Leigh Ramsay
322 Wecker Road
Carindale
QLD 4152
8th April 2013
Dear Leigh
Brian Mulheran told Lindsay
Murdoch (“Orphanages on List of Shame”) what he has told me several times –
namely that MOSAVY decides when it is safe for reintegration to take place.
This raises the question:
How does the Ministry of Social
Affairs decide when reintegration is ‘safe’?
MOSAVY could only make such an
assessment if someone from the ministry visited the family home into which the
girls were to be reintegrated, learnt first hand about the family’s income and
living circumstances, spoke with the family’s Commune Chief and with others (neighbours,
for instance) who might have some insight into the home environment. Their
assessment would then be put in writing and placed on file. And a copy of this
assessment should, appropriately, be given to Chanti, Chhork and the Commune
Chief to make sure that it does not contain errors or, in the case where
reintegration is not recommended, to give the parents such as Chanti and Chhork
an opportunity to present their case for re-integration. Is this what happens? This
is not a rhetorical question but you will not answer it because you do not
believe that you or your church are under any obligation to be either
transparent or accountable to anyone. And herein lie many problems.
There are good reasons to doubt
that the scenario I have presented above reflects reality. MOSAVY simply does
not have the human resources to determine when it is safe for 7,200 ‘orphans’ in
600 orphanages to be reintegrated with their families – given that 72% of Cambodia’s
10,000 ‘orphans’ have at least one parent and that this parent has a family.
Your response to this might be,
“but the She Rescue Home is not an orphanage.” Indeed, it is not. Whilst SHE
claims to be caring primarily for ‘victims of Human Trafficking’, in reality
(at least as of two months ago) only 16% of the girls at SHE fell into this
category. And yet the 84% who are not
‘victims of Human Trafficking’ nonetheless live in an institution that is
monitored by the ‘Trafficking’ section of MOSAVY which, if I am not mistaken,
operates under a different set of rules to those that apply to ‘orphanages’ administered by MOSAVY. If so, are Chanti and
Chhork entitled to know what the ‘Trafficking’ terms and conditions are – even
though, as we all know and have known this past close-to-five years, Rosa and
Chita are not victims of anything other than their parents poverty in 2008. The
sequence in my film in which Citipointe church conducts an impromptu church
service for poor families down by the river in June 2008 and then hands out
food parcels speaks volumes of how your church recruited its future ‘victims of
Human Trafficking.’
For MOSAVY to make a considered
decision regarding whether or not it was safe for Rosa and Chita to return to
Prey Veng to live with the rest of their family would involve someone from the
Ministry (a social worker, I imagine) travelling to the village, talking to the
Commune Chief, meeting members of Chanti and Chhork’s extended families (of
which there are dozens), checking to see if the house in which the girls would
be living was big enough etc. Quite a time consuming task and one that I
suspect is well beyond the financial resources of MOSAVY. That no one from
MOSAVY has visited Chanti’s new home in Prey Veng does not surprise me. Nor
does it really surprise me that at no point this past close to five years has
anyone from MOSAVAY visited any of Chanti and Chhork’s various homes, spoken to
their neighbours, their Commune Chief or anyone else who might have an insight
into the desirability of otherwise of re-integration occurring. MOSAVY simply
does not have the resources to make these kinds of assessments. It must rely on
the honesty of NGOs for information regarding families such as Chanti’s. And
such a system could operate efficiently if all NGOs were honest. Alas, both yourself and Pastor Mulheran have
demonstrated on numerous occasions this past few years an extraordinary
capacity to play fast and loose with the truth.
My experience with Citipointe
over the past few years of lies and broken promises suggests that
re-integration takes place when and if the church decides that it should take
place. Take ‘Srey’ for instance – the young former prostitute who scored 100%
in Citipointe’s laughable ‘Hope and Resilience’ test? Did MOSAVY play any role
at all in ‘Srey’s’ reintegration with her family? I think not. Please correct
me if I am wrong. As to why Citipointe should decide that ‘Srey’ was ready for
re-integration whereas Rosa and Chita are not, I can only conjecture.
My conjecturing is of no value,
however, in the situation that Chanti finds herself confronted by in April 2013
– her heart broken regularly by Citipointe’s promises (always broken), by your
church’s tendency not to announce family visits until an hour before they occur,
by the obligatory presence of a Khmer SHE employee during such visits who is
terrified of losing her job and by hers and Chhork’s inability to know when,
how or even if re-integration will occur. Then of course there is the
mysterious matter of the police! You keep asking Chanti to get permission from
the police for Rosa and Chita to be returned to the family. And then the police
ask Chanti for money. Are these the same police who came looking for me at my
guesthouse at a time when you were the only person I had given my address to?
Are these the same police that Pastor Mulheran would appeal to to have me
‘forcibly removed’? Could you please explain to Chanti (and hence to me also as
her legally appointed advocate) just what role the police play in MOSAVY’s
decision to either allow Rosa and Chita to return home or to remain in what
amounts (in my view) to a Christian prison?
Even more than Citipointe’s
preparedness, in Feb., to allow Chanti’s soon to be born baby to be placed at
risk as a result of her pneumonia, what galls me about your attitude to Chanti most is your total disregard for her feelings
as a mother. You are a mother yourself. Imagine if, as some point when your
children were 4 or 5 years old, some Cambodian had arrived in Brisbane and
whisked them off to live in an institution and be brought up as Buddhists and
refused to return them? How would you have felt? This is a question to you as a
mother? ‘Heart-broken’ would not, I imagine, even begin to describe your
feelings. However, you have, with no qualms at all it seems, subjected Chanti
(and Chhork) to a scenario over which they have no control, that has broken
their hearts regularly.
When ‘Chanti’s World’ is
completed and when you see it, you will understand that Chhork is a wonderful and
very loving father who could be a role model for other Cambodian fathers. He
does not drink, he does not gamble, he treats Chanti with great respect and
loves her to death. You don’t see these things in Chhork because, I think, all
you see is Chanti and Chhork’s poverty and presume, in an old fashioned
colonial way that dark skinned people cannot possibly love their children in
the way that we superior white-skinned people do. This is the only explanation
I can find for you callous disregard for Chanti’s feelings as a mother.
I have had enough experience with
Citiopointe now to have arrived at the conclusion that your church has no
business being involved in the delicate business of helping poor people in
Cambodia. You are rank amateurs whose intentions may be good (given your
religious agenda) but whose impact on the problems you seek to address in Cambodia
is negative. The pathway to hell is indeed paved with good intentions and
Citipointe is a classic text-book example of this aphorism. You would be doing
the people of Cambodia a huge favour if Citipoite closed down the SHE Refuge
Home and left the business of helping poor people to NGOs who know what they
are doing, who believe in family re-integration and who have the cultural
sensitivity to understand that Buddhism is a fine religion and not an affront to
your God. The presumption that Cambodian Buddhists must be converted to your
particular brand of Christianity is arrogance of the first order; a form of 21st.
C. colonialism that Cambodia does not need or want. Fortunately you seem to have failed to convert
at least one of Chanti and Chhork’s daughters to Christianity to date despite
your best efforts. You have been successful, however, in alienating Rosa and
Chita from their extended family (most of whom they have never met) and the rich
Cambodian culture of which the rest of their family are an integral part.
best wishes
James Ricketson
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