RAM

Besides discovering what the iTunes “genius” button does, this week has been filled with events funny and sad and great. Such is Haiti.

Thursday night we ended up going to the legendary Hotel Oloffson to here RAM play. Because RAM and what RAM is to Haiti is incredibly hard to convey, I am including a Wiki link:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RAM_(band)

This is an incredibly magical and fascinating group. Richard A Morse (where RAM got its name) is the front man, an interesting guy, born in Puerto Rico, who now lives here and owns the hotel. Basically, if you want to kick back OR move around to the beat, RAM is an intense mix of African drum beats and horns. Makes for a great time. My friend Paul has a blog with video clips – you should check them out:

http://paulsjourneyyoureinvited.blogspot.com/

(Please read Paul’s account of us trying to get some food from a waitress. A sad account of what we run into each day here.)

More interesting than the music of RAM is their political history. I won’t bore you with the details that you can read elsewhere, but their past has included kidnappings during the show, threats on their lives, an incident where the government made them perform at Kanaval and the driver of the truck went nuts and ran over people, etc.

Yesterday we walked down to the hotel to grab a drink and who greeted us at our table but Richard Morse himself! We spoke with him for about 30 minutes; he spoke about everything from music to politics to "ever leaving Haiti." It was refreshing; he is such a revolutionary figure here I imagined him to be more reckless with his life. Instead he told stories of being scared for his life and wanting to keep playing music. He spoke about how he was “simply a musician”, with a twinkle in his eye. It was refreshing to hear such a figure talk about how he merely has a good gig in Haiti and he tries to do some of the right things with the platform he does have. He told us the firsthand account of police grabbing him off stage and trying to take him away, of band members being arrested at midnight during a show, and of the 1998 Kanaval accident, in which his chief security man was killed. He joked that nowhere else in the world would offer him a job. “I mean, I asked a friend about teaching elementary school in the states – you gotta get a teaching degree for that now, which would mean more school! I’m just a musician man, and I have a decent gig here in Haiti. Just a gig man, just a gig.”

To return to my struggles with Creole, I’ve learned that I get along well if I just accept what people say in Creole and try to get the overall meaning from a few of the words and the body language. For instance, today I was playing with two dogs outside our place. A man walked by and asked me something. I thought he said the word friend, pointed to the dogs, and was smiling. I thought maybe the question was “are the dogs friendly?” I just said “oui” and he smiled and called the dogs over to him to pet them. Beautiful. What’s so hard about that?? Now flashback to work. I was going to make copies in a backroom and I stopped to ask the guy who works in that wing (the door was shut) if it was ok for me to go in. Apparently he told me in too-nice a way NOT to go in there. What did I do? Oh, I smiled and said “merci” and barged into the room. Bad idea. I barged into a sensitive meeting with a few patients and the psychologists. They gave me the death look. Ooops. As I walked out the guy I spoke with on the way in looked at me like I was an idiot. (Imagine this in the states, Me: Can I go in back here to make copies? Boss: No, there is a very sensitive meeting with big-wigs and sick patients going on back there, Me: Oh great, thanks! (Barging in.))

I digress. Last story. I bought chicken off the street the other day while walking around. They chopped it and cooked it for me. We couldn’t eat it there because a guy was harassing me to buy him a coke. (This guy wanted a coke, and 10 kids were standing there behind him. “What about them?” I asked. “I buy you one and not them?” “Forget about them man, just me.”) So I ended up eating my chicken on a bridge. As I ate it, I put the chicken bones on the bridge, figuring that a dog would be able to easily get them and chew on them (as opposed to my throwing them into the trash below). So a pile of bones was sitting on the railing next to me. Next thing I know a man is yelling at me from behind, grabs my discarded bones, and bites into a bone! He continues to yell at me as he walks off. From what I gathered this was some form of “you wasteful America.” He was not happy that I wasn’t eating the bone. The act itself, grabbing someone else’s chicken bones and biting into them, sums up the situation here.