A serendipitous sequence of events led to FGCU alum Mireille Lauture’s passion: literacy for underprivileged children in her native country and around the world.
It began with the oral Haitian folktales handed down by her mother, Hermance (Mancy) Garçon, and was nourished by a lifelong love of learning and her work with international students at Florida SouthWestern State College in Fort Myers.
Since 2010, encouraged by her sister Florence, Lauture has written five illustrated children’s books that retell her mother’s narrated folktales in English alongside a translation in Creole – a language that, until 25 years ago, was spoken but never written.
JetBlue Airways, upon hearing about the books from Lauture’s daughter, an inflight crew member, invited Lauture to join a humanitarian effort to Haiti, providing the opportunity for the books to reach her target audience. The airline, which had recently initiated flights to Haiti, purchased many of the books; friends and neighbors generously chipped in to provide more. “The pleasure of reading to the children in Haiti and handing them their own storybooks were priceless moments,” says Lauture. “Such simple gestures put a smile on their faces.”
Each of her books imparts a moral lesson, and it’s appropriate that one of those precepts is that sacrifice breeds success.
The married mother of four adult children, Lauture earned her degrees while balancing home, work, marriage and child-rearing. She received her associate’s from Borough of Manhattan Community College, and her bachelor’s from the University of South Florida. She went on to receive her master’s in mental health counseling from FGCU in 2000, while working as a recruiter for the then-fledgling university, and finally earned her doctorate in educational psychology from Walden University.
“My purpose in coming to the United States in the 1970s was to further my education,” she says. “I ended up getting married and having kids first, so that got postponed. But I never gave up my longtime dream of earning my terminal degree.”
She credits the leadership program she completed while an FGCU employee and student, saying, “those skills learned were very instrumental in everything I do.”
Lauture hopes one day to have the books translated into other languages and donated to orphanages around the world. Her books are available through Amazon, Barnes and Noble and AuthorHouse. Her email is: [email protected]
- Watch a video about the JetBlue effort and Lauture’s trip to Haiti.