Seeing as how I’m longer “in Haiti”, it’s time to move on to bigger and better things.

I recently started a new website just for my photography. I whole-heartedly reccommend you check it out.

The site is called The Lee Cohen [dot] Com

I’m thinking of having one final post, a sort of reflection of the past year, some thoughts, some lingering questions, etc. But why spoil it on a blog post when it could be a chapter of a book? Decisions Decisions.

Thanks to all the people who read the words here, a firm rigorous hand shake of appreciation for all those who commented on the words here. Commenting is so much better than just reading. Having that feedback, knowing that people are not only reading the words but interacting with them, is a great feeling, especially when you’re abroad and not sure if anyone’s really paying any attention.

So, thank you. Hope to see you again sometime.

The nun had started an education program in La Savanne, considered one of the worst neighborhoods in Les Cayes. Les Cayes doesn’t have many “bad” neighborhoods, but La Savanne qualifies. It’s where protests, or, manifestations as they’re called, often start and generate heat, and it’s place foreigners don’t venture into when the sun sets.  This sister had spent the past 30 years in Brooklyn, New York, but after the earthquake had decided to return home and see how she could help. What she found, after being away for 30 years, was quite a few changes.

“There is no trace of Haitian culture in Les Cayes!” she tells me.

Her memories of a quaint Haitian town have had a rude awakening. Les Cayes, while certainly Haitian, is not of the romantic variety of towns. It is no Jacmel, no Cap Haitian. It is a meat and potatoes city, functional, lacking much grace or attention to aesthetics. Of course, from my perspective there’s more than enough here visually to keep me interested, to not even bother to think that this city might not live up to a Haitian person’s standards (aside from the usual problems of extreme poverty, and poor city services such as trash removal, road work, consistent electricity, etc.) of what a “true Haitian city” looks like. I have very little to compare it to, honestly. While I’ve seen much of the countryside, the only other city that’s of comparable size I’ve been to (Port au Prince cannot be compared to anything, it is an Albatross) is Jacmel, which too is not a “normal” Haitian city. It’s a renowned Haitian city, a place people specifically travel to from the US for Carnival. It’s a city that has, well, a lot of culture. Les Cayes does not. It is a market and fishing city, and while I won’t get into the meaning of culture, less I regress back to my freshman year of college, there is a difference between a commercial city and an artistic one. Perhaps both have their own brands of culture, but they’re not the same. To foreigners, the commercial city might be more romantic than the artistic one:

“this is how Haitians really live!”

But for the sister, who, when leaving Les Cayes 30 years ago, appears to have been leaving a city that was culturally relevant, a place where “the city was so neat!” It was, apparently, multi-cultural, with a large number of Syrians owning shops in town, something I had to ask her to repeat, lest I had misunderstood. “You mean, from the Middle East?” I asked politely, sure she had gotten her internal creole-english translation jumbled. “Yes yes, syrians from the middle east, they owned all the shops here.” This was news to me.

“30 years ago we had 1 secondary school in town, and parents would pay 50 goudes a month for a room to rent for their studies. There was a truck that came every day at 4am and picked up all the trash you left outside!”

She says this not with the naiveté of someone who’s never seen such a thing before; after all, she’s been in Brooklyn the past 30 years—but says so with a wonderment that such a thing could exist in a city such as the one that exists today. I admit, picturing trash collection each morning seems a bit of a stretch, but why shouldn’t it happen? I feel guilty for doubting the possibility of this. Now, the sister says, in La Savanne the kids run around naked. People kill other people. There’s prostitution.

“We have, what you call, human trafficking.”

I take this all in. It is the first time someone has expressed to me what things used to be like, has expressed shock and outrage at what things have become.

I won’t go into the details of her project—it helps heads of families become literate, along with several nutritional and health components to it, and sounds wonderful.

Two interesting anecdotes.

1. An NGO here donated 100 chairs (she tells me this almost in awe—100 chairs! Can you believe it?!), and the first thing they did was engrave in each chair a serial number. Sure enough, a few days later two chairs went missing. She told all the people she helps to look for those two chairs with the very specific numbers carved into them. She went into the street and told anyone who would listen about the chairs and the numbers. The next day they were magically returned. “We must have miscounted,” one of her employees told her. “Yes,” she responded, “I’m sure that was the problem.”
2. A while back she received a fairly large order of food that she was to distribute to her adult students. She walked in to her depot one day to find two men in the process of stealing this food. She started screaming “chinese”, and told them she was a very special nun, one who knew karate! She proceeded to get into a kind of Karate Kid Swan Kick stance, which scared off the intruders. “You cannot let these people think that you are afraid of them!”

I shouldn’t be surprised, but pretty much every book is a direct reflection of where I was, developmentally.

These are in very rough chronological order.

