L’Union Fait La Force On January 14, two days after a massive 7.1 earthquake hit the country of my heritage, I set out to find my mother, who was just three miles south of the quake’s epicenter. After finding her alive, I turned my attention to my people and a country in pain. Our primary focus now [...]

It was just two weeks after New Year’s Eve, the big Platinum Key affair, and I was working hard to plan the next series of events at LUCID: Jazz Awards, Miles Davis tributes, happy hour specials. The goal: Make this year better than the last. But amid the planning and sending of final e-mails, fliers, and event lists, 30 seconds rocked an island nation. And [...]

After 36 hours of desperate and unanswered calls to Port au Prince, 31-year-old David Pierre-Louis left the safety of Seattle for quake ravaged Haiti in hopes of finding his family. “I’m just walking, trying to find my mom,” he said. He walked through the skeletal remains of the neighborhoods he once knew, to the block [...]

David Pierre-Louis tried calling his mother in Haiti for 36 long hours following the devastating earthquake on Jan. 12 before he made the decision to leave his home in Seattle to find her. Not knowing what he would find, David made his way to a neighborhood he once knew looking for the block where his [...]

SEATTLE — Opening “Lucid” in the University District was David Pierre-Louis’ life long dream. But as the lounge owner listens to a cover of the jazz piece “Haitian Fight Song” while talking on his cell phone, you know his mind is currently elsewhere. “I can’t just sit back and not doing anything, you know,” said [...]

And when I wake up in the morning, there’s a message from my friend, David, who’d left Seattle to trek through the ruins of Haiti to find his mother: “I first walked right by the house because a good portion of it was totally demolished,” he wrote. “The fitness center across the street was also [...]