Scott, here is
another family you know. The parents of the family that is – Pheng Heng, aged
60,and his wife Pok Poq, aged 52. You
locked them out of their home last month because they were $12.50 behind in
rent owed to the Cambodian Children’s Fund.
$12.50!
 |
| Pheng Heng and Pok Poq |
The Cambodian
Children’s Fund has three of Pheng Heng
and Pok Poq’s children in care. Given that virtually all CCF kids have at least
one sponsor, this means that CCF is generating between $300 and $450 a month in
income from this family without providing any financial assistance to the rest
of the family.
$300 a month is
3 times Pheng Heng’s monthly wage when he has a job. He doesn’t have a job at
the moment because he was badly injured in a traffic accident and has been
unable to work. So what do you do, Scott, when an impoverished family is $12.50
behind in their rent? A family whose children CCF is caring for? Lock them out
of their house during the rainy season.
What kind of
man are you? Such insensitive, mercenary
(and dare I say, inhumane) behavior is certainly not of the variety you boast
about on Facebook or talk about when interviewed in your jet-set travels around
the world to remind everyone what a wonderful man you are to have given up your
$1 million a year job in Hollywood to help poor rubbish dump families.
How many other
families have you locked out of their homes over sums as petty as $12.50?
You will not
answer this question, of course, and I can only hope that in due course the
media will start to ask such questions and, when you refuse to answer them,
report this – along with testimonies from families you have locked locked out
or families that have suffered other human rights abuses at the hands of the
Cambodian Children’s Fund.
Locking
families out of their homes is not the only way that your mercenary callousness
reveals itself. In my last blog entry I wrote of Tath Raksa – the 15 months old
baby that CCF is determined to ‘rescue’ from his loving but very poor
dump-working family.
Just three days
ago CCF staff went to the home of Tath Pheng and Kim Tath (the grandparents) to
apply yet more pressure on them to hand over baby Raksa. Has there been any
offer from the Cambodian Children’s Fund to help Raksa’s intellectually
handicapped mother, his grandparents; the entire family? No, it is baby Raksa CCF
is offering to help; not the family. You
want Raksa for your CCF nursery. Is there a spare bed that needs to be filled?
No doubt, in
due course, if you had your way, a photo of you and baby Raksa (a photogenic boy with big brown eyes) would
appear on your Facebook page and hundreds of people would ‘like’ the photo,
refer to you as an ‘angel’ and in various other ways heap praise on you for
being such a kind and generous man. A saint!
Until such time
as some arrangement can be made to help the entire family, I will be supporting
it so that the grandparents can afford to resist your high pressure tactics to
take baby Raksa from them.
Please tell your
staff to stop pressuring Tath Pheng and Kim Tath to give Raksa up. Tell them to
back off. You should not be harvesting babies in this way, anyway, Scott. You
should be helping entire families.
I can only hope
that it will not take as long as it did with Somaly Mam for the fraudulent
aspects of the Cambodian Children’s Fund to be exposed to public view. I hope
that you are exposed before TIME or some
other magazine puts a photo of you on its cover, hailing you as the savior of
Cambodia’s poor and powerless – a selfless man who gave up his $1 million a
year job etc.; before yet another hagiographic documentary is made by
filmmakers who have not bothered to do basic research into how CCF is actually
run, as opposed to how your marketing machine presents is as being run.
If you
desperately need a baby, Scott, find a woman you can have one with. Stop stealing
other people's babies.
