“You are a voyeur,” Scott Neeson wrote to me. He is right, if a
very broad interpretation to the word ‘voyeur’ is used. All documentary
filmmakers that take viewers into the lives of others are voyeurs. So too are
the viewers of these documentaries. We are social animals. We like to know how
others live their lives. All literature, all drama, all film, all forms of
story-telling are a way in which we can enter into the lives of others and, to
the extent that it is possible, to see and experience the world as they do.
The dictionary definition of ‘voyeur’ is:
“A person who derives sexual gratification from observing naked
bodies or sexual acts of others, especially from a secret vantage point.”
I doubt that Scott, in calling me a voyeur, was suggesting that
I get sexual satisfaction from observing the naked bodies of others. I suspect he
was inferring that, like a Peeping Tom, I filmed with Sokayn and her family
without their knowledge or permission.
So why was I filming in the Phnom Penh rubbish dump? In brief:
In 2007, whilst filming CHANTI’S WORLD, I found myself with a
few days at my disposal, with no commitments. I wondered if anything had
changed (other than the location) at the Phnom Penh rubbish dump since I had
last visited it a decade beforehand. It occurred to me that the number of
families living and working in a rubbish dump says a lot about how well a
government treats its own citizens. With an annual injection of around US $600
million from the international donor community, how much of this money was
trickling down to Cambodian men, women and children so poor that they had to
eke out a paltry living scavenging in a rubbish dump?
On my first visit to the dump at Stung Meanchey I walked, in
sandled feet, (not a good idea!) through the slush and mush to film what I
would refer to as ‘generic images’ of men, women and children at work, of
garbage trucks unloading, of bulldozers and so on. Figures in a landscape. I
was shocked by the sheer number of children working in the dump, by the putrid
smoke-filled air they had to breathe, by working conditions that would have to
be amongst the worst that any human being has to work in on the face of the
planet.
I returned to my hotel in Phnom Penh and wrote an email to my
son about what I had seen. I told him that I would go back the following day;
that I felt as though there was a story in the dump waiting to find me. A human
story. It is often this way with stories. You don’t go looking for them. They
find you.
The following day I went to the dump again and, within a couple
of minutes, caught the attention of a grubby young girl in a dirty skirt. She
smiled and waved to me. I smiled and waved back. I turned my camera on. The
young girl walked up to, took the camera in her hands, bought her face right up
to the lens and stared into it. This was Sokayn. She was 7 years old and spoke
very rudimentary English. She instructed me to follow her. I did. My camera was
still running. She took me to a line of rough dwellings made from scrap wood,
rusty corrugated iron and cloth to where her family lived. Their home rested on
a hill close to the entrance of the dump. The hill was a 30 ft high pile of old
rubbish.
Over the next couple of years I filmed sporadically with Sokayn
and her family. On each occasion I bought them rice, some other foods and gave
them a little money. I let them know, through an interpreter, that I hoped one
day to be able to help them in a more substantial way. (At the time my filming
of CHANTI;S WORLD was being funded by my job as a taxi driver in Sydney)
So, when I found myself in a position to be able to make good my
promise but could not find Ka and Chuan, I began what has become the convoluted
correspondence that you are reading now – correspondence that has as its
primary purpose finding a way to make contact with Ka, Chuan, Sokayn and
Sokourn.
Scott ’s and my email exchange is, as will be apparent,
cyclical. I keep asking that Scott and CCF act as a conduit between myself and
the family, whilst Scott places every obstacle he can in my way – justifying his
doing so with a mixture of insults (“You are a voyeur”) and by leaping to
conclusions about my motivations based on no evidence at all.
Scott’s obstructionist approach
has inevitably given rise to new questions. And, when Scott refuses to answer
these, yet more questions.
In fairness to Scott he did answer a few questions in an email
of 8th August 2012
8th August 2012
EXTRCTS FROM AN EMAIL FROM SCOTT NEESON
3 – All parents/guardians have an agreement with CCF regarding
CCF’s duty of care to the child.
This contradicts what Ka and Chuan told me, on videotape –
namely that they had entered into no written contract at all with CCF. I have
no way of knowing where the truth lies.
