Alan Cambeira

When you find true peace within yourself, you then become the kind of person who can genuinely live at peace with others … especially if these “others” are different from you. I am totally committed to the idea that one of the very few things we human beings have to offer is the richness of unconscious and conscious emotional responses to being alive! That, to me, is one of the most meaningful things anybody can bring to another soul … and that is what is so marvelous about living!

I have committed myself to the serious notion that an individual’s life is critically impoverished by her/his inability to understand and honestly accept that there are OTHER worldviews, OTHER voices, OTHER values and OTHER ways of analyzing and solving problems. Most especially today must one be made uncompromisingly aware that s/he holds a worldview that is NOT necessarily shared universally; that OTHER individuals may well have perspectives of the world that are profoundly different from one’s own. Learning to respect and embrace differences, for me, has always been and still is the true keystone to the real lesson that education should and MUST convey especially to young people in today’s rapidly changing, excitingly diverse, and often confusing world community.

“Jou va, jou vien , m’pa di passé ça” … The Haitian Kreyòl expression means literally … “Day comes, day goes; I will say nothing more than that.” In Haitian culture it conveys a higher level of understanding on the part of the speaker about the workings of a world in which injustices occur daily. In other words, the speaker is saying, “The days may go by, but you will see … my day will come around.” That day has indeed come! And finally, there is another relevant Haitian proverb that reminds us, “Se sak nan men-ou ki pa-ou!” [“You can’t evolve if you don’t get involved!”]