By Blaine Bookey, Esq., IJDH/BAI Legal Fellow

If day 1 could be summed up in the word ‘inspir­ing,’ for day 2, I would use the word ‘infuriating.’

I awoke at 5am to the sound of the roam­ing neigh­bor­hood rooster. To be fair, I was look­ing for an excuse to get up off the con­crete anyway.

I spent the morn­ing at a rally for May Day, or Inter­na­tional Work­ers’ Rights Day. At least 100 peo­ple gath­ered together and marched through the streets chant­ing things like “Leave Preval”, “Preval is a Thief.” Many work­ers were laid off ear­lier this year when the Hait­ian gov­ern­ment pri­va­tized Teleco, Haiti’s pub­lic tele­phone com­pany. I lost the group when I was stopped by a Domini­can reporter. He asked what peo­ple needed most. I said every­thing, but beyond basic pro­vi­sions women need pro­tec­tion and the sys­tem needs account­abil­ity to pre­vent the next dis­as­ter. Well, at least that is what I meant to say. The inter­view was in Span­ish after all.

I came back to the BAI to find one of the women’s groups, KOFAVIV (Com­mis­sion of Women Vic­tims for Vic­tims) con­duct­ing another train­ing on children’s rights. One of the lead­ers sum­moned me to the side. A young girl, only 15, had been gang raped. 5 men. One of KOFAVIV’s ajan (agents) had brought her to the meet­ing. These women are amaz­ing, they live in the tent camps and pro­vide ser­vices for other vic­tims, many of them are sur­vivors of rape them­selves, few of them eat more than 1 meal a day, if that.

We asked her why she came with the ajan. She said she had pain in her abdomen and wanted to see a doc­tor. It had been one week and she had received no care nor told any­one else about the inci­dent. She is liv­ing in one of the camps with a friend, her par­ents live in the countryside.

I called through the list of phone num­bers pro­vided on the card pro­duced by the UN agen­cies work­ing on these issues. No response. It’s a hol­i­day, I’m told. We even spoke with the Direc­tor of the Con­certa­cion Nationale (a national coali­tion coor­di­nat­ing a response to vio­lence against women). When we told the Direc­tor the rape occurred 7 days ago, urgency faded. She said we could not get a med­ical cer­tifi­cate any­more and we should just wait until Mon­day. This is not the case, nei­ther legally nor med­ically. The girl has some scars on her face and chest from where she had been beaten dur­ing the attack, and although no DNA at this point even if the facil­i­ties were avail­able, we wanted to pre­serve at least this evi­dence and make sure she was given drugs to pre­vent infection.

BAI’s man­ag­ing attor­ney arrived and we tracked down a Pro­gram Direc­tor at Part­ners in Health who told us to come to the Gen­eral Hos­pi­tal (now run by PIH). We waited at the hos­pi­tal for over two hours. We were then led to a dirty cot in the cor­ner of an open room with a man on a cot about 5 feet away. Tears welled in my eyes. There was no way I was let­ting an exam take place like this. The PIH doc­tor offered us her bed­room (well really just a cot in a pri­vate room in a pri­vate area). Our mid­wife, who joined our del­e­ga­tion from NY, ended up per­form­ing the exam. The other doc­tors were happy to give up the respon­si­bil­ity. I doubt any of them had slept in days.

The girl is sleep­ing in a tent out­side our office. Show­ered and fed. There was also no way I was going to allow her to nav­i­gate her way back into the tent camp where she came from, the same place where she had been raped, alone, after dark. Tomor­row she has to start the gru­el­ing process of tak­ing HIV prophylaxis.

It took 2 attor­neys, 2 grass­roots women’s lead­ers and a mid­wife to track down, at best mediocre care. PIH could not have been more con­sid­er­ate or accom­mo­dat­ing. Although we were able to work together to make today bet­ter for one per­son, there are so many more just like her. We are going to be work­ing with PIH, KOFAVIV and oth­ers in the com­ing weeks to develop a com­pre­hen­sive approach to pro­vid­ing spe­cial­ized ser­vices to vic­tims of sex­ual vio­lence (hope­fully in con­cert with gov­ern­ment agen­cies). Thanks for all of your sup­port this far, we will cer­tainly need it going forward.

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