Happy 238th birthday America: Marking the Big Fourth in Port au Prince

RASHMEE ROSHAN LALL July 5, 2014
Mo'Mojo in the Haitian capital

Mo’Mojo in the Haitian capital – Photo by Rashmee Roshan Lall

The Fourth of July has enjoyed the World Cup effect – and then some. Rio de Janeiro’s Christ the Redeemer statue bore the colours of the American flag on Thursday, July 3 – unusual, till you start to consider that 90,000 or so Americans are visiting Brazil for the 2014 FIFA World Cup.

Diplopundit’s blog records some of the more special ccelebrations at US embassies around the world, not least an enormous cake that needed six people to carry it in the Estonian capital and a Route 66-themed event in Malta, with vintage cars and a menu to match. (Click here to read the blog in full and see the pictures).

For us, here in Port au Prince a Zydeco band from Ohio rocked the crowds as a US Embassy gift to the Haitian capital. So, a group of people from the Midwest sang a style of music that is native to Louisiana in the south. Perhaps Mo‘Mojo does, in some way, epitomize the American reality that you can still be whatever you want no matter where you come from.

Jack Kerouac

“Our battered suitcases were piled on the sidewalk again; we had longer ways to go. But no matter, the road is life”
– Jack Kerouac