Oxfam’s Haiti head ‘liked lesbian shows’
HAITI: In the year after the earthquake when large parts of Port-auPrince lay in ruins, young women went to the offices of Western charities to find work.
At Oxfam in the wealthy enclave of Petion-Ville, they might hope to meet Roland Van Hauwermeiren, the charity’s director for Haiti who resigned in late 2011 before the end of an internal investigation that indicated he was bringing sex workers to the villa rented for him in the neighbourhood.
In an open letter published earlier this month, Van Hauwermeiren denied paying for sex but said he had ‘‘intimate relations’’ with a woman who was ‘‘not a prostitute’’.
‘‘They were not really prostitutes,’’ said Mikelange Gabou, who was 16, under the age of consent in Haiti, a mother and in a relationship with Van Hauwermeiren, then 61. ‘‘Because Oxfam was a big organisation, many people used to stop at Oxfam and ask for a job. Roland loved that,’’ added Gabou, who said he would give her money.
She said that he sometimes invited them to his hilltop villa. ‘‘So it might be that he had sex with them and promised to find them a job, or sometimes he gave money or didn’t give them money. They were not sex workers. The situation obliged them.
‘‘He was a good person. He liked playing music and also he liked a lot of shows, to have a show at his house. Women with women. Lesbian shows.’’
She thinks he may have found them in nightclubs and is sure that most were not sex workers. She knew two of them.
‘‘These girls, some of them were coming with babies. They used to come early in the morning on Saturdays, coming at ten o’clock and spending the whole day.’’ He would ask the maid at the house to leave when the girls were there.
‘‘At these times he never answered his phone,’’ she said. ‘‘Even if someone had died and I needed Roland in an emergency I could not reach him.’’
Gabou, who is now 23, used to live in a one-room breeze block house on a rocky hillside, not far from Van Hauwermeiren’s villa. It was not damaged by the earthquake, which killed at least 220,000 people in Haiti. ‘‘I lost five family members,’’ she said.
A year later, in January 2011, Gabou was pregnant with her first child. ‘‘The father said that he would not take care of the baby so I used to go and sell things on the streets – spaghetti, milk and other things.’’
One Sunday she was out walking when Van Hauwermeiren pulled up beside her in a car. ‘‘He asked me, ‘Can I take a picture of you?’ and I said yes. After taking the picture he gave me a business card with his name on it and he said: ‘Call me’.’’
Three days later she gave birth to her son, Christopher, in the little house on the hill. Afterwards messages arrived from Van Hauwermeiren, she said.
‘‘Roland said to his security guard: ‘There is a lady who is very sexy but she is so thin, I want you to look after her’.’’
Another card arrived via Gabou’s aunt, who had met him in the street. ‘‘I sent back my number to Roland.’’
He called and asked her to come over but she could not because of the baby. ‘‘I sent my mother to him and he sent me nappies and wipes and a lot of stuff ... He did that for a month and after a month when I was able to work again I went to visit him. I met him and we started a small relationship.’’
Their conversation was sometimes halting. ‘‘He did not speak Creole but he could say a few words – just enough to talk to me,’’ she said. ‘‘We did not go that deep but it was a simple relationship, a loving relationship to be more accurate.
‘‘He used to leave the country very frequently. Sometimes that happened three times in a week but he used to help me, sometimes giving me US dollars or local currency. He used to help me but he had a lot of girls, and they used to arrive in pairs.’’
Some in Petion-Ville are defensive of Van Hauwermeiren. ‘‘He was not on drugs,’’ she said. ‘‘He liked to smoke cigarettes and drink whisky. I never saw him in his house with other white people like him, or foreigners,’’ she said. ‘‘It was always local women. Haitian women. Women were his distraction.’’
Coming home after work ‘‘he would shower, put on his shorts and his trainers and he was ready.’’ Then he would go out to ‘‘pick up girls in Petion-Ville’’.
Gabou, who turned 17 during the eight months that she knew him, thinks she may have been the youngest. ‘‘Maybe he was not charming but you know, Haitian women like foreigners – white people. So as long as the foreigner is providing money it doesn’t matter if he is charming or not.’’
Gabou said that he taught her typing and promised to get her a laptop, and to find work in the Dominican Republic. She said that he promised to help others find work too and took their birth certificates.
In late summer of 2011 a sign appeared on the gates of his villa to say that he had gone. ‘‘I saw at least four girls coming and knocking at the gates, until the security came and they left. So they never found any jobs and they lost their original birth certificates.’’
Gabou did not hear from him again. She uses a local expression: ‘‘When you consider someone a dog, you don’t say goodbye. That shows that I was not important to him ... In Haiti things are not easy. When you find someone who is ready to help you, you need to be happy with it. I should not want that person to go to jail. Of course he broke the law but on the other side he really helped me with my baby.’’ – The Times