Current Scholarship Recipients
With your support, we were able to offer scholarships starting in the 2021-22 and 2022-23 academic years to four Gros Marin graduates. These four young women study at the University of Notre Dame of Haiti (UNDH) in Les Cayes, about an hour’s drive from Gros Marin.
Maike Jose Kestry Denart (Jose)
Jose
Jose is studying nursing. She is the youngest of seven children. In her application for PM, she said, “All the various health problems facing my country, my community in particular, keep calling me to become a competent, dynamic, and sympathetic nurse.”
Haitian children fetch water in the hilly countryside where Jose is completing her community health internship.
She has completed internships in hospitals as well as many courses, including a rotation in ophthalmology.
Jose assists a doctor in performing a procedure on a patient.
After her second year, Jose wrote, “Over the course of the past two years of my studies, I met good and bad moments. To cut the rose one must face the thorns. I have become knowledgeable about other materials, pathologies, and experiences through internships. I found internet connection problems raging while my mother suffered with health problems. But I have dedicated my time and energy to make these two years a success with your immeasurable aid to my economic plan.”
In August 2025, Jose is completing a community health internship in a public health clinic in the countryside, where, she reports, the areas they visit are “even poorer” than theirs. “The people are destitute,” she says, “but our work helps them.”
Karma Joseph
Karma
Karma Joseph graduated first in her high school class and is majoring in agronomy. Her varied courses have included beekeeping, cattle breeding,
garden marketing, and irrigation and drainage. She has visited poultry farms and other agricultural sites.
Karma envisions herself as a future entrepreneur. During her third year of university, she wrote, “I love studying agronomy because it gives me a better understanding of the relationship between people, animals, and the earth. With what I am learning, I will be able to help my community.”
Christelle Mervilus
Christelle
Christelle Mervilus is completing a degree in nursing. She hopes to provide medical care in her community and to people in remote areas who cannot travel. She has completed internships in hospitals and received her nurse’s cap in her second year of studies.
Christelle wrote of her third year of studies that “the best part was our internship at the hospital because it allowed us to practice our skills, especially in the maternity ward,” where she delivered two babies.
Like Jose, Christelle is completing a community health internship in August 2025. Of this experience, she writes, “For community health, after the fieldwork, we’re asked to review patient files at the health center where we’re working to collect important information such as age, sex, pathologies, and treatments. We have to identify the most common pathologies so that we can use them as a presentation topic before leaving the internship.”
Oldine Isaac
Oldine, 2024
Like Christelle and Jose, Oldine is earning a degree in nursing. After her second year, she told us, “Since I started university, everything is going well, I’m learning well…The courses are really interesting, but there are two that I particularly like: nursing and pharmacology, because they are very important in the life of a good nurse. As for the hospital, everything is fine. I practice more day to day…We are accompanied by a course instructor to guide us, and they do it very well…”
Oldine, who has two brothers and a sister, embodies the connection between PM and the program from which PM grew: the support provided by parishioners of St. Anthony of Padua Church in Falls Church, Virginia, for the Catholic school in Gros Marin.
Oldine, 2015
After administering the St. Anthony program for several years, PM’s founders started Providential Mentoring to assist promising students in continuing their education. All of PM’s scholarship recipients have graduated from Our Lady of the Nativity School in Gros Marin.
In 2015, two of PM’s board members visited Gros Marin as part of a delegation from St. Anthony’s. There, they took the photo of Oldine Isaac that appears to the left.
Previous Scholarship Recipients
Left to right – Roberto Smith, Davidson Delices, Romario Dorastin
Roberto Smith, Davidson Delices, and O’Mario Dorastin successfully graduated due to the endowment provided by Providential Mentoring. Roberto and O’Mario studied engineering, while Davidson studied law.