Leigh
Ramsay
322
Wecker Road
Carindale
QLD
4152
4th.
March 2013
Dear
Leigh
The
only thing that amazes me any longer about Citipointe’s exploitation of poor
families is that I am no longer amazed by anything the church does!
In
a recent letter I recollected that Chanti and her mother were paid $30 per 100
wrist bracelets made for Citipointe. The ‘ITS NOT OK’ bracelets. I was wrong,
but not by much. I asked my editor back in Sydney to check and she said that
the sum quoted by Chanti is $25 per hundred. Or 25 cents per bracelet.
25
cents per bracelet might seem to be a good business proposition for Chanti
until, that is, you learn (as I did from your website) that Citipointe sells
these bracelets for $3. So, 25 cents to
Chanti and $2.75 to Citipointe! Or, to put it another way, Chanti earns around
8% of the value of the product for manufacturing it whilst Citipointe ears 92% of
the product’s value for doing nothing other than transporting the finished product
to the marketplace - in this instance, the Citipointe website (http://store.citipointechurch.com/she-rescue-home/its-not-ok-wristband).
Such
exploitation of cheap third world labour could be somewhat justified, I
suppose, if Citipointe’s $2.75 share found its way back to Chanti in the form
of education for her kids, medical care for her family, rice, the acquisition
of clothes etc. Alas, this is not the case. The $2.75 per bracelet stays with
Citipointe – the church having made no contribution at all this past five years
to assisting Chanti’s family. The reason for this was articulated by Rebecca in
2008:
“Regarding continued support to Chanti, we are unable to assist with
distributing this sort of aid. Our focus is to assist the children in our care
as needed and the work we do with the parents is limited. If we were to be seen
giving handouts to one individual parent it could prove very disruptive to the
rest of the community.”
That’s
the reason given to me. What Citipointe’s sponsors and donors are told is quite
different: Citipointe is in Cambodia to help entire families. Citipoiinte’s
commitment to telling truth is tenuous to say the least.
Since
baby Poppy was born, (Poppy being her English name) Citipointe staff have been
around to Chanti’s house a few times offering to buy rice and milk formula.
Chanti has said no. As you will no doubt have heard back from your staff all
Chanti wants from the church is the two daughters Citipoitne stole from her in
2008.
It
is difficult not to conjecture that the reason why Citipointe is at such pains
to ‘help’ Chanti now is the realization that the church may have to relinquish
its iron grip on Rosa and Chita soon and desperately wants to be able to create
the illusion that it has , in fact, ‘helped’ Chanti. All that is required is
that Chanti accept the bicycle and mobile phone on offer (total value $140) and
perhaps a bag of rice ($40) and some baby milk formula ($20 for a big tin) and
you will be able to claim further down the track, with a clear clean Christian
conscience, “Of course we helped Chanti and her family. My Ricketson is quite
mistaken.” Yes, for less than $200 Citipointe might be able to buy itself a Get
Out of Jail Free card and hope that no-one who matters asks what, in addition
to this $200, Citipointe has done to contribute to the welfare of the entire
family in close to five years.
The
church’s total lack of help for Chanti this past five years (and I mean TOTAL
lack of help) raises, of course, the question of whether Citipointe really
helps any families at all – above and beyond a bicycle and a mobile phone? Does
Citipointe keep books? Will you release to your sponsors, your donors, the
public, how much money flows into Citipointe’s coffers as a result of its
activities in Cambodia and how much flows out? And to where it flows? Not one
cent of it to help Chanti, that’s for sure.
I
have just spent the weekend in the village where Chhork’s family lives in Prey
Veng – less than a two hour drive from Phnom Penh. We have bought all the
materials necessary to double the size of Chanti’s new house, though work will
not commence on it till later in the week because there is a whole rash of
weddings taking place right now.
Chhork
is one of 15 brothers and sisters. Indeed, in the village in which Chanti and
Chhork now have a home, it seems that everyone is a relative of Chhork’s; that
the entire village is one huge extended family. It is to this village that
Citipointe could easily have come in 2008 to see what it could do to help Chanti
and Chhork within a village context. In close to five years not one member of
Citipointe or one of the Khmer workers at the She Rescue Home has visited this
village. How can Citipointe even begin to think about reintegration without
visiting the village into which the family is to be reintegrated? The answer in
Citipointe’s case is clear. Reintegration has never really been on the agenda.
As Rebecca said back in August 11th 2008:
“Rosa and Chita stay with us until they are 18 or until she can
provide a safe environment for them, as defined by LICADHO and the Ministry of
Social Affairs.”
There
is no mention here of Citipointe doing anything to help Chanti provide a ‘safe
environment! As you know the church has done nothing to help provide Rosa and
Chita with a ‘safe environment’ (as a matter of policy, as you made clear in
August 2008) and now that the girls unquestionably have one, Citipointe is
still clinging onto the girls – determined not to release them back into the
family that the church has not only not helped but whose labour it has
exploited! Citipointe represents Christianity at its worst and I cannot believe
that Chab Dai, or any other reputable coalition of NGOs can tolerate to have
you as a member! The entire NGO community in Cambodia should, with one voice,
let Citipointe know that its exploitation of poor Cambodian families is quite
unacceptable.
On
the basis of the documents I have at my disposal and on the basis of what
Chanti, Chhork and others have told me, Rebecca had no legal right to tell
either Chanti or myself in August 2008 that
Rosa and Chita would remain with the church until they were 18. But then Citipointe
has never concerned itself too much with
the legalities of its actions, or at least didn’t until I came along and
started making a nuisance of myself in Nov 2008 by asking questions such as:
“Please produce documentary proof
of Citipointe’s legal right to keep Chanti’s daughters against her express
wishes?”
