Justin Beiber and the Surprising Music of Haiti

Any time you go to a new place, there are always things that surprise you, and the music I heard in Haiti certainly was one of them.   I'd tried to learn as much as a I could about Haiti before going down there, reading books about Haiti's independence, it's rise from dictatorship in the 1980's, to humanitarian efforts in battling AIDS and TB. For music, I'd gone to iTunes and typed in "Haiti", and gotten some offerings that sounded rather African to my untrained ears.  Since I was in charge of taking video for the trip, I downloaded a couple songs to use as music under photos or video that I'd then put on YouTube for the folks following us back home.  By the time I finished the trip, I realized I hadn't heard any of that type of music while I was down there.

When we got to the neighborhood in Rue Delmas 87 (a suburb of Port-au-Prince), we had to go through a narrow walkway between several houses and then down winding sets of stairs in order to get to the widow's house we were rebuilding.  What was the first song I remember hearing in this foreign land? Near street level a bunch of 3rd and 4th grade girls will hanging out and playing, singing along to a radio blaring "Baby, baby, baby, oh, sweet baby, baby, baby!"  Yes, Justin Bieber-mania had hit Haiti.

 (the girl on the left sang Bieber all day, except when she was working on her English with us.)

We probably carried a couple thousand 25-pound cinder blocks down via our human assembly line.  Even though the steps were higher and therefore harder, I liked being stationed on the area near the blue door.  All day, we'd hear piano playing coming from inside the door.  We figured out it must be a piano teacher's house, since we'd hear simple scales, and then more advanced pieces, and then back to scales, as students from different levels would come in for lessons throughout the day.  It was one of those 'ah-ha' moments.  Even in a disaster-ravaged country like Haiti, people were still able to send their kids to better themselves through music.

The daughter of the woman whose house we were rebuilding was Vanessa (pronounced 'vuh-NIECE-uh).  She often sang solos at her Baptist church, and had a wonderful voice.  We tried singing a few of the songs we knew in French, but it turns out Vanessa and her family and friends didn't know them.  The family and their neighbors didn't really know any songs in English, either.  Vanessa sang a beautiful song in French, which we couldn't understand, but really enjoyed anyway. Finally someone hit upon a song it turns out we all knew, and we sang it together.

This was pretty funny in retrospect- English-speaking Americans and French/Creole-speaking Haitians joining together to sing a Christmas song in Latin in the middle of July.   But in reality, it was amazing- people from different countries and backgrounds and languages coming together to praise the God they share singing In excelsis Deo, "Glory to God in the highest".

COMING UP NEXT: Mauled by a 3-Foot-Tall Dwyane Wade