The Long Road Parts 1 to 3
Part 1
Well, there’s a lot to tell and I’ve held off for a long time for a few reasons, but mostly because I wanted to forget it. It’s too hard to look back on and because I’ve dealt with it and buried it under a pile of rocks that are too heavy to lift, I guess I figured that was the best place for it. But every now and then I let some of the stories slip. Usually because I know that the telling will benefit the person I’m speaking with. Sharing adversity to aide my fellow humans is almost a responsibility and I’m finally ready to bare it.
This will, in actual fact, be a very bland and dumbed down version of things. I know I must be careful not to incriminate people, and I don’t want this to read like a dirty book for Pedo’s to get off on. I will try to communicate the feeling of the story without getting into too much of the gory details.
It’s also very important to remember while you’re reading this series, that my parents are just ordinary people who, for the most part, were just trying to live a life they believed in. They were carrying their own traumas and had their own issues, the same way the people living next door to you have. They thought they were doing the right thing and leading us down a path of righteousness. It is as much a story of triumph over hardship as it is a story of how good people can end up in terrible situations through mind control.
My mother is such an amazing person who I dearly love and respect. She is an earth mother and very in touch with nature and all the movements of the universe around her. We were a team through most of life and while she failed to defend us from Dad a lot of the time, she cared for us. And Dad No 2, well, despite his Mental Illness, he taught me about hard work and respect. Another reason I’ve held off writing this is because I know it will hurt Mum to read about some of the things that happened to us as she probably doesn’t know or remember them all, and how deeply it affected me. I know she loves me and she should know that I love her too. I also know that re visiting these things will not go down well as they are hard to hear and the memories are extremely unpleasant. The Step Dad has his own whole set of issues and possibly should never have been a Dad at all, but he is what he is but I have always struggled to hold Mum in any sort of bad light at all even though she was there and let a lot of it happen. I’m sure she did what she could during it all to protect us in her own way.
I sincerely hope you find this beneficial in some way and maybe even learn something, but least of all, the story is told. Joey xxx
The Start
It’s very difficult to know where to start so I’m just going to write it the way I’d tell it if I were sitting opposite you at a table in the pub. It will jump backwards and forwards. There will be rants for sure. But there will be hurt, great sorrow, pity as well as stories of great triumph and demonstrations of resilience that when remembered all at once become a weight too heavy to bare. That’s the main reason I like this ‘series’ approach. It can be broken down into bite sized chunks and digested easier as well.
At the end of many of the chapters in my life I find myself repeating the same line of a U2 song, “My hands are tired, my body bruised, you’ve left me with, nothing to win and nothing left to lose.” I’ll say that with all of the happiness I’ve built into my life that there is always a soldier undercurrent. I feel like I’ve been fighting for so long and that the fight is never over.
“I am of the eternal soldiers, with nothing to win and nothing to plunder, just fighting to keep my spirit free. With our hearts slightly mangled, our souls were entangled and, he was a brother of mine.”
Lyrics to a half written song for my brother in spirit Davidito. (Ricky)
In short, I am the oldest of 8 kids and we lived in 52 different houses / places by the time I was 12 and we were back in Australia.
I was born in Canada, in the Rockies outside of Calgary on an organic farm where Mum and my birth Dad lived. They were in the Children of God (COG) religious cult which at the time was pretty tame in our part of the world. They were just kids (Mum was 21) living free and busking to eat, popping in and out of communes and basically being hippies. I was only a few months old when they came back to Australia and they had my brother 1yr and 3 months later.
They then went to New Zealand and because Dad kept going on these COG road trips with other people to recruit new members he was not home very often. He was a floater without much direction and Mum met my Step Dad and that was that! I remember my Dad coming to say goodbye vaguely (I was 3), I sat on his lap for a bit. He had a long beard and a big back pack, which he put on his shoulders and walked off down the road. I wouldn’t see him after that till I was 37. Mum and my new Dad had two more children in NZ before coming back to Australia.
