Taken advantage of in Haiti

So, I was sitting on a cooler in the volunteer area in the Hospital de Hai'ti, eating a dinner of rice, beans, beets, and potatoes out of  a Styrofoam clamshell box, when the girl sitting next to me says, "I think I'm going to take my money back."

[caption id="attachment_1365" align="alignright" width="156" caption="Seats were limited!"][/caption]

"What money?"

"The money I gave to the little Haitian girl."

I had no idea what she was talking about, so I asked her for the whole story.  Apparently, another US volunteer from a different group than ours had brought a young Haitian girl, maybe 12 or 13, up to the volunteer break room and had her tell her "story."  She claimed to the room full of doctors, nurses, and other US volunteers, that her parents had died in the quake, and the funeral was going to cost her one thousand dollars.  She then passed around a bowl for donations, and left it on the table in the room for anyone who was feeling generous overnight.

I listened to her, then I saw the bowl in disbelief.  It was brimming with bills -- not just ones, but tens and twenty's, and a number of fifties.  It was probably at least a few hundred bucks.

[caption id="attachment_1366" align="alignleft" width="167" caption="Space was also limited, so most of our stuff was strewn about. There was a certain level of trust we had for one another, that had been breached by this guy's malicious intent."][/caption]

I cynically told my friend that if she really believed that this girl was trying to raise money for her parents funeral who died in the quake, that meant that they died over a month ago, and did she really expect to spend a thousand dollars on a funeral for them, when there were mass graves being dug right outside, filled with hundreds of bodies each?  I mean, it sounds horrible, but a LOT of people died, and the country is very, very poor. We discussed it for a few more minutes, then she got up and pulled her ten dollar bill back out of the bowl. She received a few looks of disapproval, but nothing too intrusive.

The next morning, one of my patient's, a young boy who was covered in painful tumors (completely unrelated to the quake), began to cry.  I went down to the pharmacy to get him some morphine, and I couldn't believe my eyes when the entire shelf of narcotics was missing.

I went to find Brooke, who was in charge of the nursing volunteers for the entire hospital, and told her what happened.  What she told me next made me angrier than I think I've ever been.

[caption id="attachment_1367" align="alignright" width="165" caption="Brooke, the director of Nursing."][/caption]

It turned out, much of the Morphine, Ativan, and Valium had been stolen.  By the same guy who brought the Haitian girl up to the volunteer room with her sob story of dead parents to pander for money.

I told Brooke about the bowl with the money in it, and she said that one of the directors had already heard about it, took the bowl, and was letting everyone know to come to his office if they donated any money and get it back from him.  The man was trying to scam us, using the girl as his prop (rumor had it he promised her half of whatever they made).  After they found out, they escorted him off the premises and onto a plane back to the states. But not after they found much of the stolen narcotics in his luggage.

And the douchebag of the year award goes to...