WORDS OF DIRELAN DUMERLIN
“My children, in your better days, never forget the needy children who must be helped”.
Word of Direlan Dumerlin, undoubtedly the best of the Haitians of his time, the most charitable of the anonymous leaders of his time, founder and donor of the National School Direlan Dumerlin (1958), located at the northeast corner of rue Joseph January and Du Centre, in Port-au-Prince.
Direlan Dumerlin was not a Duvalierist. He was what no Duvalierist was: a humanist of the first order.
Lyonel Vilfort
Chicago IL
A WORD ABOUT THE DONOR…
Direlan Dumerlin lived in a pretty two-storey house on rue de l’Enterrement, near rue Joseph Janvier. Everyone knew him very well. Taciturn and distant, he kept people out of his private life. He was very fond of the cinema and waited almost every evening for one or two screenings at the Palace cinema which was located under the Tribunes du Champ-de-Mars. As I lived in the neighborhood, almost opposite his school, I saw Dumerlin very often during his visits or inspections of the school establishment, for which he paid for the repairs and the complete upkeep. He was generous to poor families especially at the time of the return to school, but he did not like people to talk about his benefits. The original name of the school was: Don de Direlan Dumerlin. So everyone called him “Don”. He was very fond of the national football team which had taken part in the world championship in Munich (1974). Several members of this sporting elite, among others Guy François, Guy St. Vil, Roger St-Vil, Formose, Obas, etc. brought up in the neighborhood or nearby, were great admirers of the “Don”.
Since no one really knew where Direlan Dumerlin’s discreet opulence came from, some thought he had won the “jackpot” of the National Lottery. Others believed he dug up a jar full of gold or obtained a large sum of money from a lawsuit in New York where he worked for several years. But according to popular belief or the “telediol”, very fertile in opinions apparently truer than the truth, Direlan Dumerlin was very rich because he was the preferred lover of the Three Women of Egypt who gave themselves up – in the position of a triangle eroticism of which he was the active center – to sexual orgies which made the walls of his beautiful residence quiver, where he lived happily in the most complete solitude.
Lyonel Vilfort
Chicago IL
September 2, 2017