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“Salu, Selin”. The children giggle as I leave the vodou temple.It’s late afternoon, they must have finished school. Yesterday, I was delighted they knew my name and greeted them back in Creole, but today I’m trembling. The crew have awkwardly congregated around the van over in the car park but Roland is right here, waiting for me.“What the fuck was that?” he spits. Is he angry? Is HE shaking? Fuck.“Not here,” I say. “Don’t let them hear us”. It’s a steep unsealed road that leads us from the temple but it’s the only way out. I start walking.—It’s 2003, I’m 27 years old. A combination of good luck, unfortunate politics and my back breaking work on series one, has landed me the job of producer on the second leg of an international shoot for a TV series commissioned by an Australian public broadcaster. Fifteen minutes earlier, our crew of four + talent had been filming an interview inside a shack-like vodou temple in Cite Soleil, Port au Prince, Haiti. The interview was bonus material. We are here to film our series creator/on screen star, John ,participating in a three night Day of the Dead ceremony which is to culminate the following night in an animal sacrifice. This is extraordinary access to a real vodou celebration, entirely negotiated by Roland. And I have humiliated him.—----“Are you fucking serious?!” he calls after me.A white man in his late 30s, who had won local respect, denied an audience with the young female newcomer who gets her men coffee and food. At least, that must be how it looks to them. I’m making things worse, but here she can hear us. I won’t turn back, so Roland has to follow.“Now you care how it looks?! What about back there when you kicked me out?”“Not here,” I repeat, but he is walking beside me now and seethes, “You have undone all my work to get their trust and respect.”Fuck, have I?“Salu Selin,” the giggling children call. But their cries sound taunting now. Maybe they always were. —--Roland arrived in Haiti a week ahead of us, building trust with a promising young vodou priest named Doji via his mentor, vodou priestess, Jackie. Jackie loved Roland. Charming, self-assured, crazy intelligent, an unlikely professor from a family of academic royalty and a singer in a 90s funk band. What wasn’t to love? Everyone loved Roland. I loved Roland. He was the secret weapon of our team we relied on and I’d never seen him like this.—--“This has all gone to your head, hasn’t it?” he storms beside me.Is that what he thinks of me? I turn to face him. “What the fuck is that supposed to mean?”—--It was still a few hours before the first night of the ceremony. We had been filming since early morning, and we were overwrought, not yet acclimatised to the suffocating humidity or the city on the brink of anarchy.Jackie was old enough to be my grandmother. She was street-smart, she was intelligent, she was beautiful and poised. Roland had won her respect, and they shared an easy rapport. She had been reading me carefully since I arrived, testing me with every conversation, and I had been hyper-vigilant in return. The dynamic was clear: I controlled the purse strings, and she controlled our access.The second night of the ceremony lay ahead, where Doji would be taken over by a lustful spirit and compelled to bite the testicles off a live sacrificial goat. This was to be the climax of our story, and without it our trip to Haiti would have been for nothing. We had negotiated a fee before we arrived in Port-au-Prince, and Jackie had increased it twice since then. What kind of person can argue that they “have no money” when surrounded by abject poverty and devastation? Who would cry poor when they’ve flown from across the world to spend five days in a country for six minutes of content?Not me, she had gambled correctly. Not until today, anyway. —---“You were on a power trip,” he spits at me. The rage that overtook me a moment ago has been replaced by a burning lump of shame. Is he right? Was I?Does he not want me here either?We walk to the top of the rise in silence. An intersection of sorts, where one unsealed road meets another, and we turn right and travel a little further. A couple of children have chased us, but we’ve ignored them, and they’re losing interest. “Salu,” they say half-heartedly. Everyone else is out of earshot and sight. I face him again, and despite my best effort to stop, I am shaking with sobs.—--A few months earlier, we had advertised for a researcher with international experience to join our team. We were inundated with applications by experienced radio and television field producer and researcher types. In among the flood of applications came what I was to learn was a very Roland email with no phone number attached. “I am a professor of anthropology and was the lead singer in the funk band, Swoop. If my experience is of interest to you, please get in touch”.—----Our little crew had travelled across the globe. We’d visited the shanty towns of Maputo in Mozambique, the middle-class university city of Mangalore, via the desperate inequality of Mumbai, yet nothing could prepare me for the poverty, indignant fury, and undercurrent of violence that pervaded Port-au-Prince.We were staying in a five-star hotel in the affluent suburb of Pétionville, situated in the lush green hills overlooking the city. It was a beautiful sanctuary, open and breezy, French colonial architecture; a world away from what we’d driven through to get here. The safest place we could sleep—“the only option,” we had been told. A celebrity photo gallery at reception included US presidents and a young Julia Roberts. Our show was very low budget, but we could afford these prices, dirt cheap by Australian standards. Without fully grasping the intricacies of Haitian politics, it felt deeply uncomfortable to join the rich and corrupt of Port au Prince, quarantined from, literally looking down on, the rest of the city. Being guarded by armed security seemed wrong, but so did the feeling of vulnerability that there were only two of them. Violent gangs were roaming the streets, and we knew it.