The 99%- Here for a reason

Like many people, we've been wondering what Occupy Wall St. is all about. The constant refrain in the media has been "What's their platform?" "What are their demands?" "Do they have a good reason to be there?" So we went down on Wednesday to find out.

This video is a product of an amazing afternoon spent with people from all backgrounds who want to see a more just and sustainable society. Their reasons were diverse, but their energy and excitement seemed singular. As people who spend most of our waking hours trying to help tell the world about social change, this seems like an opportunity of a lifetime. Yes there were punks, burnt sage and some signs on the crazier end of things... but what I saw was a group of people longing for meaning. If it takes time to tell this story, we're ready to play our part.

I'll leave you with this story of a woman we met... a laid off social worker. When we asked her to write down her reason for coming down, she sat for a long time just staring at the poster board. I asked if she needed help and she turned to me,"I've just seen so much suffering... so many kids and families.... it's hard to put into words."

Finally she wrote down "I'm here to stand in solidarity with others that give a damn."

And she did.

AFS- Dear American Mom

We created this video in the form of a letter to the host moms of AFS, an international exchange org who is also one of our favorite clients. This was shot very quickly over a single day with the help of YES program scholars from around the world. It was interesting to collaborate with the students on the script and title card creation.... a fusion of user-generated and professional content.

We are looking forward to using more creative formats like this to tell stories as big as international exchange.

Remembering 9/11 with Brooklyn Heights

We marked the 10th Anniversary of 9/11 by participating in a multimedia program at beautiful St. Ann & the Holy Trinity in Brooklyn Heights. Our contribution was creating several videos for the afternoon, which provided the voice and feel of the community's experience during that historic event. 9/11 is of course burned into our collective memory, so it was refreshing to experience it again through the personal stories of Brooklyn's hardest hit neighborhood. It was also a blast to spend a late summer day roaming around Brooklyn trying to capture the beauty and diversity of our home borough.

Democracy looks like someone's mom

The ruined presidential palace in Port Au Prince

On Fonkoze’s website there is this tagline: Building the Economic Foundations for Democracy in Haiti.

Now often we run into taglines that sound awesome, but don’t really jive with an organization's activity. Fonkoze’s tagline is not aspirational. If anything I think it’s the best descriptor I’ve seen so far of what they do.

Democracy seems to be a notion that’s been on the tip of the tongue here for hundreds of years. Without going into Haitian history, let’s just say the people of Haiti are still waiting. And among the things that Haitian’s seem to want (health care, education, food security, to not live in tents) democracy is a real root desire.

Underneath the loans or the vitamins or the insurance… beyond any of the services Fonkoze provides, there is this subtle current of democracy. The women who come together in solidarity groups are really enacting a deep desire to participate, to be involved in something that isn’t corrupt or coercive. And it seems like with every new group of Fonkoze women there are five more Haitians for whom Democracy is a real living, breathing thing.

Now as far as I understand it, Haiti has a long way to go in terms of political democracy. And I assume the tagline refers to the fact that with greater economic possibilities, political democracy can be built. But I can't help smiling when I think of this growing tide of women who are meeting each day to practice democracy.

Today I'm back in Brooklyn, a day after my own country's democratic low point. What sticks with me most from our weeks in Haiti is this longing for opportunity, this resistance to hopelessness. When people have asked about our trip, I've had nothing adequate to say. But maybe it's just that we saw a little hope in a hopeless place... and it looked a lot like someone's mom.

It's all about the kids

The “Solid Women” blew me away with their generosity and poise.  It’s not easy to do with multiple cameras in your face.  

Even as we said “no no, we promise… this is the last shot!” they would smile and let us get what we needed.  We sat all five women down for an interview, and asked a long list of questions that were translated from English into Kreyol: What was your life like before joining Fonkoze?  What business do you run with your loan?  What are your hopes for the future?

The answers to the last question has stuck with me: What are your hopes for the future? I ask. Some of them mentioned briefly the hope of finishing the renovations on their homes or expanding their business, but the conversation always turned back to their children. I hope my children have better than I have had.  From school fees to food to emergency savings it was all linked to this pack of rascally kids who surrounded us as we worked.

