Cartoon Movement - Spotlight on Haiti

I think like a lot of people, Haiti jumped onto my radar with the earthquake. Haiti is still basically the same state as it was the day after the earthquake. They have all these things that I imagined Haiti to be. Special tent camps, ruined cities, just a broken society. We visited the presidential palace and tent camps that encompass it in the square outside. and every morning at eight they raise the Haitian flag. and the presidential palace is still demolished. and it seems like an odd and slightly surreal form of symbolism, as if that's all that the government is doing. and I think unfortunately when there is so much wrong in a society it is ripe for political satire, criticism, or comics journalism. my name is Tjeerd Royaards, I am a Dutch editorial cartoonist and I am also executive editor for Cartoon Movement, which is an international platform for comics journalism and editorial cartoons. I am here in Haiti with my colleague Matt Bors. We decided that it would be a good idea to come here and actively find journalists to pair up with cartoonists to produce a long running comic about life in Haiti that will shed some light on the many problems and the many challenges that face Haiti one and a half years after the earthquake. I wanted this project to be a little different. I really wanted it to be a Haitian perspective of people who are trained as journalists, who speak both the languages, and who are able to analyse the problems a lot better than I would be, you know just coming in for three weeks and then leaving and trying to do a story about all the problems the society faces. honestly we had no idea if this project was going to succeed and if we were able to find people, good artists and good journalists who grasped what we wanted. A couple of people had pointed me to Chevelin, who is illustrating Chemin Lakay. so we checked his work on-line and it was amazing! after we got here it became clear that he was one of the best comic artists in Haiti. I mean he is doing long form stuff which is key. it was realistic really well drawn, so both his skills and his style are perfectly suited to what we are looking for. The biggest challeng I face on this project. I'm basically the editor of the project and stories. so I have the language barrier working against me. I only speak English. You want to do the project right? Ok tell him that I am not interested to earn more money. I want to make my work better known and to take part in a project which is of importance to my country. That is why we came to hire Haitian artists. One of the other challenges is going to be taking people who have never written for comics, and coming out with someting that is top notch. So what we want is maybe 15 to 20 page stories of comics What is comics? What do you mean exactly? we kind of had to relay to them that we are looking for non fiction work in journalism that basically want them to do exactly what they are doing in radio and print, just in comics. So we are going to have on artist doing the entire project. and then different journalists, focussing on different aspects of Haiti's reconstruction. Such as the tent camps, such as where the money of NGOS goes, such as the current political situation and what is happening there. And really do some good investigative journalism, Comics have the ability to capture people's attention more than just another article on Haiti marking the anniversary of the earthquake. When people read the comic eventually we want them to have the feeling hey I get it, I get how it is to actually live there and how it is to face these problems. I think it's safe to say we are doing something unique here. This has never been done before. We thought it was worth the risk.