 My name is Paul Carmini, and I'm a graduate student at Central Michigan University for administration. Okay, can you spell your first and last name please? P-A-U-L-C-A-R-B-I-N-I. Alright, we'll get that done in a little time. Yep. Alright, so we're going to ask you some questions for our video, and then I'll ask you some follow-up questions when we're done, and I'll just have you back in a little time. Thank you for taking the time. First of all, what is your role at Central Michigan University? At Central Michigan University, I'm a student, just like everyone else who's in this class. We're either students, or as of May, we graduated undergrad or our master's programs, and we're all volunteers. We're part of an organization called Sexual Aggression Peer Advocates, or SAPA for short, and so we're all members of SAPA. It's a volunteer organization at Central. We run an online advocacy and a crisis line 24-hour days, seven days a week while schools are open dealing with sexual aggression. So sexual assault, domestic violence, stalking, harassment, and so we all volunteer as part of this organization, and we also do educational programming with it. And one of the things we do is this performance, no zebras, no excuses. That's good. I'm going to rephrase it a little bit. What is your role at Central Michigan University again, and why does that bring you here? Our role is simply with SAPA is to create an environment for survivors and secondary survivors to come into the system to find people to get help. A lot of people don't really know a lot about these issues. They don't know what to do to help people. They don't know what to do to help themselves. So we create a safe environment because we're 100% confidential for them to come in, talk with us, and figure things out. What we're doing here is Don Sapo, Department of Navy, Sexual Assault Prevention Response Office, found Steve, contracted Steve, and he's been doing a lot of help. Doing a lot of things for them with training command staff, and then we kind of got brought in because of the performance we do. It's been researched before, and it peels well to people who watch it. It peels well to people of our age. So that's what we're doing here is doing these trainings for sailors and marines around our age to get them educated on sexual aggression and eliminating bystander mentality. Well thank you, and we had talked about this earlier about what do they mean by no zebras? What they mean by no zebras, no excuses, is when you're watching Discovery Channel Animal Planet and they do a special on the safari, you see a herd of zebras out by the watering hole, they're just drinking, and then you see a lion, and it starts to stalk around them, picking out its target, and then it comes ambushing in. All the zebras take off running, scatters, and the lion pulls down the one zebra it wants. And once it does that, all the other zebras stop running. They go back to eating their grass, drinking water, because it's not them. They lived another day, it's not them, they don't have to worry about it. But why we say no zebra is no excuse is to kind of eliminate that bystander mentality. If the zebras were to watch out for each other, stick together, they could easily overcome one, two lions and save that one that could pull down. Paul, why did you join the zebras? I joined zebras with some personal experiences I've had in the past. This was a cause that kind of opened my eyes and I realized there are a lot of people out there, a lot of survivors and all these different issues. And I just wanted to get the education to be able to help these people and to help a lot of people. And doing no zebras was just another way apart from Sapa to reach more people, help more people, and gain more knowledge and personal experiences for myself to be able to further and better help people. You're a college student and had the option to have your summer off. Why did you choose to participate with the zebras instead? It really wasn't no brainer. This has been an amazing summer, an amazing experience. Doing this for the military, being able to speak with sailors and marines has been such an educational experience for us personally. At the same time, our military does so much for us. You guys go out, you defend our country, you defend our freedoms, and this is an issue that's happening within the ranks. So for us to be able to come in and help sailors, help marines, it's a huge honor. We've all just felt so blessed and so privileged to be here doing this. So could you maybe sum that up, your desire, what your desire was, and how you enjoy trying to help the military? It's a very unique experience. Really nobody gets to do this, especially civilians coming in and do this, and colleges. So for us it was an area to help marines, help sailors, help people who defend our country do something for them they do for us. And then at the same time it was a huge learning and growing experience for us as advocates in this field. What are some of the similarities between college students and sailors? A big similarity is that regardless of their sailors, marines, or civilians, a lot of them feel that nobody will believe them. They feel people don't care, they feel that if they talk to someone they're just going to get blown off because people will see this as just a women's issue. They don't really think it happens as often as it does. So that's a big similarity we're seeing when we're talking with both is they really feel like they can't go to people because they don't think they'll care about what they have to say. How do you think experiences between sailors and civilians are the same? They're the same that sexual aggression regardless in the military or in the civilian world, it manifests still in the same way. It's with different people and different environments, but the sequences are still the same, the characteristics are still the same. So it's still the same thing that's happening, it's just within the ranks of the military versus students at a college campus. What has been your most memorable experience as a Zebra this summer? I think one of them when we were in Groton we got to do a show for the McPon. He came in strictly just to see the show, introduce the show, speak with us afterwards and it was an unbelievable show. It was to 2,000 submariners, they were all real excited, real pumped for the show. The McPon got real riled up and just seeing that someone that high in the military really caring about this issue and really putting in the effort to come and learn and get other people educated on the issue was just, it was unbelievable. It was great. Now, this DVD, this performance is given to Sid Sothmors. We do it for our freshmen. Freshmen, thank you. I'm sure they get a lot, I'm sure it's a powerful experience for them. What do you hope to get out of it, what do you hope the Saders get out of it to take away from this? Really we hope they just get an awareness. The point of it is we do these vignettes that show real life situations of all the different sectors of sexual aggression and we just hope when they're leaving they're educated on it and so we hope to eliminate that by center mentality. So they can't leave and say I didn't know because they will know. They'll be able to notice these things, interpret them and know how to intervene. So we really just hope they leave and they make that change because that's why we're here. There's the issue within the Navy but we know they're the ones who can fix it. They're not the problem. They're going to be the ones who will change it and fix it. So that's why we're here. What type of reactions have you seen from Saders from previous shows? We've gotten amazing reactions. We get people coming up and shaking our hands and telling us it's the best training they've ever seen on sexual assault. They're really happy that we came because it's very in their face. It's very realistic. It's not sugar coated. It's not death by PowerPoint which they're beyond happy for. They don't want to sit there for an hour and a half watching PowerPoint slides go by. A lot of them have just been saying it's the best training they've seen, very helpful, very informative and really opened their eyes to something they didn't realize before. Great. Is there anything else you'd like to add? For all of us, we've just been so honored to do this as a whole cast because, again, the military does so much for us as a country and for us to be able to go and do this for the Navy and for sailors and Marines and to help them and have them come and tell us their stories and look for us for help. It's just been so humbling and such a privilege for us and we definitely haven't taken any of it for granted. We're just so excited to be here doing this.