Photograph from “Rodrigo Abd/Associated Press” found HERE.
On Wednesday I start a five day contract with an NGO to follow them around and take photographs of what they’re doing. I’ve been working in Haiti for 6 months, and take a lot of pictures, and I think I know some of the basic rules of photography in this context. Mainly, ask permission. If the person is unsure of why you want to take their photograph, explain why as clearly and honestly as possible. Don’t get in the way. Try and focus on new stories, not old ones. There are plenty of photographs of amputees. My goal is not to add to that reservoir; my goal is tell new stories with my camera. However, I’m also getting paid to take photographs, and need to take in to account my employers interests.
So, I ask you, what advice, tips, dos and don’ts, can you share? I’ve never been paid to take photographs before, it’s always just been a hobby, or an extra “bonus” I bring with me to the other “real” job I’m doing. For five days, taking photographs is my real job. My instinct is to be invisible. To have the people I’m following not really “think” about me: to document both the obvious stuff as well as the moments that escape them because they’re focused on the things right in front of them, rightfully so. Don’t objectify. Don’t sensationalize.
What else? What are the nuances, you photographers out there? Please comment here on other things to think about.
I’ve been inundated with requests by people wanting to be volunteers in Haiti. While they’re intentions are great, unfortunetely there are too many conversations like this:
Me: Hope for Haiti Caller: Hi! I want to get on the next flight to Haiti and help! Me: Oh, hi, thank you! Do you have a background in medicine or disaster relief? Caller: Not at all! I just want to help!
Me: Hope for Haiti
Caller: Hi! I want to get on the next flight to Haiti and help!
Me: Oh, hi, thank you! Do you have a background in medicine or disaster relief?
Caller: Not at all! I just want to help!
I get it, and I don’t begrudge them one bit. But the truth is, right now the only volunteers needed are experts. Haiti will need plenty of non-expert volunteers in the coming weeks and months, but for now resources there are so tight, and security is so haphazard, that it’s not practical, safe, or helpful to go down there.
So what can I do? Give money to these big orgs that already have raised a ton?
Well, yeah, that would be a good start. Give $5. Give $10. I’m working with Hope for Haiti, and we’re having our first plane full of doctors and nurses land in Port au Prince in about 10 minutes. Another plane is landing in the DR with supplies. So the money being donated to Hope for Haiti IS REACHING HAITIAN PEOPLE.
But let’s say you already donated, or want to help in a more tangible way. If you’ve got tech skills, we need your help with Crises Mapping.
From the co-founder of Ushahidi (quotes are from Beth’s Blog)
We have received tremendous support from the crisis mapping community through the Crisis Mapping Network, the developer community, collaborating organizations like UN OCHA Columbia, INSTEDD, Haitianquake, Digital Democracy, FrontlineSMS, Google and others, and dozens of volunteers who’ve helped with everything from data entry, to translations, to data filtering. Since the site went live, the team has been working round the clock to make improvements to the instance, fix problems (our server has crashed several times already and our alert system went beserk!), coordinate efforts with volunteers, share information with partners, and collaborate with other tech-based efforts e.g. the people finder at Haitianquake (since merged with Google’s). The fact that we have a global team means that we have been able to offer round the clock support, with the Africa-based team taking over when the US-based team goes to sleep and vice versa.
We have received tremendous support from the crisis mapping community through the Crisis Mapping Network, the developer community, collaborating organizations like UN OCHA Columbia, INSTEDD, Haitianquake, Digital Democracy, FrontlineSMS, Google and others, and dozens of volunteers who’ve helped with everything from data entry, to translations, to data filtering.
Since the site went live, the team has been working round the clock to make improvements to the instance, fix problems (our server has crashed several times already and our alert system went beserk!), coordinate efforts with volunteers, share information with partners, and collaborate with other tech-based efforts e.g. the people finder at Haitianquake (since merged with Google’s). The fact that we have a global team means that we have been able to offer round the clock support, with the Africa-based team taking over when the US-based team goes to sleep and vice versa.
Ory describes their current challenges, including:
Close the feedback loop: that is, ensure that agencies trying to figure out where help is needed are tracking our reports and following up on requests for help that are coming in. We are currently doing this via the Crisis Mappers network, Sahana, and Internews and INSTEDD teams who have just landed in Haiti, but a lot more needs to be done.
The office asked me for some early results today, so I sent them some graphs and explanations. Thought you all might be interested.
Read the rest of this entry »
Beginning of School in Haiti from Lee on Vimeo.
I had originally thought we’d be hiking. On the drive up from Cotes de Fer to Gris Gris, a town perched on top of a mountain range in the south-east [sud-est] region of Haiti, the priest/navigator/host told me he’d be able to drive me to all six schools. The impending hike, which I’d been worried about (a previous hike, due to several factors, one of them involving dehydration, had resulting in me losing my two big toe nails–another story), was a non-issue.
A quick rehash of the day, with photos.
8am-10am: Meet with Sister Marie Francois Filogene, the head of Jean Paul VI, one of our schools. She had my survey ready and filled out, along with some great data on her school, including, drum roll please…Grades! For each student! And which student moved on to the next grade due to their grades, which students were forced to repeat their grade, and which students dropped out. Best news of all, this data is required by the Ministry of Ed here, so all our schools will have it. It sounds incredibly basic, obvious stuff, but this is the first time I’ve heard of it, and people have been working on this project for two years. We pop into a kindergarten class to say hi, I take a picture, innocently enough, and the next thing we know we’re lining up every grade in the entire school for staged photos.