I wasn’t very happy with the arrival of the Step Dad in our lives and told him to go find his own mummy! He was very heavy handed with the discipline and kicked me out of Mum’s bed…
While we were in NZ we traveled everywhere and lived in communes with other COG people. We lived in a tent for a bit too and I remember us stealing apples from an orchard once because we were all hungry and had nothing to eat! We hitch hiked everywhere and Mum would stand out on the side of the road with her thumb out and we would all hide in the ditch. As soon as someone would pull over to pick Mum up, we’d all come out and pack into the good Samaritans car and off we’d go! There was one time when hitch hiking, we were all in rain coats and it was pouring rain so I can only imagine what the poor persons car looked like when we all got out!
It’s important to mention here that things weren’t always bad as in any story and there are lots of good memories of houses with backyards full of chooks and other kids! People were always coming and going with guitars and stories but mostly needing to be fed.
Australia Again
Back in Australia things got progressively more and more strict with the COG doctrines and their control over people was growing.
We traveled up and down the Eastern Sea Board from Adelaide to Brisbane stopping along the way in cities and towns. We lived in a Caravan for a few years staying in peoples front yards and driveways. We stayed on Country Properties swapping the use of their run down houses for farm work. That was in Gilgandra and Moree (inland NSW). Food was always a bit light on and Dad grew veges and we had chooks at some of the farm houses. We’d kill and cook old laying hens and ate kangaroo meat and rice for 2 months due to a lack of money.
I remember 4 of us kids and Dad waiting in the car with caravan in tow while Mum went into a Red Rooster to ask for a free roast chook! She was gone a while and when she came back there was 1 roast chook for all 6 of us!
We made good money busking in the cities with ladies coming up late at night and dumping their purses full of change into our guitar case. We’d be there in a line of four kids with contact paper shapes stuck on our cheeks singing our hearts out and blowing on kazoos! As I got older I took the lead with the singing as I was in tune at least…
We had to sing whether we liked it or not and there was a time I remember when I had a really sore mouth thanks to my six year old molars coming through and really didn’t want to sing. Dad knelt down next to me real close, pinched and twisted the skin on my ribs, whispered in my ear to not dare cry or I’d cop it when I got home and that I had to keep singing or suffer the same fate. We were the meal ticket and were literally singing for our fuel and food.
The 6th child was born in Adelaide and we were parked in a K Mart carpark when Mum had to go into hospital. I was 6 or 7 and had to stay in the van in the carpark looking after my little brothers and sisters while Dad took Mum in!
I did a few months of Kindergarten in Gilgandra and went to 4 or 5 other primary schools to do the first bit of Yr1. Basically I did only 1 yr collectively of Primary School with Mum teaching us to read and write and about Geography.
In 1982, the COG was starting to cop a bit of heat from authorities of Western countries (America, NZ, Australia etc) as they were not sending their kids to school, not paying tax, had very unconventional beliefs around sexual liberty (including with and around children), and generally not abiding by the law. There was a push to follow the “Call of Asia” as they named it and we started busking harder than ever to raise the money to go to India. That’s when shit got real.
Part 2
Off to India
So there we were, Mum, Dad and all 6 kids, packed up and heading to the airport to catch a plane to India. Us bigger kids had a backpack each with everything we owned or could wear in it. I remember helping the smaller ones with their packs as well! It was Mid 1983 and I was 7.
When we landed, my first memory was the stress of all the people, so many people. We had to line up to get through customs and Mum had a Fruit cake of all things for us to eat as a snack when we got hungry but someone stole it from the pram. We each had our own army green water bottle in a pouch stuck to our belts and that was all the water we had to drink till my parents worked out how to sterilize the water for drinking.
We ended up in a hotel room and Dad went off looking for food in tins (as that’s what we’d heard was the safest and disease free). He was gone for ages and my little brother who was quite partial to food :-) said, “See, I told you there was no food in India”! It was because just before we left to fly over, there was a charity TV ad campaign about the starving kids in Africa and he was petrified that was going to happen to us! Dad finally came back with a tin of baby formula and a couple of bottles of ‘Limca’ (Indian Version of Lemonade)! Mum mixed up a batch of Limca and baby formula in a single bowl and we all had to sit around in a circle and get spoon fed this mix from the same spoon. That’s when I was horrified! (those that know me will know exactly why!!! Sharing germs>< and spit………. not happy).
