Not Without My Sister (28 page)

These deaths spurred me on. In mid-January, I went to Cal-ifornia to speak on ABC News about Davidito. I wanted to speak the truth and tell what had happened to him—to me, to our generation. It was an emotional and difficult time, but something I never expected happened. As I walked into the hotel room where the ABC News crew were, I was greeted by Armi, my childhood friend. We hugged and talked together for the first time in fifteen years! That evening I also met Elixcia. She had flown from Washington to San Diego to be interviewed by ABC News. She was still fragile and devastated at the tragic loss of her husband, often burst-ing into tears.
I watched Davidito's home video he made the night before his death. All the anger and emotion he had sup-pressed for so long came flooding out. I could hear the anguish in his voice as he spoke of the lack of justice. He con-fessed that he had wanted to commit suicide for a long time, ever since Teen Training, and wished he had never been born.
"The goal is to bring down those sick fuckers, Mama and Peter. My own mother! That evil little cunt. God damn! How can you do that to kids? How can you do that to kids and sleep at night? I don't fucking know."
He sat on a table in his little kitchen, waving the gun that would kill him as he spoke.
By the end of it I was in tears. It was so unlike him, the timid boy I knew. I understood better his anger towards his mother when Davida, Sarah's daughter, spoke up and told her story. She claimed she lay in bed with Mo while Maria had sex with her own son. I understood why Davidito could not speak of this himself directly. It would have been too humiliating, too painful. His anger towards her was clear. She was not just an innocent bystander. She herself was guilty of child abuse.
I talked with Elixcia about what Davidito had said about Techi and Frank, and she confirmed that she knew about it. I got Frank's email address and wrote to him, asking him to come clean and to answer these charges. He never replied. Instead, Elixcia got a frantic call from Frank, who now lived in Switzerland. He had a new life now outside the cult, a good job as a businessman and admitting his past would be devas-tating. He could not do it.
What a coward
, I thought.
There are many who try and hide from their past, but wounds cannot be healed unless they are exposed and treated. I found the courage to confront my father on the issues that have separated us and tell him what I believed he needed to hear. In an email I wrote:

This is not a discussion about your motives, it's about your actions and the effect it had on your children. For years I tried to share with you how I felt, how I knew the other children were feeling, and you always dismissed it and made light of it. This is what eventually led me to parting ways with you. The person who has sown the most division in our family is you. You tried to divide me against my mother, David and Kristina, then Julie against me, and now are you going to continue with your other children?

In my father's reply he finally admitted it:
I truly am sorry that you suffered some gross encounters at MWM [
Music with Meaning
] that continue to haunt you. I honestly had no idea that you had been forced to do these things by Paul and others. Nevertheless, as your parent, I was responsible for your protection and care, and so I take the blame for not knowing about these goings-on. What sexual encounters there were between adults and children, I believed were very mild, and more along the lines of cuddling, not what you have described, which is so gross I don't even want to type it here. Yes, it was absolutely wrong, and thank God the Family put down strict rules many years ago to put a stop to it. What I, and no doubt many others, haven't fully realized, is that those who were unfortunate enough to be children in a Home where such excesses were practised are still hurting from it, even though it is so many years ago. So all I can say is, yes, I am truly very sorry and I am asking for your forgive-ness, not for what I did, but what I didn't do, to protect you at that time and be aware of what was happening to you.
Yes, you are right. I did have an encounter with Armi. I had forgotten all about it until recently. I don't remember the inci-dent you described, but I do remember another one in the stu-dio. I do remember that we didn't do much, and like she said, I didn't push myself on her. It may even have been her idea, I can't remember. But I do know that I never had any inclination to want to do those things. And that time with Armi was the only time I ever did, except after that Mene wanted to have a date, but from what I recall, we just lay together fully clothed and talked, as I really didn't want to do anything...I honestly do find the idea of adults having sex with children repulsive, and because of that I do empathize with you that your child-hood memories are tainted by those things, and I am truly sorry for allowing that to happen.

I accept that my father feels remorse, however, I do not believe his apology has gone far enough. He still does not accept that David Berg was a pedophile, responsible for destroying so many lives of our generation. He suggests that an eleven-year-old child asked
him
for sex—as if that justifies his actions—when he was the responsible adult who should have reported any sexual contact between adults and children to the police—not turned a blind eye to it.
What he wrote in this letter was more than he has ever admitted in the past, but the apology has come thirty years too late and too little. I do not believe my father is or was a pedophile, but he still supports with his money and protects the very leaders who instigated the sexual abuse we suffered. He mistakenly credits the Family with stopping the sexual abuse—denying his own daughter, Kristina, the credit and bravery she showed in speaking up and exposing to the world the terror we all suffered, which forced the hand of Queen Maria and Peter to conform. But pedophiles still remain protected by the Family, while the victims—their children—have been threatened and slandered.

