Culturally speaking, the French are losing ground in Haiti; the Americans are killing them. The Haitian society is at a stage of cultural reengineering. How long it is going to take for that to settle in is beyond my pay grade.

50 years from today, I think English could become a national language, which to me would be ridiculous. It would be really revolting. That’s why I have been advocating for a monolingual Haiti -a nation of one national language.

Language is the gateway to the world. The more language our kids can effectively speak, the better off they are. Therefore, while Creole should be the sole language officially recognized by our Constitution, since the world is becoming more and more inclusive and integrated, we also must prepare our future generations to compete globally.

We must strongly enforce the teaching of these three foreign languages -French, English and Spanish -in our schools as early as possible to the very last level of the student’s academic journey.

Such measure will be in Haiti’s best interest because, with that, we will no longer have the language-based divided society as we have it today, making most of us Haitians a bunch of foreigners in our own country.

Let’s say 50 years from now English becomes a national language just like French is one today and 200 years from now Spanish becomes overtly influential in Haiti, are we going to keep amending our Constitution to make languages national depending on which one is up and which one is down? That to me would be preposterous. That’s why it makes sense to have a monolingual nation to spare us all this ridiculousness.

Only when we all speak the same language and everything that we do as a nation is executed in that language will we begin to talk of a united Haiti, and only then will we see that all of us Haitians able to come together as one to do what we must do to better our country. Until then, keep dreaming.