I drove down with three other volunteers and a Haitian friend. It was supposed to start at 6, but we figured we wouldn’t miss too much if we showed up around 7 or so. When we got there, the crowd was massive already. We were a little puzzled to see Digicel still painting the VIP stands – constructed the day before – around the main stage. Apparently there were a couple wrinkles in the event planning. There was no music yet, but we were still early, according to island time. But regardless of the lack of entertainment, the people kept coming. When we approached the stage area, still a good hundred yards away, choo-chooing through the dense crowd, we were eventually stopped by a wall of solid people that simply couldn’t give an inch. We stood there for about a half hour before realizing that the music might still be a long way off, and instead of getting cooked in this 98.6 degree oven, we should probably seek out a better spot.
We eventually found a nice grassy area about four times further away. We could barely see what was going on on stage, but it hardly mattered. Hour after hour, the same roadies and techies continued meandering around the equipment. And the people just kept coming. By nine o’clock, the crowds extended as far as we could see, which was pretty far - Champs de Mars is the largest public space in the Caribbean. There were easily a hundred thousand people there; possibly many more, considering that everyone close enough to see the whites of Shaggy's eyes, if he ever showed up, was packed in like sardines.
Around eleven o'clock, Shaggy was still nowhere to be seen. Not that we were so eager to see him, but we'd been expecting live music, and we were getting restless, along with everyone else there. Josh and I went on a walk for something to do, and on our way back we heard what sounded like Shaggy. By the time we found everyone else, Shaggy (or someone impersonating him) had played his three biggest hit songs, shortened, back to back. He didn't seem to be anticipating an encore. Apparently, there were some major technical difficulties, and someone decided to give the people some Shaggy. But after the already-faint music died down, there was some sort of disturbance in the dense crowd in front of the stage. From where we were standing, all we could see was the beginnings of a stampede. People were pouring away from the stage in rivers. We still don't know what caused the panic - we didn't hear any gunshots or anything. But I was starting to get worried as the wave of people moved closer and closer to where we were standing. And just as I was starting to ask myself, how are we going to get back to the car, there was an explosion.
Some ran, some ducked, everyone looked around frantically. And then, directly overhead, the giant blossoms of Disney-scale fireworks. People stopped, laughed, and clutched their mouths and chests as thousands and thousands of frantic pulses evened out and slowed down. I've rarely felt more relieved in my life.
* * *
I thought I should write briefly about what I've been working on in the office. Shortly after I started there in December, I found out that they were going to pay a freelance software techie to build a database to store all of the information from their human rights monitoring activities. The idea was that every time my coworkers went to visit a prison or a police station, for example, they would return to the office and record the information in a series of customized forms on the computer. Luckily enough, I designed such a database, though much simpler, at my last job. So I asked if I could do it instead, since paying a private contractor to build one from scratch would take a lot of time and money.
The project has grown a lot since I began in late January, as well as going through several revisions, but at this point it's a fuctional tool for keeping track of the police, prison and justice systems of Haiti. It's actually been a lot of fun to work on. I needed to populate the database to see if it would work as desired, and to do that, I needed "dummy data." So, I started using the names of coworkers, friends, family, old college professors, musicians and whoever else I could think of. If you're reading this blog right now, there's a decent chance that you appear in my database as a Haitian police officer, prisoner, warden, or judge. Don't worry, I'll try and clean it up before we load it with real information and let the press snoop around in there. But if one of you slips through the cracks, I guess you'll know who to blame when you're summoned before the International Criminal Court.
