Scott
You know this
family. You wanted to take the baby from its mother and grand-parents and raise
Tath Raksa in your CCF nursery; present Raksa to the world as a child you had
‘rescued’ from poverty.
Raska is a good
looking child so his smiling face would have melted the hearts of sponsors and
donors and the money would have flowed in – both swelling CCF’s coffers and
your own ego: Scott Neeson, the $1 million a year film executive who gave up his high
life in Hollywood, hob nobbing with Mel Gibson and other superstars, to help
poor families working in the Phnom Penh rubbish dump!
This is how
your post-Hollywood life began, Scott, and I have no reason to doubt the purity
of your original intentions. Things have gone badly awry, however, and you are now
trapped by the all-too-successful funding model you have created for the
Cambodian Children’s Fund. You need a constant supply of children to ‘rescue’
to feed the appetite of your sponsors. Otherwise they may lose interest or take
their charity dollars to some other NGO
that is also in the business of ‘rescuing’ children – from poverty, child
exploitation and the sex trade.
The cuter the
child the more in need of rescue it is!
Unfortunately,
the model you have in place necessitates that you remove many of these children
from their families. Housing them in an institution makes for great photo
opportunities – gaggles of smiling kids in class, eating food, playing sport. Always smiling. (No shots of the dormitories
in which they sleep 3 and 4 to a bed though!)
Your funding
model must create the illusion that you are offering these children a much
better life (albeit institutionalized) than any alternative available to them. Without
you, without the enormous sacrifice you have made, giving up your Hollywood
life, their lives would be miserable! This
is where you are wrong, Scott. So wrong. Worse than just wrong!
Take the family
in this photo, for instance. You know their story. Raksa’s mother, Lim Kheav
Eak is intellectually handicapped. She was raped a couple of years ago. Nine
months later Raksa was born. Eak loves Raksa. So do her parents – That Pheng (grandmother)
and Tath Kim (grandfather). Grandma and grandpa, along with Eak, work in the
Phnom Penh rubbish tip. During the day, Raksa is taken care of by an 8 year old
girl, whose name escapes me just now.
The Cambodian
Children’s Fund offered to take Raksa off the family’s hands, raise him in the
CCF nursery and give him a ‘good life.’ CCF did not offer to help the whole
family – only the one cute member of it; only the one that could be used as propaganda
in your relentless pursuit of more and more money from sponsors and donors.
Yes, the family
would have loved some help from CCF but they love baby Raksa and would not give
him up to CCF. The result? No offer of help for the whole family! The message
you sent to this family was: “Give us Raksa or you’ll get no help from us.”
They opted for ‘no help’.
Many other
parents do not take the ‘no help’ option, They choose, instead, to give their
children to the Cambodian Children’s Fund in the hope that their children will
be well fed, get a decent education. The Cambodian Children’s Fund then gets
most of these parents (but not all) to sign a contact – the terms of which they
do not have explained to them. The parents are not given the option of showing
the contract to a lawyer or human rights group or anyone who can point out the
fine print to them before signing it.
Once the
parents have signed the contracts with their thumb prints, they are not allowed
to retain a copy of it. CCF retains the only copy and is then in a position to
tell the parents, further down the track, that the contract contains whatever
conditions and clauses suit CCF. The parents are then intimidated into silence.
If they kick up any kind of fuss, they
will be punished by CCF. The instances in which this has occurred are numerous.
As with the Mafia, you only need to knee-cap one person for their neighbours to
get the message that you don’t mess with the Mafia.
These poor
illiterate mothers and fathers have no idea of their legal rights and this is
just how you want it. Mothers and fathers aware of their rights are not so
easily intimidated. And one of the legal rights that these parents have, under
Cambodian law, is to have their children returned to the family if such a
request is made to CCF. This does not occur, as I discovered when Ka and Chuan
asked for their daughters to be returned to their care and you refused, citing
the contract you had entered into with them. They claimed that there was no
contract. You refused to produce us so who knows if there is a contract or not.
However, regardless of what the contract says, if there is one, they were entitled
(as are all parents of children in Cambodia) to have their daughters returned
to them whenever they asked for this to occur.
CCF has become
so confident in its capacity to abuse the human rights of parents that it often
does not bother with the formality of entering into any contract with the
parents of kids it takes from families. No doubt, upon reading this, you will
ensure that your staff get contracts with all mums and dads quick smart.
I have asked
this question before but I’ll try again:
“Could you
please make public, Scott Neeson, the contents of the pro forma contract that
you get parents to sign before removing the children from their families and
raising them in one of your many institutions?”
One day, when
true democracy comes to Cambodia, I hope that a legal class action suit is
initiated - suing the Cambodian Children’s Fund and all other NGOs who have
engaged in the theft of children from their families; in the creation of a
Cambodian ‘Stolen Generation.’