1. The View from the Cherry Tree (4^th Grade). My oldest memory of losing myself completely in a book. Written by Willo Davis Roberts, I remember being engrossed by the kid-friendly murder mystery plot in 4^th grade (Lincoln Elementary!), absorbed, looking up and seeing that the rest of the class had already left for phys-ed. I’m sure I was quite upset at the teacher for not alerting me to this with more vigor, but forgive and forget I say.
2. The Catcher in the Rye (9^th Grade? 10^th?) How cliché can you get? But in our standardized English classrooms around the country, this is one of those few books that is still anti-establishment, yet still accepted within the established order of English education classes. Considering that rebelling against the standardized, anesthetized rooms that we call classrooms was my greatest preoccupation in high school, this book was a perfect “right place, right time”. Damn phonies.
3. The Dharma Bums (Freshman Year). This is what started the downward spiral into my love for writing. Wha? Paragraphs with one period? Sentences that start with But and And and Because? Most importantly: wine out of a jug!?! A great Freshman year book. Smarter people read it in High School. I read it Freshman year.
4. Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance (Freshman Year). I still try to read this book once a year. I don’t read it as a novel anymore; I’ve stripped it down to a series of passages and chapters that I rereade and have at times used in curriculum with both high school students and graduate students, when I was doing basic writing workshops. If you’re willing to put in the time, there’s a lot of wisdom in here that, personally, has stayed with me over the years.
5. The Monkey Wrench Gang (Freshman Year). Set off a lifetime appreciation for Edward Abbey. I did a lot of hiking Freshman year. Abbey owes some credit for this. Freshman year I was in Eugene, Oregon, and these books are pretty evident of that.
6. Atlas Shrugged (Freshman Year). A wild departure from my normal fair of Beats and Environmentalists. I believe I was reading this book as I was moving back to the East coast from Eugene. Read into that as you will. I didn’t agree with Rand’s dehumanizing view of people, but I loved her intensity, and share her scorn for those who prevent me from getting things done due to their stupidity. Rand’s does take it a bit too far for my taste, however, but this isn’t a top 10 favorite list, it’s a top 10 influential list, and thus is qualifies.
7. The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying (Forced sabbatical between Freshman and Sophomore years). I still remember highlighting passages of this on the train from New Delhi to Shimla, to the amusement of my fellow white passengers. We were going to a small town to do “cross-cultural” activities. 10 years later I still don’t know what that means. This would be my bible/torah/koran for 6 months. I don’t think I ever read it again, but it felt like I didn’t need to. It had been imprinted.
8. The Sheltering Sky (Sophomore Year). Bowles (and Burroughs, to a certain extent) took the beatniks and put them in their rightful place: playful writers, often lacking much substance or real insight. Bowles, on the other hand, wrote in the 50s of the West’s continuing obsession with “understanding” the rest of the world, and the profoundly disastrous results typically ensued. This was before all that technology crap, when people took a ship, A SHIP, to travel! And they were dressed up, and they drank champagne, and their vices and affairs were oh so much more romantic. I was born in the wrong era. But I didn’t have to worry about getting drafted to kill people. It all evens out.
9. Ulysses (Junior Year Abroad). Junior year I studied in Dublin, Ireland. I got an internship at the James Joyce Centre, having only read The Portrait of an Artist as a Young Man. Hadn’t read Dubliners, certainly hadn’t read Ulysses. I lied to get the job. But I had 2 months before the internship started, took trains around the countryside of Ireland, read Dubliners and started reading Ulysses. I was able to finish reading it under the watchful eye of one of Joyce’s last living relatives, by a fireplace, in a study. It couldn’t have been more romantic. I’ve reread the book half a dozen times, and it’s never felt repetitive or predictable. It changed the way I thought about novels, about what they were capable of, and of what happens when you push the format to its limit.
10. The Paris Review (Senior Year). This shouldn’t count, but I’m including the literary journal here because it exposed me to too many great writers to list here. I interned there, and while in retrospect I don’t think I was Paris Review material (not picky enough—I liked rooting for those unsolicited submissions that weren’t perfect, but they showed promise dammit!), it was an incredibly influential journal in terms of widening the scope of my reading and pushing myself to be more critical about what I liked and didn’t like when I sat down to read a story. It wasn’t just about reading stories—it was about learning what a good story was, what made a good story—something I still work on today, when I take a picture, or write an evaluation of an education program in the south of Haiti, or write a blog post.

One thing stands out. I’m 29, and these books fall between the age range of 10 and 22. What happened the last 7 years? I read some great books. Books that changed the way I thought about the world (if it were the top 11, not 10, White Man’s Burden would be here). But those books you read growing up, when you’re molding your perspective of the world (not to say that mold ever really hardens–it should remain pliable with the constant application of fresh material), are the ones that stick.

Put some of your most influential ones in the comment section.

Here’s what I’ve found so far. If you’ve got other sources where telediol has been mentioned or, even better, studied, please please let me know. It’s completely fascinating.

