Harassment Panel

I was recently asked to be on the harassment panel for the new trainees. As a representative from the harassment working group I have had time to talk to a variety of PCVs about the different kinds of harassment they face and their coping mechanisms.

I’m pretty sure I’ve talked about this kind of thing before so I wont go into too much detail but to say that it was great for me to sit in front a big group, to help facilitate discussions and to hopefully ease the minds of trainees a little.

I am, by no means, in a site with an excessive amount of harassment. I joked because it was still kind of early on my way to catch a taxi to the training site and no women were out. I felt like I was doing a walk of shame or something as I watched one man after another undress me with his eyes. Then I got to the training site and thought, well, harassment isn’t that bad in RoseValley. It is something you get used to. You don’t have a whole lot of choice. You either get used to it or go home. It is rarely threatening in my neck of the woods, if ever. It is just really annoying. On good days harassment doesn’t faze me one bit. On bad days I’d really like to sock someone. Of course I know better then that, they wouldn’t be afraid to hit back.

I felt like the training itself went really well. I worked with three other volunteers and we presented different scenarios to small groups of trainees. We then discussed, how these situations could have been avoided entirely, if they couldn’t have been avoided, how could you lessen the impact? How could you respond to them? Where could you find sources of support if you can’t deal with it on your own? These are very important topics because Harassment is something that volunteers face every single day and it can completely destroy a volunteer’s service if it is not handled in a certain way. That of course is hard because there is not one specific kind of harassment, way of dealing with, or way of avoiding it. And harassment is entirely subjective. What you may see as harassment, I may not. What I may see as harassment, the man doing it may not. The important this is that if you perceive it as harassment towards you, then it is.

The PCTs seemed receptive to the discussion. Hopefully they are prepared for what lies ahead of them during their service. In the mean time it gave me a chance to look back at my last 5 months in RoseValley and focus on the techniques I used to keep a positive attitude on the hard days. The worst thing you could do is become resentful and hateful towards a specific group of people. It hinders you service, makes it difficult to collaborate with people and makes it impossible to appreciate all of the amazing people that do exist and are present everyday in your community.