Project Jacmel update: Claudel 'Zaka' Cherry is back in Haiti after long, emotional sojourn to U.S.
After a long and emotional sojourn to the Vermont home of his deceased best friend, Claudel "Zaka" Chery is back in Jacmel again.
This year was supposed to have turned out differently. His plan, hatched by his former American roommate and mentor Flores (Flo) McGarrell, was to attend post-secondary school in Canada or the United States en route to becoming a filmmaker. But the playbook for 2010 went fuzzy when Flo, an artist who ran an art institute in Jacmel, was killed in a hotel that collapsed during last January's epic earthquake.
The dark trauma that followed Flo's death inspired Zaka embark on a documentary project, a tribute to the life of his friend.
After a side-trip to Jamaica during the summer to film Haitian artists in a residency there, Zaka returned to Jacmel amidst much concern that his unstable living situation - he has no family and no steady income - would hamper his chances of getting a U.S. travel visa. The trip was critical for two reasons: Zaka had won a placement at the Vermont Studio Center, the nation's largest artist residency program, and it was where Flo's family had had him buried.
By some stroke of luck or good fate, Zaka got his visa and spent much of autumn on his first trip to the U.S., where he was surprised by the "huge buildings."
"I spent a lot of time with Flo's Mom and Flo's Dad doing interviews with them. Flo never told me who he was, really. I did research and I saw that he has a lot of work done," Zaka said. "A big shock was when I got in Flo's room in Vermont. The first night I went inside, Flo's Mom told me, 'This is yours now,'" he said.
Unable to extend his visa, Zaka returned to Jacmel in late November.
"Coming back to Jacmel was a hard time for me - we had all these problems going on with cholera, problems with politics," he said. Although he's happy to see his friends and to keep working on his documentary with editors from Jacmel's revered Ciné Institute, Zaka is still plotting to attend university abroad at some point.
"Since I've been in America, I was thinking: Everybody wants to try to help me," he said. "That changed me a little bit."
Jessica Leeder