Violence and Political Unrest

Some of our previous posts have shared a little bit about the road blocks that occur on a somewhat regular basis in and around our area.  Last week, the chaos began with more fervor than anything we've yet seen around here. There's a lot of political unrest over the district that is Arcahaie. From what we hear, the federal government has proposed a notion to take away Arcahaie's title as a district (or whatever the correct translation is) because there can only be so many of these districts throughout the country and they would like to create a new one up north. This would also mean a loss of all of the little tax money they receive to function.

To put it lightly, people are pretty upset about it. We have seen some peaceful protests, but there is always the group that likes to take the violent approach.  After the first bizarre couple of days of numerous vehicles and tires sent up in flames, guns fired, and "the blacktop" backed up for miles, law enforcement stepped in.  The police and UN troops are both out in full force along the main road.  Armored vehicles with fully-automatic machine guns, helicopters overhead, and guns in every hand are on standby in order to prevent the chaos from continuing. They have announced that they're not afraid to shoot anyone who gets out of line.

Schools are not in session, stores are closed, and the usually very busy streets are mostly vacant near and on the blacktop. All of this prevention has caused the gangs to be upset about their inability to wreak havoc, so they said, "tomorrow, we'll call on the voodoo powers." Thankfully, we heard or saw nothing of anything really coming of it. For now, on Friday, people are still very cautious, but starting to ease back out toward the blacktop. We are prayerful that no unprepared lives will be lost by all of this, and that the whole ordeal can be resolved peaceably.

Troops and police guard a protest.

A burnt flat-bed truck, still loaded with bags of concrete that never made it to the job-site.

What's left of the dozens of tires that were burnt in the streets. The police have done a lot to keep things cleaned up, which helps keep a sense of peace and tells the trouble-makers they aren't accomplishing anything.