Journalist shares challenges of Haiti quake

Journalist Damien Cave, a foreign correspondent for the New York Times, spoke Monday on the difficulties of covering last year’s earthquake in Haiti. Cave was on assignment in the ravaged country.
Journalist Damien Cave, a foreign correspondent for the New York Times, spoke Monday on the difficulties of covering last year’s earthquake in Haiti. Cave was on assignment in the ravaged country.

When journalist Damien Cave saw and smelled piles of bodies in Haiti after 2010’s tragic earthquake, his emotions took over.

Cave, a foreign correspondent for The New York Times, gave a speech Monday titled “Interpreting Disaster,” as part of the Provost’s Lecture Series called “Natural Disasters and Human Responses.” Cave, who has reported from Iraq and Haiti and is currently working in Mexico City, discussed the difficulties of experiencing disaster as both a journalist and a human being.

“I thought I had understood death, but there’s nothing that really prepares you to see sheets over 10 bodies or seeing a sheet over a small body that you know is a child,” he said. “How do you translate that [and] how do you get that to people? How do you translate an experience that is so broad, that includes so many destroyed buildings, so many dead people?”

Cave added that an important balance to maintain as a journalist covering disasters is to both show the audience as much as you can and connect readers with individual stories.

This balance is especially difficult for journalists at a time when it is popular for the media to give snapshots of news situations that are not necessarily representative of how conditions actually are, he noted. The media’s heightened coverage of “crazy street”­— one of the few areas in Haiti with notable looting and violence—exemplified how disaster coverage is often defined by what is most sensationalist.

He said he also found that emphasizing personal narratives of Haitian people and places was the best and most authentic way to write stories in the wake of the earthquake. Focusing on a universally relatable scene that the audience can understand, such as people on a bus ride through Port-au-Prince, can bring an identifiable character to the people being featured in a story about disaster.

“By going to those places that are universally familiar shows the dignity about a country that isn’t treated with much dignity,” Cave said. “When you look really deep, it’s often a search for dignity.”

During his time reporting in Haiti, Cave came across a pile of grade school class photographs in the rubble from the earthquake. He said the moment he realized that most of the children photographed were dead was chilling because it was a very real connection between the raw numbers of the death count and faces of children who had died.

After finding the photos, Cave picked up the pile and put it in his bag, where they remain until this day.

“I kind of hate that they’re there, but I can’t take them out. I feel like somehow it’s disrespectful,” Cave said. “Taking the pictures meant I could do something, and the ability to do something helps you cope. But I know it’s totally dysfunctional to carry the pictures around with me.”

Cave said working in the extremely emotional environment of Haiti post-earthquake took time to deal with, as he had to deliberately work on processing what he was exposed to while reporting.

“You have to wait for that process—what you have experienced needs to be digested,” Cave said. “It’s like an unbelievably huge Thanksgiving meal, and I have to sit on the couch and let it work through me. You have to accept that this will change you, know that and let it work its way through you.”

Junior Chelsea Hayes said Cave’s work featured the voices of the Haitian people in a way that is particularly meaningful in today’s media coverage.

“How do you deal with choosing what gets reported?” Hayes said. “I thought what he talked about—giving dignity to the voiceless—needs to happen more in the media.”

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