Juliana

I was startled awake by a knock on my bedroom door. "Yes?" I answered, groggily glancing at my clock. It was 3 a.m. and a violent storm was raging outside. Through the peals of thunder, I faintly heard my friend
Tina asking me to open the door. I had a habit of locking my door at night, just in case. I got up to open it for her. What could she want at this time of night?
There was an apologetic look on her face. Two masked men stood behind her brandishing an AK47 and a machete. As soon as I opened the door, the muzzle of the gun rose to my face.
"You! Come now!" one of them ordered. I was in a skimpy T-shirt and shorts but I didn't have time to throw a robe over myself The intruders herded the two of us into the master bedroom where Dad and the kids slept.
They demanded money, and Dad pointed them to the briefcase under the bed where he kept his savings of $1000. They prised it open with the machete and found the envelope with the money, but grew enraged when they pulled out the notes inside. The Ugandan currency averages 1800 Uganda Shillings to the dollar. This means stacks of notes. To their minds, a few crisp bills meant nothing.
"Where is your money?" they shouted furiously.
"That is all the money there is. Anything more I keep in the bank. Nobody keeps much money in their houses," Dad tried explaining to them.
They didn't believe him. The head burglar threatened to rape us women if we didn't tell them where the money was hidden. We pretended we didn't understand and they turned on Dad. One of the men held him down while the other raised the machete high in the air. They were going to hack his leg of unless we told them where the money was.
As the robber's arm lifted for the first blow, Dad cried out desperately, "Jesus, help me!"
I shouted, "Stop! I have money!" Perhaps the combination of our voices startled the robber, because he froze for an instant and then slowly lowered his arm and turned to me. "What did you say?"
"There's no need to do that. I have some Uganda Shillings in my room."
The promise of Ugandan money was something he understood. He jabbered with his accomplice quickly, and they split up. One of them stood guard over the room with the gun, while the leader escorted me to my room for the money. I gave him all my shillings, which amounted to no more than $10, but the amount of notes seemed to appease him. He then tore through my entire room searching for anything else of value.
Inspired by their success, they took the other two women one at a time to their rooms to rifle through their things.
They had been in the house for two hours and dawn would soon break. It was time to go. They told us all to go to our rooms and lie down on our beds. None of us left our rooms for another half-hour, waiting and listening, unsure whether they were truly gone.
Finally, we ventured out to look around. They had taken the video machine, mobile phones and stereo system. None of us could believe the ordeal we had just passed through. It seemed almost surreal. They did not find our music studio where the most expensive equipment was and they did not find the two young men sleeping in the house, which could have proved dangerous. But most amazing of all, none Of us had been hurt. There were numerous stories of people we knew who were beaten to within an inch of their lives, raped, or even killed during robberies. We had come out shaken, but otherwise unscathed.
Our story was reported in one of the Family news publications. Family members would be sure to question why God had allowed it to happen. Wasn't He supposed to protect His missionaries? A prophecy came out saying that we had been out of the Spirit and disunited, and that was why the enemy had been allowed to break through.
This scathing article stung when I read it. We were put-ting life and limb on the line to spread the Family gospel, yet the moment anything went wrong, we would be hung out as the dandy bad examples. We were on our own on this one. If we did well, it was all thanks to Jesus through the Family, but if anything went wrong, or we struggled in any way, we were the ones to blame.

