Structurally speaking, NGOs are not accountable to the people they serve or the host governments. They are only accountable and this story shows the limits of this to their donors and countries of origin. Knowing my work in the field, a colleague with years of experience working in disaster response agencies asked me what I thought.
How can that be not surprising? Not one, not two, but at least three cases of confirmed pedophiles, former priests, sent to Haiti to hush angry parishioners in the U.
They only were brought to light in Haiti if they ruffled the feathers of the powerful, aligned with the wrong political faction, such as president Aristide, ousted in I lost count at four orphanages from the U. And many victims were young Haitian men and boys.
They are the good guys. But the cover-up was, again, not surprising. Where Did the Money Go? I had to send nine drafts, and successfully argue for a reconsideration, for a peer-reviewed journal article based on quantitative data, with statistics checked through SPSS. At issue was not the data themselves, but the interpretation and policy significance. Local staff people with sometimes decades of experience were forced to work for someone half their age, who do not speak the local languages, for a fraction of the expat salaries.
As human beings, we are all flawed. Most of us live with some level of contradictions in our lives, managing ambivalence or other multiple motivations. What do Haitian people say? Like every people on Earth, Haitian people are diverse and complex.
