Together in Mission: Haiti
Posted by timfrakes | Filed under Uncategorized
There is a new Lutheran Church in Haiti. The Evangelical Lutheran Church in Haiti is a growing body of believers with 12 congregations scattered across Haiti. The Florida-Bahamas Synod of the ELCA asked me to put this video together for the 2010 Synod Assembly.
Tags: ELCA, Faith, Florida Bahamas Synod, Haiti, Tim Frakes Productions, Travel, Video
Clearing Rubble, Redemption Lutheran, Carrefour, Haiti
Posted by timfrakes | Filed under Carribean, Disaster, News, Tim Frakes Productions
Members of Redemption Lutheran Church in Carrefour, Haiti gather to clear rubble from their destroyed church building. The structure collapsed during the January 12, 2010 earthquake that hit Haiti. Fortunately, no one was in the building when it collapsed.
Tags: Church, Faith, Florida Bahamas Synod, Haiti, Lutheran, Tim Frakes Productions, Travel, Video
Haiti Lutheran Church: New Office
Posted by timfrakes | Filed under Carribean, News, Tim Frakes Productions
It’s not all bad news coming out of Haiti. As workers put on the finishing touches, Pastor Livenson Lauvanus of the Haiti Evangelical Lutheran Church shows off their new office space in Port Au Prince. The new space will provide offices space, guest lodging, a chapel and meeting space. Funding for the rental property was provided through the ELCA.
Tags: ELCA, Florida Bahamas Synod, Haiti, Tim Frakes Productions
Religion and Ethics Weekly: Haiti
Posted by timfrakes | Filed under Carribean, Disaster
At the Haiti/Dominican Republic border, I ran into Gail Fendley a producer with Religion & Ethics Weekly on PBS. Gail and her crew were producing a story on relief work from the Dominican side of the border. We exchanged business cards and I was able to share footage I recorded in Haiti which they used in this story.
Tags: Haiti, Tim Frakes Productions, Video
Haiti, Three Weeks After: Chris Herlinger Reports
Posted by timfrakes | Filed under Carribean, Disaster, News, Tim Frakes Productions
My friend Chris Herlinger from Church World Service and I produced this story in Port Au Prince, Haiti, three weeks after the January 2010 earthquake.
Port Au Prince, Haiti
February, 2010
by Chris Herlinger
In the nearly three weeks since the catastrophic Jan. 12 earthquake, Haiti feels like a desert bereft of much that makes for a dignified life.
Port-au-Princes downtown area, hit hardest by quake, still looks and feels as if the disaster happened just days ago. The smell of rotting flesh wafts through the air, and the sides of some buildings look as if they are ready to fall into the street at any moment.
It is startling to see a building cut in half, office chairs and desks, filing cabinets and sinks suddenly exposed to the harsh midday sunlight just as it is to see thousands of people, suddenly displaced, living in the makeshift displacement camps within and outside the capital city
Yet the capacity of Haitians to embrace elements of normalcy is encouraging beyond words. That means dressing in your Sunday best to attend church or offering a hand to neighbors or visitors.
The international community continues its role in providing humanitarian assistance to Haiti an effort that by all accounts was slow in starting and is still not seamless, given the many challenges that
faced Haiti before and immediately following the quake.
Tags: Haiti, Tim Frakes Productions, Video
Why We’re Addicted to Disaster Porn
Posted by timfrakes | Filed under Disaster, History, Peace and Justice
My friend, photo journalist Paul Jeffrey shared this David Sirota story with me. I post it here as a response to friends and family who ask, “How was Haiti?” Though not a religious article, I think there is some Gospel in here somewhere.
Tim
Why We’re Addicted to Disaster Porn
By David Sirota, AlterNet
Posted on February 2, 2010, Printed on February 3, 2010
http://www.alternet.org/story/145498/
The black t-shirt — so tight, so come-hither. And oh, those safari button-downs — joke-worthy on Eddie Bauer mannequins, but on news correspondents, so … enticing.
America missed these sartorial seductions, pined for their sweet suggestive nothings. And now, finally, a nation of television addicts can thank its disaster pornographers for bringing back the lurid garments — and the lustful voyeurism they evoke.
Yes, thousands of miles from the San Fernando Valley’s seedy studios, the adult entertainment business is alive and panting in Haiti. This year’s luminaries aren’t the industry’s typical muscle-bound mustaches of machismo — they are NBC’s Brian Williams pillow-talking to the camera in his Indiana Jones garb, CNN’s Sanjay Gupta playing doctor and, of course, CNN’s Anderson Cooper in that two-sizes-too-small t-shirt “rarely missing an opportunity to showcase his buff physique,” as The New York Times gushed. They are all the disaster porn stars in the media with visions of Peabodys and Pulitzers dancing in their heads.
And We the Ogling People drink it in.
Like any X-rated content, this smut is all flesh and no substantive plot. The lens flits between body parts and journalists pulling perverse Cronkite-in-Vietnam impressions (at one point, CNN showed Cooper and his t-shirt saving a child). But there is little discussion of how western Hispaniola was a man-made disaster before an earthquake made it a natural one.
Though neighboring the planet’s wealthiest nation, Haiti has long been one of the world’s poorest places. It sports 80 percent unemployment and a GDP smaller than the annual executive bonus fund at a single Wall Street bank. The destitution is tragic — and a reflection, in part, of colonial domination.
For much of the last two centuries, Western powers used embargo threats to force the country’s population of erstwhile slaves to reimburse their former European masters for lost “property.” As Harvard’s Henry Louis Gates recounts, America aided these efforts from the beginning because President Thomas Jefferson feared a successful black republic would “inspire slave insurrections throughout the American South.”
