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!

The Olevolos Project - New Video!

As the Holidays draw near, and we get farther and farther away from our summer trip to Africa, it's been a gift to be able to look through the footage we shot and photos we snapped to remember what an incredible journey we had.

Some of you may remember from our post in June that we had the opportunity to visit The Olevolos Project just outside of Arusha, Tanzania.  The Olevolos Project is an organization that strives to "develop young leaders in the Olevolos Village through formal schooling, tutoring programs, and extra-curricular activities."  One thing I can attest to from our travels, however, is that it is one thing to say that's what you're about; but it's a very different thing to actually be those things and work towards them every single day.  Everyone at The Olevolos Project walks that walk, and does it with a HUGE smile. 

Don't take my word for it... just watch our brand new video about The Olevolos Project.  It is guaranteed to make you smile!

Energy in Common- Flip that switch!

The smell of cooking fires.

Certainly one of the sensory souvenirs we left Africa with. Indeed throughout the developing world, energy poverty (lack of access to clean, safe, reliable energy) is something you can physically feel.

Energy in Common is a wonderful organization that uses the fundamentals of micro-finance to help entrepreneurs in the developing world improve their livelihoods through clean, modern energy technologies. In turn, lenders from the developed world get carbon offsets for their investments.

Our 30 sec spot for EIC attempts to tell this story in an energetic and passionate way. Take a watch! Its sure got us looking at every light switch we flip as a small miracle.

NCLEJ - Moving Mountains

As we are catching up on sharing some of the videos we did earlier this year, we simply can't forget NCLEJ - the National Center for Law and Economic Justice.

NCLEJ is a nonprofit organization that advances the cause of economic justice for low-income families, individuals, and communities. Their work is hugely important and very often overlooked. While NCLEJ doesn't work with individual clients, they do tackle the systematic stuff that ends up moving mountains. It was a challenge to create a video without personal stories, but with the help of solid music and motion graphics, I think we created something that will help add life and vitality each time NCLEJ goes to tell its story.