|
Mey Mey, aged 3 |
Dear Scott Neeson
Meet Leng Kak, aged 45, with the 2nd
youngest of her 8 children, Mey Mey, aged 3.
|
Leng Kak & Mey Mey
|
Mey Mey’s family has generated $45,000 (at least) in
sponsorship monies for CCF over the past five years. 6 of Kak’s 8 children are
back working in the Phnom Penh rubbish dump. The family has nothing to show for
CCF’s 5 year intervention in the lives of the children and their mother.
|
Mey Mey |
Here is Kak off to work in the
Phnom Penh rubbish dump, carrying the tools of her scavenger’s trade.
|
Leng Kak leaves for work |
6 of Kak’s 8 children work with
her in the dump.
|
Leng Kak's 8 children |
You may recognize Seang Kry. She,
along with 4 of her siblings, were in residential care with the Cambodian
Children’s Fund for five years.
|
Seang Kry |
Seang Kry is too young to work 11
hours a day, 7 days a week in the dump. She only works a few days a week.
Her 11 year old sister, Seang Ly
is not too young, however. She works in the dump every day.
|
Seang Kry & Seang Ly |
And
nor is her 15 year old brother, Vouern too young. He can earn
between $2 & $3 a day scavenging and help support the family.
|
Vouern |
Sister
Seang Vy, aged 14, is not too young either to work full time in the dump. She
and Seang Ly were in CCF residential care until earlier this year.
|
Seang Ly & Seang Vy |
You
may recognize Seang Vy. CCF staff told her earlier this year her that if she
wanted to stay in residential care she would have to work, unpaid, taking care
of CCF children as a nanny. (Forcing kids to work for no wage is but one of the
many scams you are involved in.)
Behind
Seang Vy and Seang Ly in this photo, sister Seang Kry plays with her friends on
top of bags of scavenged plastic.
|
Seang Vy & Seang Ly |
The
buyers of recycled plastic will only pay for clean plastic. One of Kak’s jobs
is cleaning the plastic. To do this she must stand, waist deep, in stagnant
toxic water.
|
Leng Kak cleans scavenged plastic |
Below
the waist infections are common. The family has no money to go to the
doctor so infections (common in the line of work the family is engaged it) must
simply be endured.
This
is Sopaul, not a member of Leng Kak’s family but a neighbor in the small
community that lives by the dump.
|
Sopaul |
Aged
67, Sopaul works full time as a scavenger, and has done for 26 years.
|
Sopaul & Raksmey |
She
had a badly infected finger recently. Unable to afford to visit a
doctor she cut a hole in a lime and put her finger in it to avoid further
infection.
|
Sopaul |
Sopaul
has not received one cent of assistance from CCF’s ‘Granny Program’.
Kak’s
youngest daughter Meng Hong's prospects for the future do not look good.
|
Meng Hong, aged 2, Leng Kak's youngest child |
Nor do those of sister Mey Mey.
|
Mey Mey, aged 3 |
When
they are old enough they will join their siblings working in the dump or in
some other similarly demeaning form of slave labour.
The
Cambodian Children’s Fund has played a significant role in the lives of the
members of this family for the past half decade. The question is: “Has CCF
helped this family in any meaningful way?”
|
Seang Ly, Leng Kak, Mey Mey, Seang Vy |
Some
maths will help here:
Whilst
in residential care each of Kak’s 5 children had a sponsor paying $150 a
month to CCF.
Sponsors
were paying $750 a month to care for 5 children.
Kak’s
5 children were generating $9,000 a year of income for CCF.
All
5 children were attending government schools. These are free of charge, so their
education cost CCF nothing.
All
5 of Kak’s children were sleeping at night in dormitories – 2, 3 and 4 kids to
one bed. And the children were placed in different residential care facilities,
as is CCF’s policy. Keeping families together is not a top CCF priority.
|
Seang Ly |
If
CCF’s figures are to be believed (in fact, they cannot be trusted!) it was
costing you $1,800 per annum to take care of one of Kak’s children – close to
double the per capita income in Cambodia.
In
the meantime Kak was working 11 hours a day, 7 days a week, to support herself,
Meng Hong and Mey Mey. Her income for the year was less than $1000.
CCF
boasts of its ‘Outreach’ program. In the case of Kak’s family, this amounted to
‘Rice Support’ - $250 of rice each year.
|
Leng Kak,Mey Mey & Seang Kry |
Some
more maths:
CCF
Sponsors supported 5 of Kak’s children to the tune of $9,000 a year.
