# 93 A letter to Gina Rinehart

Gina Rinehart

Hancock Prospecting Group

HPPL House

28-42 Ventnor Avenue

West Perth 6005

Dear Ms Rinehart

re your rumoured new partnership with Scott Neeson and the Cambodian Children’s Fund

As a matter of principle Scott Neeson does not answer questions from journalists. He will neither confirm nor deny anything – including the rumour from within CCF that you will be investing heavily in the Cambodian Children’s Fund. If the rumour is untrue you need read no further.

If you are still reading, you should take all I write here with a grain of salt. Indeed, it would probably help if you started from the presumption that I am a nutter with a grudge against Scott Neeson. This is the kindest of the epithets that Scott’s supporters refer to me as in their public comments! I have no problem with being described as a nutter but please consider the possibility that there are some questions you need to ask Scott in you intend to donate to the Cambodian Children’s Fund.

I write here in my capacity as a documentary filmmaker, a journalist and a blogger. (And certified ‘nutter’ of course!)

You have had some experience with Cambodia and so know that nothing here is ever quite as it seems to be; that the epithet ‘Scambodia’ is an apt one for a country that attracts scammers of all kinds here to make a quick buck exploiting materially poor Cambodians.

Opening an ‘orphanage’ in Cambodia, for instance, is a license to print money. All those poor terminally cute children, with their wide innocent doe-like eyes, smiling from Facebook pages and NGO websites! What donor, what sponsor can resist the urge to reach for their wallets!

The fact that 75% of the children in so called ‘orphanages’ have at least one parent is no impediment to NGOs labeling them ‘orphans’. Kept in the dark about this detail, sponsors can obtain a warm inner glow that comes with giving an NGO $150 a month to ‘save’ the cute smiling ‘orphan’. That this child shares a bed with three others or sleeps on the floor is a detail sponsors and donors are kept in the dark about. The rest of the rescued ‘orphan’ child’s family lives on considerably less than $150 a month but this detail also is kept from sponsors and donors.

The fact that many of the parents have been tricked into giving up their children to institutional living (thumb prints on ‘contracts’ they cannot read) is no impediment either. Who is going to stop such NGOs filling their ‘orphanage’ beds with kids whose mums and dads then lose meaningful access to their children? The Cambodian Ministry of Social Affairs? No.

And if, as is all too often the case, these children are indoctrinated into the Christian faith, alienated from their own culture, to whom can these materially poor parents turn to get their kids returned to their care when they realize that their children have, in effect, been stolen from them? Human rights organizations? No. These have developed close (and symbiotic) relationships with the very NGOs that are filling their ‘orphanages’ (or other such ‘rescue NGOs) with children taken from functioning (but very poor) families.

In addition to the crooks, the scammers, (in the ‘orphanage business’ for the money), there are NGOs that are sincere in their desire to help Cambodia’s poor. They believe that the best way to do so is to remove children from their families, bring them up in institutions and provide them with regular meals, schooling and an education, whilst leaving the rest of the family in abject poverty.

In the case of the evangelical Christian NGOs there is another advantage that accrues to this removal of children – the opportunity to win souls for Jesus Christ. In this enforced indoctrination these well-meaning Christians alienate the children they ‘rescue’ from their Buddhist religion,  their culture and its traditions, their communities and their families. That most of these NGOs mean well I have no doubt, but their Christian benevolence has firm foundations in a sense of cultural and religious superiority. The children in their care, they believe, are much better off being brought up as Christians in an institution, cut off from the wider Cambodian community, than in the heathen faith to which their Buddhist parents adhere!  One only has to visit the websites of these NGOs to discover that close to the top of their agendas is the saving of souls.

That the creation of this ‘stolen generation’ of children is tacitly endorsed by human rights organizations such as LICADHO and ADHOC reflects just whose human rights they believe to be worth fighting for. Cambodian children stolen by NGOs to fill ‘orphanages’ do not make it onto the list.

