There
has been no knock on the door from the police this past five days so it seems
that Pastor Mulheran’s thinly veiled threat was more a crude attempt at
intimidation than a reflection of a special relationship between Citipointe and
the Ministry of Social Affairs. Why on earth would MOSAVY want to arrest
someone who, by his actions, is demonstrating
his desire to help a whole family lift itself out of poverty!
To
continue of with Pastor Mulheran’s letter. The sheer length of it and the
amount of nonsense it contains necessitates a rather lengthy response from
myself.
***
We
believe that the girls would be reintegrated at a much quicker pace if (i) the
girls were not being subject to having their identities exposed to the wider
public and (ii) the family did not continually rely on external support. The more
recent any external support has been provided, the less the family has the
ability to demonstrate self-sufficiency.
Here,
Brian, you demonstrate your profound ignorance and, it seems, a total lack of
knowledge of the Grameen Bank and the concept that lies behind micro loans. How
does a poor person with no assets ‘demonstrate self-sufficiency’? Where does a
poor family like Chanti’s find the capital to buy a tuk tuk? In fact I have
loaned the money to Chanti and Chhork to buy the tuk tuk and they say that they
will pay me back. If they do, if they can, that would be great, and I will use
the money returned to me to help another family. The point is that the $1,500
investment I made in that tuk tuk now provides the family with an income. A
modest income, yes, but no more modest than the income of most Cambodian
families. Five years ago Citipointe could have loaned Chanti and Chhork $1,500
to buy a tuk tuk. Did the church? No. When, in late 2008, Chanti and Chhork had a
boat to rent out to tourists for river cruises and a thriving stall business
down by the river but were hit badly by the world’s financial crisis (leading
to a severe cutback in tourism) did Citipointe offer to loan Chanti money to
tide the family over? No. For close to five years, Citipointe has done NOTHING
to help Chanti’s family become self-sufficient. Indeed, judging by Citipointe’s
actions, as opposed to the spin to be found on the church’s website, it seems
that the church’s interests lie in keeping Chanti as poor as possible so as not
to be deprived of two of its prize tourist attractions – Rosa and Chita. So
determined does the church seem to be to keep the family poor that you attempt,
in your letter, to redefine my attempts to help it out of poverty as a form of
trafficking in itself!
It seems
that the message you are sending to poor families such as Chanti’s is this:
Demonstrate that you can get up and walk and we’ll give you a pair of crutches.
Mind you, the codswallop you write about self-sufficiency raises yet again the
question: When did Citipointe consider the family to be sufficiently self
sufficient to be just weeks away from reintegration? The reintegration that I
interfered with through actions such as buying food for the family so that the
children would not suffer from malnutrition, paying rent so that it would not
have to sleep on the street, paying to have a tumour removed from Chanti’s
wrist etc?
And what
about Citipointe’s financial support for girls like Rosa and Chita whose
families are poor? The ostensible reason why you are helping these girls is
that their families are not self-sufficient. But rather than help the families
become self-sufficient (at least in the case of Rosa and Chita) you use their
inability to be self-sufficient as justification for holding their daughters
against the wishes of their parents. This is not Christianity, Brian. I will
hot conjecture here as to what it is. I will leave it up to audience members
for CHANTI’S WORLD to join the dots and arrive at their own conclusions.
One
other issue we wish to raise with you is the alleged threat (blackmail) in your
letter to Ps Leigh Ramsay within your email 12 Feb 2013.
Dear
Leigh
My
next letter, should I need to write one and publish it online, will not be to
you. It will be designed to put such pressure on you to justify your continued
refusal to return ---daughters to you that questions will be asked in the
highest places. In the meantime, here is my latest to you, online:
Our
legal advice states that this email constitutes ‘blackmail’ in that it
threatens us (with consequences) if we do not meet your demands to release the
girls back to the family…
As for
your suggestion that I have attempted to blackmail Citipointe by declaring that
my next letter would not be to Leigh, this is nonsense. As you know, my next significant
letter, a week or so later, was to Australia’s Ambassador to Cambodia. This was
not a letter that I particularly wanted to write; that I had hoped it would not
be necessary to write. However, after close to five years of Citipointe’s
broken promises I felt it important to bring the matter to the Ambassador’s
attention.
As any
independent reader of my correspondence
(my blog) can attest, I have many many times offered to work with the
church to help the entire family. Citipointe has ignored my every overture. If
you have a lawyer that wants to run with my letter to Leigh as an instance of
blackmail, go for it Brian!
…the
release of the girls is not within our control as the girls are in the legal
custody of the government under MOSAVY and they determined when integration
will take place.).
I have spoken with Chanti’s neighbours and others who
live in her community (including her Village Chief) and not one of them has any
recollection at all of anyone from MOSAVY ever coming to the community to check
to see how the family was coping financially or to ask any questions of the
kind that would place MOSAVY in a position to make an assessment as to whether
the home environment was suitable for Rosa and Chita. In the middle of last
year Leigh tried to tell me that ‘social workers’ from MOSAVY had deemed to
community to be one that was not suitable for Rosa and Chita. Upon closer
questioning Leigh admitted that it was Citipointe church ‘social workers’ who
had made this assessmenht. As with MOSAVY no-one in the community has any
recollection of any social worker from Citipointe asking questions or making
investigations of any kind.
We
sincerely believe that if you will understand what we have done and why we have
done all the things we have done over the years, that you might be able to see
that we both have the same desire.
A simple
question, Brian: What has Citipointe done to assist Chanti’s family this past
close to five years? A list please, with dates attached to it.
