Mamou alumni wait for recommendations
MKs wait to find out what the denomination that ran the school they attended in West Africa is doing to make sure present and future missionary kids are safe.
By Debra Fieguth ChristianWeek staff
Survivors of abuse at a missionary school in West Africa are frustrated after officials with the Christian and Missionary Alliance have told them that they may not have copies of recommendations made by an independent commission of inquiry.
"Total silence" is what Beverly Shellrude Thompson of Burlington, Ontario, says she has heard from the denomination that operated Mamou Alliance Academy, the school she attended in Guinea from 1958-68. Shellrude Thompson and other members of the Mamou Steering Committee received the ICI’s 95-page report detailing abuses in January (CW, Feb17/98). Weeks later they received a "need-to-know" report naming perpetrators and outlining their specific abuses.
But the "need-to-know" report was supposed to have included a comprehensive list of recommendations to ensure that missionary children now attending boarding schools are safe, says ICI vice-moderator Lois Edmund of Winnipeg. "We very clearly indicated that the recommendations were to go with the rest of the report," says Edmund. "They weren’t to be separated out."
On its own, the need-to-know report lays blame on specific individuals accused of abuses. But without the recommendations it does not suggest any accountability or basis for change on the part of the denomination.
Richard Bailey of Fort Myers, Florida, chairs the denomination’s board of managers. Following the release of the final report, he says, he requested the board’s secretary, Francis Grubbs, to send the "need-to-know" report and recommendations to the Mamou alumni. "I was under the impression that everything was mailed out," he said last month.
But he later learned that Grubbs, a pastor in Ohio, had not sent out the recommendations. "He made the decision and I actually agree with it," Bailey said. The recommendations were intended for use within the denomination anyway, says Bailey. "It was all denominational matters. There was nothing for the steering committee." But, he adds, "there’s nothing there that’s really private."
Confidential report
Grubbs says the board decided that until the recommendations are dealt with by the division of overseas ministries, they would not be released. "What happened here is the ICI made the statement that they were to be sent out. But that was none of their business," says Grubbs. "It’s a confidential report to our board of managers."
Grubbs says the recommendations will be made public when the denomination holds its council in June.
