Lynda Charles grew up in northern Haiti, the daughter of a mother who "dreamt big" for her children despite having little formal education herself. Lynda knew she wanted to be a doctor from around age five, after a visit to her pediatrician, a memory she still carries word for word. She went on to medical school in Port-au-Prince, choosing medicine over parallel acceptances to study teaching and languages, and finished her internship and required social service year to earn her medical license. Her path to the U.S. wasn't a plan; it was a death threat. Two weeks after returning from a training in France that had set her up to lead a national genetics education program, Lynda received a threat serious enough that her mother insisted she leave the country immediately, even though her mother had paid for medical school and stood to "lose" that investment. Lynda arrived in Delaware in 2015 on a visitor visa, eventually starting an immigration process at her uncle's urging. She later returned to Haiti with her husband and young daughter, worked at Haiti's Ministry of Public Health and then a nonprofit, and, after a cold application to the UN Volunteers program she almost dismissed as a scam, landed a UNICEF nutrition role in northern Haiti, close to her hometown. She was promoted to a full UN staff position about a year later, fulfilling a dream she'd written down in a journal at age fifteen. In 2024, escalating gang violence and kidnappings in Haiti pushed her to move permanently to Delaware with her three children, while her husband remains in Port-au-Prince. In the episode, Lynda talks about the choice she made not to pursue U.S. medical relicensing as an international medical graduate, deciding instead to build a career in leadership coaching and community health work so she could be the present, hands-on mother she didn't get to be while working long hours in Haiti. She describes the heartbreak of realizing her children's caregivers knew their day-to-day preferences better than she did, and how that shaped her choice to prioritize time over title. She also opens up, for the first time in this kind of public setting, about surviving sexual abuse as a teenager and the years she spent privately carrying shame and a sense of unworthiness even while succeeding professionally, and how her faith became the turning point that let her forgive her abuser, her mother, and herself. The conversation closes with a look at her book, Not Just an Immigrant: Not Defined by Borders, But Refined by Grace, why she wrote it, and her reflections on what she wishes people understood about the real cost of immigrating to the U.S: financial, emotional, and beyond.
