User:Omegatank01/Lawrence gonzalez

Lawrence Gonzalez, Born December 11, 1982, is a Haitian-American who served as an Honorable Term as Sergeant of the United States Marine Corps from July 2001 to January 2008 as an Infantry sergeant, Anti-terrorism Security, Ground Communications, Organizational Repair. He is a veterans who served during Operation Iraqi Freedom in deployment at Camp Lemonier, the Horn of Africa. He is the current president of the United Haitian Students of Florida.

Early life

Lawrence was born in Miami, Florida, the son of Marie Andree Gonzalez and Serge Gonzalez. Sent to Haiti at 11 months, He was raise in Port-au-Prince. In 1991, He and his sister would move back to the states to live with his single mother. He attended School in Miami, Florida from Miami Shores Elementary, Horace Mann Middle School, North Miami Senior High, and graduated from North Miami Beach Senior High.

In 2001, he join the United States Marine Corps. By 2002, he enrolled at Florida State University earning a Bachelors in French with a concentration in Business Management, as well as a minor in Criminology. He is currently studying Taxation at Florida State University in the Masters of Accounting Program.

Career

He worked his way up in the Military to Sergeant as a Ground Communication Organizational Repair Technician as well as various other positions. Worked as the Haitian Heritage Museum Education Manager - 2008 to 2009 where he Conceptualized and develop cultural curriculum/lesson plans incorporating Sunshine State Standards and Interpreted Materials related to program exhibits for students K-12, is a graduate of Florida State University with a Bachelor of Arts in French with concentration in Business Management and a minor in Criminology. He is a Sergeant of the United States Marine Corps and has served in Operation Iraqi Freedom. He is proficient in ground organizational repair, communications, anti-terrorism security, and unit management. His proudest achievement was to volunteer to aid the victims of hurricanes Katrina and Rita, sacrificing his schooling to help rebuild a city.

He has over 5 years of experience working with schools, providing service and mentoring for low income, at risk students. In the past, he has worked with the Boys and Girls Club of Tallahassee, the Black Males College Explorers program at Florida Memorial College, and the Toys for Tots program at the Naval and Marine Base in Tallahassee. He currently works with the Youth Committee of the Haitian American Leadership Organization as a youth mentor, moderator, and motivational speaker. His project experience range from curriculum writing, leadership training, and event coordination. Working with the youth has given him an understanding that the only way any society improves is through the prospects that it invest in the future. In this way, he hopes to improve his community one student at a time.

Lawrence Gonzalez has earn numerous awards such as Who’s Who among American High School Students, and The Greater North Miami Chamber of Commerce Service Award.

Family

Lawrence Gonzalez is the son of Marie Andree Gonzalez. His Oldest sister, Serge Andree Gonzalez currently resides in Miami, Florida.

See also

* Young Haitian-American * Dual Citizenship initiative * Mobilization of the Youth

External links

* [United Haitian Students of Florida]

[edit] Press releases

[edit] News articles

Lawrence Gonzalez, Haitian-American has been born to lead and quoted in the following articles.

http://www.miamiherald.com/news/miami-dade/v-print/story/1207541.html#

Posted on Fri, Aug. 28, 2009 In U.S., young Haitians mobilize to help their nation

BY TRENTON DANIELtdaniel@MiamiHerald.com

Lawrence Gonzalez wants to invest his energy, sweat and time in Haiti. And he believes he has found just the way to do it: Create a corps of Haitian students in the United States to work on service projects in the Caribbean nation.

At a recent Haitian diaspora conference in Sunny Isles Beach, elbow-to-elbow crowds of participants swapped business cards, passed out policy papers, and pitched earnest plans to develop Haiti.

Gonzalez, 25, was busy, too. In small groups and large, he talked about the United Haitian Students of Florida, an organization he heads to get students more involved in Haiti.

``A lot of us, the younger ones, haven't even been to Haiti,'' said Gonzalez, who lived in Haiti until he was 9 and is now a graduate student in accounting at Florida State. ``But they want to contribute to Haiti.''

From Washington's corridors of power to South Florida's classrooms and conferences, Gonzalez and other young Haitians from outside the country are developing ways to help rebuild from decades of economic devastation and civil strife.

The effort comes at a crucial moment for Haiti. The country enjoys a semblance of political stability not seen in years, and former President Bill Clinton, the United Nations' special envoy to Haiti, is trying to lure foreign investors after the country suffered widescale destruction from last year's spate of hurricanes and tropical storms.

