Wyclef Jean is planning
a benefit concert in Haiti later this year to promote peace in the country, which
was plagued by violence when the existing government collapsed.
Jean told reporters
on the Caribbean island of St. Lucia that he would like to see 2 million of
Haiti’s eight million residents attend.
"I was in
Haiti three weeks ago and I was hanging out on the block in the ghettos, in
the baddest parts of town, with no security. All that stuff you see on the news
recently, with the guns and things, I didn’t see none of that."
Recently, US Secretary
of State Colin Powell called on international support to help rebuild Haiti,
the same thing Jean called for earlier this year.
“It’s
gonna take the whole Caribbean coming in,” Jean told AllHipHop.com in
an April interview. “The United Nations, all of the nations coming into
Haiti. Not just for 6 months.”
Haiti is one of
the poorest countries in the Western hemisphere. International donors recently
pledged over $1 billion dollars to aid to help Haiti’s reconstruction
effort.
Jean recently released
an album in his native language of Creole called Welcome to Haiti,
a semiautobiographical tale about a young immigrant from Haiti who recently
moved to New York.
