SUMMARIES OF FREE HAITI CONTENT FOR ONLINE OR PRINT MEDIA WORLDWIDE

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1. Slum football

“Maths is too easy!” boasts ten year old Edouard. “I don’t care about it, but I have to go to the
lessons, or they don’t let me play soccer.” He chucks his exercise book to the ground to prove his
point, and starts to lace up his football boots. Six days a week, Edouard and 50-odd other Haitian
street kids get two hours of football training for free provided they turn up to two hours of school
first. All of them see football as their way out of Cité Soleil, Port au Prince’s most notorious slum. All
of them are determined to play for Haiti in the World Cup - one day.

IMAGE GALLERY PROVIDED

2. Tent city cinema

Entertainment options are scarce in Haiti’s teeming tent cities, where more than a million displaced
people still live in often squalid conditions. ‘Cinema under the stars’ is a project that tours a huge
open air screen around the tented camps, showing Haitian films, children’s shows and public service
programs about hygiene and disease prevention. Thousands of people jostle for a space to watch
the show, which also features musicians, dancers, and even comedians. The cinema’s organisers
believe they are not just showing films, but providing ‘food for souls’; using entertainment to help
people deal with the emotional scars left by January’s earthquake. “We need to let these people
know they haven’t been forgotten” says organiser David Ramphy.

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3. Fighting crime – with rubbish

In Carrefour-Feuilles, a down-at-heel suburb of Haiti’s capital Port-au-Prince, crime rates were once
as high as the piles of rubbish that lined the streets. Then locals had the idea of turning their trash
into treasure. Waste paper and cardboard are mixed with water and sawdust, then pressed and
dried in a low-tech process that produces compacted briquettes that can be used as cooking fuel.
The briquettes are cheaper and considerably more environmentally friendly than the charcoal that’s
normally used in Haitian stoves. The project has also had an unexpected side effect: the employment
opportunities it provides has led to drastically lowered rates of gang violence. “Since we started this,
people feel safer, and the place is cleaner. And with the money I earn here, my children can go to
school” says Melanie Germain, a mother of five who works at the briquette factory.

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4. Haitian celeb putting his money where his mouth is

Carel Pedre is Haiti’s answer to Simon Cowell or Kyle Sandilands – a radio breakfast DJ with a wildly
popular phone-in show who also presents Haiti’s version of Idol. He’s as slick and smooth a talker as
you would expect, but when the earthquake hit, he did more than talk. He slept in his car outside
the radio station and was broadcasting messages from survivors and appeals for help within hours of
the disaster. He’s not afraid to get his hands dirty, either. This Easter Sunday, he and a group of
friends cooked pots of soup then simply drove to the Cité Soleil slum and served it up. That
spontaneous act of giving has become the Sunday Project, which now feeds over 300 children every
weekend. “We want to show that ordinary Haitians like us can do something very simple, very
practical like this – we don’t have to sit around endlessly talking about our problems” he says.

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5. Social networking in post-quake Haiti

In the hours and days following the Haitian earthquake, social networking platforms like Twitter and
Facebook revolutionised the reporting on the disaster. As survivors and even those still trapped used
their mobile phones to communicate messages and images of desperation – and hope – to the
outside world, there was a feeling that this previously frivolous medium was coming of age as a
serious news platform. Four months on, I take a look at how social networking is helping to facilitate
Haiti’s recovery, and giving a voice to those who feel they’ve been left out of the reconstruction
process.

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6. Creating art from rubble in Haiti

The picturesque town of Jacmel, traditionally Haiti’s artistic centre, was hard hit by the January 12 th
earthquake. Four months on, the town’s surviving artists are regrouping and trying to come to terms
with the disaster. Some, like Ambroise Anderson, are using objects found in the rubble and even the
rubble itself in works that attempt to find meaning and beauty amongst the devastation. Others, like
‘Phoenix’, are designing t-shirts to sell online and raise money to rebuild the town’s arts centre,
knocked down in the quake. But all are sure that their future lies in collaboration and mutual
support. “Now, more than ever, artists need to work together” says Anderson. “Individually, we
might have been forgotten. But as a collective, we can put ourselves back on the map”.

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7. Haiti’s film students aim for the world stage

When the earthquake hit the southern Haitian town of Jacmel, students at the country’s only film
school were on the ground within hours, filming the aftermath of the tragedy with equipment
salvaged from the ruins of their campus. The students edited their footage in a makeshift tent and
provided it to major news networks around the world. “It was like therapy for us, to go out filming”
says Ebby Angel Louis, 28. “It was the only thing that kept us from breaking down”. The students are
now working on a full-length documentary about the dramas of life in one of the town’s tented
camps, and hope to find work in a revitalised Haitian film industry when they graduate in July. “We
want to stay here, and make films, and give Haitians a voice of their own in the world” he says.
“Other people can’t tell Haitian stories the way we can”.