At the diaspora conference, where Clinton urged Haitians overseas to play an active role in what happens in Haiti, the idea of youths helping Haiti popped up repeatedly.

The basic premise is for first-, second-, or third-generation Haitians to travel to the country during their junior or senior year of college, or after graduation. The in-the-trenches work ranges from teaching computer skills to planting trees.

One conference speaker likened the role of young Haitians going to Haiti to the rite-of-passage trip many young Jews take to Israel. The reason: It's a chance to do good, to forge meaningful ties with culture and community.

``This is an opportunity to create bonds that are not artificial bonds, that are not familial bonds,'' said David Elcott, a professor of public service at New York University.

At the diaspora conference, Elcott urged Haitian parents outside the country to encourage their children to volunteer in Haiti. The work, Elcott noted, is in keeping with President Barack Obama's inaugural call for public service.

Opportunities to visit Haiti are likely to increase now that the United States has downgraded its travel advisory to the country. It no longer advises against nonessential travel.

Robert Maguire, an international affairs professor at Trinity Washington University in Washington, D.C., has worked on the idea for the past seven or eight years, though political unrest in Haiti had thwarted progress.

Development in Haiti rests heavily on building the health and education systems, Maguire said, and so the diaspora is ideally suited for teaching, in part, because of its knowledge of Creole.

Maguire has passed the idea on to State Department officials.

``The U.S. authorities are certainly aware of this,'' said Maguire, an expert on Haiti. ``I introduced the idea as a kind of mechanism that would facilitate productive engagement of Haitian youth.''

A spokeswoman from the State Department said that the agency has received the proposal and looks forward to discussing it soon with Maguire.

Maguire and other advocates of such ties say the benefits of a diaspora connection are countless.

Carolyn Rose-Avila, a former Peace Corps volunteer and director, has helped draft a proposal for a diaspora youth program, which she said would help fill a void since the Peace Corps no longer operates in Haiti.

The Peace Corps suspended its Haiti program in June 2005 because of security concerns and shut down entirely in April 2006. It is not clear when or if it will resume work in Haiti; a Peace Corps spokeswoman said the agency has not received an invitation from the Haitian government to reestablish a program.

Its absence moved Rose-Avila to consider the Haiti Volunteers in Education Corps. Young people, she said, view the country without cynicism.

``I was driven by the fact that the Peace Corps was no longer in the country,'' said Rose-Avila, a board member with the Favaca volunteer nonprofit and its former executive director. ``Since [the Peace Corps] is not in Haiti, I thought it was a major disconnect. Young people tend to work in a different space -- they don't try to know all the answers. They don't come in thinking Haiti's a `basket case,' but that it presents a wonderful experience.''

Along with a few colleagues, Rose-Avila hammered out a program sketch, which would require $1 million to start. The project would target college students or recent graduates as volunteers to help teach computer skills, environmental conservation, math, reading and English for at least one semester.

Axelle Latortue is among those interested in creating a youth program. The 27-year-old daughter of Haiti's Miami Consul General, Ralph Latortue, she sees the diaspora's involvement as instrumental to Haiti's development.

``You have people not as politically engaged or politically polarized as the older generation,'' Latortue said. ``They come with creativity in approaching Haiti's problems.''

http://www.current-news.org/2009/01/12/black-immigrants-see-personal-triumphs-in-obama/

By JENNIFER KAY Associated Press Writer

MIAMI (AP) – There is no box on U.S. Census forms that accurately describes Ray Gongora. The Belize-born naturalized citizen grew up in an English-speaking Central American country, a former British colony where African slaves were once sold. He emigrated in 1986 to a country that deemed him Hispanic based on the geography of his birth.

“I identify myself as other,” Gongora says. “I am black, so to speak – a brown-skinned Caribbean person. You cannot identify yourself as a black American because our cultures are so totally different.” He doesn’t worry about not being counted, though. Not with President-elect Barack Obama set to take office Jan. 20. Obama, the son of a white woman from Kansas and a black man from Kenya, will be the first black U.S. president, fulfilling the dreams and promise of the civil rights era. But for black immigrants and their children, Obama’s swearing-in realizes other dreams.

