When Saturday’s rain started to fall, hundreds of people living in Place Boyer’s tent camp in Petionville had no choice but to hunker down for the night. Haiti Reporters, which was hosting their graduation under a tarp at Brazil’s Cultural Center just across the street, was more fortunate. They were able to move their celebration inside.
Such is the contrast of Haiti, and such is the dichotomy this new crop of reporters is committed to chronicling.
Despite the fact that Haiti Reporters, brainchild of Dutch filmmaker Ton Vriens, is nearly a year old, I only met Ton and the students a few months ago. But what a gift it has been. Bright, young, dedicated kids, mostly in their mid 20’s, attend a four-month course which teaches them everything from handling a camera to the nuts and bolts of editing. Their work, a sampling of which was shown at the graduation, ranged from an investigative piece on the consequences of not having a birth certificate to documenting Haiti’s version of duck-duck-goose and the like.
As ‘godmother’ of their class, I could say only how proud I was to be associated with their program, and stressed the important role the reporters have in telling their country’s story in their own words. They, after all, know their story better than anyone else, and should not leave the foreign press to decide what news is and skew it in a way that determines Haiti’s reputation. I also stressed the responsibility they now have to speak out, particularly in light of President Martelly’s much-criticized dressing down of the press this week when he told them, in so many words, to shut their mouths if they didn’t have anything nice to say.
The ‘godfather’ of the class, Robenson Alphonse, one of Haiti’s brightest, most audacious and well-informed journalists, underscored the important role journalists play, and in words far more eloquent than mine congratulated them on their courage, determination, and responsibility to report the news, not make it.
A new class of Haiti Reporters will begin in September. I plan on working with them while I continue to work with the graduating class. I am inspired by them. It’s exciting to be around reporters who have not yet been repressed by the media system, who are curious, motivated and not yet jaded or cynical. It will be a challenge to keep their reporting fresh and honest as time goes on, but it’s exactly what needs to happen in order for them to have, and their stories to make, the greatest impact possible.