No Means NO!

During my first week in Cap Haitien I was able to experience teaching in a third world country. We taught boys and girls of all ages about menstruation, puberty, abuse and sexual education.

I don’t think we ever expected to hear what came out of some of the little boys and girls mouths.

Our first teaching session we were speaking to the girls about abuse and the one girl spoke up and said most girls here are just waiting to be abused….

Our first teaching session we asked the boys how many have hit a girl before and almost every single boy raised his hand…and laughed

Our second teaching session we again asked about abuse to the girls and they told us that it is common for boys to hit , slap, punch, cut them and let them bleed…

One of the older males we are not sure if he was a teacher or what his role was but he was sitting in on one of our teaching sessions and told us a story. He said one time I was with a girl and we were “fooling around” and then we were about to have sex and she said no. He said I told her that it would be okay and after talking to her we had sex and then she felt bad after her…we told this man that yes this is abuse…emotional abuse.

We asked the boys why they abuse women. Their answer well if they don’t obey or they do something wrong or that we don’t like.  

We told the boys that this is wrong and that girls deserve to be treated with respect and so do they. Conflicts can be resolved over talking them through instead of violence. We enforced that they could go to jail for many years with barely any food.

We realize it’s a part of their culture and that to make a difference we need to start with the younger generations. But it shouldn’t be normal, violence is not okay no matter where you live. No one deserves to be hit, punched, slapped, kicked or cut open and left to bleed..no one!

All of this information made us sad, angry, hurt, but started a fire in a lot of our hearts to make a difference! It brought us to tears and we left a lot of the abuse teaching sessions discouraged…and feeling like we were just talking for the sake of talking and that we weren’t getting through to these children.

But then I shared with our group in reflection one night that even if we got through to one person…just one person, we made a difference, maybe only a small one but it’s a start. If one girl goes home and thinks, you know what it’s not okay for me to get hit and I am not going to let anyone hit me, we have made progress.  

And the difference is now we are forever changed…you can’t turn back from what you heard and your going to go home and your going to research and your going to come back more prepared to make a bigger difference next time!!!

So to my girls back at home, don’t be discouraged because you did make a difference, you made a bigger difference than you could ever imagine, and the Haitians made a difference in your life that I know you will never forget!

“I saw what I saw and I can’t go back”…Sara Groves