In journalist Jean Roland Chery’s case, his immediate family—including his beloved mother—is safe, but living in dire straits like many Haitians. In early 2003, Chery was a reporter with Radio Haiti-Inter, and had to flee the country. His colleagues were being killed, not in the aftermath of a natural disaster, but by armed gunmen. After someone opened fire on his house one night, he escaped to New York City with the help of the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ). His wife and child followed soon after.
These days, seven years later, Chery can often be found in the CPJ office trying to get through to his colleagues still on the ground in Haiti. Working in cooperation with CPJ, he is searching for information about the number of dead, injured, and missing. But he’s also gathering a tally of destroyed or damaged equipment and buildings, lost archives, and other logistical needs of journalists.
“They are victims also,” said Mr. Chery last week in the CPJ office in New York, where he makes phone calls and writes his blog for the organization as a consultant. “They don’t have anything—like where to live, [yet] they continue to work.”
The information Chery seeks is coming slowly, bit by painstaking bit, as badly damaged communication systems and impossible circumstances make it hard to reach even one person every day.
“The last time I called numbers for four hours and reached one person,” he said, with a concerned look on his face.
Since e-mail contact is extremely limited, he must call day after day to a long list of Haitian journalists that he knows in and around Port-au-Prince. The phone rings. Or doesn’t. Nobody answers. The mailbox is full of messages that can’t be checked. The system isn’t operating. There are three major cell phone companies in Haiti. For people on a working network, simply charging a phone is hard.
Chery has already found out that at least 10 journalists are dead and many injured. CPJ will eventually take the information he’s collecting and use it to help the organization assess the situation on the ground and how to best provide assistance.
Ongoing Nightmare
For those who are alive and uninjured, they face circumstances so extreme that the basic reporting is like climbing a mountain every day.
Radio stations are crucial for getting news and information out in Haiti—the literacy rate there is only about 50 percent, newspapers are read mostly by the wealthy elite, and televisions are not common among the less well-to-do.
According to Chery, there are 50 commercial radio stations in Port-au-Prince alone. In the countryside, which relies even more heavily on radio, the organization AMARC works with at least 30 affiliate community stations. And that’s just a portion of the media outlets in a country with a population of over 9 million people.
Working for Free
Since the banks in Haiti collapsed along with many other buildings, the journalists Chery is in contact with are working for free. Those who are still alive and able to work are trapped in a cycle of news that’s focused on basic emergency information, leaving no time for life, culture, and human interest stories.
Aside from trying to preserve their own lives, journalists are hard-pressed to report all of the information related to the devastation around them.
“We don’t know how many journalists died—we don’t know how many radio stations collapsed,” Mr. Chery says. “They told me that 24 hours is too little for them to give information to the population.”
There are a few needs that are clear, though, aside from basic survival.
“We need equipment,” he says. Specifically, reporters need hand-held tape recorders, mini tapes, and batteries. And the populace needs transistor radios so they can hear critical news and information. But with the current unstable security situation, even getting tape recorders safely into the hands of reporters would be a tremendously difficult task.
Carlos Lauria, program coordinator for the Americas at CPJ, acknowledges the situation is grim, but he remains optimistic.
“I know how resilient these people are,” said Mr. Lauria. “They’ve been through so many problems—they’ve been tested by cruel dictatorships, rampant violence—and they’ve always been able to get back on their feet.”