The easy path for any NGO wishing to help poor Cambodian children (whether their motives be pure or less than pure) is to remove them from their families  and house them in an institution. This allows the NGO to create its own large extended family; to engage in its own social engineering experiment and get sponsors and donors to pay for the privilege. It also provides for great photo opportunities, which in turn generate donor and sponsor dollars.

The psychological and emotional damage done to children removed from their families and placed in institutional care is well known. That such removal is not cost effective is also well known. It costs between 5 and 9 times as much to raise a child in an institutional setting as it does to raise the child within his or her own family; within the community that is the repository of the child’s familial ties,  culture,  traditions,  Buddhist religion and his or her sense of personal identity.

The more difficult path for an NGO is to help children in need (of food, education, medical care etc) within their own families and communities. This is logistically much more complicated than going down the institutional path. Those being helped are scattered and their individual needs are different and require individualized attention. And great photo opportunities of the kind that institutional living provides are not available. A classroom filled with smiling NGO kids in residential care, wearing neat school uniforms, tells a story that is clear and seemingly unambiguous. Any potential sponsor or do not can look at the photo and say to themselves, “Yes, this is a successful NGO.” A photograph of a smiling ‘barang’ with a young smiling girl in his arms in an institutional setting conveys a clear message. This man cares for children. He loves them. He saves them. And they love him. How heartwarming!

And buried deep within the hearts of minds of donors and sponsors to institutional care provides by ‘barang’ is the belief that ‘good white people’ know what is best for ‘poor brown people’ and that the children are, when all is said and done, better off being removed from their families.

What image for donor and sponsor consumption can clearly convey the good work done by an NGO that is, say, seeing to it that one girl from a severely disadvantaged family now has an opportunity to get an education? Her labour is no longer required to fetch water, cook food and take care of her siblings because these tasks have been taken up by others in the community as a result of an income generation scheme implemented by the NGO. Where is the photo opportunity? Certainly a photo of a smiling ’barang’ holding this smiling girl in his arms in a village setting would be…weird! Unsettling! Not likely to generate sponsor and donor dollars. More likely to attract the attention of an NGO on the lookout for pedophiles!

Of course there are NGOs that do just this – help disadvantaged children within their families and communities. And they are to be applauded for their good work – much harder but potentially much more beneficial than the herding of kids into institutional care.  These NGOs are not a personality cult  based – as was the Somaly Mam Foundation and as is Scott Neeson’s Cambodian Children’s Fund.  Their value lies in the results they achieve within families and communities; results that are long-lasting and aimed at making families and communities self-sufficient.

Such NGOs have a more difficult path to travel in terms of raising money from sponsors and donors needing and wanting a quick ‘feel-good’ fix; the warm inner glow that comes from seeing a smiling child.  Such photo opportunities are not there for family and community-based NGOs. There can be no photos of the celebrity NGO (Neeson, Somaly Mam) hanging out with Susan Sarandon, Heather Graham or other celebrities as they watch Cambodian dancers perform for the Hollywood glitterati. The work of NGO initiatives that are family and community focused is boring from a photo opportunity point of view. The temptation to go down the ‘celebrity path’ is great.

So where does Scott Neeson’s Cambodian Children’s Fund fit into the spectrum of NGOs in the ‘rescue business’. It’s hard to know because (a) We only have Scott’s finely tuned and very clever public relations to instruct us what goes on behind CCF walls and (b) CCF staff, the families of children in CCF residential care, and young adults still within the CCF educational fold, are forbidden to talk with the media. It is a closed shop and anyone who speaks out is immediately banished.

I have never met Scott, despite many invitations from myself to do so. My impression of him must, of necessity, be based on those of his actions that are available to public view and on the reports of those who have either been resident in one of his facilities or who have worked for him.

