Dye Mon Gen Mon

[bcholmes]

Today was a bit of a quiet day.

Early in the day, a number of political activists came to our place to celebrate Independence Day and to eat Soup Joumou. The house was full of people, all enjoying soup and some rhum raisin, with speechification and guitar playing. It was fun.

For my part, though, I was really keenly interested in making it to a protest that we'd been informed about. Several of the groups that we'd spent the last few days interviewing were attending a protest to take place in front of the UN/MINUSTAH and OAS compound. We got there about two hours after the stated start time of the event.

It was a small protest -- I'd say 50 to 75 people, but they were hollerin' up a storm. The MINUSTAH folks, of course, were wearing armour and carrying really big guns.

We were interested in getting pictures of some of the MINUSTAH people in charge; I was looking at this guy (who had a Canadian flag on his sleeve. I noticed that if I got him from an angle, that I could see around a bend where a bunch of troops were standing by with full riot gear. There was a clear line that I wasn't allowed to cross, so I couldn't get any closer, but I snapped a few pictures of these troops. Interestingly, ten minutes after I took this photo, those troops disappeared.

Here's a picture of me shooting MINUSTAH as they're trying to shoot me. As with the Lovinsky protest I went to two years ago, the MINUSTAH guys had many people out filming and photographing the protesters. I was playing 'tag' with the guy on the left for a while -- not moving my camera from away from my face. He seemed keenly interested in taking a picture of me.

I wonder about the support process for these photos. How many people sift through the pictures? How much effort is put into identifying unknown blan who suddenly show up at a protest? You'd think they have access to a lot of passport photos to identify us.

I'm pretty much resigned to the fact that there's a file on me at this point. Oh, well.

Unfortunately, the protest fell apart after the megaphones came out. The primary organizers wanted to denouce the elections. Many of the attendees wanted to raise the issues of unfulfilled promises relating to layoffs at the docks and telephone company. The factions argued a bit and then wandered away, and the entire event was over pretty early.

Afterward, we went up the mountain to do a quick drive-by of Petyonvil, and then went up to the scenic look-out that I've been to before. Basically, we're looking down the mountain, here, at Pòtoprens. It's a pretty impressive sight, although the smog makes it hard to capture on camera.