When I think of protesting, I think of doing it for a major cause.  Maybe like the march on Washington for jobs and freedom where Martin Luther King, Jr. gave the famous “I Have a Dream” speech.  Maybe a more local protest like what happened earlier this year with the teacher’s in Wisconsin.

In Haiti, I feel like I hear about protests all the time.  The UN claims many protests, I hear through people about protests, and then this week we actually witnessed a protest.  Not to say that I want to witness it but it made relevant to us what happens.

In the Beginning

The streets in our neighborhood have been flooded again and again.  Lately, it has been completely flooded.  I wouldn’t be surprised at all if I saw someone with a raft.  That would be the ultimate in truly embracing this. Also, I was getting worried that the pigs would lose their place to feed 🙂

To be honest, I am not concerned about the cars in this situation.  It is the people that walk these roads day in and day out.  They are literally walking through this awful awful water.  Last week I was walking on the street and crossing the water on rocks.  Of course, I slipped and covered my legs with the disgusting, smelly water.  I started to think about it, the water is mixed with tons of trash.  Trash.  Spoiled food, chicken bones, goat guts, oil containers, toxic chemicals, dead rats, mice and really anything else you would normally throw in the trash… it sits openly on the street to mix with the standing water.  I know, I know, this is a great read to settle the stomach :-D.

The Protest

As you can imagine, after a while people start getting a bit upset over the new lake.  Out from the woodwork of the neighborhood men appear and put huge barricading boulders in the middle of the water literally blocking cars from passing.  At this point, I didn’t even want to attempt at getting a picture, especially while the twenty something guys were around blocking the road and putting the barricades up.  As far as I know, the worst thing that happened in this situation was that a couple guys chipped and dug a huge hole in the concrete down the road a bit.  They were arrested and most of the protest was dispersed after that.

This is certainly not something I would think you would need to protest over.  In the states, I would just make a phone call to department of transportation or water company and expect that it be fixed fairly soon.  Maybe in Haiti it takes a bit more noise to be effective in getting your request across.  Luckily, it was a very localized protest. Not sure how effective it was but it opened our eyes, on a small scale, to some of the protesting in Haiti.