Today marks the one-year anniversary of my Fellowship in Haiti. It was a challenge-filled year and the path that has led me to a place where I have a new vista on journalism in Haiti has been strewn with obstacles and even a few dead ends. My overall experience has been one of tremendous personal growth that encompassed the full gamut of emotions. Ultimately, it has been so positive that I’ve extended the Fellowship. I can say with all honesty that that I am looking forward to building on my past successes and achieving new ones with renewed energy.

I’ve worked with nearly 100 journalists in different parts of the country – and many of them are finally starting to take pride in the fact that they are journalists, and beginning to think of journalism as a career as opposed to a stepping stone to something else. Now they don’t just think about how they approach telling a story, but how they can play a role in monitoring Haiti’s reconstruction.

This evolution seemed to culminate this weekend in their interactions with Kalyanee Mam, the associate producer, researcher and director of photography for the 2010 Academy Award winning documentary, “Inside Job.” I invited her to Haiti as part of an investigative film series I helped launch earlier this summer. In addition to speaking to a packed auditorium following the Haitian premier of her film, Mam held several workshops for the journalists I’ve been working with. She also shared her personal story: In 1979, for more than a year, she lived with her family in a tent camp following the fall of the Khmer Rouge before the International Organization of Migration helped her and thousands of others emigrate to the United States.

Her personal story was as influential, if not more so, than her experience working on “Inside Job.” During law school and then after passing the California bar, Mam traveled to countries that were going through reconstruction – Mozambique, China, her own country Cambodia, and then Iraq, where she recorded, clandestinely, the stories of her colleagues.

It was Mam’s critical thinking and love of story telling that eventually led her to segue from law to documentaries, despite having never touched a camera. Her documentary on Iraqi refugees, “Between Earth and Sky,” brought her to the attention of Charles Ferguson, who recruited her for “Inside Job.”

Which brings me back to why she was in Haiti. I wanted her to share her experience as a researcher on the film with my journalists, to inspire and motivate them and share some of her research techniques. Mam did that and so much more. When she said that at the height of reconstruction the U.S. was pouring $12 billion a month into Iraq and Iraqis still didn’t have water or electricity, a buzz started in the room. When she said that Cambodia, 30 some years into its own reconstruction, has more than 3,000 non-governmental agencies, the buzz became louder. The buzz grew louder still when she said that HIV, which was non-existent before the UN arrived in Cambodia in the 1990s, has now infected tens of thousands of people there.

I felt the shift in the room. The parallels were obvious: Gobs of money with not enough tangible results. An invasion of NGOs that were haphazardly taking the place of services their government should be delivering. The introduction of deadly disease – in Haiti’s case, cholera as opposed to HIV.

Suddenly it became very real to the journalists that by not taking responsibility for what was happening in Haiti they were putting their own lives, those of their families, and ultimately the entire country at risk. By not learning and sharing the lessons that could be learned from other countries, they were shirking a responsibility that could have disastrous consequences. The “theoretical” immediately became practical. You could see that the paradigm in the room, in their thinking, and in their understanding of journalism, had irrevocably changed.

The questions the journalists asked were pointed. What kind of dangers did Mam face, particularly as a woman, when she revealed corruption and mismanagement? Why did she give up a steady income as a lawyer to be an unemployed documentary filmmaker? What did she do when she couldn’t get access to information? What could they, as journalists in a poor country with no history of investigation and a massive fire wall for access to information and documentation, ever hope to achieve?

Mam had answers for them all, most of which boiled down to two points. The first was that they needed to be responsible, reliable storytellers as they conveyed what was happening in their country. The second was that if primary sources weren’t available, they had to be creative and find another way to get access to information. Not telling the story was not an option.

But in addition to the techniques they could apply to be better investigative journalists, she said that Haitians also needed to reconstruct their thinking, not just their country. They needed to look for the positive stories that she believed were as important to tell as the ones on corruption and mismanagement. As journalists, it was their role and responsibility to encourage Haitians to be proud of and engaged in, this transition period.

At the end of one of the workshops a journalist I have been working with for four months came up and shook my hand. “I get it now,” he said, and with just those four words, I believed him. It wasn’t that he hadn’t ‘gotten’ it before, but hearing from someone else what I have been hammering for months seemed to take hold.

I’ve no illusions that the road ahead is easy. It will be long, hard and circuitous. But I’m seeing light where I hadn’t seen it before. And I am even more inspired to help Haitian journalists so that they will not, in 30 years, bemoan the fact that the NGO community runs their country and gives their government an excuse not to perform as it should. That Haitians will not, as Iraqis have, lose the remaining educated class to emigration, but rather work to hold people accountable so that the professional and business class will want to be part of building a better and stronger Haiti.

Ultimately, I’m going to work alongside them to bolster the new found understanding that their role as journalists is critical, valuable and should be respected. To achieve this, they must have pride in themselves, in their work and in their ability to hold officials and decision makers accountable.