* * *
Around this time, an email came saying my sister Davida was taking so much heroin, it was likely she could die any day. In a final act of desperation, her mother, Sotiria, had attempted to contact Dad through Family members in Greece. Davida needed urgent help, they said, and Dad reluctantly decided it was his duty to go and see if there was anything he could do. I was resolved to go with him. Somehow, I knew I could help her more than our father ever could. He was useless, from my point of view. He had not been a father to her thus far—he didn't even know her—what did he expect he was able to do? Rescue her from the clutches of heroin by preaching Jesus' saving love to her? Pretend to be a father to her now that it was too late? It was obvious to me, by the state she had deteriorated to, that it was far too late for all that.
The money I had raised for a ticket was stolen in the bur-glary. If I wanted to go, I had to use my emergency money—the money all Family members are required to have in case they have "flee." This was to be used only in emergencies. I was determined to go, so I promised the Home I would work to pay this money back.
Davida was the lost sister I had dreamed of meeting. I knew in an odd way, there was a connection between us, and that I had to help her. From the moment we met, we were inseparable; as if we had grown up together our whole lives. We roamed Athens together by day, and shared a bed at night as comfortably as a pair of Siamese twins.
Dad may as well have been part of the furniture; he was irrelevant. They were civil, friendly even, but the closeness of a father with his daughter was starkly lacking. That missing affection she bestowed on me; and for a brief period of time we both experienced what it would have been like to grow up with a close sibling.
Sotiria gave me the money for us to spend out, since she did not trust Davida not to use it on her next fix. Everything of value had been stripped from the tiny apartment and sold for instant cash. Davida was encouraged in these endeavours by her no-good boyfriend, Stavros, and their interminable condition. Her mother had to hide any cash she had, yet somehow, the two of them found it anyway. Money had been a struggle for Sotiria; everything she brought home from working long hours in the hospital had been eaten up by heroin.
Two weeks into the visit, Dad decided he was ready to return home. The visit had accomplished little. He had failed to make a connection or form any bond with his daughter. But I was not ready to leave and my sister begged me to stay, so I remained for a couple of months longer.
One day we went out into the center of Athens. I decided to get a tattoo as a remembrance of Greece and my sister. She left me at the tattoo parlour, saying she'd go for coffee and return after two hours. I nodded distractedly, studying the book of designs before me.
The artist took three hours to complete the tattoo of an ancient ornamental dagger that appeared embedded through my flesh. I put it on a place that usually remained covered. The Family did not endorse tattoos, but there was no official rule against it. It was my secret rebellion.
When I emerged from the parlour, my sister was nowhere in sight. I waited about for over an hour. Night was falling when she finally returned, stoned out of her
head. I was furious that she had lied to me and she saw I was upset.
"Julie,
agape mor
, I'm so sorry. I couldn't help it. I met some of my friends, and they wouldn't let me go till I had some." She clung to me, begging forgiveness. "But it wasn't heroin, I promise. It was only coke. Please don't tell my mum."
I didn't tell because it wouldn't have helped anything. She was shivering, and I took off my wrap and put it around her. As long as she stayed there in Athens, the drug environment would always surround her and she was not strong enough to resist it. I begged her to come with me to Africa. I would set her up in an apartment, I'd raise the money for her to live till she could get better and get a job.
There was a time limit of three months in which Family members could be out of their commune. Dad wrote reminding me my time limit was almost up. Sotiria and Davida begged me to stay and I begged Davida to come with me. They wanted me to leave the group, but at the time, this did not even feature in my mind as an option. I wanted to stay with my sister, but because of the rules, I had to go. A tug-of-war went on in my heart. In the end, I flew out, leaving my last $200 with Sotiria to go towards Davida's ticket, if she ever decided to join me.
After returning back to the grind of Family life, Dad broke the unexpected news. "Honey, Celeste has written to say she's decided to leave the Family." Dad looked distraught. Celeste had always been his favourite child, the one he doted on. The news rattled him to his foundations.
I was surprised. "Did she say why? It seems odd that after coming straight from Queen Maria's Home, she should almost immediately decide to leave the Family. Maybe all is not as it seems in World Services."
"Yes, I do wonder." I could see the doubt wavering in Dad's eyes. Celeste could never do any wrong, and perhaps his daughter had seen something while she was there that contributed to this decision.
Celeste wrote me a personal letter a couple of days later, detailing her decision and vaguely explaining she could no longer agree with some of the Family's beliefs, nor did she want to raise her child in it. I wanted to know details. I wanted to know exactly what had brought my sister to this decision. I was twenty-one years old, and I felt I deserved to know. In my letter I wrote to her I said:

Basically I'm asking all this, cuz I've been evaluating my life of late, and what I'm really doing or accomplishing here, and yes, in the Family in general. But when I read your letter, and the whole "being fully persuaded in your own mind" thing, I realized, I wasn't. And haven't been for quite some time. And what I meant by you being the "strongest" of all of us was you being the most "sold" on the Family, seeing as you were in WS and everything, but if you found it didn't crack up to be all that, then that really got me wondering whether I'm the "dumb sheep" being led around by the nose.
Basically, if I've been sad for this long, I should look at the bigger picture and start to wonder, why? So I have been, and I find that the way I've been living has been one long attempt at convincing myself that I'm living for a noble cause. But I've been lying to myself, hence the disillusionment, the discouragement and lack of challenge.
I want to do something with my life... which I am proud of... I have absolutely no clue what to do...I don't know of any situation to start in, or how to even start, and suddenly I feel helpless, and it's frustrating. It's like a fbg I'm sitting in right now, and I'll sit a little longer till it clears and I can see my path ahead. I only hope it can be soon, as it's almost worse to be sitting here when it's the last place I want to be anymore.