5 – Over the past 6 years, CCF have provided financial, social
and material assistance to the family, in order for them to start lives
independent of the garbage dump.
This contradicts what Ka and Chuan say. Again, I have no way of
knowing where the truth lies. I do know that Scott’s previous assertion that
CCF had helped the family start a new life in their homeland was not true. And
the question arises: “How effective has CCF been in enabling the family to
start lives independent of the garbage dump if, after six years of such help,
Ka and Chuan are still working in the dump?
6- CCF is available to address any comments made by the parents
regarding "their relationship with CCF".
7- CCF can provide the case file on Sokheng if you provide
written permission from the parents. We are unable to provide this information
without the parent's consent. With such a good relationship with the parents, I
assume they would consent to this.
Best
Scott
18th
March 2013
EMAIL
TO SCOTT NEESON
Dear Scott
In relation to two of the points you make in this email:
(6) 6- CCF is available to address any comments made by
the parents regarding
"their relationship with CCF".
I am in Phnom Penh, in the final stages of finishing off
filming. I would be delighted if you or any representative of CCF were to
provide your perspective for CHANTI'S WORLD.
(7)- CCF can provide the case file on Sokheng if you provide
written permission from the parents. We are
unable to provide this information without the parent's consent. With such a good
relationship with the parents, I assume they would consent to this.
I have, today, been to the home where Chuan and Ka were living.
They are no longer there. One set of neighbours believe that they have gone to live in the provinces. Another believes
that they are working in a garment factory. The phone number I have for the family
(***********) no longer works. Or, perhaps the family is in the province and
out of telephone range.
I have money to give to Chan and Ka and would appreciate it if
you could pass on a message to them that I can be contacted at 098208184
best wishes
James Ricketson
23rd
March 2013
EMAIL TO SCOTT
NEESON
Dear Scott
I am not really all that surprised that you have not responded
to my email of six days ago. This is your style. Ka, Chuan, Soyan and Sokourn,
the entire family, ‘belong’ to CCF and how dare an upstart such as myself think
he can make contact with the family!
I went through this before, you will remember, and managed to
track the family down despite your best efforts to prevent me from doing so. I’ll
keep trying and perhaps will be successful. Perhaps not. I do know one person
who may be able to tell me where Ka and Chuan are but she will not be back in
Phnom Penh for another week or so. Time will tell.
When last I saw Ka and Chuan I promised them that when I had
sold my film I would buy them land and help them financially to set themselves up
in their province so that the whole family could be together. I am in Cambodia
with money to give them fulfill my promise but you, in your inimitable fashion,
are determined to make it as hard as possible or, if you can, impossible.
I will put the money into a bank account where it will accrue interest.
It will remain in this account until such time as I track down Ka and Chuan or,
when they are 18 and allowed to take control of their own lives, freed from
your paternalistic neo-colonial clutches, when I can track down Sokayn or
Sokourn.
If it takes years to track them down I imagine that the family
will wonder why it was that you and CCF put so much effort into preventing me
from fulfilling my promise.
If you should have a change of heart, you have my email address
that you can pass on. Or, if no member of the family has access to or knows how
to use the internet, there is the postal service. My address is 316 Whale Beach
Road, Palm Beach, 2108, Sydney, Australia.
CCF is not, of course, the only NGO that has adopted your form
of paternalistic approach to caring for kids – a form of caring that is designed
to break up families and to give you complete control of the kids lives. There
are many others. Many. Too many. It is not just the government of Cambodia that
exploits the Cambodian people. There are plenty of NGOs doing so also – taking
advantage of the lack of a functioning legal system and the lack of a properly
functioning Ministry of Social Affairs to make up whatever rules suit them.
On the basis of my experience with you to date, you are just
such an NGO –making decisions on behalf of Ka and Chuan (two adults) because you
do not believe them capable of making decisions on their own behalf regarding
whom they should associate with and whom they can communicate with. This is the
very worst form of paternalism, Scott, and if you just stopped for a moment to
think about it, you would see what you are doing for what it is.
