Port-au-Prince, Haiti (CNN) — When the earth started to shake on January 12, Rocher Joseph-Michelet was in his tiny, one-room apartment, composing lyrics for the upcoming Carnivale in Port-au-Prince.
He ran out the door to find an entire two-story building, crumbling and falling in his direction. “They break down. I fell down, I was on my back,” he said.
In heavily-accented English, peppered with American slang, Joseph-Michelet described how he was all-but buried under the rubble… and then rescued by members of his hip-hop group.
“Thanks to God, thanks to my friends,” he said. “I’m so proud it’s them come to save me.”
Joseph-Michelet is better known by his stage name “MRJ.” He is a member of a neighborhood hip-hop group called Sekte Atis Lib, or S.A.L. They are six childhood friends from the same poor neighborhood who rap in Creole.
MRJ escaped the earthquake with minor injuries. Many other residents of his neighborhood weren’t so fortunate.”Two days after the disaster, we [carried] 39 dead bodies… from here to the central cemetery,” said Gaby Guerrier, the manager of the band.
He spoke while standing on a rooftop which offered a view of a devastated urban landscape of collapsed and dangerously sagging cinderblock apartment buildings.
The members of S.A.L. have been forced to abandon their homes in this tightly-packed community of concrete houses and narrow alleyways.
“It’s too dangerous, nobody wants to live in the houses again,” said Guerrier’s younger brother Panarothy, also known as the rapper named “Next.”
He led CNN on a tour, past a large wall mural showing S.A.L.’s name in jagged graffiti, to the sprawling, fetid camp where the band, their families, and some 4,500 other displaced Haitians now live.
The artists have helped each other build crude shacks out of plywood and rusting metal sheeting, along a winding dirt alleyway they have playfully nick-named “Big Man Street.”
Twenty-one year old Geffrard Jonel, a.k.a. Fame, has already decorated the walls of his hut with posters of soccer teams and music groups. He said he and three others slept in the tiny room, along with some unwanted visitors.
“Rats!” he yelled, to peals of laughter from the rest of the group.
Despite the unbearable conditions, spirits among the band’s members appeared remarkably high.
“If you get angry with it, you get angry at God,” said the manager, Gaby Guerrier.
“We are not more important than those people who are dead. God just leave us alive. We thank him for that.”
Perhaps because of this infectious optimism, 25-year-old “Next” has been appointed the leader of a camp association, representing all 4,500 residents.
“If I have a problem, I’ll come to him,” said one resident named Levi Lazard. “Because he is the one that can make the people listen to him.”
On the day CNN visited, Next and about ten other colleagues had just completed construction of a sandbag platform to house a large water bladder and distribution system donated by Irish aid organization Concern. Residents with buckets and jugs were already lining up for a taste of fresh water.
“We want to make the people, the survivors live better,” Next explained. He then issued an appeal for other aid organizations to come and help the community.
“We need something else specially for the children,” he said. “We need to make a place for the children for education. There’s no school. It’s destroyed.”
Three weeks after the earthquake, residents of this camp were stripping away vegetation and small trees from the surrounding area, and the air was thick with the sound of hammers and saws as people worked to construct new ramshackle homes.
Before the earthquake, only one member of S.A.L. had a full-time job, working at a juice factory. The others were unemployed artists, filming music videos on shoe-string budgets, all victims of Haiti’s impoverished economy.
Since the disaster, these young men have carried corpses, cared for wounded friends and relatives, and become leaders of their displaced and desperate community.
They are also trying write new lyrics, to explain this life-changing ordeal.
“This is a revolution of nature,” said MRJ, who survived the two-story building collapse.
MRJ and his colleagues then delivered a memorable a cappella performance amid shelters made of bed sheets and sticks where hungry children wailed.
“All the parks have become home to most,” he chanted in Creole, as the sun set over smoking campfires.
“We have to mobilize to overcome this crisis. Hopefully now the system will reboot. The time for the people has come. Solving the problems will take time. But we’re not going anywhere. We need to deal with this crisis at the grass roots.”
