Yesterday I arrived in Port-au-Prince around lunchtime. I flew in the country with a commercial flight, which is possible again after the earthquake since Monday. I don’t see much difference to the situation when I was here in January, except that there are more tents everywhere. Most of them look rain-resistant, so that’s good. People that didn’t get a tent, started to built shacks in the middle of the city. There are shacks in very weird places – in front of the university on the sidewalk. The rainy season started already, yesterday evening it rained for about one hour and today the sky was gray and it was quite cold for Haitian conditions. It’s amazing to see how life continues normally. When you are in a bus and don’t look outside, you would not notice any difference of the country.. People dress as before, they act as before, they smile as before. But when you do look out of the window you see that so many of the buildings are destroyed, it’s horrible.

I’m staying in the house of Natacha, my friend who is the director of the NGO “Haiti Care”. She moved into a new place last year and this house is really amazing – it has not one scratch. There still is no electricity at all, but she has a little generator that we use from time to time.

Today I took pictures for the German NGO “Kindermissionswerk”. I will work for them most of the time that I am here (I will stay for 3 weeks). Tomorrow I will visit a project of them in Jacmel.

A Haitian man sleeping in the streets.

Don Bosco center for streetchildren.

Togehter with the ARTCO Gallerie in Herzogenrath, Germany we will organize a print sale of 49 of my Haiti pictures.

My pictures are sold in an edition of 15 pictures and the first 3 of these 15 will be sold for the good cause. 100% of the amount raised will go to projects in Haiti.

These are the prices:

20×30cm - 300 Euro (special price for this campaign - normal price 400 Euro)

40×60cm - 450 Euro (special price for this campaign - normal price 550 Euro)

60×90cm - 600 Euro (special price for this campaign - normal price 700 Euro)

The award winning picture (Unicef picture of the year 2008) - 1100 Euro -  (special price for this campaign - normal price 1200 Euro)

The pictures can be bought online here: http://www.artco-ac.de/

I’m sitting in the airplane of the Belgian Air Force. A few hours ago the plane took of in Santo Domingo to go back to Belgium.

I have spent one week in Port-au-Prince and I am sorry that I didn’t find time to write my blog. This time I wrote a blog in my native language German, which can be found here:

http://blog.zdf.de/3sat.Kulturtube/  -> scroll down

Haiti is widely destroyed; it’s horrible to see. An estimated 200 000 people died and the number rises each day. The hospitals are filled with patients; most of them get a Körperteil amputated and are left alone afterwards. They find themselves alone in the streets, without house, often without family and sometimes even without friends. So many people have lost everything. I talked to a 22-year-old boy, who has lost all his family and all of his friends. He happened to be in the streets during the earthquake, while his family was in their house and his friends in school – both buildings collapses and buried every person who was important to him.

I always thought everything happens for a reason. No matter what happens to me or to any other person, if good or bad - would have some kind of sense behind it. But in this situation I just cannot find the sense at all. A country that has been one of the poorest in the world since many years looses many of his kids, of his teachers, of his hospitals, of his universities, of his bancs… It basically looses his future. It’s not that they have to start at point zero - no, they first have to get all the broken buildings, all the mess out of the city before they can start all over again. And this isn’t easy with an almost complete lack of an infrastructure.

Here in the airplane are also 13 Haitian orphans flying with our group. They have been adopted and will get to their parents in Belgium as soon as we will land. They are saved. I hope they will have a good life in Belgium and I wish that when they’re grown up, Haiti will have succeeded to restart all over again and be a nice place.

I don’t think I need to write more – I think my pictures tell more than my words:

http://www.photoshelter.com/

In Haiti there are over 300 000 “Restavek. The Restavecs are children of Haiti living in a family different from their family of origin and often used as domestic servants or as slaves. From poor families in rural areas, they are placed by their families in urban families. Often the economic situation of host families is not very different from those of biological families of these children. Also orphans often end up as Restavecs.