From today’s NYTimes (2010):

Bit by bit, though, the individual losses are coming into focus for Haitians finally ready to grieve. Many victims were not accepted as dead until the search missions were over, and many bodies were never recovered or were dumped in mass graves. But belatedly, funerals and memorial services are taking place daily, and the traditional word-of-mouth network known as telediol has reawakened, delivering death notices.

And then, following the telediol link, I found this (1994)

Millions of Haiti’s people live beyond the reach of newspapers, television and even radio, but everyone here, from illiterate peasants to the rich, has a lifetime subscription to the flourishing word-of-mouth network known as “telediol,” or “mouth television.” Part rumor mill, part oral news service, telediol is one of the most accessible and effective means of communication for Haitians.

The importance of the medium was demonstrated again last month when the number of people leaving by boat for the United States suddenly surged, threatening to wreck the Clinton Administration’s policy on Haitian refugees, and then just as quickly dropped to a trickle. In both instances, Haitians and foreign diplomats say, people were responding to information obtained via telediol. Word Spreads Fast.

From Time Magazine (1964):

The victims-were Louis Drouin, 28, a short, stocky mulatto, and Marcel Numa, 21, a tall handsome Negro, both members of a 13-man guerrilla force that landed on Haiti’s southern coast four months ago. Operating independently of other scattered bands in Haiti, they ambushed troop columns, encouraged peasants to defy their Duvalier overseers. Papa Doc had no trouble finding out who they were; in tiny Negro Haiti, the word gets around fast by telediol grapevine.

In retaliation, Duvalier’s secret police slaughtered whole families and even distant relatives of the rebels. Drouin’s family was marched naked through the streets of their home town and “removed” at a nearby army barracks. Meantime, Duvalier’s rag-tag army was killing off the miniature force one by one. The government bragged that only Drouin and Numa remained.

Washington Post (1996):

Everyone seemed to believe the latest story sweeping the Haitian rumor mill: Hillary Rodham Clinton was about to sneak into town for a secret voodoo ceremony to bring good luck to her husband’s presidential reelection bid.

Never mind that the story had no basis in fact and no one knew how it got started. Once it hit the telediol, Haiti’s informal news system, it attained instant credibility. Telediol, which literally means “ear to snout” in Creole, is what Haitians call the pervasive word-of-mouth news network.

From International Medical Corps:

This is a society and culture bent by a failed state to not trust what they could not see. I would visit each center and ‘report’ back to the hospital.  ‘Reporting’ used a phenomenon called ‘tele diol’ or word of mouth.  It found most the centers calm, well staffed, and appropriately equipped.  Upon return I would have one of the local Creole translators tell one family member, ˝the ‘Chinois’ doctor just came back from the rehabilitation center and he thinks it is very good.˝  By the next morning, nearly all were willing to go. Just remember, ‘tele diol’, it can be used for good or for bad.

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 first met Sophia a week ago. She was staying in a tent with a husband, wife, and 2 infants. She did not know any of them, had merely been grouped with them into a tent. Sophia is 13. When she was very little, she was “entered” into the Restavek system by her parents, which is often the equivalent of indentured servitude. The parents give her away to a family, and are promised that the child will receive an education in exchange. Instead, these children are usually put to work. Sophia was no exception. For as long as she can remember, Sophia lived with a family that was not hers, that did not treat her as family, and worked in the streets of Port au Prince selling corn. She told me that occasionally she would get to go to school, but then her adopted family would stop paying her tuition, and she would get kicked out. This pattern followed for many years, until the earthquake struck, killing her adopted family, and making this child a woman overnight—without family, without a home, without many options. She walked the streets aimlessly until finding a bus, and got in without even asking where it was going. She didn’t care. It was going far away from there. Sophia is still a young girl, and seems to be at peace with her situation. She isn’t agitated as she tells me this story, simply stating the facts as if she were in a history class. I’ve tried to have her moved from Gabion to an orphanage, as girls her age are perhaps the most vulnerable in camp environments to sexual abuse. Bureaucracy is Sophia’s enemy at the moment, but the government here, particularly the local mayoral office, is showing signs of life.

A few days later I bump into Sophia again as I’m dropping off medical supplies for the two doctors who treat minor injuries at Gabion (more serious cases are triaged to one of the two major hospitals in town). She is happy to see me. She has met other children her age to play with in the camp, which is good. She asks me if I can carry her.

“Carry you? What, on my shoulders? Where?” I assume, stupidly, that she wants to goof around.

“Out of here,” she states plainly. “Can you carry me on your shoulders out of here?”

We both know the answer to the question, but Sophia wanted to ask me anyway, and there’s no hard feelings when I tell her that I can’t. What I can do is write about her story, and check in on her from time to time, and keep pushing on that immovable object called bureaucracy.