UNITED STATES
Ashley Easter
Today, I would like to announce a guest post by Dianne Darr Couts, President of MK (Missionary Kid) Safety Net. I met Dianne at the 2016 SNAP conference in Chicago where I was first introduced to the great need for MK advocacy. MKSN does amazing work to protect and support children (adolescent and adult) who were victimized while their parents were on the mission field. The story you are about to read is true and may be triggering to some survivors.
Missionary Kid Safety Net: Hope, Healing, Support and Advocacy
In the predawn hours of a fateful August morning, five-year old Richie was torn screaming from his mother’s arms and put in a pickup truck with another child and a man he barely knew. The truck carried him 400 miles away across the dry savannah of Mali, West Africa and into the rain forest of Guinea. After dark on the second day, it pulled up outside a dormitory on the top of a hill. Richie’s sister Dianne, barely twelve, heard the truck and flew outside to swoop him up in her arms – only to be reprimanded harshly by the dorm mother and told to go back to bed. The next morning, after a brief, joyful reunion with his brothers David and John, there was a grim warning: “Richie, it’s bad here. It’s really bad.”
By Richie’s sixth birthday two weeks later, he knew what his brothers meant. The first grade teacher was vicious and cruel, denying children access to the bathroom until they urinated in their seats, yanking children from their desks by their ears, and going into fits of rage over minor things like a child’s inaccurate drawing of a pig. The classrooms opened onto a veranda and her outbursts and the children crying could be heard by everyone – the principal, the other teachers and the older students. But the sounds died in the forest, never reaching the ears of Richie’s parents much less the mission board in America that was responsible for the school and the children under its care.
Note: This is an Abuse Tracker excerpt. Click the title to view the full text of the original article. If the original article is no longer available, see our News Archive.