Miriam is a little 7 year old girl who lives in Port-au-Prince and is a restavek. Her father died 4 years ago. Her mother went to the countryside to organize the funeral and never returned. Today, she lives with her neighbors, who have a 6 year old son. When he is outside playing with his friends, she does the cleaning, dishes, and shopping. In return for her work Miriam has the right to sleep on the floor and eat the remains of the family meal.

More pictures - soon on my homepage

I am in Haiti since 10 days. Today is my last day before I will leave tomorrow.

First I have spent 4 days on Ile de la Gonave, a beautiful little island not far from the mainisland of Haiti. I photographed the daily life there as I did on my last trip. Now I finished that project and the pictures will soon appear on my homepage.

The last days I photographed a Restavek child in Port-au-Prince. Her name is Miriam, she is 7 years old. 3-4 years ago her dad died and her mum run away, leaving her behind. Her neightboors took care after her, so that she does not end up as a streetchild. She can live with them, but sleeps on the floor while they sleep in their beds. She wakes up earlier as everyone else, so she can start doing the housework.. cleaning the dishes, cleaning the floor, go to the market, go to get water,…

She is one of the lucky ones, as in return she can go to school. She gets food as well, but only after the family has finished eating.

I will soon put pictures online!

Tomorrow I will be in New York for 2 days and be back home on Thursday.

I was a bit silent in the last month, because I worked on some commercial work.

Soon I will be back in Haiti - but only for 10 days beginning of August. I don’t think I will take my laptop with me, so I will tell you about it when I’m back and show you new work on my website.

Here are a few shots of a portrait session that I had with Mathei Grosch - a belgian politician - last week.

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Here a few pics that I shot for Kelleter, a backery in Eupen, my hometown.

Many things happened since I came back from Haiti. I didn’t stop in Miami as planned as I had to return back home to help a friend in need. This was much more complicated than I expected and I got myself many problems and my life fell into an extreme chaos. Now I finally find my normal life back (what is normal?), or maybe it’s better to say that I find my energy back.

In the meantime I had some of my Haiti pictures published in the Sunday Times and I have gotten a grant from the “fondation de la vocation belge” to go back to Haiti (So I will go back still this year - probably in September-October).

I will leave Belgium to go to India on Sunday evening - and I am looking forward to that. I cannot publish the pictures on my blog before they appeared in Geo magazine, so you will have to wait a bit longer for pictures this time. But I will try to update my blog with the experiences I make in India. The city I will go to is Ahmedabad.

Because of all the chaos in the last weeks, I didn’t work a lot on my Haiti pictures; to bring order to them and publish them on my homepage. I will do that after I return from India in two weeks.

I shot Haitis senatorial elections in Port-au-Prince yesterday.
The situation stayed calm, but only 5-10% of the population came to vote.

Last weekend I was on a Voodoofestival in a place close to Gonaive. I went there together with Natacha (the director of the school of Haiti Care), friends of Natacha and Keely, an american girl I met on through www.couchsurfing.com and her boyfriend.

We left Port-au-Prince in a usual Haitian bus. This means: the old American schoolbuses that landed in Haiti after they were so destroyed that noone in the US would use them anymore. Instead of placing 2 people on a seat (which are meant for 2 people), they place 3. So you sit their - packed like sardines for 4 hours in a country with a really hot climat and a lot of dust on the roads - waiting that this journey will end soon. The road is really bad and the driver often drives slalom around all the holes in the streets… or the street is one big hole for a few or even many kilometers.

We arrived in Souvenance finally and were all exhausted. RARAs were going on the hole afternoon and Keely (also a photographer) and me took pictures. RARAs is kind of a Voodoo dancing parade that is always celebrated around the Easter period.

Saturday was the starting day of the real festival. People, all dressed in white started to have ceremonies, danced in trance and some fell into a trance and moved, crawled on the floor and screamed… finally arriving at a tree where they put their feet underneath its roots and stood there for hours…

Sunday was the main day… probably the most shocking and crazy things I have ever seen. First a Voodoo priest tells me that it is all about white magic and good things, second I see how they sacrifice animals. It was not the sacrificing itself that was shocking - it was the way how they did it.