We ended up on a bus and went to the nearest COG commune where we met a family we’d traveled with in Australia and there we stayed for a bit.
We all suffered major culture shock. All our clothes went mouldy and I got a tropical boil on my leg that has left a scar to this day! We all got sick even though we were boiling water for 20 mins before drinking it and Mum boiled the crap out of everything we ate first!
Back in Australia we had a bit more freedom and if we didn’t like a situation or the people, the Olds would just pack us into the caravan and off we’d go. But in India, we were stuck in the communes and mobility was greatly reduced. There was a well established network of COG homes with leaders in each home as well as area leaders etc. Every now and then whole areas would get together for a “Fellowship Meeting” and that could be up to 20 odd families each with their 4 to 7 kids so they were quite a turn out!
Reduced Freedom
With the reduced freedom of movement and the intensity of the communes, things went down hill pretty fast. The discipline was next level and there were rules for everything. You could get heavily beaten for the smallest of demeanour.
You could only have 2 cups of tea per day and it couldn’t be so hot that you couldn’t hold your finger in it, you were only supposed to use 2 squares of toilet paper each time, (which wasn’t always a problem because we couldn’t find or afford toilet paper a lot of the time so we used cotton mattress stuffing which was oily and non absorbent or if we were lucky, it was a roll of washed cotton which was at least absorbent!
The sheer volume of rules and the governance of life’s every aspect is a mind control tactic that stops members from having too much spare time to think about what it is they are even doing there!! We memorised lots of verses from the bible and about 15 entire Psalms. We kept on busking and selling music tapes that the COG made, as well as posters depicting what heaven would look like etc. It was 2 Rupees for a poster and 10 to 20 Rupees for a tape. But all the while we kept “Saving People”… That entailed getting people to recite after you the “Accepting the Lord Jesus Christ as my God and saviour and accepting that you are a sinner but that if you believe in Jesus, he will save you with his grace and forgivness”. Blah Blah
Funny thing was that the Hindu’s had no problem with any of that because they have so many gods that adding 1 more was no problem!
We’d go to schools, universities, restaurants, businesses etc and go to peoples houses to sing for them and then try and sell them stuff. We could go for hours doing that, always walking and catching the odd Rickshaw. Back in Australia getting food for nothing, or “provisioning” as it was called was a lot easier than it was in India as everyone was begging there!
My 2 Brothers and I got Malaria, here’s the story.
It was a stinking hot night in Ahmedabad and as it was in every commune, the Olds would sleep in some sort of bed in the middle of the room, and all us kids would sleep on the floor around it. We’d roll up our beds in the morning which were nothing more than thin cotton mattresses with a sheet and maybe a pillow. In summer, we’d just lay on the marble floor as it was way cooler, even the pillow felt like it was swallowing your whole head and making it hot!
My second brother and I wanted to sleep out on the balcony 1 night as we had a mosquito net at this particular house and the youngest brother overheard the request and did the whole “Me too, me too” thing. He was a very restless sleeper and I said that I didnt want him to becasue he would roll around, kick up the net and we’d all get Malaria! Well, you guessed it, Mum let him sleep out on the balcony with us and half way through the night I was woken by the buzz of mosquitos and our net had been lifted up by my little brothers leg and it was now filled with Mozzies with bellies full of our blood.
All 3 of us got Malaria but I got it the worst. It was horrible. I was lucky enough to only have 3 fits of it but the worst one was the last. I had a high temp of 107F for 4 hrs and Mum kept taking me into the bathroom for cold showers. I felt so, so cold and was shaking uncontrollably but was still burning up on the inside so she had to keep doing it. I really thought I was going to die and later on Mum said she thought the same thing… That was intense.
Now the COG didn’t believe in Medication or going to the doctors and instead put their faith in Jesus. There are many people that died as a result and I’ll tell that story at the end of this. Mum had to empty out a little teddy shaped jar of vitamin C she had and took it to the doctors, filled it with Quinine and memorised the dosages for each of us 3 boys and smuggled it back into the house. I believe I would be dead if she hadn’t done that.