2-4: What was supposed to be a casual meeting with 6 school directors who were ripe for being in our control group ends up being a romp through a Haitian jungle, mountains looming on all sides, as we crawl through rocky roads and stop repeatedly to make sure we’re going the right way. We are. Only the head director is there, which isn’t the best news, but he happens to be great, and it kills me to tell him (actually, my coworker who speaks French/Creole tells him this, but it kills me to watch him tell him this) that we don’t have the money to support his school this year, but that we’ll throw all the vitamins and medicines we can find (and we get a lot) at him if he helps us with my study. He seems okay with this arrangement, and we make plans to have a meeting with all the other directors October 2nd.
Think I just finalized my “vision” for what my database will look like for my research here. It helps me to visualize it:
School here starts September 7th, which would worry me, but none of the kids really show up until the 2nd or more likely 3rd week of September, so I still have time to work on my database before all the little pieces of data starts flowing in. To give you an idea of what I mean:
I’m monitoring 29 schools (it was 37, but we decided to cut all the ones in Port au Prince, as they’re so different from most of our schools that it would throw off all our results—tuition is higher, attendance is higher, teachers are more qualified, travel time from home to school is shorter—urban and rural schools are just completely different animals here). Each school will be (for the first time ever) sharing its daily attendance data with us. Schools directors will add up the absences in each grade, and each month we’ll collect the forms and give them new ones for the upcoming month. So, using quick math, with 7 grades in a primary school and 7 grades in a secondary school, I’ll be collecting 203 attendance forms (7 x 29) each month. Each school director will also be tracking his/her daily local weather, broken down into simplistic categories like sunny, cloudy, rainy, stormy, hurricany. If you can’t tell I haven’t really figured out the wording for them to describe the weather yet.
If I were just putting this all into an excel spreadsheet it would be more straight-forward, but since it’s going into a relational database, every day can be seen as an individual unit of information. So October 3rd, in the School X’s 2nd grade, is one piece of data. Thinking about it that way, we just ballooned from 203 attendance forms to 6,090 pieces of data (203 attendance forms x 30 days on each form).
That actually isn’t as scary as it sounds, because I only have to build one template that I can enter this stuff into. One template I can use for each school’s attendance, broken down by month, week, day, school grade.
What DOES scare me is that if I don’t build that one template correctly, in 5 months I’ll be screwed. It’s cliché, but it’s like building a house. If you can build a solid foundation, you can always change things later on. But you don’t start with something solid? Forget about it. So I’ve got a few weeks to do some test runs and make sure what I think will work will actually work.
I’ll also be following 100 teachers chosen randomly at different schools, following their individual classes performance and their students’ attendance (instead of having it added in to all the other 2nd grade classes, for example, keeping particular teachers attendance data separate for closer examination).
And I’ll be doing all the stuff I just talked about with 12 schools not in our program, so we have a decent sized control to measure all this stuff against.
I’m a little nervous. Not about Haiti, or visiting schools, or talking to teachers, or conducting surveys. I’m nervous about this monstrosity of a database. It’s the first one I’ve ever built from scratch. If there are inherent flaws in its foundation it could make life very unpleasant for me down the line. I need to get back to work.
I know, I know, he stole it from Africa, but still, when my boss told me he used that phrase on an almost daily basis, TIH, this is haiti, it made sense. First impressions are a dangerous thing: everything here in Port au Prince is exciting, in an adrenaline rush sort of way–the street kids, the mountains surrounding us, our truck swerving through traffic. But I know that in two months the things that are new and fun and exciting won’t be, not most of them. The romanticism of chaos will have worn of, and will then simply be in my way. And I’ll yearn for simple traffic lights and order and peace. But for now, it’s all very exciting. In that spirit I warn you that the next few posts, this one included, will have an air of sensationalism to them that I will look back on with regret at some point. Is it cool to write about horror stories you’ve heard? Aren’t I just feeding the ugly paranoia and incomprehension that this island suffers enough from already? Without further ado…
The Good
Have met some extraordinary people my first day: a pastor who bakes bread on the school grounds, enough to not only pay off the overhead of baking but with enough bread surplus to feed all 600 of his students twice a day. Several Haitian doctors, very friendly, who work for very little money and could work in far better places, but feel a sense of duty to stay and help their fellow countrymen.
The largest children’s hospitol in Haiti, St. Damien’s, built with french and italian money, very clean, lots of smiling children, seems to be a very well-run ship.
Staying in a great hotel overlooking PAP (port au prince–there’s also A LOT of acronyms–we’ll learn them together). AC. Hot water. Cable TV. Those three things will be gone as of tomorrow morning. From my room, which has lost power twice since I started typing this, I can hear women singing in the distance.
The Bad
There are UN personel everywhere, armed, with seemingly nothing to do but look either tough or bored. Some of them are in armored personal carriers, all of them are armed. We’ll be driving around, and I’ll think to myself, this is just an island in the Caribbean. This stigma attached to it is baseless. Then you turn a corner and see one of these things and think to yourself, holy shit.
The org I work for installed a great, solar powered water purifier at the school/bakery I mentioned earlier. Nobody will buy the water (which is cheaper and safer than the shit water they currently drink), because it doesn’t taste like chlorine, so they don’t trust that it’s really safe. It’s treated with filters and UV rays instead. These kind of problems drive people insane: good ideas that can’t get past cultural walls. At St. Damien’s I pass two rooms full of adorable children. I found out they will all be dead in a few weeks, from various illnesses.
The Ugly
The golden halo: if you get caught stealing something in PAP, it’s not uncommon for you to be pushed into the middle of a rubber tire and set on fire.
If you hit a pedestrian or motorcycle with your car, and stop to see if the person is okay, it’s not uncommon to be dragged out by a mob and beaten to death. So, my boss advised me, don’t stop.
