Written by Erica Joseph
KRM Cuban/Haitian Caseworker; Co-founder of The Route nonprofit organization

It started, unexpectedly, with the weather. 

One morning in Louisville, our office was absorbed in a debate about the storm that had swept through the city the night before. News reports showed snapped utility poles, power outages, emergency crews, and dramatic images along Preston Highway. From what I had seen, it looked as though half the city had been hit by a disaster. 

“Was the weather bad near your house yesterday?” I asked Ketsia. 

She shrugged. “No. Just a little rain.” 

The room erupted in laughter. “Just a little rain?” 

I pulled up photos of broken utility poles and neighborhoods left without electricity. Someone insisted it was an unusual event. Our Cuban coworker laughed and swore it had been nothing extraordinary where she lived. Finally, another colleague offered the simplest explanation.“Maybe it was just more localized.” We all laughed because somehow, we had lived through the same storm while describing completely different realities. 

One person’s “little rain” had been another person’s natural disaster.

A few weeks later, after the Supreme Court’s decision affecting Temporary Protected Status (TPS), that conversation no longer felt like a story about the weather. It had become an unexpected metaphor for migration itself. People can live through the same country, the same historical moment—even the same crisis—and carry away entirely different memories. 

A few days later, we met again, and our conversation began with the heat. Ketsia said she had barely slept, even with the door open. When I asked how she handled hot nights in Haiti, her face lit up. “I used to sleep on the rooftop.“ 

Just like that, Kentucky disappeared. 

We were suddenly somewhere between Delmas 24, Carrefour Péan, midst San Fil, and the neighborhoods that still lived vividly in her memory. As she spoke, she traced an invisible map of Port-au-Prince with her hands, naming streets, crossroads, and landmarks as naturally as if she had walked them that morning. I tried to follow. Not because I had never known those places, but because exile quietly redraws the geography of memory. Places that once felt as familiar as our own hands begin to blur. The roads remain, but they become harder to travel in our minds. 

Later, our conversation wandered toward flowers. Hydrangeas, she told me, had always been among her favorites. She also loved sunflowers. At the time, it seemed like an ordinary conversation about gardening. I didn’t yet realize those two flowers would become one of the best ways to understand her story. 

She laughed when we started talking about aloe vera. People always describe it as a plant that survives almost anything. “Not true,” she said. “They’re harder to keep alive than people think.” 

From a distance, resilience often looks effortless. Up close, it demands constant care.

Then I asked a question that changed the direction of our conversation. 

“Who are you?” She laughed softly. “That’s not an easy question to answer.” 

She was born at Chancerelles, the historic maternity hospital and raised in Port-au-Prince. Her father’s family came from Cavaillon; her mother’s roots stretched through Bainet and La Vallée de Jacmel. She was her father’s second child and her mother’s third. “That’s a long story,” she smiled. Together, her parents raised a family of six brothers and two sisters, all growing up under the same roof. “We spent our whole childhood together.” The center of those memories was Delmas 24, where family, neighborhood, and belonging became inseparable. 

Education, Setbacks, and Perseverance 

 

School was one of the first places where Ketsia discovered both confidence and self-doubt. 

She attended Notre-Dame du Perpétuel Secours in Bel-Air before continuing to Frère Bouvier and later George Muller College. She described herself as rebellious, though teachers generally appreciated her curiosity and determination. Some years she finished at the top of her class. Other times she struggled under the weight of anxiety. She adjourned Rhéto (twelve grade). After graduating in 2005, she planned to enroll in the Faculty of Human Sciences (FASCH). Life intervened, and she missed the registration period. When she finally sat for the entrance examination in 2007, she encountered what she still considers as the first major disappointment of her life. “Not passing the FASCH entrance exam was my first real failure.” For someone who had rarely experienced failure, the result was devastating. 

But it did not become the end of her story. 

Years later, in 2013, she walked through the doors of FASCH as a psychology student. “I finally got in.” Between those two moments, she volunteered at Radio Lumière (stereo 92.1), where she learned broadcasting by doing. She later worked at Haiti’s Ministry of Environment before becoming a liaison agent at NuTV Haiti, a private telecommunications company.  When political unrest, university strikes, and the Peyi Lòk period repeatedly interrupted her studies; she adjusted the only way she knew how. 

“Sometimes all I could do was take one or two classes and keep going.” That quiet determination seemed to define much of her life. Whether in school, at work, or in activism, Ketsia rarely followed a straight path. Instead, she learned to keep moving, even when progress came one small step at a time. 

 

Activism

 

When I asked Ketsia when she became an activist, she smiled before answering. 

“Honestly, I’ve always been that way.” 

She didn’t describe a defining moment or a single protest that changed her life. Instead, she spoke as though activism had always been part of her character. Even as a schoolgirl, she found herself organizing classmates whenever something felt unfair. She helped lead a protest against a school decision without her parents ever knowing. Looking back, she laughs at the memory. At the time, it simply felt impossible to stay quiet. Growing up in Port-au-Prince meant growing up alongside inequality. Neighborhoods like Solino, Bel-Air, and Ti Chéri were not distant headlines but part of the landscape she knew. Poverty, exclusion, and violence were impossible to ignore. 

