I agree, highlander. I am so sorry you had such an excruciatingly painful childhood, and wish I could do something- anything_ to heal that hurt that exists is no many hearts.
I so regret the day in 1999, when I was in Boa Vista, and a mom and her six year old daughter came through on their way to PQQ. I didn't know what I do know.
I was human enough to remark that I though it was very sad. This provoked an immediate angry response from my relative along the lines of how dare I judge the family/mother/mission! She told me how dangerous it was in the tribe, how lonely for other children the child would be, but mostly it was a defensive response to the truth.
I listened to her, trying to be open-minded and all. Plus I hadn't come down with pneumonia yet, that would happen overnight, so I really had no first-hand experience of the strength of the missionary-denial-system yet.
I quickly found it that missionary denial knows no limits. Here I was panting, with extreme pain in my right chest continually plus and extra stabbing pain when I breathed in, coughing up rust colored sputum, with a high fever, and it took two days and about an hours pleading by a mission nurse to get the director to go get me any antibiotics.
(On day two I had taken all my energy to drag myself out of the house and down the stairs to her apt and begged her to take me to the hospital! She told me I would die for sure there, and she would go talk to the director and get me antibiotics. It took a lot of persuading and persistence on her part. I owe my life to her. I support her for many years after that out of appreciation.)
His belief system was that Americans took too many antibiotics, and we were just whiners. I could have died. It didn't matter what reality was in front of his eyes; he lived by his beliefs, not by reality.
I still see that frightened, apprehensive little girl in my memory. If I knew then what I knew now, I would not talk to my relatives at all. I would have taken the mother aside and warned her about leaving HER daughter in ANYONE ELSE's care other than her own loving hands and her own two vigilant eyes. I would tell her that God was way bigger than she had been told, and he didn't need her help at the mission, that if is was God's will and his timing no one would have to commit the sin of child abandonment to make it happen.
I know that mother never heard a perspective like that. That little girl would be about college age now. Sad.