This email will either be ignored by you or result in one of
your arrogant pontifical responses. Such is life!
Cheers
I received no response to this email. Five months later, during my
present trip to Cambodia, I wrote to Scott again:
12th August
2013
EMAIL TO SCOTT NEESON
Dear Scott
A few days ago an
acquaintance of mine, wishing to make a financial contribution to an
‘orphanage’ in Cambodia, asked me what I thought of the Cambodian Children’s
Fund. I told him straight up that the CCF was not an ‘orphanage’. He was
surprised. His impression, from his online research, was that it was. I checked
online to be sure and my friend is, definitely, wrong. The CCF does not
advertise itself as an orphanage. However, given how little there is on
the CCF website about the parents of the children in your care, perhaps
my acquaintance’s confusion is understandable.
In response to his
question, ”Is the CCF a good NGO,” I could only reply, honestly, that I did not
know. Like him all I had to go on (other than my first hand experience) was
what I had read on the CCF website. It all reads well and sounds impressive but
then I had had, I told him, an experience with yourself that left me wondering
how much of what is on your website is true and how much of it is the CCF
telling potential donors and sponsors what they want to hear?
I suggested that he ask
questions and make a decision for himself based on the answers he receives.
Number one question, I suggested, should be “How many of the kids in the CCF
are orphans?” Number two question should be, ”What is the CCF doing to help the
parents of the CCF kids become sufficiently self-sufficient that they not
longer need to grow up in a large institution but can grow up within the loving
embrace of their families?”
My acquaintance was
shocked by the implications inherent in my questions. He admitted to his own
naivete and asked for more information. I provided it. Or, should I say, I
provided only the information that has come my way through personal experience.
And this personal experience is, in a nutshell, that for close to two years
(since Sept 2011) you and Patrick and CCF generally have gone out of your way
to prevent me from having any kind of contact with Sokayn and Sokourn’s parents
Ka and Chuan. You have advanced all sorts of reasons as to why this should be
so but, with the passage of two years, they do not hold water.
It would have been very
easy, at any point since Sept 2011, for CCF to contact Ka and Chuan, let them
know that I was trying to make contact with them and let them know how to make
contact with me should they wish to do so. (This is all very well documented in
our correspondence). I provided you with my email address, my phone number and
my physical address in Australia. It would have been so easy for the CCF to
have passed my message on to Ka and Chuan and then passed their response back
to me. You did not do so.
At first I thought this
was just you being an old-fashioned colonist, Scott, but when I did find Ka and
Chuan , another reason occurred to me. Whilst Sokayn and Sokourn were being
treated to a first world education, with access to computers, three meals a day
etc. their parents were living in a box with no windows, working six and
sometimes seven days a week in the dump to earn, in one year, a combined income
of $1,000. Why, I wondered, was CCF doing nothing to help Ka and Chuan?
In the meantime, CCF was
receiving (this is 2011) around $4 million in donations. In short, there was
quite a bit of money floating around. The question in my mind was (and
remains), “How much of this money, in reality, goes to helping parents such as
Ka and Chuan retrain and/or become self-sufficient such that (a) they no longer
need to work in the dump and (b) no longer require the services of the CCF to
take care of their children?
I asked some questions of
you along these lines but you did not answer them.
It was around this time,
when I made contact with Ka and Chuan working in the dump (at the same time
that you were declaring that you had helped the family start a new life in the
provinces!) that I asked Ka and Chuan what there was I could do to help them become
self-sufficient and so able to get Sokayn and Sokourn released back into their
care. Their answer was that they wished for, wanted and would be very happy if
I could buy them a small block of land and a house in their province. This I
promised to do. I made my promise for two reasons. One, I had become fond of
the family and two, I believed strongly that if I were able to sell my film
that those who appear in it should reap some benefits from the sale. I extended
the same offer to Chanti and she and her family are now the owners of a small
block of land, a house and a tuk tuk.