It seems to me that Scott is not in the business of rescuing kids for the money.  And nor does he have a religious agenda. Without children of his own, it seems to me, and with a clear desire for adulation (especially within the world of Hollywood celebrity) Scott has set up his own huge family with himself as the old style patriarch whose every wish, whose every whim, must be obeyed by staff and residents alike. CCF is Scott’s own experiment in social engineering and all runs smoothly as long as no-one acts in a way that is contrary to Scott’s wishes; as long as nothing emerges into the public domain that threatens to burst the bubble of the self-image Scott wishes to project: Scott Neeson as Saviour! The 21st century’s answer to Mother Theresa.  

The nagging question persists, however:

“Why are there 700 kids living in institutional care when most of them have parents?”

Despite Scott’s grandiose and endlessly repeated statements about his giving up his $1 million career to help poor families living and working in the Phnom Penh dump, he was, when all is said and done, just a very successful marketing person working in the film business. And his success was deserved. Scott is very good at marketing. However, marketing a product is not the same as having a good product to market.

(It is worth adding here that most NGOs have, in one sense or another, ‘given up’ an alternative career in order to help materially poor Cambodians. You do not hear them saying “I gave up being a banker/architect/engineer etc.  in order to help poor people.” This is a choice made by individual NGOs and not to be endlessly bragged about.)

So, what is Scott’s ‘product’ – apart from projecting a public image of himself as the savior of the 700+ kids he has rescued from their impoverished families? Yes, pretty well all of the 700+ kids Neeson has in residential care (the exact number is a secret) have mums and dads; they have siblings; they are members of families and communities. Many of these families are still working in the Phnom Penh rubbish dump for annual accumulated wages that are the equivalent of a couple of months of sponsorship donations to CCF. How much of this sponsorship income finds its way into the pockets of the families whose kids are in residential care?  An interesting question, Ms Rinehart, and one you might like to ask – not just of Scott but of the families themselves. Without Scott or members of staff present.

Relative to the sheer number of families whose children are in CCF residential care my sample (the families I have spoken with) is a small one. Nonetheless,  I have yet to find any one family that has received more than a few kilos of rice in any one year from CCF. One family I know well (and have filmed with) has three kids resident with CCF generating sponsor income for CCF to the tune of $450 a month. In a two and a half month period CCF generates more income caring for this single mother’s three children than she and her other children earn in a year working in the dump. How much of this money goes to the family working in the dump. None! Is this appropriate?  

An example of how the CCF patronage system works is to be found in the case of one family renting a small ramshackle shack from CCF for $12.50 a month. The father became ill and could not work so the family fell one month behind in their rent. And what was CCF’s response? To lock the family out of its own home. See:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ve280RWEV5w

And read:

http://cambodianchildrensfund.blogspot.com.au/2014/11/25-scott-nesson-locks-poor-family-out.html

I have spoken with lots of people who have worked for CCF, who are working for CCF, whose children are resident at CCF but not with any children currently resident with CCF. This is impossible – not just for me but for any journalist. For some sponsors and donors, yes, but in such cases CCF staff are present to see to it that no child veers away from the company line. Perhaps you and the CCF board might consider arranging to talk with the children without any members of staff present. And perhaps talk to members of staff without Scott or other senior CCF manager present.

Scott’s response to a suggestion such as this will be to say all he can to discredit me. That’s fine by me, but please ask a few questions and do not presume that the answers you get (from a skilled marketing person!) are necessarily a true and accurate reflection of what takes place behind closed doors. (I should add here that CCF is not alone in its lack of interest in the precepts of transparency and accountability. This is true for many NGOs in Cambodia. They do not want anyone to know what goes on behind closed doors. And, alas, there is no-one, no organization, that will hold them accountable.)

It may well be that some children can and do benefit from being brought up in a residential setting – enabling them to get the kind of education they could not get if they stayed with their families. Helping the entire families of these children may not be a solution to a particular child’s need for a decent education. Cambodia needs as many well educated children as it can get. Indeed for Cambodia to eventually rid itself of dependency on NGOs, on foreign aid, requires a whole new generation of well-educated young men and women who can become tomorrow’s leaders in both the worlds of business and politics.

