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Being kidnapped taught Marc "Eddy" Jean Francois a lesson in self-reliance
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PORT-AU-PRINCE (AlertNet) - The kidnappers struck without warning - a gang of teenagers, a dozen at least, waving guns and shouting threats.
Marc “Eddy” Jean Francois had just stepped out of a shop in downtown Port-au-Prince, where he’d been ordering parts for his electronics business. It was a Tuesday evening in November 2005.
The gang carjacked his vehicle, drove him to their lair and locked him in a room. They took his cell phone and called his father to demand a 50,000 gourde ($1,200) ransom – an impossible sum in a country where around 70 percent of people live on less than $2 a day.
As Eddy tells it, there was a woman there too. She’d been kidnapped some time before and a ransom had been paid. As the gang prepared to let her go, one of the hoodlums started complaining about his share of the loot. He drew his gun and shot her dead.
“I was very scared,” Eddy recalled. “I tried to talk to them, about the Lord and positive things. I tried to calm down the spirit, the mind.”
Incredibly, Eddy won over his captors. They reduced their ransom demand to 35,000 gourdes ($870), which his father and girlfriend somehow scraped together. The gang got their money and kept his car, but they let Eddy go.
He escaped with a sobering lesson.
“That experience made me understand that you can work a lot – for 10 years, for five years, for six years – and someone who doesn’t work for nothing one day sees you,” he said. “There is no state, no
government, no safety, no security. And you go back to zero or you can lose your life.”
This “back to zero” epiphany became a life philosophy and fuelled his dream of becoming a motivation coach for young Haitian entrepreneurs, holding seminars and publishing books.
Eddy’s message is simple: the way to build up happiness and material security is to treat each new day as though you’re starting from scratch.
“What I understand is that small is as big as the biggest thing is small,” he said poetically. “Every day, everybody starts from zero. You do the same thing. You wash, you pray, you finish the day. You make a balance; you make a report of your day. And tomorrow’s the same day.
“In business or in everything, if you want to work, you start from zero.”
Eddy, now 42 but with a face going on 26, put his philosophy into practice as he rebuilt his enterprise over the next half-decade into an electronics store called Cadis.
Then the earthquake hit in January 2010, demolishing his inventory and wrecking his rented shop. It was back to starting from scratch again.
“First I had to convince my mind that I wanted to restart,” he said. “I sold everything I had – all my clothes, some shoes… I put them in plastic and I sold them.”
The money he earned helped him build up a little stock: flashcards, batteries, eventually reconditioned laptops. Moving back into his old shop was not an option. So he banged together his own roadside stall using corrugated iron and an old door. At night, he stashes his goods in the cupboard of a friend who lives nearby.
Almost a year later, Eddy’s makeshift business – “Radio Galaxie” – is turning a small profit. He described a typical day of “starting from zero”.
“I wake up at about 4 sometimes, where I sleep on the roof of my father’s house,” he said. “I used to sleep inside the house but there are a lot of neighbours. They make a lot of noise. They talk about everything, bad things. It’s not convenient with my mind, with my goals, with my dream.
“And at about five I listen to the radio, to have positive thinking…And I write every day, because I want to become a very good lecturer, a very good writer too. I’m writing a book now. I hope to finish in March.
“And I come here every morning at about 6.30. I pick up all my materials, put them on the street. And step by step, I make some cash to take care of myself, to feed myself every day, and buy everything I need, and invest in goods and products, to grow.”
The last time I saw Eddy he was designing a flyer for a motivation event he hoped to organise for entrepreneurs, just as soon as he could raise the cash to hire a venue. It read: “Grand Seminar Avec MEJF”. (MEJF are his initials.) He’d charge participants $20 to attend.
“When I was young, I had a dream,” he said. “I still have this dream. My dream is to travel around the world to motivate people about good things.”
He continued: “You have to move every time. You have to shake your body, to start something, to restart again.”
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