You’d say, “OK, they’ve taken it to an extreme here. If Hollywood had done it you wouldn’t have believe them. There was bullet holes and shrapnel in everything. There wasn’t a building standing above a story tall. It's not obviously the whole of Haiti because much of Haiti is stunning. The fact that one side is really heaven and the other side is hell. I mean, the island of Hispaniola, which shares the Dominican Republic. These gorgeous waters and that is just destroyed. I think what makes it so shocking is when you get this sort of … pearl essentially. I’ve been to some horrible places, as well as some extraordinarily beautiful ones. I don’t know if there is a specific thing, other than the fact I didn’t really know that hell on earth really, truly existed. So you’re always sort of trying to work out what’s happening. Q: What did you learn from your trip to Haiti that you didn’t know before you left?īarker: I’m always looking. I’ve traveled all over the world and it’s rarely the place that makes it for me. To me, that’s the part that really makes it. She’s taken in 11 orphans herself and she’s a 75-year-old woman.
She really is one of the most extraordinary people. At the school, Unik’s mother, who is, to be honest with you, like an angel. We had people smiling at us and welcoming us. The moments that really stand out are how welcoming and how loving and how decent so many people were, in such diabolical situations. If this was a scratch-and sniff-TV you’d turn off for sure.” But those moments aren’t the moments. Believe me, there are times when I wanted people to think, “Goodness, it looks stunning, but you can’t imagine how bad it smells right now. Q: Is there one moment or image that stands out in your mind from your trip to Haiti?īarker: It’s not the horror, it’s not the shock. Without education, half of them have no chance, but with education, through schools like Edeyo and not just people giving food but actually through the education that helps them build their own lives. The soul and the crux of this film is that Haiti is in a very desperate situation yet there are the disenfranchised youth that are there, and of course they make up 50 percent of the population. I think someone was upset about the burial. We had guns pulled on us while we were there, which actually doesn’t appear in the film because we had to pull our cameras down in order to get the guns out of our faces. We were down there for five days and six nights. So make it happen.” So a day later we got on the planes, went down there, and shot the film "Haiti: Hunger and Hope." I said “Unik, we’re going.” He went, “Really?” “We are going. I’ve got my team, I’ve got my camera man.” I called Unik. So we thought, “Listen, OK we’ve got our tickets. You just have to be street.” Nigel Barker photographing some of The Edeyo Foundation's school children
She said to me, “Nigel, you know it’s a desperate situation down there, but there’s never been a time that they need you more than now. I remember I finally spoke to a nun, who was about 70 years old, and she had just come back, right after the riots. I spoke to various people who were in Haiti and I contacted other groups. I thought to myself, we had already spent the various amounts of money to go and we also knew this was an important time to go down there. At the same time for me, it was really irritating. He was obviously very upset, but understood. We said to Unik, “Look this is not the time. At that point, obviously Vogue pulled out.
That if we were to go, we would have no protection and that it would be foolhardy. Embassy actually closed and the Canadian Embassy also closed, having been bombed. They overthrew the government, there was widespread looting. Right before we went, the food riots broke out around the world, specifically in Haiti they were very, very bad. There was couple of different groups who were coming with us on this trip. We originally set out to go down to Haiti with him and at the time Anne Vincent from Vogue was coming. As a photographer and filmmaker, go down to Haiti with you and film for people to see what’s happening.” I said to him after he’d been going for about a year, “Look, what I could do that would probably be most useful is use what I do. It was amazing to see what Unik was doing personally. I’m already involved in many different charities and organizations, most of which are very big charities, like the Humane Society of the United States or the Elizabeth Glaser Pediatric AIDS Foundation. His idea was to start the school with his mother. At the time, I was just like, “What are you going to do? How can you help? What possibly could you do?” It seems like such an extraordinary problem.
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