The Hon. Marie Laurence JocelynLassegue, Haiti’s Minister of Women’s Affairs and Rights, will visit the Island from July 15 to 19 as the guest of the volunteers of Martha’s Vineyard Fish Farm for Haiti Project and PeaceQuilts, two Vineyard humanitarian organizations working to relieve poverty in Haiti. She will be accompanied by a small delegation, all here to support the Island to Island Solidarity initiative.

Born in Port-au-Prince in 1955, she was educated in both the Democratic Republic of Congo, formerly known as Zaire, and France, where she completed university and post-graduate studies in literature in Strasbourg andBesançon. Over the past three decades, Mrs. Jocelyn Lassegue has had an illustrious professional life as a women’s rights advocate, an educator, a journalist, a television anchorwoman, a public servant, a civil and democratic rights activist, a social entrepreneur and a politician.

She will be guest of honor at the Haitian art benefit sale on July 18 at 5 p.m. at the Martha’s Vineyard Resort on New York avenue in Oak Bluffs. She will be at the tennis tournament benefit opening at 9 a.m. on Thursday, July 16 at the same location. The minister will also be speaking at the Oak Bluffs library at 6 p.m. on Thursday, July 16. The public is welcome to meet the minister and her delegation at these events.