“I’ve always had a sensitivity for people who are oppressed,” she stated. 

That sensitivity followed her into adulthood. She joined demonstrations during the political turmoil of 2004, later marched for workers’ rights and higher minimum wages, and eventually became involved in the PetroCaribe movement and Nou Pap Dòmi. Yet when she speaks about those years, she rarely mentions political parties. 

Instead, she talks about people, families who could no longer afford food; young people who had stopped believing elections mattered. Communities living with massacres so frequently that horror risked becoming routine. “Malerezman, masak tounen yon pwogram nan peyi a.” (“Sadly, massacres have become part of everyday life.”) She paused before adding quietly, 

“When people can’t eat, can’t vote, and violence becomes normal… that’s when young people have to stand up.”

For Ketsia, activism was never about becoming visible. It was about refusing to become indifferent. 

If there is one sentence that captures those years, perhaps it is this: “If I had to do it all over again, I would.” 

Time, however, reshaped her understanding of movements. When she was younger, she believed everyone standing beside her wanted the same future. Experience taught her otherwise. Some sought justice; others sought influence, recognition, or opportunity through politics. She does not say this with bitterness. If anything, she says it with acceptance. 

“People can fight side by side for very different reasons.” 

She no longer believes it is her place to judge those motivations. Many former classmates and fellow activists have gone on to become diplomats, professors, political advisers, and public officials. She speaks of them without resentment. Everyone, she says, must choose the life they believe in, if their choices do not come at the expense of others. 

Then she tells me a story. 

Before large demonstrations, organizers often gathered near Carrefour Aéroport. The real work happened before cameras arrived: planning routes, preparing signs, coordinating volunteers, cleaning afterward. One day, after an event, singer and politician Gracia Delva appeared to help clean. Ketsia laughed as she remembered it. “He wasn’t really cleaning,” she said. “He came for the picture.” We both laughed. The story revealed a deeper truth: those who sustain movements are often unseen. But it never made Ketsia cynical—only humbler. She learned that activism is measured not by recognition, but by whether people are served.  

Lakou, Roots, and the Meaning of Home 

Over a plate of boiled plantains and liver, our conversation drifted naturally toward Haiti’s Flag Day, family traditions, and eventually the meaning of lakou. The word immediately changed Ketsia’s expression. 

“Lakou isn’t just a courtyard,” she said. 

She paused, searching for words large enough to describe something that had shaped her entire life. 

“It’s where people gather. Where they eat together. Tell stories. Rest. Help one another. It’s where community happens.” 

So, lakou is less a physical place than a way of understanding the world. It is belonging made visible. 

She spoke with tenderness about evenings spent listening to stories, children inventing games before sunset, neighbors carrying meals from one house to another, and konbit, the tradition of collective labor in which everyone’s hands became everyone else’s strength. No one succeeded alone; people grew together. That is why Ketsia rejects the idea that Haitian traditions conflict with Christianity. “I was Haitian before I was Christian,” she said. Her faith was a choice; her identity was not—and she refuses to let one erase the other. 

Then, we talked about a tradition many people dismiss as superstition: burying a newborn’s umbilical cord beneath a tree. Rather than debating beliefs, she invited us to think differently. “Imagine if every Haitian planted a tree every time a child was born.” For a moment, tradition became an act of memory, reforestation, and hope. 

She wondered how many traditions people abandon as outdated, never asking what wisdom they hold—eating with their hands, learning beneath trees, walking barefoot, composting, and sharing instead of owning.  Ketsia saw these traditions not as signs of poverty, but of a culture built on interdependence long before sustainability became fashionable. As the rain began drumming against the windows, we stayed silent. The sound felt familiar, a reminder that memories often arrive with the rain. 

A Millennial Generation Between Hope and Survival 

 

Listening to Ketsia, I found myself thinking about what it has meant to belong to Haiti’s millennial generation. Around the world, millennials grew up alongside the internet. They witnessed the rise of mobile phones, social media, and a world that seemed increasingly connected. Many came of age believing technology would open doors their parents had never imagined. Haitian millennials lived through that transformation too, but they inherited something else alongside it. 

Political upheaval, the 2010 earthquake, Cholera, hurricanes, fuel shortages, the Peyi Lòk years, mass displacement, the collapse of neighborhoods they once called home. 

While many of their peers around the world were learning to navigate a digital revolution, countless young Haitians were learning to navigate checkpoints, uncertainty, and survival. Ketsia belongs to that generation. A generation that grew up believing citizenship meant participating, voting, organizing, and imagining a better country. 

Today, she worries about younger Haitians who have never had the chance to experience democracy in the same way. “The right to vote has been taken away from us.” It was more than elections—it was about belonging, and the belief that having a place in a country means still having a voice in its future. 

