Leaving was never the plan. Building always was.

2015

Two things at once

October 2015, I enter the Faculty of Medicine and Pharmacy of the State University of Haiti. Very quickly, the coursework is not enough. I start doing two things at once, and I have never stopped since.

On one side, public health. In January 2018 I found PHARMINFOS Haiti, an association of pharmacists I still lead today. Awareness campaigns in Jacmel and Les Cayes, mobile clinics in Pétion-Ville with the Haitian Pharmacy Students Association, World Pharmacists Day. That is where I learn the one gesture I have never stopped making since: explaining a medicine to someone who has never had a pharmacist in front of them.

On the other, business. With friends I create Ice Kid Haiti, selling frozen treats for children. I also invest in transport. Business was never brilliant, but one thing was clear to me: I had the urge to create.

2018 — 2020

The question that set the course

In Haiti, medicine does not always arrive through the counter. It is sold in the street, taken without a prescription, passed between neighbours. Everyone knows it, and everyone lives with it. One thing had never been measured: what is actually inside those boxes.

In 2018 I travel to the United States for the first time, for a research project run with the University of Colorado. As a research assistant at GHRIC and a pharmacovigilance assistant at the University of Colorado Anschutz Medical Campus, that is the question we set out to measure, on the antimicrobials sold in the street markets of Port-au-Prince.

The answer is a bad one: some of those antimicrobials are of substandard quality. And an under-dosed antibiotic does not just miss its target, it manufactures resistance everyone will inherit. Where medicine escapes the professional, it is the whole population that pays.

Substandard Quality of the Antimicrobials Sold in the Street Markets in Haiti appeared in July 2020 in Antibiotics, a journal indexed in PubMed, and I am among its authors. That same year I graduate, among the top of my class. In October, the International Pharmaceutical Federation invited me to present the study to an international panel, alongside the pharmaceutical councils of Spain and Belgium.

2020 — 2021

The Optimum Pharma dream

Newly qualified, I begin practising: Pharmacie Express in Tabarre, and Hôpital Zilda Arns in Bon Repos, where I complete my year of social service. It ends in 2021.

But practising is not enough either. With physician and pharmacist partners I start Optimum Pharma, and I leave Pharmacie Express to devote myself to it entirely. The ambition is not to own a pharmacy: it is to build a Haitian pharmacy banner, present across several regions of the country. In my mind the model looked like what Jean Coutu represents in Quebec.

In January 2021, with Wellington Derameau, we launch Médicaments et Société. The idea is simple: if people buy antibiotics in the street, it is not recklessness, it is that no one ever explained anything to them.

I did not dream of leaving. I dreamed of building.

2021

Leaving

The security and socio-political situation deteriorates. My mother urges me to leave the country; for a long time I refuse. It is the events themselves that finally convince me: I can no longer plan my future the same way. I apply for a Canadian study permit, for a master's in public health at Université Laval.

In April 2021, my mother's illness moves the question. It is no longer where I build my career, but where my family is. She goes to the Dominican Republic for care and I join her. I spend four months there. That is where Canada's answer reaches me.

Leaving at that moment feels like abandoning her. But she is the one who has pushed me to go from the start, and I come to understand why: what I will be able to do for her, I will not do by staying.

On 16 August 2021, I board a plane for Montreal. Optimum Pharma stays behind.

2021 — 2023

Starting again at the bottom

My title does not follow me. The degree, the residency, the years of practice: none of it crosses the border. Care attendant, then pharmacy technical assistant, which is to say behind the counter of the profession I used to hold as a licensed pharmacist.

At the same time, I begin the master's. It is one of the hardest periods of my life. You have to study, and rebuild almost everything else: a country, a society, a network, a professional system I know nothing about. Alone, far from my family, with no certainty at all.

It was not the degree that was hard. It was everything that had to be held up around it.

It is also the period that changed me most. It taught me adaptation, which is not a quality you have: it is something you learn when you no longer have a choice.

One thing, though, crosses the border with me: the show. The pharmacist explaining a treatment to a patient in Tabarre and the one speaking into a microphone from Quebec City are doing exactly the same thing. They take knowledge that belongs to a few and make it usable by everyone.

I finish the master's in 2023, with an academic excellence scholarship in my final term. I serve as a student representative and work at CRAD on the health impact assessment of the metropolitan land use and development plan, with the Communauté métropolitaine de Québec and government partners: how the way a city is drawn can be read, years later, in the health of the people who live in it. The field interests me enough that I am considering a doctorate in it.

2024 — 2026

The road back to the title

What remains is to have recognised what I already know how to do. A preparatory year in 2024-2025, then the qualifying programme in pharmacy at Université de Montréal in 2025-2026.

In June 2026, a step I did not expect so soon: lecturer in pharmacognosy, at the very faculty where I studied. The oldest subject in pharmacy, taught to those who will practise where medicine often reaches the street before the counter.

And in July, Médicaments et Société returns to the air, from a studio in Montreal. The major issues of public health, medicine and the responsible use of medicines, explained to the people who live them.

Today

What I am building

My career was built in health, but the entrepreneur in me never went away. Health, teaching, entrepreneurship are the same ambition in three forms. Create value, open doors, leave a useful mark.

Today I build companies and projects with a long view. The point is not to succeed more. It is to build something durable, able to stand beyond me, and to build freedom: the freedom to choose my projects, to invest, to help.

I do not believe in solitary success. A success that does not help others grow remains a failure. When I see a good opportunity and I can bring other people aboard, I do.

We do not always control what happens to us. We do control what we decide to build with it. That is why I do not consider myself as having arrived: I consider myself on the way.