Like many rural children growing up in Haiti’s Artibonite Valley, Robens Ocean, from a very early age, worked in the fields alongside his parents, tending goats and hauling water, but mostly he picked rice.
Children’s hands are well suited for this kind of work, and Robens picked rice throughout harvest season from dawn to dusk, then went home, ate a little supper, slept, and then started again the next day at sun up. In Haiti when someone tells you their parents are farmers, what they mean is that they’re subsistence farmers, scratching out just enough food to feed their family day-to-day, and little more, for there were no other jobs to be had.
This is an all too typical story in rural Haiti, and Robens was a typical child in every way; typical in every way but one. Robens was a gifted student. So good in fact that year after year he ranked at the very top of his class. Robens loved school and he was good at it. But school in Haiti isn’t free, and so, like many parents in Haiti, Robens’s mother and father could not afford even the modest tuition necessary to send all their children to school. So Robens knew that very soon, he would no longer be able to continue with the one thing that he loved and that gave him hope for a real future. But Robens was one of the lucky ones. An administrator at his school had heard of an organization that provided scholarships to deserving students right there in the Artibonite Valley. The group was The Crosby Fund for Haitian Education and each year the fund provides full scholarships for over 400 students from Pre-K through university. Robens was accepted. Not only would he be staying in school, not only would he earn his high school diploma, but the Crosby Fund paid for him to go on to college!
Tuition, books, room and board, living expenses, everything. Robens went on to earn his bachelors degree and graduated with honors in Business Administration and now has come home to the Artibonite Valley, working as a Registrar and Student Database Technician at The Crosby Fund’s headquarters in Deschapelles. When I asked Robens, sitting across from me in a pressed shirt and shined shoes, to describe if he could try and imagine what his life would have been like without the Crosby Fund, he struggled to answer, and for a long time just shook his head, his eyes searching the ground in front of him. Then finally, after a long moment, he looked up, and with his eyes shining a little he said, “the Crosby Fund was sent by God”.