“I remember when the first snow fell that year. You looked out the window with a mixture of incomprehension, curiosity and wonder. You thought you were in Haiti, you spoke to us in Creole and you didn’t understand at all why you were in a hospital, surrounded by white people.”
Edwidge De Mota tells the story and Césalon Junior Pierre, for his part, has forgotten everything about this snow which, in his head of a recent head trauma victim, was falling very strangely in his native Haiti, which he did not remember leaving a few months earlier.
In early 2010, Mr. Pierre was living in Haiti with his mother. After the earthquake that destroyed much of the country, it was decided that the young man would move to Quebec with his father, his new partner and their family.
“I arrived here on May 5, 2010.”
Soon, it’s summer and the little trip to the Bas-Saint-Laurent. And then, the mountain bike accident.
“I was told I ran into a tree.”
First sent to a hospital in Quebec, he was transported to a hospital in Montreal, between life and death.
He will remain in a coma for a long time, have a stroke, and be broken into a thousand pieces.
“A miracle”
In 2010, Mme De Mota, a specialized educator, had just started her job at the Marie Enfant Rehabilitation Center at the Sainte-Justine University Hospital Center when Mr. Pierre arrived, after a long stay in intensive care.
“He was my first case,” she remembers. “A very serious case. A miracle. I was 29, I had just started my job and I had a big imposter symptom.”
The educator will accompany her patient for nine months, after he leaves intensive care. Together with all the other therapists, she will work to bring him as close as possible to his full potential, to remind him, even, that he had immigrated from Haiti a few months earlier, that his life was here, now.
The first few weeks I was with him almost all the time. He was hemiplegic, he didn’t understand what he was doing in a wheelchair. He was trying to get out of it, which exposed him to further injuries.
Edwidge De Mota
“If you hit a wall,” continues Edwidge De Mota, “you didn’t know what to do. You were going around in circles, in your chair.”
Mr. Pierre listens to him recounting fragments of a past he has no memory of.
It was even during a visit to the dentist, years later, that he learned that he had screws all over his face, which delighted him. “I liked to make my little brother believe that I was a bit of a robot, and there I had the proof!”
Césalon Junior Pierre had forgotten the names of all his therapists. But not that of Edwidge De Mota.
“I am deeply moved”
“I am deeply moved, I feel privileged that he wanted to see me again. It is a beautiful gift to see what he has become, that he has managed to come all this way. As a special needs educator, we are like gardeners, we sow little seeds, but we never see the harvest.”
And it is particularly surprising in the case of Mr. Pierre. Because, with his experience and inspired by his educator, he decided to become a specialized educator himself.
That he is following this path, “it is an honour for me and for the entire profession,” she tells him.
PHOTO MARTIN TREMBLAY, THE PRESS
Edwidge De Mota and Cesalon Junior Pierre
I want to work with young people who have big difficulties. Unruly young people, who don’t give a damn about anyone. When people are like that, you have to find what they lacked. Through my career, through my great journey, I want to be a model, an example, for young people in youth centers.
Cesalon Junior Pierre
“I can see you there perfectly,” M encourages him.me From Mota.
Before that, he still has a few years of study ahead of him. Reading at CEGEP is a challenge for him, due to the cognitive after-effects of his head trauma.
“You’ll put your ego aside and ask for any special help you might need, won’t you, Cesalon?” asks his former teacher.
Césalon Junior Pierre will therefore take over from Edwidge De Mota, who is undertaking studies to become a psychologist.
“By remembering me and meeting me, Césalon has in a way allowed me to come full circle.”