Meeting Martelly: A New President for Haiti Is Inaugurated

On the night before his inauguration, Haitian president-elect Michel Martelly came to the Karibe Hotel, where our U.S. team and our Haitian program director Linda Metayer were staying. He sat outdoors among us as the band began to play. There were watchful bodyguards, but also a feeling of welcome, of fraternity.

The people I spoke with were happy, excited; not just the tent-camp organizers who had always been solidly behind "Sweet Micky," the popular singer, as President Martelly was known, but also wealthy people and the intelligentsia. There had been a shift in the weeks since the election, a sense of possibility that, freed from narrow, self-serving needs -- he'd already had plenty of fame, adulation and devotion, and had made plenty of money -- he might really mean what he'd said about rebuilding the infrastructure and making, for the first time, education available to all.

It felt important to talk to him, to tell him how hopeful we were as well as what we were doing. And so, Linda and I arrived at his table. She explained in Creole -- the people's language here in Haiti -- about the Center's work and our hopes for establishing a national program of self-care and mutual help. "Thank you," he said to us in English, "for everything you are doing for Haiti." He gave us names and contact information for key advisers and the next Minister of Health, embraced us with a kind of warmth and ease that is rare in politicians.

<>

In the background, the guitarist, Belo, was joined by backup singers and other musicians -- two, three, five, 10 of them. The music, a kind of joyful Haitian reggae, had us smiling and dancing. I wish you all could have been there. The president stayed at his table for a while, happily greeting supporters, many of whom had returned from the Haitian diaspora, enjoying his evening and everyone's music.