Neighbourhood Watch

[bcholmes]

We had a little bit of excitement tonight. I was sitting at the kitchen table talking to V, the wife of the couple who work here at the guest house. Both of them have been coming to Haiti for years, and they've done a lot of stuff. So she's telling me stories of things that they've seen, and people from the history of Lavalas. It's an interesting conversation. And then Te showed up. Te is one of the guards who works here. P and V know even less kreyòl than I know, and the guards have about the same amount of English, so it's always an interesting thing having a bit of a conversation. Te says he's looking for the "flash", which P and V recognize as wanting P's good flashlight.

P goes off to find the flashlight, and Te mentions something about a vòlè. Me, I recognize this word. It's from the French: voleur. Thief.

Now, I've been awakened once or twice by flashlights going by my window: the guards do keep a good eye out at night, and they check nooks and crannies looking for things that shouldn't be there. So I figured that they probably saw some movement and just wanted to check it out.

But P went out with Te, and it became clear that something more was up.

Beside the guest house, there's a soccer field -- the land belongs to the Izméry family (the same family that owns the guest house building), and it's run as a local recreation centre for the neighbourhood. Apparently someone saw a stranger in the park, and quickly a crowd of people confronted him.

So, some things about this were interesting because they're so different than they'd be back home. First up, this guy was a stranger, and everyone in the neighbourhood knew it because everyone in the neighbourhood knows everyone else in the neighbourhood. The neighbourhood was concerned that he might be a thief. Since it was one guy versus a growing crowd of people, they instructed him to lie on the ground until they could figure out who he was and he (probably wisely) complied. So by the time we showed up, there were about twenty-five people surrounding this one guy lying on the ground.

Now, at some level, it sounds like this could be a real mob situation. Twenty-five people jumping to the conclusion that this guy was a thief. But they were really orderly and organized about things. They asked the guy his story, and he claimed that he used to live in the neighbourhood (which is how he knew the soccer field), and that he was supposed to meet a friend around there, but he had to go to the bathroom, which is why he was in the field at night.

So the mob asked for his friend's phone number to check on this story, and the mob started phoning on their cell phones. Unfortunately, his friend tended to hang up the phone. (Perhaps the guy on the other end of the phone was afraid that there was some trouble, or perhaps it was all a lie. I don't know.) They also got numbers for the guy's brother and mother. Nobody seemed to be able to really mollify the crowd.

They weren't perfect; when they couldn't get answers, a couple of people slapped the guy. But mostly I was amazed at how orderly this mob was. In Toronto, either nobody would get involved, or it'd be a really bad scene with shouting or something.

Eventually the police came, and the guy was taken off to the police station; his mother and brother were going to meet him there. And the mob dispensed. But it was definitely a moment that was very different than anything I'd ever seen in Toronto.

Comments

[marahsk.livejournal.com]

It's great that neighbors are paying attention to potential thieves.

But essentially a mob "only" slapped this guy and made him lie on the ground before he was taken away by the police, for the "crime" of being a stranger in a park. Nice.

[bcholmes.livejournal.com]

It's not a public park. It's a walled-in soccer field run by the same programme that runs the guest house. It is strange for an unknown person to be wandering around in the field in the dark.

And while, yeah, at times the whole incident pushed on my boundaries, knowing that mobs kill thieves, here, I was surprised at the restraint of the crowd.

[marahsk.livejournal.com]

It's not a public park. It's a walled-in soccer field run by the same programme that runs the guest house. It is strange for an unknown person to be wandering around in the field in the dark.

Ah, I didn't realize it was a private area. That does make his presence more suspicious.

And while, yeah, at times the whole incident pushed on my boundaries, knowing that mobs kill thieves, here, I was surprised at the restraint of the crowd.

Killing thieves is bad enough. What bothered me is that there is no real evidence that he has done anything illegal.