CULTURE

foreign powers and local strongmen. From the nearly two-decade U.S. occupation of the island in the early beats of the 20th century — a deadly military occupation whipped up by the Wall Street interests of National City Bank of New York, an earlier mutation of the investment bank and financial services company known today as Citigroup — to the Tonton Macoute death squad of midcentury dictator François “Papa Doc” Duvalier, the sovereign nation has spent the lion’s share of its precious free years under someone else’s heel.

“Haiti has basically undergone every brutality and intervention you can imagine,” Walent says when asked why Boulder County residents should throw their energy behind the work of Locally Haiti during the upcoming benefit concert and art exhibition. “So for folks who are motivated by social justice, it’s a natural fit.”

‘SOLIDARITY IN ITS TRUEST SENSE’

But Walent says there’s a more fundamental reason locals here on the Front Range should be moved to help empower people in a country where they will likely never step foot. The humanitarian-minded Lafayette resident — who first visited Haiti to pitch in after the infamous 2010 earthquake killed more than 200,000 people, displacing another 1.5 million while damaging critical infrastructure and touching off a devastating cholera outbreak — says it’s about seeing your own struggle bound up with someone else’s.

“I mean, this is our neighbor, a stone’s throw away from Miami, that is in true crisis,” he says. “I’m not saying that it should come from a place of guilt. There’s a famous quote that says something like, ‘If you’ve come here to help me, no thanks; but if you’ve come here because your liberation is wrapped up in mine, then let’s work together.’ … It’s solidarity in its truest sense.”

That’s the animating force behind Locally Haiti, where Walent has served as the organization’s stateside executive director since 2017. With a special focus on the country’s rural areas, the nonprofit has partnered for more than three decades with the community of Petit Trou de Nippes, located 95 miles west along the coast and a far cry in many respects from the commercial center where Beaubrun and El-Saieh were first zapped by the power of Haitian music and art. Walent says that with the help of its on-the-ground leaders and the local government’s ministry of health, the organization will soon break ground on a new hospital and health center for the region after a 2021 earthquake destroyed the only healthcare facility serving a population of roughly 40,000 people.

“When there is a vision that takes into account all the complicated cultural and country-specific realities in coming up with a solution, that solution is much more likely to be effective,” he says. “Every place is complex. And you can imagine how hard it would be for someone from [another country] to come to the U.S. having never spent time here, or not knowing the local context or norms, or what different problems there are to anticipate, and then being dropped into some city with a bunch of resources. They would come up with some plan that didn’t make sense, or wasn’t durable, or didn’t really fit the local needs. But for some reason that happens in Haiti all the time.”

Back in the Upper Manhattan neighborhood of Washington Heights, a week and change ahead of his Boulder County sojourn to help generate support for Walent’s organization and the island tethered to his heart from more than 1,500 miles away, Beaubrun reflects on a similar lack of context in framing the place he calls home and the people who make it special.

“On the news it’s always an earthquake, or this or that — they don’t show you the whole culture,” he says. “It’s a really beautiful place to be, and [that’s] because of the people. It’s not a poor country, the way people want to see it. To me, ‘poor’ is when you’re poor in spirit. Haiti is not poor in spirit. They are always laughing, smiling — joy, you know, singing. And at the end of the day, if you cannot have that, I don’t see the point.”

ON THE BILL: Locally

Haiti: A Celebration of Art and Music. 5 p.m. Sunday, June 25, The Arts HUB, 420 Courtney Way, Lafayette. $25