Coldplay
in Haiti
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Date: 4 April, 2003
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Chris Martin.
Photo:
Zed Nelson |
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| ‘I've
never seen anything like this before. I felt homesick. I just wanted to retreat
into my little bubble of being a pop star and worrying about my reviews.'
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Earlier
this year Chris Martin of rock band Coldplay, embarked on a crash course in the
economics of international trade by spending a week with Oxfam in Haiti to promote
the campaign to make global trade rules fairer for poorer nations. Below we carry
one day in Chris's Haitian diary. Read the whole diary by clicking the link at
the end of our extract.
'After another long, bumpy drive which felt
as if somebody was hitting you on the bum with various types of rock, we went
to another coffee co-op to see men putting the coffee out to dry in the sun on
concrete patios, and women sorting the beans by hand, picking out the best quality
ones for export.
This co-op was just three years old, and still very
basic. The women told us how they can't afford to send their children to school,
or buy even basic health-care. We also learned about a plague of insects that
is destroying the coffee crops, and it all seemed so bleak.
I've never
seen anything like this before. I felt homesick. I just wanted to retreat into
my little bubble of being a pop star and worrying about my reviews. I was talking
to a guy at lunchtime and I said I didn't have any solution to these problems,
and he said, "Of course you don't. You're a singer." And I thought,
"You're right, what the hell am I doing here in a bandana trying to look
like Axl Rose?"
Yolette Etienne, the inspiring Haitian woman who
heads Oxfam here, keeps telling me to look for the hope. "We've just got
to do things bit by bit. You've got to see the good that these little projects
are doing."
Chris Martin travelled to Haiti with Oxfam, like Christian
Aid, a member of the Trade Justice Movement.
• Read
the whole of Chris's Haitian diary
• Watch
video of Chris in Haiti
• Visit
the Trade Justice Movement website
• Listen
to Coldplay live on Radio One's Evening Session
• Watch
Coldplay in the studio making their new album
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