Panorama archive · Media
How media making changed my Haiti fishing village
Originally published
Submitted By: Francklin Barbier
Location: Petite Riviere de Nippes, Haiti
My name is Francklin Barbier and I live in a small fishing village in Haiti called Petite Riviere de Nippes. Three years ago, when Haiti Ocean Project got involved with Adobe Youth Voices, we started learning about photography and taking videos to tell our stories. That was the first time I used a camera before and it was exciting. Same with the other kids in the project, they never took pictures of themselves or anything else.
It takes three hours in a car to get to our village from Port-au-Prince. We are not a village that has much interest from the government or the TV and radio. But, when we started taking pictures and videos through AYV, we started sharing that with other people in Haiti with our website and through Facebook. Then, people were interested in our village and what we were doing to help the ocean. We got attention and then we got donations and the BBC came and filmed us.
What started with a small group of kids has grown. There are hundreds of kids now that want to be involved with what we are doing with Haiti Ocean Project. And, they are interested because they see the beautiful pictures we have taken of the whales and the dolphins and the sailfish. They want to go and see what we see and it got so much awareness for the project and our goals. Sometime we ask fishermen to take us out on the water to film the marine mammals. We would include the fishermen in our videos, and they liked to see themselves on the camera. We would show the videos to other people in the village and they were really happy to see fishermen that they knew on a video. This is the impact that media making has had on the community. It has given our community a chance to feel a connection with the photos and videos we take. It also gives our community a way to be proud of what they have like the ocean and the marine mammals. Our village is special and now we have a way to show that to the rest of Haiti and the world and it is all because of media making.
