My name is Valcourt Honore. I was born in Port-au-Prince, the largest city of the Republic of Haiti. I grew up in a small city called Delmas, which is near Port au Prince. I am the fifth child of a family of 6 children; I have 2 older brothers, 2 older sisters and a younger sister. I was educated in a very religious family because my mother and father have a lot of responsibilities at a Christian church close to my house. Therefore, I have been attending that church since the first day of my birth and I like it, too, because i have a lot of friends there. My primary school (Institut Oberlin) was also a Christian school where I made my first friends. At age 11, I switched from Institut Oberlin to a National school (Lycee Jean Jacques Dessalines) and I studied there for 5 years.
During my fourth year at the national school, two of my best friends from the same school had a lot of conversations with me about United World Colleges. At the end of the same year, I decided to do some personal research about the colleges (UWC) and I became really interested in applying because of the cultural diversity that exists in those colleges. When I was able to contact the national committee, I applied. I passed all of the exams and I was one of the 3 admitted students of 2011-2013 at the United World Colleges. During these 2 years at UWC Costa Rica, my life has changed completely because of the environment where I was living. I was exposed to new ideas because people from different parts of the world were living together in that community. I become more open minded since I learned about many cultures, other religious points of view and, finally, I now have a higher level of critical thinking.
I have really enjoyed the cultural diversity at UWC Costa Rica and I like spending my free time having conversations with my friends (Sena, Guellord, Samuel and Chisomo), playing basketball with Nora, Karim, and Xunan, and sometimes joining the frisbee team. Furthermore, I like exercising. I would like to continue to do all of these activities at Lewis & Clark College and of course with different people.
I decided to attend Lewis & Clark College because I am confident that I will continue my studies in a diverse community where I can continue to learn more from others cultures. Furthermore, I believe that I will benefit from a higher education in a very agreeable environment. At Lewis & Clark, I would like to be involved in different multicultural activities in order to share my Haitian roots. I really like Economics and Business administration and that’s why I hope to major in both. I have not traveled much, especially outside of my continent. Hopefully, I will do that during my four years at Lewis & Clark. Ultimately, I would like to teach some basic vocabularies in Creole to anybody on campus who is interested in learning it so they can have conversations with any Haitians when they will be visiting Haiti.