In Obama, they see their own parents, themselves as outsiders and the children they raised to believe that education was the road to success. His election superseded not only color, but also economics, family divisions, government failures and nagging questions of identity.

“It’s an individual accomplishment for each of us,” Gongora said. Gongora, a 53-year-old postal worker, scheduled a vacation day Jan. 20 to watch the inauguration on television at his Pembroke Pines home. His hope for his U.S.-born children is that no one will question their citizenship in an Obama administration, even with a Honduran mother and a Belize-born father.

“I said to my (17-year-old) son, ‘You are natural born, you were born here. You can be president even if your parents were both born in different countries,”‘ he said.

Haitian-American schoolchildren were so caught up in the election that they wrote “Obama” on their arms as they talked about their culture in a Haitian Heritage Museum program this fall. His story, not just his skin color, was so similar to their own, said Lawrence Gonzalez, the Miami museum’s education manager.

Obama’s father left Kenya to continue his education in the U.S. The president-elect also knows what it’s like to uproot his life: He was born in Hawaii, then spent part of his childhood in Indonesia. He returned to Hawaii to live with his grandparents, then left the islands for college. He eventually settled in Chicago.

“They left that comfort zone and came to a random area where they weren’t accepted. They continued to work to make a better life and get a career going,” said Gonzalez, a Haitian-American who was born in Miami. “Our parents did this.” Jean-Marie Denis, 67, beams as he lists the reasons any Haitian could say, “Obama is my brother!”

The president-elect achieved success through education, so prized in the Caribbean country that families scrape together money for tuition even in the hardest times. He made his name in Chicago, a city whose first permanent settler was Haitian. He named a Haitian-American, Patrick Gaspard, as his political director. Finally Obama fulfills Haiti’s legacy as home of the world’s first successful slave rebellion, led by former slave Toussaint L’Ouverture.

“Martin Luther King’s movement was a continuation of Toussaint L’Ouverture’s dream. Obama is, 40 years later, the realization of Martin Luther King’s dreams,” said Denis. “Toussaint L’Ouverture didn’t work in vain.” Denis, a naturalized citizen whose bookstore Libreri Mapou is a cornerstone of Miami’s Little Haiti, also sees himself in Obama’s father, who left a poor African village to study in the United States. “Now his son is president,” Denis said. “He’s just like me. I came to this country with $50 in my pocket and now look at me, with two doctors in my family.”

For all the times that Obama had to fit into a new environment, he never lost his roots, said Sharon Makoriwa, a 30-year-old Kenyan. Obama has said that while the world saw him as black, he still identified with the small-town values instilled in him by his Midwestern-grown grandparents, something that helped him connect with rural Illinois voters in his Senate run. “During the campaign they said, ‘Who exactly is this Obama?’ I found it a very ridiculous question,” said Makoriwa, a grantswriter for the African Services Committee in New York.

“I connected with him as a newcomer to the United States. I’m living in a new culture, I have to learn to respect the culture and I have to fall back on my values and my principles to be who I am,” she said. Many immigrants are also hopeful that Obama will inspire change in their home countries. The president-elect’s Kenyan ancestry gives him the authority to criticize African governments, and will set an example on a continent where leaders often fail to uphold the rule of law, said Bonaventure Ezekwenna, 47, who left Nigeria to study in New York in 1983.

“He is in a better position than anybody else to speak with the leadership on the African continent, eyeball to eyeball, that it is time for change,” said Ezekwenna, CEO of Africans in America, which focuses on human trafficking issues. “As leader of the free world, if he tells them the game is up in his motherland, his ancestral home, they will get a clue that the game is up.” Marlon Hill, a Jamaican-born Miami attorney, made Obama’s election official as a member of Florida’s Electoral College.

“It felt like carrying tons of history on my shoulder,” the 37-year-old said. But Inauguration Day should not be a time for immigrants to stop and reflect on past sacrifices and achievements. They need to expect more, he said – from Obama and from themselves.

“It’s beyond just being about Obama and him being a president who is black. It is about our circumstances and, whether we are black or black immigrants, can we do more with our circumstances? Can we provide for our families around us?” Hill said. “We have fewer excuses now because of an election of an Obama-like person.”

http://www.halohaiti.org/archives/conventions/2009/bios-09/lawrence-gonzalez.html

http://www.myspace.com/431031514

http://www.facebook.com/Law.Gonzalez

www.youtube.com/user/omegatank01