GPzMike Abroad

Wow, well we had a bomb dropped on us this morning. We all knew something really big was brewing during this past week or so especially because there were absolutely no rumors filtering around about what it might be. The clamp was down mightily on this one.

Well, this morning we found out. Three local volunteers got kicked off the program as well as banned from our base, including the public spaces such as the bar next door (owned by our landlord, Joe). They have been accused of sexual misconduct. I use that verbiage specifically because we do not know the extent of the misconduct. We do know that they each were removed from the program for different misconduct charges and that a week of investigation went into finding out what the truth seemed to be. In some form or another they accosted an international volunteer. Now, I know that the Haitian male mentality around sex is somewhat different than the US male mentality. They are generally much more crass and direct. Or they just jump straight to "I love you." and they will not take "not interested" as an answer.

I've heard rumblings from female volunteers that some of the local guys, both in the volunteer program and outside it, have been crossing the line into harassment on a number of occasions. I've always told the lady to go directly to the highest member of the staff on site and tell them what happened. I'm not sure if any of them ever took my advice. Perhaps I should have taken them to the staff member or reported it to staff myself. Perhaps that might have stopped this event from taking place? I can hope and think so, but I'll never know. I will never not take it to the staff in the future. Even if it's a language barrier problem or a mere misunderstanding it should be documented and addressed. I should have made that happen.

To top it off, two volunteers got into a bit of a fight on base as all this was coming down the pike and they were removed from the program as well. Dark couple of days for the local volunteer program. Yuk.