MK forum

Bemused, I have read many of your posts and am aware of your history. That was said tongue in cheek. No offense intended. I apologize.

[quote="Aussie"]Heaven knows what a WISC test is, but I doubt Bemused had any learning difficulties. Someone who can write the most insightful comments, then make us laugh with his humour and then cry when he rewrites a song we all know, despite suffering the abuse he obviously has, is obviously talented and well balanced.

Aussie, I posted a message, but it looks like it got lost somewhere in cyberspace. You may be confusing learning disabilities with mental retardation. They are two separate things. Many brillant and successful poeple have been challenged with a learning disability of one nature or another, some of the most notable being Hans Christian Anderson, Agathie Christie, Tom Cruise, Leonardo DaVinci, Thomas Alva Edison and Albert Einstein.

While neither brillant, successful or rich, I graduated from college magna cum laude but I test out in math at 10th grade high school. Yeah, life's a challenge. It would be insensitive and irresponsible of me to even hint that anyone posting on these threads would be mentally retarded. But, at least 10% of any student body in almost any school has a learning disability of one nature or another.

Hope that clears the confusion.

Maybe better referred to as "learning differences"?

Nicely put. Went to the University of Life myself. Still there, it's a long interesting course. Hope to graduate with a Bachelor of Common Sense, but it is taking some time .

Why is there no careers adviser required in PNG? Could it be that there is only one choice of career being recommended? It isn't a forgone conclusion that most MKs want to be missionaries, for some of us that is the last career choice! I think the thinking is, "don't worry the kids will eventually come back, because we'll leave them no other options, by time we finished with them". Not many Downunder MKs made it back to the field, wonder why, maybe we saw the light when we left, or saw the darkness when we looked back!

Aussie,

Well said, it probably was the latter option. What a farce the whole system was. Full stop.

We were kids, we were supposed to be loved, cherished and guided, not beaten, abused and our brains scrambled. I don't look back and think of all the good times I miss, I just see hours and hours of hearing the same thing over and over again. The anguish of trying to please a system I had little faith in and being constantly told I was "second class". You are right very few Downunder MKs went back to NTM, we had it rough, we saw what happened to our parents, why would we want to go back?
There was little love shown to us and our only hope was to get out with sanity intact.

I have been contemplating for some time the dynamics that was and is NTM. NTM boasted the fact that they had such a high return rate of MKs. My question is, "How many of those returned because they felt it their NTM duty to return?" And, "How many returned because they felt a genuine call from God?" Of course, NTM never believed in a call to missions. And, I believe that this has been an Achilles Heel in NTM for decades. Hpw much did this attitude promote the abuses of which we read on these threads?

You'd need more than an educational psychologist to explain why you'd go back to PNG after some of the stuff some of us experienced in our childhood. It seemed to be an unwritten expectation that we would eventually get back to NTM.

Graduate after graduate would get up and get up on the stage and thank their wonderful parents, their wonderful dorm parents, the wonderful Finnamores, their wonderful teachers and God. And I'd be thinking, oh please let me get out of this place before I have to start telling lies publicly. Even the worst behaved MK would have a reconversion experience just before graduation and there they would stand on stage, tears rolling down their sincere faces telling how they had been so bad, but now it all made sense and they were off to Bible School to do what God was going to reveal to them. God, my foot! We all knew if we didn't do that routine voluntarily, Jim Finnamore would pull the personal file he had on you and write what you were going to say, just like the creep said he would. And there would be Jim sitting there smirking, knowing he'd ruined another kids brain and taken away their free will, so they did exactly what his perverted mind wanted them to.
As for thanking the wonderful dormparents, what sort of MK would stand up at graduation and thank the likes of Jim Given for caring for them so much? Only someone who was to scared to say anything else or terribly naive and blind. The pervert molested little girl after little girl, beat the locals and peddaled his rascist crap with no shame whatsoever.
Then there were the lovely teachers, frustrated women who beat the living daylights out of kids, while pining them over the nearest objects. Good old Althea Lawrence who beat kids for decades, why on earth would you thank that old witch.

And yet there was that magic formula, if you wanted to graduate, you had to thank all these perverts publicly and reveal how God was going to use you. And NTM wonders why some of us got out of there and never ever wanted to go back!

Simple, because we saw it for what it was, an awful place to grow up, where you learnt to lie just to get out of the place in one piece!