Haitian Beatz

It is a time of planning with reflection. That's the best kind of planning, I've found. How to know what

to put on the old to do list if you aren't sure what works? Or what doesn't matter? In these days of mind-spinning technology, many of us use pictures to help move the new year along in the most positive light.

Everyone is a photog-rapher these days. Quality digital photography is available at our fingertips, literally. Smart phone cameras deliver images worthy of magazines. And even for those of us who aspire to great photog-raphy, the digital camera gives us the opportunity to freeze memories into megapixels, catalog, and print and share them. And if you are like me, you've spent time in the past month reviewing your own year in pictures.

They show the faces and places you love the most. The funny, the poignant, the pretty. Even though we have them by the boatload compared with the handful we gathered 20 years ago, many of them are precious.

"Don't see it through the viewfinder," friends and experts warned me. "Don't limit the experience to what you can photograph."

They were talking about Haiti. It's a culture I've only discovered in the past few years. To go there, to meet the people there, to share your life with others in a foreign land is a remarkable experience. True, you can learn about a developing nation in words or videos shared by others. You can hear the music, see the art, and hear the stories of a people so different than our own. But being there makes all the difference.

In 2011, I was fortunate to go twice to Haiti. In February, I traveled with a group to Grande Colline, in the mountains to the south of the small country. And in October, I returned to the Central Plateau along the border with the Dominican Republic. It was my third trip, and even then I heard the advice repeated, "Don't see it through the view-finder."