Leigh Ramsay
322 Wecker Road
Carindale
QLD 4152
17th. March 2013
Dear Pastors
Ramsay and Mulheran
It is now
three days since I wrote to ask that you clarify the church’s position vis a
vis Rosa and Chita:
http://citipointechurch.blogspot.com/2013/03/a-family-visit-for-rosa-and-chita.html
You have not
responded. For more than four years you have not responded to or answered any
pertinent questions at all in relation to Chanti and Chhork’s basic human right
to bring up Rosa and Chita within their own family. Citipointe believes itself
to be above the law (both Cambodian and Australian) and the church has nothing
but contempt for Chanti’s rights as a mother.
Because
neither of you have ever bothered to sit and spend a day with Chanti and her
family you are blissfully unaware of the love that exists between the kids and
their parents; blissfully unaware of what an amazing grandmother Chanti’s mother Vanna is and what
a doting and good father Chhork is – as CHANTI’S WORLD will reveal. You do not see Srey Ka come home
from school proud of her ability, now, to write in Khmer. In short, after all
these years, you do not know this family at all. There are merely a generic
‘poor family’ and, in your minds, Citipointe’s capacity to feed, clothe and
educate Rosa and Chita in an institution is far superior to Chanti’s ability to
feed, educate and clothe the girls within a family context – with some help
from Citipointe or some other NGO. Or, in my case, with the assistance of a
friend of the family of 18 years standing. I am now doing all the things that
Citipointe promised Chanti it would do back in mid 2008; all the things that a
good NGO would do to help make a family self-sufficient. Yet it is Citipointe
that retains custody of the girls and deems it appropriate to limit their
visits with their family to two hours in hot sun on the boulevard down by the
Bassac River! If Citipointe had, as its primary objective, alienating Rosa and Chita from their family,
their religion, their culture, the church could not have come up with a better
program than the one it has in place.
There is one
further aspect of this ‘family visit’ that I would like to place on record. I
almost wrote ‘to ask you about’ but I know from experience that there is no
point in asking either of you anything. You believe Rosa and Chita to be church
property and that no third party has any right to query the legality or the
efficacy of Citipointe’s actions.
“Who was the
third girl that accompanied Rosa and Chita on the family visit?” Given that the
young woman staff member from the She Rescue Home was never more than five feet
from Rosa and Chita, this necessitated that the third girl (whom I would guess
to be about 10 years old) was also in very close proximity to Rosa, Chita and
Chanti all the time. So, rather than allow Rosa and Chita to visit the whole
family (Rosa and Chita have four siblings, a father and a grandmother) in the
family home, Citipointe arranges for the meeting to happen in hot sun (with an
almost total absence of shade) with a third girl in tow – rendering impossible
expressions of spontaneous affection between Rosa and Chita and their mother.
Who was this girl? Why was she present during this family visit? Were Rosa and
Chita to be present when this girl visited her own family later? Was Citipointe
killing two birds with one stone here?
Of course no
answers to questions such as this (to any questions) will be forthcoming from
Citipointe. You are an NGO that does not even go through the motions of
adhering to the precepts of transparency and accountability. I would have
thought that Chab Dai might have certain standards that it expected members of
its coalition to abide by but it appears not. Each and every member can, if
they so wish, deceive or trick illiterate parents into placing their thump
prints on a document that the church can then present to the parents as a
contract in which they have essentially signed away all rights to their
children. That this practice can be condoned by Chab Dai (through its silence,
if nothing else) is beyond mind-boggling and raises questions about what other
practices Chab Dai allows its coalition members to get away with!?
This past six
weeks I have had many encounters with poor families similar to Chanti’s but I
will only mention one here because it so clearly highlights what is wrong with
Citipointe’s approach to ‘rescuing’ girls.
I will call
this girl (young woman) Srey Mom. Mom works down by the river selling cold
water to passers by – Khmerand tourists alike. Mom is 17 years old and has been
doing this job since she was 10. Mom speaks very good English as a result of
her parents sending her to a school that costs $85 per term. Mom’s father is
too sick to work so her mother has three jobs. Commencing at 5 in the morning
she works as a washer woman – washing clothes. She then works a full day as a
municipal gardener. When she finishes this job she prepares food to sell in
night markets, finishing at around 10 pm – a 17 hour day. Her monthly wage for
this 100 hour working week is $140. That’s 400 hours work for $140 or around 35
cents per hour.
