Melissa Noel and Her Reporting on "Barrel Children"

Melissa Noel is an award-winning freelance journalist. She has worked for NBCNews.com, Huffington Post, Caribbean Beat Magazine and Voices of New York and the recipient of a Pulitzer Center grant to report on Caribbean children left behind by their parents when they migrate to another country.  On November 28th, she stopped by LaGuardia to talk about her reporting, the challenges she faced, the opportunities she found, and the children at the center of these stories.
Being the daughter of Caribbean parents, from Guyana, to be more specific, it was only natural that this subject didn’t seem foreign to her. In early 2016 Noel attended a Caribbean Film Academy screening in Brooklyn of the short film “Auntie” by Barbadian filmmaker and Barrel Stories Project founder Lisa Harewood. Both the fictional film and the documentary project highlight some of the very real ways migration and separation impact Caribbean families. After the screening, she met Melissa Elias, originally from Trinidad and Tobago. She told her about her own childhood separation from her mother and how it still negatively affected her as well as their relationship 20 years later. “I knew immediately that I needed to look into this further”, Noel said.
After all, the practice of sending barrels filled with goods is a common practice among immigrants from the Carribean, and that’s where “barrel children” receive their name from.
For about forty-five minutes, Noel spoke in great detail about the motivations and the causes that drove her to this specific story. To begin with, and according to Noel, this is a heavily under-reported subject that has lasting consequences in the region. It’s such a prevalent issue that local clinical sociologist, Dr. Claudette Brown coined the term after working for more than thirty years in the subject.  
Noel felt like someone needed to put a face, real names, to a problem that is widespread and almost universal among Caribbean immigrants. “While I saw studies done, I wasn’t seeing stories… instead of it being John and Jane it was group A and group B”.


After six months of preparation and three weeks in Jamaica where she interviewed local authorities, caseworkers, teachers, parents and, of course, local children, Noel returned to report on the issue. Now, she says, she is ready to go back and expand on her initial research to keep shining a light on a pervasive issue that affects an entire region. 

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