{"id":1974,"date":"2008-06-23T06:38:00","date_gmt":"2008-06-23T01:38:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/chris.dwan.org\/?p=1974"},"modified":"2008-06-23T06:38:00","modified_gmt":"2008-06-23T01:38:00","slug":"haiti-vignette-barikad-crew","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/chris.dwan.org\/?p=1974","title":{"rendered":"Haiti Vignette: Barikad Crew"},"content":{"rendered":"

I found out from one of the young men who runs the guest house<\/a> where we stayed in Port Au Prince that three members of Haiti’s most popular rap \/ hip-hop group, Barikad Crew, had just died in a horrible car accident. They were driving between gigs, and a high tension electrical wire touched their car (circumstances are murky), and three of them were burned beyond recognition. That happened on Saturday night, the night before we arrived in country.<\/p>\n

The following Saturday my group was returning from the countryside in a big open truck. Fourteen Americans piled into an open truck. I was clinging to the top of the cab, taking pictures of the approach into town. As we came into the city, I saw a mob walking in the street ahead of us … perhaps a couple of thousand young Haitians all wearing red bandannas and matching white and red shirts. <\/p>\n

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My first thought was “oh crap.” I’ve got a thing about large groups of upset people. I had never really been on the receiving end of thousands of people visibly, obviously not the same race or nationality as me … staring at me. The fact that they were all wearing matching bandannas was the really freaky part to me. This wasn’t random … it was organized. I was very much reminded that we were in their<\/em> country … and I started giving mental odds that we were about to become a story on CNN. <\/p>\n

Then I remembered that the funeral for the rappers was supposed to be that day. I looked closer and saw things like “RIP” and pictures of three men on the t-shirts.<\/p>\n

Some of them gave us the finger as we passed, others gave us the peace sign … just like you might get from any crowd of young people. We encountered similar groups throughout the city for the rest of the ride back to the guest house.<\/p>\n

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I found out from one of the young men who runs the guest house where we stayed in Port Au Prince that three members of Haiti’s most popular rap \/ hip-hop group, Barikad Crew, had just died in a horrible car accident. They were driving between gigs, and a high tension electrical wire touched their . . . → Read More: Haiti Vignette: Barikad Crew<\/a><\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[55],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/chris.dwan.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1974"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/chris.dwan.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/chris.dwan.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/chris.dwan.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/chris.dwan.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1974"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/chris.dwan.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1974\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/chris.dwan.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1974"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/chris.dwan.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1974"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/chris.dwan.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1974"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}