Stuart Clark's impromptu Haitian TV appearance!

“Would you like to do an interview with us tomorrow?” asked Wendell Theodore from Port Au Prince’s top-rated talk station Radio Metropole on Wednesday night. What he neglected to tell me is that our live chinwag is actually going out on their sister TV channel, which is why I’ve just had a cape draped round my shoulders by a make-up girl who’s a ringer for Hot Press cover star Azealia Banks.
“You’re very pale,” she mutters as she gets to work with the powder-puff. It’s a three-way conversation with Monsieur Theodore asking his questions in Creole and our right-hand man for the week Cedrick Lafond translating into English as I grin inanely into the camera. Everyone in the studio looks genuinely touched when I say that a huge number of Irish people are aware of Haiti’s plight and later this month will be participating in the first Irish Haitian Week, which – plug! – includes a tasty sounding Whelan’s weekender on January 28 & 29 featuring the likes of Bipolar Empire, Storyfold, runawayGO and The Riptide Movement.
TV current affairs duties completed, we head for the centre of Port Au Prince where the increased police presence turns out to be unnecessary. Rather than raging against the government or the United Nations, Haitians have decided that this is a day for quiet contemplation. Well, except for in the city’s numerous churches where the congregations are celebrating the lives of their lost loved ones by singing, clapping, stamping their feet and generally behaving like they’re at a Prince gig. Not for the first time this week, I’m overwhelmed by the sense of community.
Lunch is spent in the company of the good folk from 3PSM, a peace and reconciliation group based in the St. Martin area where before Christmas a gang turf war claimed the lives of 14 people. Some of the killing, we're told, was done by gun-wielding foot soldiers who've yet to hit their teens.
Concern brought a 3PSM delegation to Ireland last year to attend the Dáil and Stormont, meet Sinn Féin and the DUP and compare notes with their counterparts from the Glencree Centre For Peace & Reconciliation whose praises they cannot sing enough.
A voodoo artifact buying session later - if that doesn’t get me excommunicated, nothing will! - we’re back on our terrace overlooking Port Au Prince sipping a chilled Prestige and looking forward to checking out mizik rasin heroes RAM tonight in Hotel Oloffson. Down the hill to our left there’s a volley of fireworks being let off; immediately in front of us there’s somebody belting out some choice gospel tunes on their beatbox; and to our right the neighbourhood dogs are having another of their barkathons. I’m telling you, dear old Dublin seems dull by comparison.

We’ll have a full report on my Haiti trip in the January 28 edition of Hot Press. In the meantime, visit [link]www.concern.net/where-we-work/caribbean/haiti[/link] to see how you can help.

Pic by Niall Carson.