrine]: First answer me.

[Jean Mary]: Well.

[Sandrine]: The decision to not, I mean, to not teach us or not raise us in Creole.

[Jean Mary]: Well, in your case, especially when you lived here, at three years old you went to Haiti. So you were in a French school. In this school. Generally, Creole is automatic. Somehow you’re going to speak it, but French you have to be very strategic for them to speak it. The strategy was to speak French and Creole is automatic.

[Sandrine]: But you prevented me a bit from Creole.

[Jean Mary]: I didn’t prevent you. I already told you it was a strategy, but it wasn’t prevention on my part.

[Sandrine]: I mean, a strategy so I would learn French well.

[Jean Mary]: Exactly.

[Sandrine]: But Creole was relegated to second place.

[Jean Mary]: Not to second place. You’re always going to learn it.

[Luis Fernando]: Sandrine laughs a bit from nerves, but also because it’s the response she’s always received when she touches the topic. He never accepts that he prohibited it. And he always emphasizes that word…

[Sandrine]: He calls them like strategies to navigate the world, you know?

What they tell me is that you said I mean, you prevented me from speaking in Creole. I mean I had to do it secretly with exactly, with Mary, with…

[Exil]: Exactly. So, when you. Emphasize French, well you’re going to perfect it, but underneath you’re already learning Creole. But, well you have to speak French. For the same reason that happens in Haiti.

[Luis Fernando]: The same thing that happens in Haiti. Poverty, lack of education, violence, lack of institutionality. And here you have to understand something… Her father left to study medicine in Colombia as a young man, because the country, at that time, was living through a political crisis not very different from the one that motivated their departure a few years later. It was the opportunity he had for a better life. And that marked his worldview.

[Jean Mary]: Being born in Haiti constantly one must be fighting. If not, you’re going to be in misery.

[Luis Fernando]: But despite that, Sandrine realized in this conversation that he never wanted to stay in Colombia.

[Jean Mary]: My plan A was always Haiti. That’s why as soon as I finished, I went there. I set up my clinic. Your mother was working.

[Luis Fernando]: That’s why his insistence with French, because they had always taught him that it was the language that allows you to lead a better life there. And he always told her: Sandrine is a woman and Black, her life, anyway, is going to be difficult… regardless of circumstances.

[Sandrine]: So, in a world where I’m a woman, I’m Black and let’s say I only spoke Creole, eh, surely the confrontation or navigation in the world would have been very different from the options I’ve had today.

[Luis Fernando]: Her father’s plan to make his life in Haiti was impossible. He had to leave because he wanted a life for his family that the country couldn’t give them. Sandrine understood that this is a wound her father will always have. And every day he thinks about how to help.

[Sandrine]: My dad is a faithful believer that he’s going to do something related to the country. I mean he wants to change things in the country. He wants to offer education in the country, he wants people to learn, see beyond what can be seen in Haiti.

[Luis Fernando]: He took the job as ambassador for a while precisely seeking that.

[Sandrine]: And I think it’s part of what happens with my dad seeing so many opportunities that for example Colombia has given him. I mean, if he could bring all 12 million Haitians who are in Haiti and have them see how things work in Colombia, which isn’t the number one country to highlight, but where things work much better than in Haiti, he would do it.

[Luis Fernando]: Jean Mary believes that an important step is building bridges with the rest of the world. So that Haitians have more opportunities to break out of the cycle of violence and poverty. And that’s achieved, in part, with languages.

[Jean Mary]: Haiti is a country totally isolated in terms of languages. So, to reconstruct Haiti we have to make many efforts. Look around us. All those countries speak Spanish, English. We only speak Creole and French. So, Haiti needs to strengthen languages. I always said no, well my children should speak all those languages and well side by side.

[Luis Fernando]: Because that way his children will be able to help in the task.

Sometimes, Sandrine still feels that her father could have taken another path, one where the demand didn’t become fear and resentment. A more loving path, freer. Talking has started to heal things. There are quite a few missing but understanding where the decisions her father has made come from has helped her.

[Sandrine]: I think it was a very beautiful encounter. Understanding that from his position as a migrant it wasn’t so easy to choose between what and what else when he has heard all his life that Creole, well, wasn’t what opened doors.

[Luis Fernando]: But recently she has seen a change in her father that makes her happy. A year ago, Jean Mary had another child with his new partner. And when Sandrine has visited the house of her father’s new family, she has noticed something: he does speak to her little brother in Creole.

[Sandrine]: And now that Yoyo exists, I’ve noticed that you’re very pro speaking to him in Creole.

[Jean Mary]: Because of the same mistakes.

[Sandrine]: I mean, you accept that you made a mistake.

[Jean Mary]: But, well it’s not the same right? It’s, it’s…

[Sandrine]: It’s the same. It’s the same. Today you speak to Yoyo in Creole.

[Jean Mary]: That’s why. But look at your case. You were in Haiti? But if you’re in Colombia, well you have to make the effort to learn the language.

[Sandrine]: But right now you said to not make the same mistake.

[Jean Mary]: It’s not to not make. They’re strategies.

[Sandrine: Why don’t you accept it?

[Jean Mary]: No, but the idea well never. Is to stop speaking Well the language no. But strategies. In your case, you lived in Haiti. No?

[Sandrine]: Okay, Okay. Well, yes, it might be different.

[Luis Fernando]: Her father let slip the word mistake. He had never said it. Maybe Sandrine’s years-long fight to return to Creole, to Haiti, did change something in him. Maybe it showed him that that language isn’t always a terrible sentence. Maybe he understood that Sandrine feels more Haitian when speaking it. And, maybe, he wants his new son to feel the same.

[Daniel]: Haiti is experiencing an unprecedented humanitarian crisis. In 2025, more than 4,000 people have been killed and more than 1,300,000 have been internally displaced, according to the UN. In addition, the UN estimates that 90 percent of the capital, Port-au-Prince, is under gang control. 

Sandrine Exil is a Colombian-Haitian international journalist. She lives between both countries. Luis Fernando Vargas is senior editor at Radio Ambulante. He lives in San José, Costa Rica. 

This story was edited by Camila Segura and me. Bruno Scelza did the fact checking. Sound design and music are by Andrés Azpiri. 

The rest of the Radio Ambulante team includes Paola Alean, Adriana Bernal, Aneris Casassus, Diego Corzo, Emilia Erbetta, Camilo Jiménez Santofimio, Melisa Rabanales, Natalia Ramírez, David Trujillo, and Elsa Liliana Ulloa. 

Carolina Guerrero is the CEO. 

Radio Ambulante is a podcast from Radio Ambulante Estudios, produced and mixed in Hindenburg PRO.

If you liked this episode and want us to continue doing independent journalism about Latin America, support us through Deambulantes, our membership program. Visit radioambulante.org/donate and help us continue telling the stories of the region.

Radio Ambulante tells the stories of Latin America. I’m Daniel Alarcón. Thank you for listening.