Haiti: Tents Beyond Tents
12 Mar 2012
There is a tradition of using cartoons and animation to satirize domestic politics and international relations. Yet animation also provides opportunities to consider specific issues and developments from an entirely different perspective. Accordingly, cartoons are not only used by satirists, but also investigative journalists and documentary makers. This week, we present a selection of cartoons that show issues currently shaping the international relations agenda in a very different light. We begin with CartoonMovement.com’s cartoon strip on the aftermath of the 2010 Haiti earthquake and the problems still facing one of the world’s poorest countries.
The devastating earthquake that struck Haiti on January 12 2010 killed more than 300’000 people and left over one million homeless. Today it is external pageestimated that half a millionHaitians continue to live in squalid conditions in hastily constructed tents and encampments. And despite the pouring in of aid and NGOs, hunger, water-shortages and disease continue to blight the population. Much of the country’s infrastructure was also destroyed by the earthquake and has yet to be reconstituted.
In an attempt to shed light on Haiti’s continuing problems, CartoonMovement.com’s Tjeerd Royaards and Matt Bors travelled to Haiti in July 2011. But instead of writing yet another article, they brought together Haitian journalists and cartoonists to animate the current plight of many Haitians. In the following video, they tell us more about how they went about this, what they wanted to achieve, and why a comic strip was their medium of choice for this project.
The result is the comic series ‘Haiti: Tents Beyond Tents.’ The first chapter is available here (switch to full-screen mode for best quality):