Celeste was busy trying to start her new life and our contact became sporadic after this. Dad's initial doubt was replaced with doubled fervour for the Family's cause. He told me that it was inevitable that there would be a falling away of those who were not completely dedicated to the cause. "We just have to keep praying for Celeste," he said. "She'll come back once she sees how much worse it is out there!" I, on the other hand, knew my sister would not have left without good reason. I struggled in my mind, thinking one day to leave, but then the fear of not knowing anything out there, or how I would survive, kept me there. I pushed my doubts to the back of my mind and survived in auto-mode.
One day, Kingdom broke into tears and wouldn't stop crying. His mother was worried, but he wouldn't talk to anyone except Dad. Eventually Dad was able to coax the whole ter-rible story out. King had been awake during the night of the robbery and witnessed the whole ordeal. It had scared him. He wondered why Jesus almost let his Daddy get hacked up with a machete. My little brother was intensely unhappy. He was confined to the house all day and his life revolved around school, cleaning and Word Time. He didn't feel he was good for anything, and more than anything else, he felt unloved, unappreciated and unchallenged. In his mind this translated to mean there was nothing to live for. He had seen a machete in the garden and had been overwhelmed with the idea of using it on himself. He was just ten years old.
When Dad described the situation at Home Council, Sunshine was crying and everyone was shocked. It hit me in the gut. I understood those same emotions, but I was amazed that King was already experiencing them so young. I real-ized that my little brother silently bore his sorrows and never vocalized his thoughts. Both he and his sister Shirley were quiet, withdrawn and suppressed children. They had learned early on that raising their voices only attracted trouble. I never knew what was going through their minds, and this was the first time I caught a glimpse of the desperation they must be experiencing.
It had never been the same since the robbery, and that house gave everyone the jitters, so we moved again. Raising the money to live was always a struggle. Our company, RadioActive Productions, produced music and radio shows for free. It was part of our "witness," spreading the Words of David, but where it should have been financially supportive, it failed to pay the bills. Dad was trying to re-establish him-self as a radio star, but we couldn't even sell the shows. In a poor African country, nobody would broadcast our programs unless they were free.
Usually we made ends meet by going around to local businesses to ask for donations. I was not proud to be a beggar for Christ. The Family called it "provisioning," but in reality it was just another form of begging. We, the privileged white man, begging for help when we were meant to be the ones helping. It seemed terribly wrong to have to ask for food and clothes in Africa, where the average local lives on an income of less than $20 a month. With our TV, our nice furniture and our spacious two-storey house, we would be considered wealthy by the average mud-hut dweller. I was keenly aware of this when we had people over to our Home for Bible Stud-ies. Who wouldn't want to join the Family when they could live richly and all they had to do was accept a few odd beliefs?
Every so often, a supermarket or business had a surplus of outdated or damaged goods, which they contributed to us for charity. We were supposed to be a distribution center, though usually we kept most of the donated items for our-selves, and whatever was not good enough for our own use was distributed to various orphanages and poor neighbour-hoods. This was called CTP—"Consider The Poor." During these CTP distributions, one person would follow the rest of us with a camera as we doled out the goods. We would pose with the African people receiving outdated goods from our benevolent hands. These pictures would be used to make up the monthly newsletter that we distributed to raise support for ourselves.
I despised the whole concept of posing for a picture. It seemed so fake and demeaning to the poor locals and I won-dered what they thought of it. But beggars can't be choosers, and by the impoverished state they were in, they couldn't care less; they were just grateful to be receiving anything at all. This bothered me all the more. We were using their poverty to our own ends—to receive more goods from charitable companies that would go to us, and only the last bit of rubbish would trickle down to them.
Audaciously, we called ourselves missionaries.
But what else could we do? Most missionaries are sup-ported by their Home Base. In the Family, it was the opposite way around. We, the missionaries, were supporting our Home Base. So we survived the best way we could, raising funds through posing for pictures. We couldn't sell the Fam-ily magazines, books and videos because most people were too poor to afford them, and the small amount we did sell was a drop in the bucket.
A mandatory 17 per cent of our income went to World Services. We ate a lot of beans, lentils, rice and cheap meat. Food was portioned out sparingly. We always struggled to pay our bills. Housing is not cheap in Uganda. We usually just made our budget, with nothing to spare. Then, Queen Maria released a letter called "Gifts," saying God was not happy with the Family contributing the absolute minimum to World Services, and that they could not expect His financial blessings if they did not graciously give above and beyond the set quota. Also, if any Home were not following all the "New Moves of the Spirit" or harbored sin in the camp, God would be obliged to toss them on to the scrap heap.