“I Never Wanted to Leave Haiti” 

That sentence landed differently from everything else Ketsia had shared. She didn’t say it dramatically. She didn’t need to. “I never wanted to leave Haiti, but the bastards set fire to my paradise…” 

She repeated it more than once during our conversation, as if reminding herself that migration had never been part of the life she imagined. 

Long before she arrived in Louisville, she had built a life she loved. She volunteered with emergency psychological intervention teams, attended and taught Sunday school at Bellevue Salem Church, participated in reading programs at the U.S. Embassy in Tabarre, studied psychology at the Faculty of Human Sciences, and worked in communications. Even after years of political instability, she still believed her future belonged in Haiti. 

“The hardships weren’t my motivation for leaving,” she told me. She had lived through difficult periods before. Haiti had always seemed to move in cycles—moments of crisis followed by moments of hope. Even in 2022, she believed the country would recover again. 

What she never imagined was becoming displaced inside her own country. 

When I asked whether her mother still lived in the family home, Ketsia quietly shook her head. 

“No, the gangs set fire to our home in 2024”, she mumbled. 

But the loss had begun long before the fire. In March 2023, escalating violence forced her family to flee their neighborhood in Delmas. They found temporary refuge in the home of one of her father’s friends in Delmas 31. There were nearly thirty people living there. Six families with children, parents, and grandparents. People slept upstairs, downstairs, in the gallery, or wherever there was enough space to stretch out for the night. The house itself was spacious. Safety was not. 

“The heat wasn’t what bothered us,” she recalled. “It was the gunfire.” Bullets echoed almost every day. Kidnappings had become routine. Theft, fear, and uncertainty shaped ordinary life. 

As she spoke, I realized that displacement had entered her life long before she crossed an international border. She had become an exile before she ever left Haiti. Her family’s home eventually burned. Whatever violence had not stolen was consumed by fire.

For someone who had spent years believing that change was possible, the loss was more than material. It represented the collapse of the place where so many childhood memories had begun. 

“As activists, we were always fighting to build a better Haiti.”

She still believes in that dream. What has changed, she explained, is not her love for Haiti but her exhaustion. “It’s not that I no longer believe in change. It’s a kind of fatigue.” Years of postponed elections, recurring violence, and political uncertainty have left many Haitians feeling trapped in an endless cycle. 

 

Leaving Home

 

Eventually, leaving became less a choice than the only path that remained. When Ketsia finally arrived in the United States, she did not describe relief, but grief. 

“I felt like I had failed.”

Migration stories are often told as stories of opportunity. Hers was a story of interruption. Leaving Haiti did not feel like achieving a dream. It felt like surrendering one. She was escaping violence while leaving behind the people she loved most.

Her family had scattered; some had lost their homes; others were surviving wherever they could. Distance offered safety; it did not offer peace. Today, she waits; she waits for immigration paperwork; waits for family reunification; for phone calls from Haiti. “Last year, my sister filed an Adjustment of Status application for me.” Now she waits. Like so many immigrants, she lives between one country that no longer feels safe and another that is still becoming home. 

Sometimes waiting becomes its own form of courage. 

Rebuilding Belonging 

 

Yet if displacement changed Ketsia’s address, it never changed the instinct that had guided her life. She kept serving. In Haiti, she volunteered during emergencies, offering psychological support to people living through crisis. In Louisville, she simply found new ways to continue that work, through the American Red Cross, Catholic Charities, the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention, Leadership programs, Community organizations. The organizations changed; the calling did not. One memory still stands apart. 

She smiled as she recalled attending Kentucky Refugee Ministries’ first haitian Remembrance Day gathering. “That day,” she said, “I felt welcomed again.”

Before we finished talking, I asked whether she hoped to return to Haiti. She didn’t answer immediately. “Not right now.” Silence settled between us. Then she asked a question that carried more weight than any answer could have. 

“Where would I return to today?” 

Her family’s home is gone. Many friends have scattered across different countries. The neighborhoods she remembers have been transformed by violence and displacement. There was no bitterness in her voice, only grief; then, almost quietly, she added:

“But I still hope.” 

I realized then that hope had become less prediction than practice. 

Blooming in New Soil 

 

Weeks after our conversations, I kept thinking about Ketsia’s favorite flowers: hydrangeas and sunflowers. They became a metaphor for her story. Like hydrangeas, immigrants are shaped by the places where they take root. Like sunflowers, they keep turning toward the light, even after storms. Exile changes us, new countries, new languages, and new communities, but it does not erase who we are. Adaptation is not a betrayal of our roots. It is often the only way to survive. But survival is never the whole story. 

Resilience can look effortless from a distance, but it is built through loss, memory, and the daily choice to keep growing. Ketsia never wanted to leave Haiti; she left because she could no longer stay. Wherever life has planted her, she has continued creating spaces where others feel seen and connected.

Like the hydrangea, she has learned to bloom in unfamiliar soil without forgetting her roots. Like the sunflower, she keeps turning toward the light.

And, looking back, perhaps the weather had been telling the story all along. One person’s “just a little rain” can be another person’s storm.

 – Erica Joseph, just a kid from Haiti