 

If you’ve seen almost any of the videos we make, you might know that we have been lucky to meet kids all over the world with beautiful smiles and quick wits who are kind enough to contribute their magic to our work.  The kids we met in this village outside of Les Cayes were no different: polite, energetic, sassy, excited to see their pictures.  Knowing that Fonkoze's work trickles down to these small toothy grins is, in short, pretty awesome.

There is no Yellow Brick Road

I’m not sure what I thought micro-finance would be like. Maybe after a small loan a woman wakes up the next day and presto!, finds a thriving business that enables her to build a brand new house and send her kids to good schools. I suspect most of the criticism of micro-credit comes from notions like this.

The truth is there is no yellow brick road out of poverty. Instead we’ve watched as Fonkoze provides companion services with their financial ones. Not because it’s a nice thing to do, but because they know that each client is a real human being with many intertwined challenges.

We shot our group of Solid Women at education classes (a few of them can’t read, but decided to skip the literacy module in favor of the business module). There was a vitamin distribution, where children got essential vitamins. And even micro-insurance that helped women deal with the inevitable frailty of their businesses.

And that’s the beauty of Fonkoze… they’ve created a network where any services that might benefit clients can be implemented and integrated with micro-finance. Most importantly I think the women feel that Fonkoze isn’t just a piggy bank, I think they take their commitment to the program pretty seriously. One women we met was in her 60’s and just starting literacy classes. When we asked why she smiled and said simply “I didn’t want to die without knowing how to read.”

This is slow work… often without fireworks. But these women are moving.

Poverty is Misery

What an uplifiting title for this post.... I bet you're excited to read.

During our interviews (conducted in kreyol) the Solid Women use the word misery and the word poverty interchangeably. When you see the life of a Haitian peasant up close, the opportunities for misery peak out of every nook and cranny.

Lozelle told us that when the weather is bad, she “tells her children to patient.” When that doesn’t work, they eat leaves from a nearby tree. Mariette (the vivacious group leader) is a mover and shaker. But she couldn’t build her business with the loans from loan sharks that charged up to 20% interest. Perhaps most heartbreaking was Seden’s story. She told us, “I couldn’t move, I couldn’t do anything.” In the end, misery can manifest itself in this state of paralysis. We’ve seen it often here in Haiti…. people just sitting on the side of a busy street. Waiting.

Fonkoze did not erase misery from these women’s lives. On the contrary each day brings a new struggle. But for each of them it seems the first time in their lives they’ve been provided with an active opportunity to change their circumstances. In fact it was the other four women who came to Seden and said “You can’t just sit around all day. Come on… get up, we’re going to join Fonkoze together.” And they did.

I keep coming back to the above picture of Seden. As we take photos/videos we're hoping to balance the beauty evident in the country, work and faces of these women, with the reality that misery exist in abundance here. There is something subtle about her look that works in this direction...there is a nuance I can't put into words.

Solid Women

These five women are what brought us to Haiti. They call themselves “Solid Women”, but individually (and less imposingly) they are Marriette, Seden, Lozelle, Antonia and Joseline.

When we first approached Fonkoze about helping to tell their story, we were eager to see what micro-finance looked and felt like up close. Most of us have been exposed to the idea of micro-finance in the form of Kiva or Nobel Prize Winner Muhammad Yunus, but broadly MF means financial services for the poor. It turns out that millions of poor people through out the world can activate their entrepreneurial potential when given access to small loans.

Our work at Good Eye Video has taken us through the wide and varied galaxy of approaches to solving social problems and micro-finance struck us as one of the most elegant and inspiring. At the same time I know MF has been criticized in recent years for either over stating its effect on poverty reduction or leaving many of the poorest untouched. Which story to tell?

I’d like to say we found some answers, but I think what we experienced was much more important. Over the course of a week we visited each of these Solid Women, in their homes as well as shooting their various business ventures. We learned lots… in the next few posts we’ll share some of our biggest takeaways.