It
was not until 15 months after Citipointe removed Rosa and Chita from the family
that the church came up with retrospective justification for its actions in the
form of the contract entered into with the Ministry of Social Affairs – without
even letting Chanti know that you were doing so or for what reason. What legal
right did Citipointe and the Ministry of Social Affairs have to be entering
into this contract? Because Rosa and Chita were ‘deemed’ to be victims of Human
Trafficking – when you know that they were not? And never have been? And what
about the agreement that preceded the one Citipointe entered into with MOSAVY?
This one was with the Ministry of Foreign Affairs! What interest did the
Cambodian Ministry of Foreign Affairs have in the matter of two girls from a poor
family being cared for short term by Citipointe? What legal grounds did
Citipointe have for entering into this contract with Foreign Affairs? Again,
without Chanti’s knowledge, without consulting her and never giving her a copy
of the agreement between Citipointe and Foreign Affairs?
Chanti
has been asking for copies of these agreements for four years now but
Citipopinte does not believe that it is under any moral of legal obligation to
provide a mother with the documents that have led to her having her girls
removed from her care. The failed form of social engineering that led to the
‘Stolen Generation’ in Australia has
been updated and exported to Cambodia by Citipointe church. In many ways it is
worse, however. Imagine if, going back 50 years, well-meaning Christians could
pay money for the privilege of not just visiting an institution filled with
stolen Aboriginal children but of being able to wash their hair for them – all lined
up in a row! Even in those relatively unenlightened times I suspect that here
would have been (and quite rightly so) a public outcry. In Cambodia in 2013,
however, you can get away with it.
The
worst aspect of this is that Citipointe does not even see or understand the
cultural insensitivity the church reveals in treating the supposed victims of
Human Trafficking in this way. Citipointe thinks that this lining up of girls
to have their hair washed as something to be proud of and as added inventive to
‘poverty tourists’ to come to Cambodia!
All
the evidence suggests that Citipointe has been able to get away with this
appalling abrogation of Rosa, Chita and Chanti’s human rights by ‘deeming’ the
girls to be victims of Human Trafficking and somehow or other convincing MOSAVY
that they are. At the risk of belabouring the point:
Rosa and Chita are not and never have been victims
of Human Trafficking.
The
notion that they are, whether it emanated from Citipointe or from MOSAVY is a
fiction. A dangerous fiction.
In
order to justify its very existence Citipointe needs victims of Human
Trafficking. And if there is a shortage of such victims Citipointe needs to
find them; create them. What better way than to go down to the river, hand out
some food parcels to poor kids and their parents (filmed by myself), make some
great sounding promises to the parents of girls like Rosa and Chita and take
their daughters into care. That’s Step One in the Citipointe ‘How to Steal the Daughters of Poor Cambodian
Families’ manual. Step Two is to label the girls as ‘victims of Human
Trafficking’ and Citipointe kills two birds with one stone: (1) the church is
able to remain under the ‘Trafficking’ umbrella within MOSAVY and (2) the
church now has some cute girls it can present to its sponsors as victims and
who it can put on parade for the never ending stream of ‘poverty tourists’ who
visit the She Rescue Home to enrichen the lives of the girls by washing their
hair - and make a few quick and easy $s for the church in the process.
The
benefits of this ‘victims of Human Trafficking’ scam do not end here, however.
Because Rosa and Chita are now ‘deemed’ to be victims, anyone who takes photos
of them is breaking Cambodian law and can be put in jail – the most recent threat
leveled at me on behalf od the church by Pastor Mulheran. And, with a bit of
luck Citipointe can convince MOSAVY that Chanti , in her late 20 and mother of
six) should also be ‘deemed’ to be a victim of human trafficking (the fact that
she is not is just a detail) and so render the very making of CHANTIS WORLD as
a breach of Cambodian law. (So, Somaly Mam can’t tell her story!?) The church
thereby guarantees that its activities will never ever be scrutinized by anyone
in the media – the hope being that the mere threat of being arrested, jailed
and banned from coming to Cambodia again will scare off any journalists who ask
the kinds of questions I ask.
I
trust that any other journalist who might take an interest in Citipointe’s
removal of Rosa and Chita fromtheir family might start with this very simple
question:
Are Rosa and Chita victims of
Human Trafficking?
Hopefully
such a journalist will request, at first, a simple yes or not. He or she will
not be bamboozled by use of the word ‘deem’.
Once
our intrepid journalist has established that Rosa and Chita are NOT victims of Human Trafficking, the
next obvious question will be:
Could Citipointe please provide
documentary evidence that the church acquired and retained custody of Rosa and
Srey Mal in a way that was legal in Cambodia and, given that Citipointe is an
Australian-based NGO, legal in accordance with Australian law?
If
Citipointe can provide such legally binding documents the next question would
be: Why was the mother of Rosa and Chita never been consulted in the process of
these legal documents being drawn up and why has she not been provided with
copies of them so that she can know where she stands legally vis a vis her own
daughters?
It
is now much too late for Citipointe to come out of CHANTI’S WORLD with any
credibility at all. And you know this to be the case not because I have any
particular beef with the church (though I now do, knowing as much as I do) but
because you are as familiar with the facts as I am and, regardless of what
Pastor Mulheran writes, facts trump opinions every time.
The
very best end result that Citipointe can hope for now vis a vis CHANTI’S WORLD
is the modicum of redemption that would result from the church offering, over
the next five years, to contribute to the financial welfare of the entire
family and to make this commitment in writing. This would present some evidence, finally,
that Citipointe is capable of acting with genuine Christian charity and not
merely talking about it for the benefit of sponsors and donors.
best
wishes
James
Ricketson
No comments:
Post a Comment