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8. The Haitian ladies’ Friday sewing club

“I just woke up one morning and thought ‘What can I do to help women here?’” says Nadine Royere,
a determined, no-nonsense 35-year old living in Cité Soleil, Haiti’s infamous slum. “I started talking
about it with some of my female friends and we decided to get together one afternoon a week and
start sewing.” The sewing circle, which they’ve christened ‘The Jasmine Ladies of Haiti’, meets on
Friday afternoons to create pastel-coloured crochet shawls, knitted baby hats and embroidered
handbags. They hope one day to sell their handiwork on the overseas market. “Because our things
are made by hand, not mass-produced in factories, the prices will be too high for most Haitians to
afford” Nadine says.

“None of us have other jobs” she goes on. “We do this in between looking after our families. There’s
not much a girl can do here once she leaves school. I want this to build up skills for some of the
younger ones, and in the future it might bring in some money to help us support our children”.

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9. Bananas for hope in Haiti

When you think of Cité Soleil, Haiti’s most notorious slum, banana plantations are hardly what spring
to mind. In fact you could be forgiven for thinking that the whole of Haiti is simply an arid,
deforested wasteland unfit to feed its starving population. But five minutes’ drive from the worst of
the shantytown’s deprivations lies another world of lush green banana plantations and relatively
prosperous rural villages. “We are growing bananas, beans and mangoes very successfully here” says
Guensmork Alcin, one of the farmers in City Soleil’s so-called ‘rural zone’. “We’re even doing it
organically, using composting and worm farming techniques that don’t need chemicals”. Life is
better in the rural zone, he says. “We need more people to move here, growing their own food,
away from the social problems and violence of the urban section. When you come here, you feel at
peace” he adds. Ironically, there are still 1500 hectares of fertile land lying empty, which could be
producing food for the starving people of the slum in just a few months. All the farmers need is a line
of credit to help them buy seedlings and start planting. “We don’t need anyone to tell us how to
grow bananas” says Alcin. “We just need a bit of investment, and we’ll do the rest”.

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10. Haiti’s ‘Voodoo blacksmiths’ undefeated by the earthquake

Bumping along the unsurfaced road that leads into the ramshackle Haitian village of Noailles, you
might glimpse the colourful walls of a voodoo temple half-hidden amongst the banana trees.
Noailles, and the nearby town of Croix-des-Bouquets, are known as centres of the much-
misunderstood religious system, which locals prefer to spell Vodou. Since the 1950s, the village has
also been a centre of decoupage, the art of making metal sculptures from discarded oil drums. The
‘voodoo blacksmiths’ as they have been somewhat sensationally christened by foreign writers, use
vodou motifs such as La Sirene (the mermaid), and Dambala (the snake) in their metal plaques,
which have provided over a dozen families with a livelihood since the 1950s.

“The earthquake didn’t slow us down much” says master blacksmith Ulysse Pierre. “What we’re
more worried about is the lack of metal drums. Oil comes mostly in plastic containers these days”.
Others, like Michel Brutal, regret that overseas demand dictates the style of the works that are
produced. “Americans want us to do giraffes, elephants and painted lizards” he sighs. “It’s not part
of our tradition, but they order by the containerload, so what can we do?”

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11. Haitian quake highlights plight of the disabled

Eder Romeus is a twenty-eight year old Haitian with a handsome face and serious eyes. Affected by
polio in early childhood, he lost the use of his legs and has used crutches to get around for the whole
of his adult life. Two years ago he founded ACCENT, a group that aims to help Haitians with
disabilities find work and lodging. Haitian society, he says, is deeply suspicious of differently abled
people, with many believing that they bring bad luck or are being punished by spirits for some
misdeed. Ironically, since the January 12th earthquake, which left an estimated 5000 newly disabled
people in its wake, attitudes have shifted. “It’s up to us now to start making things work better here
for people with disabilities” he says. “So that something good, at least, can come out of something
so bad”.

Eder’s work is being supported by Sawa Global Heroes(www.sawaglobal.com), a charity that aims to
give a wider audience to community ‘heroes’ like Eder.

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12. IMAGE GALLERY BY YAEL TALLEYRAND

Yael Talleyrand is a sixteen-year-old Haitian from Jacmel, in the country’s south. Her powerful,
intimate photographs chronicle life in the tent cities, not by recording the deprivations of everyday
life, but by looking into the faces of the tent dwellers themselves. “Some people might find it more
obvious to take pictures of destroyed houses, or schools...but I maintain that it’s only in the people’s
eyes that you can really see what happened” she says.