A few weeks ago as I nervously checked to see if Tampa Bay was in Tropical Storm Hanna’s “cone of uncertainty,” I watched as the storm plowed through Gonaives, Haiti. Less than a week later, in a brutal one-two punch, Hurricane Ike slammed the same impoverished, low-lying area, compounding the disaster and adding hundreds to an already terrible death toll.
I felt deep sadness as I saw on TV the faces of the people suffering and struggling to stay alive in Gonaives. I had seen those faces before.
In February 2004, rebel forces were shooting their way through Haiti’s small towns in a bloody conflict that would soon topple the government of President Jean-Bertrand Aristide. For a short time, I joined a few photojournalist friends to follow the rebels as they stormed the towns in the north of the country before moving south to the capital of Port-au-Prince.
During the revolution, Haiti was a state of complete lawlessness. In addition to rebel fighting and political assassinations, armed gangs roamed the streets and set up checkpoints, robbing and hurting whomever they pleased. It was smart to be afraid.
The day after the rebels took the town of Gonaives, my traveling partners and I spent a few hours photographing the residents of a shantytown along the seafront there. Our translator was visiting relatives in town, so we were on our own — just three white guys in an all-black country, walking around a gang-controlled town in one of the poorest and most desperate places on the planet, with tens of thousands of dollars worth of camera gear around our necks.
It would have been easy to feel like a target, but the people living along the Gonaives waterfront warmly welcomed me and my friends as they struggled to communicate how the political turmoil was upending their lives. Photographing the people in the shantytown was one of the only times in Haiti when I felt safe openly working in the streets.
Months later, after Aristide had fled the country, Hurricane Jeanne crushed this region of Haiti. Tidal surge barreled into Gonaives. Officials estimated that between 2,000 and 3,000 people in the area were killed.
Friends who went to Gonaives to report on the flooding said the community on the edge of the sea was simply gone. Nearly every soul in that area was lost.
When I look at the faces of the people in the pictures I shot there — especially the children who goofed for our cameras while playing in the streets — I cannot help but be moved. Those images of the warm and welcoming people in that poor seafront shantytown were in all likelihood the last images, maybe the only images, of a group of people and their place on this earth that have likely ceased to exist.
At the time, a revolution was in full swing. The time spent photographing in the shantytown felt like a short, creative departure from the real story: the violence and bloodshed.
But the people who had welcomed us and struggled against a language barrier to describe their hardships did so because they believed in our power as journalists to tell their stories. They believed, or hoped, that we could give them a voice.
To many it sounds naïve and silly, but I think those destitute, but hopeful, people in Gonaives were right. We, as journalists, do have the power to bring people’s stories to the world. And we must.
Revolution, violence and bloodshed will always be powerful and important stories. But they mean little without understanding what it means to be a human being in those circumstances — the father who struggles to scrape together enough food to feed his children amidst the chaos, the mother who buries a child caught in the crossfire, the children whose innocence is lost as they witness it all.
It only takes a few minutes in a Haitian shantytown to hear those stories, but we must dig in and listen rather than just move on to the latest round of fighting.
In retrospect, I wish I had slowed down and paid more attention to the people I encountered in Gonaives. In all likelihood, it was the last opportunity they had to tell their stories.
The sweet, shy little girl in the image above lived one short block from the sea. I wish I had had the presence of mind to stop and find out more about her, to get her story. I wish I could remember her voice.
Robert Browman is a multimedia journalist based in St. Petersburg, Fla.