We've Moved!

We've Moved!

Saturday, November 25, 2006

MURDERED OLD FOLKS.WHO GIVES A DAMN?

They had a miraculous, if horrific, scam. Until 1999, a family of Seventh Day Adventists, trawled the streets of Toronto, Canada, looking for derelict and homeless victims to fill their sordid, crowded, filthy retirement homes they owned up north near the town of Huntsville. They took control of the seniors' old age pension cheques, cashed them in and kept the money. But it did not stop there. The pensioners started to go missing but their cheques kept being cashed. One senior escaped and blew the whistle.

The owners were arrested for fraud and four seniors were declared "missing believed murdered." One of the owners, Katherine Laan, already had a long criminal record for theft and extortion. In fact her most recent job was treasurer at a local Christian school that she bilked out of $25,000.

Yet at their fraud trial two years ago, only money was mentioned. Not murder. Incredibly, the local police could find no evidence of foul play and they could not find the bodies, so they gave up. Imagine the national outcry if four teenagers from the local high school had been declared,"missing believed murdered." But these were old folks, so who really gave a damn.

Well a few brave, local souls did, and earlier this year spoke out on 360 Vision, the national current affairs programme of Vision TV. They spoke of police indifference, of seeing blood in Katherine Laan's car and they pointed the finger not only at her but also at her brothers Walter, Paul and David. But . The rest of the God-fearers in this community suddenly developed a case of mass laryngitis every time a reporter spoke to them, with neary a word coming from their quivering lips. Their sullen eyes though were saying: we don't like strangers prying into things around here, even if it is about murder. It's local and it stays that way. A couple whispered to us that they would be killed if they said anything. One man said he knew who killed the seniors and some told 360 Vision, anonymously, where the seniors are buried. The 360 team checked all of these calls and found some to be hoaxes, other clumsy attempts to get on TV. With alarming hostility, Ontario Provincial Police Headquarters refused to say one word about this shameful case or to assist 360 Vision in any way. One can only surmise they are either hiding something or are incompetent.
Not long after the fraud case, that levied fines and ordered restitution, the oldest brother. Walter, went on a rampage of vicious home invasions, brutally attacking old folks he knew in the area. For this, at least, he got 12 years in jail.

360 Vision later found Katherine Laan, a convicted felon, running a private Aventist school with her sister who blurted out to the reporter on the phone "at least she hasn't killed anyone here."
The very next day after the one-hour documentary aired, Seventh Day authorities closed the school down.

And the four old folks? Still missing believed murdered. They are conveniently forgotten now, except by the killer or killers and those up here who know who did it and how but lack the courage to come forward. They may wish to pause and ponder the following quote by Dr. Martin Luther King Jr:
"Our lives begin to end
the day we become silent
about things that matter."

Note: The documentary,"Mystery In Muskoka," helped 360 Vision win its prestigous 2006 "Gemini" nomination for the best current affairs programme in Canada.

Saturday, November 18, 2006

HOW NOT TO HELP THE POOR

It appears on page B10 of the Huntsville Forester, Ontario, Canada, a full page "thank you" to local businesses from 17 Christian ladies (their word) for donations to a cause grandiosely branded "Nicaragua 2006." They spent a whole ten days smiling at small children (none of the women speaks Spanish),their fundraising guaranteed one food centre would continue to feed poor kids three times a week , gave out second-hand clothes , distributed medicines, did such good works that the seventeen lives changed "in ways not even we fully comprehend...but our prayer is that the lives we touched will understand just a bit better about the love of Jesus, so freely given." And, oh yeah, they thanked the donors for help in building a church, get this, on a rubbish dump.Wonder what happens when it rains?

So these women feel good about what they have done. So, I guess, do the dozens of local companies who gave money and material. Unfortunately what they have all done is guarantee Nicaragua will remain the region's poorest country.Their patronising, their condescension and the ignorance are breathtaking.

A recent study done by an expert in Honduras, himself a longtime Christian missionary dismissed these short-term missions by well-intentioned insouciant "evangelical tourists" as meaningless and damaging. If you want to help, first learn the language, then commit to spending at least two years in the country, and do not assume you know more than the poor themselves. Listen to them, hear what they want, and working side by side as equals..

The seventeen ladies and their donors could have gone a much easier and infinitely more effective route. They could have simply sent the money to various responsible NGOs that are helping 300,000 Nicaraguans whose lives have disintegrated after the crash of world coffee prices, the main cause of the continuing poverty. They could petition our local Muskoka MP, Cottager Clement, to hound the International Monetary Fund into giving coffee growers in Central America cheap loans without punitive conditions.

If you really want to help Nicaraguans, don't give them Jesus, used clothes and Canadian values. Give them back their coffee trade.

Sunday, November 12, 2006

Booze Hoo

This Sunday in the sparse, grey village of Dwight, Ontario, Canada, is remarkable for two things:freckles of snow and a liqour store that opens from 1pm to 4pm.It doesn't get much better than this.
Down the road a few klicks in the town of Hunstville, they've been conned again by the Christmas shoebox campaign, One Christmas Child. It's a warm and cuddly thought sending shoeboxes full of our trinkets to kids in poverty stricken countries so they, too, can have a good Christmas. Canada will send about 100,000 boxes this year.What no one is told is that the campaign is run by Samaritan's Purse whose sole aim is not to provide poor third world kids with any happiness but to convert them and their parents to Christianity.Once the shoe boxes reach their destination, Christian literature is handed over as well. Who is behind Samaritan's Purse? Son of Billy, Franklin Graham who has condemned Islam as evil and has called for its overthrow.The British Guardian newspaper has described Graham's evangelical form of Christianity as "particularly toxic."Perhaps clean water, education and shelter might do a bit more than odious, patronising religious zealots trafficking in trinkets for souls.