CCF
gives $250 or this $9000 to Kak to help her, Meng Hong and Mey Mey
Not
satisfied with the financial windfall Kak's family represented, CCF
decided that 14 year old Seang Vy should pay for her keep by working for
free as a CCF nanny – taking care of young children you have removed from
families similar to her own and which you pass off to gullible sponsors and
donors as kids whose parents don’t love them, parents who are violent,
alcoholics etc.
|
Mey Mey, Seang Vy & Seng Ly |
You
do not actually call them ‘orphans’, Scott, but the message you put out in the
media is that were it not for you these kids would have no responsible, caring
and loving adult to take care of them. This is a lie. Cambodian parents love
their children, as do parents all over the world. Yes, some parents are
alcoholics and some beat their children. This is so in our own countries also.
We do not, as a result, allow NGOs to remove these children from families just
because you feel like doing so and because it is good for the CCF business model: the more kids in residential
care, the more sponsors, the greater the capital inflows!
Kak
did not like the idea of 14 year old Seangy Vy working as a CCF nanny slave so
pulled her out of residential care earlier this year.
|
Seang Vy, holding mandarin, with sisters Mey Mey, Seangf Kry & Seng Ky |
Forcing
a 14 year old girl to work for no income for CCF is not only a blatant human
rights abuse; it is also against Cambodian law. This means nothing in Cambodia,
of course, if you have a lot of money and can pay corrupt Cambodian
officials to turn a blind eye to such abuses.
|
Seang Vy pours condensed milk into bread roll. A treat! |
The
same applies with the fraudulent ‘contracts’ you force parents to sign. These phony
‘contracts’ (parents are not allowed to keep a copy) are, in reality, just another
way of intimidating parents into complying with your dictatorial wishes and
empire building. If they do not, parents risk having their children ejected
from CCF and having to repay all the monies allegedly spent by CCF in the
children's care, as is stated clearly in the CCF ‘contract’ they have signed.
These ‘contracts’ are illegal, as you know, but fortunately you have, in Alan
Lemon, corrupt former Australian Federal Police officer with legal training to
administer this side of your business.
Forcing
children at CCF to work for no wage is but one of many of the human rights
abuses you practice. Fortunately for you, Cambodia’s human rights organizations
do not rate the illegal removal and detention of children from their families
very high on their list of human rights abuses to write reports about!
None
of Kak’s children are now resident in CCF. All but Meng Hong and Mey Mey are
working in the rubbish dump. This is necessary if the family is to
survive. None of the children are going to school. The family has
absolutely nothing to show for its 5 year involvement with CCF. CCF’s coffers,
on the other hand, have swelled by $45,000.
Kak’s
family is a very close and loving one. Their problem is not an alcoholic
father, parents who beat their children or any of the other justifications you
give out for removing children and incarcerating them in a CCF residential care.
Kak’s family’s problem is poverty, pure and simple. Extreme poverty. The only
employment available to them is working in the rubbish dump.
The
$9,000 that CCF received in one year of ‘caring’ for 5 children would have
bought a house and block of land for the family back in the province from which
they came.
The
$18,000 that CCF received in two years of caring for 5 children could, in
addition to buying a house and land for the family, have been invested in
helping it become self-sufficient in a business enterprise of some kind. And
imagine what an investment of $45,000 could have achieved in guaranteeing the
futures of Kak’s 8 children!?
Instead,
after several years of CCF intervention in the lives of the members of this
family they are all working in the rubbish (except for Hong Meng and Mey Mey),
are suffering from malnutrition, have no access to medical care, are not going
to school and are destined to live lives of extreme poverty.
Families
such as Kak’s are easy prey to the likes of CCF.
|
Seang Ly takes Meng Hong and Raksa for a ride! |
Sponsors
and donors feel great sympathy for kids like these who don’t have enough to
eat, kids who live in slums, kids who have to work in a rubbish dump. Their
hearts melt (as they should) when they see photos of young children who must
work in a rubbish dump to help their family survive. Wallets are opened. Money
flows into CCF’s coffers, photos of the kids appear smiling on CCF’s Facebook
site and in the interminable hagiographic articles that you manage to get
published about what a hero you are to have given up your $1 million a year
Hollywood job to rescue kids from the rubbish dump.