—---Given our show was funded by taxpayers, every dollar was subject to strict review. We had internet banking, but a deposit took at least two business days to land and there was no such thing as affordable international roaming. I had a cap on funds for the overseas leg and every call I made added hundreds of dollars to a mobile phone bill our budget could barely absorb. The only way to send an email was back at the hotel or in an internet cafe, neither a quick drive from the temple, and those connections were often unreliable.In 2003, the Day of the Dead and its associated public holidays coincided with a long weekend in our home-town, Melbourne. The banks were closed and I had already drained my account of whatever had been allocated to take us through to the end of our stay, as well as the hundreds more Jackie had insisted on since my arrival. Then, in the middle of the interview with the cameras still rolling, she advised that if we wanted to attend the crucial night of the ceremony, their fee had gone up again.A rush of adrenaline propelled me out of my body and I heard myself say to the team. “Get out”. I think the footage exists somewhere.“Selin, I think I should stay.” Roland had said as the others left quietly.“No,” I said more forcefully, pinching myself to control the tears of rage that would destroy any negotiation. “Selin - ““Get out. LEAVE”.At least I think I yelled. I don’t remember anything from that point including what I eventually said to Jackie that made her stop pushing me on money. Whether or not I raised my voice, against his better judgement, Roland left us to it.______ “I’m so sorry”, I sob.“No, I’m sorry,” he counters immediately. “I shouldn’t have spoken to you like that”.He gives me a hug but I have to pull myself together quickly. I can’t indulge the tears, I can’t release the tension. It’s the prerequisite of hyper-vigilance and we’ll need that to get through the next few days. Calmly, I try to explain that I had no intention of undermining his authority, only that I acted on instinct and to protect his relationship with Jackie. I was also holding back tears and if he had stayed, I would have cried in front of her - negotiation over. Roland is barely listening. “It was my ego,” he says but it wasn’t.While the crew have been filming and managing equipment and camera sheets and rushes, while John has been writing and rewriting, ensuring we have enough coverage, Roland and I have been hyper-sensitive to our environment, to the subtle shifts in dynamic, ensuring we respect our interview subjects, the culture, the religion, the community and our local fixers, We are also charged with protecting the safety and wellbeing of the crew and making sure John is able to pull together all he needs to fulfil our obligations to the stakeholders in Australia.The conditions around us are constantly shifting and sometimes these aims exist in opposition to each other, in a way I had not predicted. The truth is, Roland and I are physically, psychically and emotionally exhausted. And we’re barely half way through.—--Our Haitian “fixers” were a team of three locals: two Haitian men in their 30s and a white American ex-missionary woman in her 50s. One of the men, Djalocki, was spiritual and, years later, became a vodou priest and interfaith minister himself. The fixers provided invaluable decoding of the complexity of unrest among Haitians—instability fuelled by corruption, gang violence, and extreme poverty. The hatred many felt toward wealthy countries, and by extension us, was less complex. The colonising nations that had destroyed the country continued to profit from hundreds of years of savage exploitation of the Haitian people and land, the corruption and civil instability.On the day we arrived, having battled our way through extreme heat and humidity from the tiny airport into the van, Djalocki encouraged us to leave the window open as we drove away. “Don’t separate yourself,” he said. “You are not on safari.” “Also don’t point the camera at anyone without permission,” Roland warned. “National Geographic?” locals would ask us. They were sick of the documentary crews, the photographers. In Port-au-Prince, taking photos without permission could lead to violence, even death.Last night, on our way to our rooms, Roland and I had been standing on a balcony of the hotel, looking into the horizon. “Hard to believe people are killing each other just 100km away,” he said, referring to the violence in the city of Gonaives. It was a reality I had not properly grasped.“You’re not worried, are you?” I asked him. “I’m worried so you don’t have to be,” he said. But I didn’t sleep that night.—------ We walk back down the hill and the sun is lower. We’ve got enough time to get some dinner before returning for the evening’s celebrations. People are milling outside their houses and a couple greet us warmly as we return to the van. We’ve only been gone 15 minutes but it feels longer. In some ways I’m lighter, I’ve let off some steam, but I think I am unsettled, uncertain, do I feel unworthy?Jackie is nowhere to be seen but the crew are waiting with our fixers in the van. “Mum and Dad have made up” we joke awkwardly. It’s pretty quiet as we drive away.