It started with the goats: The cut the throat of the goat and let it bleed. Like this the will dance around about 15 minutes, let the goat bleed and torture it to dead. Then they put it on the floor and everyone in the room sticks his finger into his throat and puts the blood on their white dresses or even drinks it. Just after that they will carry the still living animal outside and kill it finally.

A woman putting the goats blood in her mouth.

Everyone sticks his finger into the throat of the goat.

The killing of the chicken is even worse:

First the Voodoo priest pulls off some feathers,  than he breaks both wings, than he takes the tongue of the chicken and pulls it completely out (the chicken is still alive) and at the end he turns its head and trows it on the floor. I don’t know how long in lays there, but it is not killed right after… It is a real torture and I was just so shocked.. I could not take good pictures… I wanted to cry… They killed one chicken after another… In total they kill 101 animals this week (from Saturday to the Friday after).

Blood coming out of the chicken after they tore out its tongue.

The Voodoo priest praying before killing the next chicken.

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They also killed one big cow.. I could not really see what was going on, but I saw that they started to pull of the skin when the cow was still alive…

During the killing of the cow the crowd hold knifes in their hands as part of the ritual.

The cow after…

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On Sunday afternoon they also took a bath in “sacred” waters.

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During the whole day, people fell into trance and went to this one specific tree to place their feet underneath its roots.

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In the evening they took the hooves and heads of the killed animals and carried them around while dancing.

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Everything was really shocking for me… I didn’t know much about Voodoo and even though I knew they were sacrifising animals regurlarly, I didn’t know how brutal it was… Keely and me were joking about letting Greenpeace know about what is happening there…

I’m still recovering from that experience… And I don’t know what more to say…

Gonâve Island

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Gonâve Island (French: Île de la Gonâve) is an island of Haiti located to the west-northwest of Port-au-Prince in the Gulf of Gonâve. It is the largest of the islands in terms of size located off the Hispaniolan mainland. The island is an arrondissement in the Ouest Department and includes the communes of Anse-à-Galets and Pointe-à-Raquette. Made up of mostly limestone, the reef-fringed island of Gonâve is 60 km (37 miles) long and 15 km (9 miles) wide and covers an area of 743 km² (287 sq. miles). The island is mostly barren and hilly with the highest point reaching 778 meters (2,552 ft). The island gets anywhere from 800 mm to 1600 mm of rain a year, higher areas representing the latter figure. Issues of overgrazing and water resource overexploitation affect the island’s approximately 100,000 residents. The island was once used as a base for pirates.

Water Scarcity

La Gonâve is referred to as one of the most water scarce locations in the world. Residents on the western side of the island are known to walk 12-15 kilometers roundtrip to collect their water that is often brackish.

In 2005 following a particularly drastic drought, the Mayor of Anse Gallets formed the Water Platform, composed of service groups working on the island. Current participants include the Mayors of Anse Gallets and Pointes a Racquette, the Deputy, Justice of the Peace, World Vision, Concern WorldWide, Sevis Kretyen, the Matenwa Learning Center, the Alleghany Weslyen Church, the Methodist Church, Haiti Outreach and many others. The Water Platform acts as a focal point for activities on the island, providing a coordination point for the multitude of groups working on La Gonâve.

The members of the Water Platform have been working to address the water needs of the island by capping springs, building rainwater catchment cisterns,building water systems and drilling wells. Dozens of rainwater catchment cisterns and wells have been drilled on the island as an effort to bring water relief to the poor residents of the island.

On the way to Ile de la Gonave.

Arriving in Ans à Galets

On the countryside

Many people have to walk a lot of kilometers to get water each day.

Dance lessons

On the market.

Replanting trees.  Haiti has only 2% of trees and vegetation in the country.

A RARA, a Voodoo dance

Des Ètoits, a fishing village. People are leaving to Port-au-Prince in boats.

Repairing a broken boat.

Transporting charcoal to Port-au-Prince.

A boat passing by selling roots and coconuts.

In the north-west of the island. People continue to cut trees to make charcoal.

A village called La Source has beautiful beaches but no tourism at all. There is no real Hotel on the island.

A poor family in La Source.

Anse à Galets