What
never appears in any of these articles is just how much money you have made
exploiting the poverty and powerlessness of the Cambodian people. ($45,000 from
Kak’s family) Much more than you would have made in Hollywood (where your
career was on the skids) and with the added advantage that your ego gets to be
boosted by your seeming to be some kind of secular saint to the well-heeled New
Yorkers who come to your gala fund raising events.
|
Heather Graham, CCF board member |
|
Heather Graham, Scott Neeson & CCF kids on display! |
Here,
the rich and famous (Salman Rushdie, Heather Graham) and those on the lookout
for tax breaks (Steve Tisch, Cammie & John Rice), can hear the sad but uplifting
stories of young Khmer boys and girls, dressed up in suits and fancy clothes
for the occasion, rescued from poverty by Saint Scott.
|
Salman Rushdie @ CCF gala fundraiser
|
What
your New York patrons don’t see and will never find out about is that these
kids return to their crowded dormitories in Phnom Penh and every few weeks get
to visit the the rest of their families still working in the rubbish dump with
no assistance from CCF at all.
|
CCF kids flown to New York to be put on display |
|
John & Cammie Rice |
(Now that CCF is in severe financial
difficulties and you are kicking kids out of the dormitories as quickly as you
can, the sharing of beds is no longer necessary. The remaining victims of your
funding model can, at least, get to sleep in their own bed!)
CCF
is mostly smoke and mirrors. A sophisticated scam.
|
Steve Tisch |
And
it is a scam that is aided and abetted by the media in Cambodia and
internationally. In Cambodia there is the Phnom Penh Post which, because it is
partially owned by you, will never publish anything that is in any way
critical of CCF or yourself, as proprietor. Nor will the Cambodia Daily publish
anything other than cut and paste versions of CCF press releases. For reasons
that I do not pretend to understand (and can only guess at) the Cambodia Daily
will likewise not publish anything negative about you or CCF.
|
Leng Kak & Seang Ly |
You
might respond to this with:
“That’s
because there is nothing negative to publish.”
Leaving
aside the various scams that have been written about in this blog is great
detail (World Housing, the missing $2 million of salary monies, for instance)
there is Leng Kak's family.
I
have been offering to introduce journalists from the Cambodia Daily to Leng Kak
and her 8 children for more than 18 months now. And to other families
whose first hand experiences with CCF would reveal to a Cambodia Daily
journalist the reality behind CCF’s child rescue model – a far cry from the
impression created with photos of happy smiling children – all too often, in
the case of cute little girls, in your arms.
|
Heng (oldest daughter, aged 19, Seang Ly & Seang Vy |
A
diligent Cambodia Daily journalist visiting these families would ask questions
like: “How many children sleep in each bed at CCF?” (see previous blog entries
for countless other questions) and draw their own conclusions – which may well
be different to my own. The Daily refuses, point blank, to ask you questions or
to look closely (indeed, at all) at your CCF operation.
The
CCF house of cards will, of course, collapse under the weight of your lies and
spin at some point. Those of us who are well aware of what a fraudulent organization
CCF is (the entire NGO community in Cambodia) can only hope, when CCF does
collapse, that you have in place structured re-integration programs for the
children in your care; that they are not simply dumped back with their
families, as Leng Kak’s children have been, with no backup and no financial
assistance.
|
Vouern & Seang Ly |
The
reality behind the Facebook spin is that CCF is extracting children from
families and leaving the rest of the family working in the dump and living in
makeshift dwellings such as those seen here. Children from scavenging
families fill beds and provide you with great photo opportunities.
|
Scott Neeson with kids |
Is
there any pretty little girl at CCF who has not been picked up by you and had
her photo taken in your arms this past decade? Almost always the girls are
smiling in these photos but every now and then you can read in the expression
on the young girl’s face: “Who is this man who has just picked me up and is
smiling so hard at the camera for no apparent reason!?”
|
Scott Neeson & bewildered young girl! |
It
is to be hoped, when CCF collapses, that the media that has been complicit in
your scams, does not try to protect itself by refusing to report it in an
honest way. This applies also to human rights organizations such as LICADHO whose concern for the human
rights of the Cambodian people does not extend to the 9,000 or so fake orphans
in the country that generate so much in the way of income for dozens of
fraudulent NGOs.
Despite
the $45,000 (at least!) that CCF has earned from sponsors to help Leng Kak's
family, it is not better off than it was five years ago. The $45,000 has either
been wasted or found its way into the acquisition of property - the Black
Bamboo restaurant and the other millions of dollars worth of land and housing
that will be at your disposal when CCF collapses and all the kids in
residential care are back where they started a decade or so ago.
|
Seang Vy, Seang Ly & sister-in-law Raksmey |
If
any journalist asks (and they probably won't) to respond to the allegations I
make against you and CCF (and have been for a few years now), you will say that
all I write is lies. If so, prove it by answering the countless questions I
have asked in previous blog entries; prove it by demonstrating, in concrete
terms, just what CCF has achieved this past decade in terms of assisting
families to become self-sufficient.
|
Scott Neeson with teenage girl |
After
the expenditure of close to $40 million you must, surely, have some great
success stories to point to?
|
Meng Hong & Leng Kak |