Stories of Success from the Bridge Program
Valstie Toussaint Rameau graduated from the CLC's Bridge to College program in 2019. Her path, like many Bridge students, was neither short nor easy, and she is a testament to the grueling work, faith, and tenacity that are required of so many immigrants in the U.S.
Valstie came to the U.S. as an asylee from Haiti with an undergraduate degree in history and a law degree from France under her belt. However, with English as her third language, the burdens of working under a restrictive work permit, and the reality that loomed before her of what it would take to ever practice law in the U.S., she set her sights on a more practical option. "My idea wasn't to do college over," she says. "You don't want to start over. . . but I had to be realistic. When you're coming to the U.S., you are trying to find your way. How can you try in this society if you don't seek an education?" It was that understanding that led her to the CLC, where her mother was already taking English classes, and to Bridge.
While Valstie was a student in the Bridge program, she was working long hours as a cashier at CVS in East Cambridge. It was her only job at first, but once her English improved, she got a second job as a unit secretary at Spaulding Hospital. When she graduated from Bridge and started at Bunker Hill, where she was accepted to the notoriously difficult general sonography program, she continued her work at Spaulding and CVS, where she was now a supervisor, all the while going to school full time.
However, as an asylee, Valstie was not eligible for federal financial aid, so even though she was working about forty hours a week, she reports, "I was spending all my days at Bunker Hill and in clinical rotations and was not able to work enough to cover all my expenses." She attributes her ability to complete the general sonography program in a relatively short time frame (three years full time, including summers) to the many scholarships she received over the years--three Friends of the CLC scholarships, two First Literacy scholarships, a City of Cambridge scholarship, and an "immigrant scholarship" from Bunker Hill, which covered her last two semesters there.
In 2022, Valstie graduated with her associate's degree in general sonography and, additionally, a license to practice obstetric sonography. Today, she works full time at Cambridge Hospital as an ultrasound technician. When asked about how she feels about having entered a completely new field, Valstie says, "It became a passion. Cambridge Hospital is a really diverse hospital. I can meet people from anywhere in the world. This is what I was looking for."
Valstie also finds the work itself to be incredibly meaningful and moving: "You learn so much from people. So many people come with hope, and when you see the first baby's heartbeat, it's an amazing experience." There are the painful aspects as well. "When someone's losing a kid, you have to take off the professional a little and become a human."
When I interviewed Valstie in April, her first baby with her now husband was due in a couple of weeks. "Having a baby," she says, "is bigger than anything I've gone through, even going from Haiti to France to the U.S." She plans to someday bring Melodie, the name she has given her daughter, to Haiti. She has not seen her three younger siblings since she left in 2017, but she hopes to eventually bring them to the U.S. As for Melodie, Valstie says, "I need her to have more opportunities. As a woman in this world, you have to be strong. [My] coming to the United States was the first stop for her, even though she wasn't here yet."