Crushed by this oppression, Haiti was then assaulted in the 1990s by American “free” trade policies that destroyed its agriculture economy and tried to turn the country into the world’s sweatshop.
In recent years, as the menace of Western-backed coups lurked, Haiti has at times been compelled to pay more interest on its debt than it received in foreign aid.
This is the real story of Haiti that the black t-shirts and safari button-downs (and, alas, their viewers) have never cared about. They’ve only noticed the country when a cataclysm provided more telegenic images than the daily death and despair of the island’s pre-earthquake squalor.
Even now, as the casualty count rises, disaster pornographers barely mention the macabre history. They know that doing so would break unspoken rules against holding up a foreign policy mirror to America and against riling the politicians and business interests that contributed to Haiti’s demise.
Rather than reporting on what made Haiti so poor and therefore its infrastructure so susceptible to collapse, we get clips of Haitians momentarily cheering “USA!” as food packages trickle into their devastated capital. Rather than inquiries about how poverty made Haiti so ill-prepared for rescue operations, the disaster pornographers instead obediently follow George W. Bush, who self-servingly says, “You’ve got to deal with the desperation and there ought to be no politicization of that.”
“Politicization” — so that’s the safe-for-TV euphemism they’re using these days, huh? Evidently, it must be avoided — evidently, nothing kills an audience’s heaving passion faster than “politics” or (God forbid) contextualized news.
Anything like that — anything beyond the exploitation of raw disaster porn — well, it might ruin the money shot.
David Sirota is a best-selling author whose newest book, “The Uprising,” was just released this month. He is a fellow at the Campaign for America’s Future and a board member of the Progressive States Network — both nonpartisan organizations. His blog is at www.credoaction.com/sirota.
Tags: Haiti
Wrapping Things up in Haiti
Posted by timfrakes | Filed under Carribean, Disaster, News, Travel
Tim Frakes pauses on the grounds of a golf course now converted into a massive tent city following the January 2010 Haiti earthquakes.
Packing up my equipment and belongings as my time in Haiti draws to a close, thoughts and emotions percolate. I was invited to come to Haiti two weeks after the January 2010 earthquake that leveled much of Port Au Prince and the surrounding countryside by the ELCA Disaster Response and the Lutheran World Federation.
As a videographer, I was charged with recording footage related to the combined response efforts of the Act Alliance, a global alliance of churches and related agencies working to save lives and support communities in emergencies worldwide.
Most of my time was spent working along side photojournalist Paul Jeffrey from the United Methodist Church and Chris Herlinger, a reporter from Church Word Service. Paul and Chris are top-notch professionals that work with courage, passion and accuracy.
Together we spent time in the demolished city center, tent cities, worship services and food distributions. Back at the LWF offices in Peiton Ville, we spent the evening hours editing stories and photos. Fortunately LWF has blazing fast internet, so our job was made much easier.
The people of Haiti are really in a bind. Apparently things were slowly improving before the earth quake. The scope of devastation and loss of life will make the goal of building a stable, healthy Haiti much more difficult.
The global relief effort is amazing. I witnessed Brazilians, Hungarians, French, Sri Lankan, Finns, Scotts, Cubans, Dominicans, and many Americans working together. I hear that Americans are complaining about the apparent lack of coordination and slow pace of relief response. I can only say that the enormity of this disaster cannot be underestimated. It is really bad. This is not a problem that you can simply “fix.”
That said, the world community is doing their best. No matter what happens, Haitians will reach down and draw from and endless well of determination and find a way to go on.
Tags: Haiti, Tim Frakes Productions
Food Distribution Gone Bad
Posted by timfrakes | Filed under Carribean, Disaster
Here is what it looks like when a food and tent distribution goes bad. This scene was recorded in Gressier, a village about 20 km outside Port Au Prince, two weeks after the 2010 Earthquake.
Tags: Haiti, Tim Frakes Productions, Video
Sylvia Raula, LWF Haiti
Posted by timfrakes | Filed under Carribean, Disaster, Tim Frakes Productions
Sylvia Raulo, Country Representative for the Lutheran World Federation Haiti Program reflects on the 2010 Haiti Earthquake.
Tags: Haiti, Lutheran, Tim Frakes Productions
Personal Notes from Haiti
Posted by timfrakes | Filed under News, Tim Frakes Productions
Haitians pick through the rubble of a fallen building in Port Au Prince
Hait Notes: It is 5:00 a.m. here in Port Au Prince. A still photographer, Paul Jeffrey and I are driving out to the city center this morning to do some filming in good light.
I am staying at the Haiti offices of the Lutheran World Federation. It is a large house converted into offices in normal times. These days it is packed with faith-based non-governmental organization staff members from all over the world. They are coordinating relief efforts and helping Haitians move on with their lives. We have running water (cold only) from a tank and electricity from a generator.
No sleeping quarters, so I and others are camped out in tents at various places in the compound. The compound is up in the hills overlooking the city. We have two armed guards who stand watch over night. No rioting or anything close to it here. In fact, I have seen only orderly behavior as I travel across the city.
The destruction is massive in the city center. It is easy to see how so many were killed. No bodies in the streets. All have been picked up and buried. Almost every open space, park or parking-lot has been converted into a tent city.
We are hearing that Americans are outraged because of the rioting. I think when Fox News or CNN hear about a large government food/water distribution, (typically unorganized) they are ready with cameras to record the melee.
In reality, most distributions are organized and peaceful. Everyone is working to make the best of a bad situation.
I am headed home on Monday through the Dominican Republic. I catch an American Airlines flight Tuesday.
Tags: Haiti, Tim Frakes Productions