The NEGES Foundation

(note: due to a combination of internet scarcity, lots of shooting and generally getting into the pace of Haitian life... we have a few blog posts going up a bit late)

As we've come to discover, Haiti and the US are intertwined in a deep and fascinating way. First of all 1.2 million Haitians are our fellow Americans. These diaspora communities exist in cities like Miami, New York and Boston and are responsible for almost half of the national income of Haiti (estimated $1.2-$1.5 billion annually in remittances)

Lucky for us, Brooklyn is full of Haitians.... and that's where our next project got its start. We ran into the NEGES foundation through friends at Brooklyn Society for Ethical Culture. This small community development project is led by Yoleine Gateau Esposito and James Philemy, two Haitian Americans who wanted to help develop the educational opportunities in Léogâne, a coastal community about an hour outside of Port au Prince.

The 2010 earthquake destroyed nearly 90% of the structures in Léogâne (which was at the epicenter). This of course was heartbreaking for a small development project like NEGES, built up over the course of years with small donations and lavish amounts of personal time and commitment.

We only had a few hours to stop by NEGES, but we were given a tour in the power of resilience. The drive to Léogâne leaves no doubt about the impact of the quake... rubble and destruction still line the road. There are tent cities everywhere. Which makes it all the more remarkable that inside the gates of NEGES we found a primary school fashioned out of shipping containers ready to receive its first classes. We found a Women's center, community space and a beautiful little restaurant.

There are many arguments we've run into against this kind of small development. It isn't scalable, it's hard to get self sustaining, it can throw the local balance out of whack. But it's the human thing to do. It's the kind of project whose warmth, ambition and attention to detail are evident in all sort of ways. There is something beautiful about people who will build an educational center on a far off island. And then do it again.

We hope our video and pictures can help. If you want to, you can visit http://www.negesfoundation.org/Home.html every dollar makes a difference at a place like NEGES. We heard about many cool programs waiting to be enabled by funding.

A picture of Shada

I leave you with this picture of a slum called Shada. You can see how the awe-inspiring landscape is made even stranger with the addition of ad-hoc structures and a sea of trash. As one doctor said… we all know that places like this exist, but don’t really contemplate it fully until we are walking the alleys of broken concrete and sheet metal. As a storyteller, I’m conflicted about what role images of poverty this powerful should play. It think it’s easy to see this and think it’s a dream… some alternate reality where people live ten to a room next to open sewers. I often find myself falling into the same trap when my vision of a visit to a place is mainly through a viewfinder.

What made Shada real for me was playing an evolving game with a gaggle of joyful, shoeless kids who didn’t speak my language. We played catch with some piece of plastic junk, then wall ball, then bloody knuckles, then they taught me different high fives (the entire time obviously making fun of me in Kreyol). Trying to think of these rascals spending their childhood playing games on the banks of this inlet of trash is the only way Shada seems to exist in the same world I do. At our nice American style hotel I thought of this as the A/C hummed and I was clean from the shower and some part of me was longing to file this picture under D for dream.

Hands up for Haiti

Hands up for Haiti is one of many small NGO’s that have sprung up in Haiti over the last ten years (and particularly right after the earth quake). Started by several medical doctors who felt called to help the Haitian people, Hands Up has started to hone in on its niche here in northern Haiti: facilitating medical volunteer trips for US doctors, nurses and students. It’s always interesting to work with new organizations as they shape themselves and especially if that task is the daunting one of healing people in a nation notorious for poor public health. Here are a few things we’ve been learning and thinking about.

First of all Haiti is a classic case of development chaos. It’s certainly a place in need of transformation and its proximity to the US seems to only fuel the creation of NGOs of all shapes and sizes. We’ve heard Haitians call Port au Prince the world capital of NGOs. Here in northern Haiti were finding a huge patchwork of groups, often times working like lasers in a dark room… doing good work, but so focused that they seem to leave mere dots of light and lots of dim area. Groups like Hands up for Haiti seem to be aware of this problem and will hopefully lead to better integration and cooperation. It will be interesting to continue learning more about this as we travel south.