The more educational opportunities there are the better - especially for young women who, all too often, have to give up their education in order to perform domestic duties. And a decent education is not always available to them living in a remote village and in an environment in which there is the expectation that they will perform domestic duties of the kind allocated to women. A solid argument can be made for kids such as this to be housed in what amounts to a ‘boarding school’, but questions arise:

- How many of the 700+ kids in institutional care at CCF are from remote communities?

- How many of the CCF kids in residential care are going to local schools that are just a few kilometers from where their families live?

- Why are the CCF kids in residential care going to schools close to where their families live not being supported within their families.

- What is the quality of the education these kids are receiving?

- How many CCF kids finish school?

- How many go on to higher education?

- How many ‘graduates’ of CCF’s educational programs are gainfully employed two years after they leave CCF?

A program is only as good as its results. All too often NGOs are not results-oriented but wish to be judged by sponsors and donors for their intentions. Good intentions are not enough. The pathway to hell etc. It is results that count and without any independent assessment of results sponsors and donors have only the word of those that run the NGO to go by. This is unsatisfactory since all NGOs are on the lookout for funding all the time and are in competition with other NGOs looking to secure funding from the same sources. They need to make themselves look as good as they can on their websites, on Facebook, etc. The better an NGO is at marketing its product the more chance it has of securing funding; attracting sponsors and donors. There is little funding to be found by by an NGO saying, truthfully:

“We have discovered after two years, as a result of independent assessments that such and such a program is not working. We have consequently abandoned it and will no longer embark on any new programs until they have been rigorously tested and proven to be effective.”

Bill Gates did just this after spending $1 billion on an education program that looked great on paper but the results of which did not bear out the preconceptions and predictions of those involved in formulating it.

“Did Bill Gates waste a billion dollars because he failed to understand the formula for the standard deviation of the mean?  The Gates Foundation certainly spent a lot of money, along with many others, pushing for smaller schools and a lot of the push came because people jumped to the wrong conclusion when they discovered that the smallest schools were consistently among the best performing schools.”

It is worth having a look at the following:

http://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2010/09/the-small-schools-myth.html

My point is that with the Cambodian Children’s Fund education initiatives (and this applies to all NGOs) it is not enough to look at what is intended (no matter how noble the intentions) but at the results. And the results are certainly not going to be made apparent with photos published on Facebook or by picking out one or two feel-good success stories as evidence of the program’s efficacy

More questions of a more general nature:

- When CCF takes  2 or 3 children from the one family into care, does it split these children up – sending them to different CCF institutions? If so, why?

- Is it true that teenage boys and girls in CCF residential care are not allowed to form relationships of the boyfriend/girlfriend kind?

- To what extent does CCF direct the young people in its care into the career CCF feels is best suited to them? As opposed to the career that the young people themselves wish to pursue?

- Is CCF‘s approach to the children in residential care, when they grow up, one of wishing to control the direction in which they live their lives? Are they free to study whatever subjects they like? To pursue careers of their own choosing?

Broadly speaking, to what extent it CCF seeking to control all aspects of the lives of both the children it is educating and of the families of these children? Whose needs are being met here? Those of the Cambodian children and their families (and hence of the future of Cambodia itself) or of Scott Neeson?

Whilst these questions are being directed here at CCF, they are questions that need to be asked of all NGOs working with children who have been removed from their families? As far as I can tell, such questions are rarely asked or debated in a public context in Cambodia.

In the absence of transparency and accountability NGOs can make up their own rules. Their fellow NGOs, operating in accordance with their own rules, turn a blind eye to the human and legal rights abuses perpetrated by unscrupulous NGOs – the end result being that all NGOs are tainted by the misbehavior of a few. A sad state of affairs.

best wishes

James (Nutter) Ricketson