—---We’re in Day 2 of the festivities and tonight is the sacrifice. But right now, we are speeding away from the market, from a gang situation we don’t quite understand. Djalocki is driving and I am in the front passenger seat. When a boy on the footpath lifts his arm in aim, for a split second I see a rifle but it’s a rock bigger than my head that smashes the windscreen right in front of me.We drive for a few minutes then our van and the car carrying Jackie and Roland pull over to inspect the damage and so I can pick the glass off my skin and rinse it out of my mouth. When we get back in, Djalocki is quiet as he drives. After a time, he turns to me, and says, “You are blessed, you know". “How?” I ask, eyeing the flecks of blood on my arm.“A second later, you would have been dead”. I look confused for a second before he adds. “Your window was open”—--I’ll never know if it was our confrontation the previous day or this near death experience that finally won Jackie over but there was a shift in our dynamic and eventually Roland told me my composure had been noted and I had secured her respect. Perhaps I should have felt validated or relieved but the truth was, I didn’t feel anything. I was able to shower and change after the attack on our van, before heading back to Cite Soleil for the night’s ceremonies. There we were, in a shack cum temple, heaving with addled revellers, just the one entrance/exit in a single room walled with flammable sticks and lit candles. Relentless drumming, singing, drinking, dancing, and spirit possessions that overtook people at random and caused them to gyrate and throw their bodies around. The climax of the evening, the promised graphic sacrifice of a live goat, was for me almost overshadowed by the treacherous cliffside drive that took us to a village in the hills in the middle of the night. We slept restlessly for a couple of hours, heat bearing down on us despite there being no glass in the windows of the room we shared. We slept under nets to combat the malarial mosquitoes that were everywhere.—-“Bon Soir, Selin” a couple of kids have ventured closer to the van but there are quite a few people in the car park now, waiting patiently for the celebrations to begin. Tonight the goat that last night was sacrificed, that has been slow cooked using traditional methods all day, will be shared among the community. “Salu,” I smile weakly but I’m so tired, I can barely stand. Surely they want a chocolate bar, the back of the van is still open, and they’re on display. The crew are nearby but we’ve all had enough of each other and everyone is standing on their own, hair sticking to faces, clothes covered in dirt, munching in silence. Intermittently someone returns to grab another chocolate, a packet of chips or nuts or whatever else I was able to muster from the thinly stocked petrol station. Iclose the back of the van and I can see the kids are disappointed as they wander away. There’s not much left and we have a long night ahead.Who is left to feed? Djalocki is back, a few metres away, chatting to someone I don’t recognise. He must be hungry, he’s been with us most of the day. I wave him over, and he meets my gaze, but not my smile, then continues with his conversation. Something is off. I lock the van, ignore a couple of quiet groans and, as the person he’s talking to walks away, I approach him.“Dja?”He faces me coolly. I’m nervous, suddenly. “Are you hungry?”“Yes,” he replies.“Come and eat something, everyone else has,” but even before he replies, “No they haven’t” I am looking at the twenty or so people now milling outside the temple and my heart drops.“I don’t have enough,” I say weakly and I don’t. I don’t and I didn’t have enough to make sure the four people I’m responsible for can reset from today and get through the next few hours. But twenty minutes ago I did have enough to let four people who generally want for nothing go hungry so that everyone around us could sample something small.“Later tonight,” he says, “they are going to cook the goat and, like they did yesterday and the day before, they’ll share with you everything they have”.It’s not dramatic, the way he turns and leaves but I’ve had the wind knocked out of me all the same. Roland has been skirting the edges of the car park, and Djalocki joins him and they chat, relaxed.—Even if we hadn’t left Haiti the next day, I don’t think Djalocki would have spoken to me again and more than twenty years later, I still feel shame and even something akin to grief at the loss of his approval.----We had high resolution video and stills cameras rolling constantly in our 6 days in Haiti, a week that was profound, confusing, exhilarating, complex, terrifying. But I haven’t looked at any of it in years. My memories, many likely flawed, play out like film scenes. The light is always beautiful.There is one image my mind has turned to often in recent weeks. It’s grainy and low resolution, no sound, captured on my 2002 Sony Cybershot’s rudimentary video function. It was the morning after the sacrifice, the day before we left Haiti. After that broken two hour sleep, we woke to a beautiful country property in the hills outside of Port au Prince. We filed to a nearby cemetery to film a gentle Haitian ritual, something different to what we’d seen but another way they honour the Dead. It was broad daylight, we were outside of the city, no alcohol, no drugs, no temple, no candles, no rockstar vodou priests, no entourage and no spirit possessions. In my little selfie video, the director, Craig and I are drinking coffee at the cemetery. The sun is on our face and although there’s no sound, we chat down the camera and smile. 5 sweet seconds that still play on a loop in my mind.