Lesson number two is that taking pictures of sick kids never gets easier. I personally feel awful each time we have to capture images of people in vulnerable moments of illness. Thus far we’ve shot in a small local clinic, a clinic in the giant slum of Shada and at a medical training session. The docs we’ve been traveling with report pretty lousy health in most of the patients they encounter. We saw lots of painful looking cases of pneumonia, fever and malnutrition. There was even one person who needed an operation immediately to avoid serious complications. How do you capture this experience? For us it’s been a difficult trade-off between respecting the Haitians we meet and doing what we can do to help support them. I’m thinking I might make up a little badge to wear around my neck wherever I travel to do video work.

Hello, I take pictures to try to help people. These pictures help raise money and sustain projects.

Every person in the world has the right not to be photographed. Please raise your hand if you don’t want your picture taken.

Would this work? Maybe it’s just a tough job that requires us keep in mind that we do this not to be voyeurs, but to change things. I’m not sure I know the answer, but I do know that when I heard later one of the babies I photographed would likely not make it (107 fever… so high the thermometer couldn’t read accurately), I knew that we need to make these videos and pictures count.

PS. Many thanks to our friends at Hands up for Haiti. You made this leg of our journey a pleasure. The work you do is changing lives. And yes... I promise to start taking my B-12 supplement.

Beautiful

It’s a shame people don’t mention beauty when they talk about Haiti. My first impression looking out of the airplane window was that northern Haiti was simply stunning… a cradle of farmland between mountain ranges. This entire trip we’re hoping to tell an honest story about Haiti, one that involves the immense long-lived suffering of Haitian people, but also one of a place that deserves to have its mountains and old buildings remarked upon…. we do it for Italy and France don’t we? Bermuda? Jamaica? So here lets get started. We begin in Cap Haitien, the second largest city in Haiti and not far from where Christopher Columbus stumbled upon the other half of the world. First up, a video for an organization called Hands Up for Haiti.

Bon jour Haiti

Remember that earthquake in Haiti? Bad news about a place of which you've only ever heard bad news about? Last year when world attention and charitable pocketbooks turned for a brief moment to Haiti, I found myself feeling helpless. What other stories could be heard amongst the devastating images of destruction and news of despair that flowed hourly to us? As the months passed and new emergencies blossomed, Haiti has remained a place of mysterious hopelessness.

But from our experiences at Good Eye Video, we know that anywhere that people continue to wake up each morning, start a fire, find water, haul mangoes to marketplace... there has to be hope somewhere there. We decided that knowing Haiti in a different way was important challenge to undertake.

In four days we embark on a three week trip to Haiti to shoot videos for two amazing organizations. The first is Hands Up For Haiti http://www.handsupforhaiti.org/, a brand new NGO aiming to facilitate American medical professionals volunteering in Haiti. The second is one of the best regarded poverty alleviation organizations in Haiti, Fonkoze http://www.fonkoze.org/. We'll be telling the Fonkoze story by focusing on a group of five women (one of thousands such solidarity groups in Haiti) who are climbing the staircase out of poverty together.

We hope you'll follow along with us as we learn a little bit more about the Haitian people and the organizations that are working with them to change not only our perception of Haiti, but also the reality of life in the poorest country in the hemisphere.

About Barnard!

Last fall, we had the pleasure of collaborating with Barnard College to create a sort of comprehensive video for their new website that answers the question... "What is Barnard?"  As you can probably imagine, it's not a simple task to create a video that shows off the best of what a college has to offer, in both academics and campus life, while staying true to the student voice AND doing so in 4 minutes.

As an alum myself, it was great to be back on campus talking with these incredible current students and hearing about their college experience.  It made me proud to see that, in every student it admits and educates, Barnard is living up to the ideals we're hoping to get across in this video.

So, after many months of prepping, doing test shoots, filming sit-down interviews and taking beautiful shots of every inch of the campus... we are proud to show off the final version! 

I'm most excited about the fact that the video can be found on Barnard's homepage, so I've taken a screenshot to commemorate the occasion.

Please have a look at the finished version below, and tell us what you think!