With Ka and Chan’s phone
number and knowing where they lived I had no need to use the CCF to pass
messages on for me. This was just as well because you had made it clear, for
the most spurious of reasons, that you had no intention of doing so. Then,
earlier this year, Ka and Chuan moved from their box out near the dump (to
refer to it as a home would be a gross exaggeration) and the phone number I had
for the family no longer worked.
Again, I appealed to
yourself, Patrick and CCF to put me in contact with Ka and Chuan again so that
I could fulfill my promise to them. You have consistently refused to do so all
year. I have tried in every way I can think of to track Ka and Chuan. Without
success.
As I have mentioned
previously, I will put the money aside for the family, in a bank account, in
the hope that one day, somehow, I will track them down – at which point they
will wonder, with good reason, why CCF put so much effort into preventing me
from fulfilling my promise to them.
In reading through your
website contents over the weekend, making sure that CCF was not passing itself
off as an ‘orphanage’ (it is not) I came across the following:
Pages and pages of
children (with photos attached) being advertised as available to be sponsored.
QUESTION:
“Do these
children have parents? If so, how much of the money raised through sponsorship
of them goes to assisting the parents of these children become self-sufficient?
Another sentence of
interest that I came across was:
“We provide cash and rice
support to a family for one to three months.”
QUESTION:
“Given the
level of dire poverty experienced by the parents working in the rubbish dump,
how effective is one (or even three) months of rice in alleviating this poverty
and helping the families become self-sustaining?”
The third sentence that I
found interesting was:
“For child protection and
other reasons, it will not usually be possible to visit the family home. But
rest assured that your visit to CCF will enable you to appreciate the reality
of the life of the child and family you are helping.
QUESTION:
“What ‘child
protection matters’ are being referred to here? What ‘other reasons” exist for
not allowing sponsors to visit the homes of children living in a CCF home? How
can a sponsor possibly appreciate the “reality of the life of a child and
family” without visiting the family home?”
One possible answer to
this question is (and please correct me if I am way off beam here) that CCF
does not want sponsors to see and experience the hovels that the parents of CCF
kids live in as this would be both distressing and raise the question:
“How come the
kids are being looked after so well whilst their parents are living in squalor?”
There were a few occasions
when I was filming in the dump, a few years ago, in the hovel that Ka and Chuan
called their home, when Sokayn and Sokourn came home for the weekend from CCF.
It was at this point that I first began to wonder how and why it was that CCF
could treat Sokayn and Sokourn so differently to their parents? Was CCF’s
breaking up of the family intentional or was it merely a byproduct of CCF’s
belief that the kids would have a better quality of life and greater
opportunities for the future if they grew up in an institution rather than with
their poor parents? Why, I wondered, was CCF not helping the entire family lift
itself out of poverty, as opposed to lifting two children in the family out of
poverty and leaving the rest to wallow in it?
Because there is no independent
monitoring of ‘orphanages’ in Cambodia, there is no-one, no body, to whom the
CCF is accountable for the way it treats children and families. I have no
reason to believe that CCF has anything other than the best of intentions in
the way it treats the children in its care. What I do wonder, however, is
whether it is necessary to break up families in order to help the child members
of them.
Good intentions are not
enough. We all know that the pathway to hell can be paved with good intentions.
I am sure that the vast majority those involved in taking Aboriginal children
from their families in the 19th and 20th centuries did so
with the very best of intentions. However, we now know that this experiment in
social engineering was traumatic for both the parents who had their children
‘stolen’ and for the children themselves – all too often forced to grow up in
large institutions. It is six years since Australia formally apologized to the
‘stolen generation’ for what was clearly a misguided policy. And yet, today,
with the rapid growth in ‘orphanages;’ in Cambodia (orphans who have parents!)
this discredited form of social engineering is alive and well.
The Opinion piece in
today’s Cambodia Daily (“Orphanages Make Children Vulnerable to Many Types of
Abuse”) expresses, with more eloquence than I am capable of, the dangers of
warehousing large numbers of children in institutions as opposed to the much
cheaper and more humane alternative of assisting these children within a family
context.
If you should have a change
of heart regarding putting Ka and Chuan in contact with me I would be
delighted.
best wishes
James
I received no response to this
email
…to
be continued…
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