Ann Pale through the years
Ann Pale through the years
At the beginning, lest we forget, we had Windows on Haiti, released on April 22 1998, a hub of information and opinions which fostered among its users a spirit of solidarity and friendship, for the most part. That culminated in April 2008 in the 10-year anniversary celebration of the site. Though we had been debating Haitian Creole and Politics on the site since the turn of the century, using various forms, the Ann Pale forum adopted its lasting phpBB platform in the year 2003, becoming a center of spirited debates on current news, culture, language, politics, religion, spirituality and why not, even science and technology. Not long after the earthquake of 2010 however, the activity on the forum sharply diminished and many of Ann Pale's original contributors turned to Facebook, almost exclusively, as their platform of choice for exposing their various points of view on issues related to Haitian culture and politics. So, it is fair to say that the forum truly held its own from 2003 to 2010, but that after that point it gradually fell out of favor. Quite a few of the former participants reconnected on Facebook, the dominant social network of our times. Curiously, the warmth that had been experienced on Ann Pale gave way, in many cases, to more rigidly ideological and less interpersonal forms of expression. I suspect that at least some, and count me among them, will miss Ann Pale always.