However,
the only difference is that your actions (which you believe are the best) are actually elements that are
causing greater inhibiting factors for the protection of the girls’ privacy and
their reintegration. We want to believe that you have their best interests at
heart (this will be hard, if not impossible for you to believe), then cease
your involvement and contact with the family and trust us and the Government to
do the very thing that is in your heart (reintegrate the girls) at a greater
pace.
Brain, I
need not respond to this paragraph in any detail. I do not trust Citipointe.
The church has given Chanti no reason to trust Citipointe. Your use of words
such as ‘speedier’ and ‘greater pace’ in relation to reintegration are truly
Orwellian given that the church has done absolutely nothing this past close to
five years to facilitate reintegration.
While
you may believe that your relationship is vital for them all, some of your
current actions are not helpful.
Which
actions are those Brian? Loaning the family money to buy a tuk tuk? Paying the
children’s school fees? Taking Chanti to hospital when she had a high fever when
she was sick with pneumonia, buying, with my Christian friend a house for the
family in the provinces? Please indicate to me and for readers of my blog which
of these and the various other things I have done to help the family become
self-sufficient are ‘not helpful. Then list the things that Citipointe has done
a ‘are helpful’. This is not a rhetorical question, Brian. If Citipointe is
true to the declarations it makes on its website you should be able to come up
with a long list of things the church as done to help the family.
We
ask graciously for you to give the Government and us a chance at reintegration
without your involvement and your compliance on the items we have requested.
However, for the sake of a speedier reintegration of the girls and the family,
if we don’t have that opportunity we will have no option but to use the law
against you as outlined in the document to expedite the possibility of
assisting the Government to reintegrate the girls without your involvement. Using
the law is the last thing that we want to see happen, because for you to be
convicted of a crime and serve a sentence may mean that you will never have the
opportunity to re-enter Cambodia again.
Brian,
this thinly veiled threat to use the law against me, to have me convicted of a
crime and to be banned from ever coming to Cambodia again is, to say the least
decidedly un-Christian! I believe it just to be a very crude form of
intimidation but it does reveal a lot about the mind set that informs Citipointe’s
relationship with Cambodia and provides cogent evidence as to why Citipointe
should not be working in Cambodia at all.
Citipointe
clearly believes that it has the right, emanating from its ownership of
Chanti’s daughters, to get on the phone to the relevant person in the Ministry
of Social Affairs and request that I be arrested. You make no mention of what
crime I am supposed to have committed but in Cambodia such details are not
important. Your suggestion that I would receive a jail sentence for this
unspecified crime again suggests that Citipointe believes it can pull strings
within the court system to guarantee a custodial outcome. Likewise with my
being banned from ever coming to Cambodia again.
I do not
believe that Citipointe has this kind of relationship with MOSAVY and that the
Minister of Social Affairs should take a very dim view of Citipointe’s
presumptions here. But let’s look at the crime that I believe Citipointe would
like to see me charged with – photographing victims of Human Trafficking. We
come back to the basic fact that, as you know, as the Minister knows, Rosa and
Chita are not and never have been victims of Human Trafficking.
You
claim that MOSAVY ‘deems’ Rosa and Chita to be victims of Human Trafficking. Is
this so or is it Citipointe, by virtue of the fact that it is supposed to be
helping victims of Human Trafficking, that ‘deems’ Rosa and Chita to be
victims?
Brian,
only in Alice in Wonderland and the Orwellian manuals of totalitarian leaders
can words be redefined to mean whatever you want them to mean. To be the victim
of Human Trafficking means that you have been trafficked. The term cannot be
applied to the children of a poor mother who merely sought temporary help from
Citipointe church. Good luck, even in Cambodia, arguing that the fact Rosa and
Chita are not victims of Human Trafficking is no bar to pretending that they
are and treating anyone who takes a photo of them as a criminal.
Let me
end this segment of my response to your letter with a brief account of what
transpired yesterday when I took Chanti, yet again, to see a doctor. Firstly,
the Khmer gynecologist (a woman) said that it would be necessary for Chanti to
spend a week in hospital for the birth of her next child. This will cost
between $250 and $300. Is Citipointe prepared to meet his expense? Secondly,
she informed Chanti that it would be dangerous to her own health to have any
more babies. Yes, she acknowledged, Chanti could not afford financially to have
any more babies but this was not her concern. She says that Chanti is
physically not capable of having any more babies without great risk to the
wellbeing of herself and the baby. A lively discussion ensured (with Chhork
present) about whether it would be preferable for Chhork to have a vasectomy or
for Chanti to have her tubes tied. The decision arrived at is that some weeks
after Chanti’s baby daughter is born she will have her tubes tied. This was a
decision arrived at by Chanti and Chhork in consultation with their doctor.
They are both adults and capable of making such decisions for themselves.
Whether I think the decision if the right one is irrelevant. I am helping them
to live the lives they wish to lead – not the lives that I think they should
lead. Citipointe’s decision that the house the family now has in Prey Veng is
not big enough for the family (despite the church havening seen neither the
house or a photo of it) is yet another example of the paternalistic attitude to
Citipointe; of its desire to control the circumstances under which Rosa and
Chita return to their family. You will probably be horrified to learn that the
village in which the family now owns a house has no electricity. Each family that
can afford it has its own small generator but what the entire village needs is
a big generator. Cost: $500. Would Citipointe be prepared to buy a $500
generator for the entire village? Is Citipointe prepared to make any financial
contribution to the welfare of the entire family above and beyond a $100
bicycle and a $40 mobile phone?
…to
be continued…
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