Out of Mom’s
three monthly salary of $420, she pays $85 for Mom’s school fees. The room the
family lives in (Mom has a young brother also) costs $50 a month or $150 for
three months. So, out of Mom’s mother’s wages per three months $235 are spent
on rent and school fees. This leaves $185 for the family to live on for three
months or $15 a week. That’s $15 a week for food, clothes, medical care for
Mom’s father and other sundry living expenses.
$15 a week is
not sufficient for the family to live on so Mom, after school, sells cold water
down by the river. She works from around 4 in the afternoon till 10 at night.
On a good day she makes $5 – all of which she gives to her mother. Mom has been
doing this since she was 10. Not only is Mom a delightful and intelligent young
woman, she is not a beggar. I did not meet her though begging but when I bought
a cold drink of water from her. Mom’s mother works three jobs to educate her
daughter and Mom helps her mother do this. Mom is a remarkable young woman.
When I asked her what she wanted to be when she finished school she replied, “A
superstar.” Whilst superstardom is probably beyond her Mom has the
intelligence, the drive and the burning passion to succeed in her life if only
she can get a little help.
Imagine the
scenario, five years ago, when Mom was 12 and if she had met someone from
Citipointe down by the river. The church’s immediate response to a 12 year old
girl selling water down by the river would have been she was at risk and
perhaps in need of the kind of help Citipointe offered Chanti. If Mom’s mother,
exhausted from working three jobs a day, had accepted interim help from
Citipointe, if Mom’s mother had placed her thumb print on a sham Citipointe
contract, Mom could now be living in the She Rescue Home and be available not
only to be sponsored but to be a tourist attraction for Citipointe’s ‘poverty
tourists’. Mom could be ‘deemed’ to be a victim of Human Trafficking or at risk
of being a victim of Human Trafficking. Mom’s mother would be devastated to
have lost her only daughter, the Chab Dai Coaltion would have turned a blind
eye to this abuse of Mom’s and her parents human rights and LICADHO would not
bother, if my experience is anything to go by, to respond to any correspondence
from any person advocating on behalf of Mom’s mother to have her daughter
returned to her care. In Australia we are, as a nation, ashamed of having acted
this way in relation to Aboriginal children and yet, in Cambodia, children can
be ‘stolen’ from their parents with impunity – despite the number of human
rights organizations in Cambodia!
Mom is not a
fictional character. Citipointe or any other NGO that might be reading this
blog can meet her, talk to her, find out what hers and her family’s needs are.
If Citipointe were to act in a truly Christian manner it could do one or both
the following:
Pay Mom’s
school fees $555
per annum
Provide the
family with one bag
of rice per month $480
per annum
For around
$1000 per annum Citipointe could lift the burden from Mom’s mother’s shoulders
and make it unnecessary for her to work 17 hour days to provide her daughter with
an education. This sum would also make it unnecessary for Mom to sell water
after school and, instead, to spend this time studying much harder than she is
able to. Fir around $1000 a year Citipointe could ‘rescue’ an entire family and
give Mom a very real chance of becoming a ‘superstar’ in whatever field she
chooses to follow in life.
Such an
approach on the part of Citipointe would, of course, necessitate that the
church made, as its top priority, keeping the family together; not extracting
one member of the family from poverty for a number of years and then sending
them back into the world of poverty they came from when they turn 18 –
alienated from their family, their religion, their culture and without the
requisite skills to survive in the real world.
I am sure that
it is a lot of fun for your girls to get to swim in a clean chlorinated pool,
to be able to play computer games and so on but their parents will be unable to
provide them with such luxuries when they are 18 and God knows what they may be
tempted to do in order to satisfy their desire for the consumer goods that
Citipointe has encouraged them to see as their right.
Unless
Citipointe shifts its focus to helping entire families such as Mom’s and Chanti’s,
I believe that your church is actually doing more damage than good in the long
term and hope that the Ministry of Social Affairs closes down the She Refuge
Home and transfers the girls in the care of Citipointe to NGOs committed to
helping families within communities.
best wishes
James
Ricketson
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