After this letter, everybody obediently voted in our Home Council meeting that week to raise the percentage to 25 per cent. I was seething when it was brought to a vote and mine was the only hand raised against the motion. A fourth of our Home's income was going to World Services in the hopes that this would ingratiate us with the Almighty. Then we looked deep into our souls to make sure there was no hidden sin the All Seeing Eye was focusing on, and lastly we sucked our spiritual Husband's golden seeds with increased fervour.
Maybe the combination or timing was not quite right, or maybe it was my failure to fuck our Savior, because that windfall we always hoped for never came.
A few months later I went on a trip to the States with Tina. We ended up visiting the Family Care Foundation Home in California, the family's charity where tithes and donations are funnelled through for tax exemption purposes. I was shocked when I arrived at a mansion. They owned a huge property. They ate good food, lived richly and had enough money to take vacations in their holiday house in Mexico. In stark contrast to the struggling homes in Africa who ate lentils and beans and could barely make the rent.
I returned from the trip slightly disillusioned. And while it was fun seeing other Family young people, some experi-ences from my travels did not sit well with me and gave me food for thought. The Family had changed drastically since my childhood. Instead of training the next generation through harsh discipline and boot camps, the modern Fam-ily of the new millennium was a cool place to be. The young people dressed cool, went to Family music concerts called "Wordstock" and big meetings, all in an effort to instil the Family doctrines in a cool way.
I realized the second generation of today were all young kids and that very few from my age group and above were left. Of the entire Heavenly City School of over one hundred young people, there were only about five I knew of who remained in the Family. I calculated that there were only about 2000 second-generation young people remaining. Of that, at least half were under twenty years old, meaning they
would be too young to remember anything from the past. So, 1000 members of my age and older remained. Over 36,000 members have passed through the group. If even a third of them were second generation, then by the laws of averages, less than one tenth remained in the Family.
All the incriminating letters had been purged during the court cases, and no evidence of the Family's dark history remained except in the memories of those who lived through it. Most of the young people writing testimonials on the Family's websites were under twenty and had no rec-ollection of the hard times. I wondered how they could claim the Family was the best place in the world when they knew nothing else.
Queen Maria started releasing letters saying anyone who left could be influenced by the Devil and tell exagger-ated stories. A smear campaign began against any ex-member young people speaking out about their harmful experiences, or asking for explanations and apologies. Any abuse, Maria said, that may have occurred in the past had been apologized for, and it was only a handful of bitter vocal apostates, who were bent on destroying the Family and stop-ping our good work, who were spreading lies. This angered me because I knew these things had happened on a larger scale than Maria was saying. I lived through four Family Training Schools around the world and witnessed the widescale abuse practised on all us children. It was not the fault of the younger generation that they believed Maria. They had no memories of that time. They were too young, or not yet born. I said as much one day, as we read one of these letters in devotions.
"But it did happen!" I persisted stubbornly. I knew I would get in trouble for dissension, but I had reached a point where I didn't care anymore. They could do their worst, but I was tired of being silent. "I remember well. It happened to me. It happened to my sisters, my family, my friends! History has been rewritten!"
After Celeste left Uganda, Tina's mother Keda joined the home. She had been a top leader for many years and was still on the payroll of World Services receiving a monthly stipend. She took it upon herself to shepherd the home and Dad buckled under her influence like a little lamb. Keda had the uncanny ability to sniff out potential rebels. She corrected me for my outburst and said I needed to have a prayer of deliverance against bitterness. I went through the motions, but could not deny my memories.
I started a more regular correspondence with Celeste. Now, more than ever, I was interested to see not just the one-sided picture I was being fed in the group. The doubts I was voicing set off alarm bells with Dad. He approached me and asked whether was writing to Celeste.
"Once in awhile, she'll write to me with her news," I answered.
"I think you should limit all contact with her," Dad said. "What? Why?" I knew perfectly well why.
Celeste had been featured in a magazine article about her time in the group. She was now possessed by a Vandari—a blood-sucking parasite demon. She had gone over to the dark side.
Dad was having nothing more to do with her, and nei-ther should I. I was shocked at Dad's cold-hearted dismissal of his own child now that she no longer adhered to the Family's beliefs.
"I'm not going to stop writing to my sister, Dad. Don't worry, I'll keep it positive, tell her our witnessing testi-monies."
I knew that would reassure Dad enough to drop the sub-ject for the time being, though he continued to check up on me from time to time. I realized anything I said would be twisted and used against Celeste. This upset me. I had my own thinking mind. Why couldn't I take responsibility for my own doubts without Dad throwing the blame on my sister?