Because we were sick, our family was placed in quarantine in our bedroom. All except for Dad. You can imagine a single bedroom with now 7 kids in it with Mum for weeks. Cabin fever central!! What happened then was that the rest of the commune would eat first and then bring the left overs up to us. They weren’t covering the food up properly and so the next thing we all got was Typhoid because the flies were sitting on the food before it was brought to us. Again, all of us except Dad. This quick succession of severe diseases would ultimately make my parents decide to leave and head back to Australia.
Faith in Jesus not Medicine
So I had very few friends in the COG as I was usually the oldest in the communes with the rest of the kids being smaller. We also moved around so much that you never got to see the same people for very long and if there was a kid of similar age, there was no guarantee you’d get along! But there was this beautiful young couple called Thomas and Theresa and when we first met them they didn’t have any kids yet. They were Indian but very well spoken. He would take me on his scooter early in the morning to the fruit and veggie markets to get food and then she would give us the odd school lesson on reading etc. In fact once she was sick one time and we missed a lesson and that night i was pouring cups of water over a lit up bare light bulb and onto my tummy to try and warm it up as our showers were always cold and the bulb exploded in front of my face (no surprise there!) and the lesson we missed was going to be about not mixing power and water!!!
Anyway, they were awesome and I really really liked them. I found out later that she died from Malaria due to not taking medication with their commune in stead holding around the clock prayer vigils for her. At that time Thomas and her had 2 little girls, and after she passed away, the COG took the 2 girls away from him and sent them to a kids camp because he was putting them ahead of his “Work for God” just because he had to care for them alone. They loved to play God and pull families apart, put one husband with another wife and send everyone in different directions. They devastaded thousands of families, all the while calling it love.
We were always holding around the clock prayer vigils for someone who was sick or something. I did a few 4 hr shifts myself!
She was certainly not the only person to die from that ridiculous COG doctrine. May their blood be forever on their hands both in this life and in the next.
Part 3
The Infinite Control
The COG had control down to a fine art. They used all 3 forms of abuse and I’ll cover each on it’s own in following Parts of the series.
We were slowly separated from anyone who would potentially tell you that what you were doing was crazy, Family, Friends, Relatives. When you joined you had to “Forsake All” which entailed donating all your money to the group’s leadership, giving away all your personal possessions like clothes etc so that you only had a few sets left. They likened it to being a disciple as described in the Bible and really, that’s how they made it so easy to push. Then they sent you to far away places where you would find it very difficult to get back from without money and contact with the outside world.
Then they had a rule for every single element of life so that you spent so much time trying to follow all the tiny rules that you didn’t have a chance to step back and see it all for what it was!
When washing the dishes you had to do the cups first, then the cutlery, then the plates and lastly the pots. There had to be a pre rinse, a wash and an after rinse set up. You had to put the cups facing up in the cup’d so you didn’t trap germ filled air in the cup. I’ve mentioned the rules around drinking tea previously as well as the toilet paper usage. There were volumes of the “Mo Letters” (15 to 20 odd volumes of David Bergs (Self Named Moses) writings).
They got you to go through self revolutions and change your name which further degraded your sense of self and identity. The Olds would have changed their names 3 times. This made it hard for authorities to track people as well. If an ex member did spill the beans on the group, half the time they didn’t know people’s real names!
Once you were in the ‘grown up’ sphere you even lost the right of consent when it came to accepting sexual partners. You were not allowed to say no if someone felt they needed ‘Love’ from you. There was no ‘self’ and it was all justified by saying it was surrendering to Jesus and if you resisted, it meant that you thought you were better than God, you were self righteous, and you were punished for it.
As kids we were hit with everything from wooden spoons, fly swats, lengths of bamboo, belts, paddles or just the bare hand and anyone in the house could administer discipline to a child. As an adult they just shunned you and put you through a series of sessions with leaders. The love tap turned off and you weren’t involved in the goings on of the house. They were made to read large sections of the ‘Mo Letters’ and then pray for forgiveness.
There was physical exhaustion with the work load that was placed on an individual with hours and hours of door to door ‘witnessing’ and selling of the tapes and posters previously mentioned. Endless housework, cooking, cleaning and group activities.
They had us shit scared of the outside world and anyone who wasn’t in the COG was a “Systemite” who was part of the “System” outside. They were always out to get us and because the end of the world was coming in 1993 (more on that later) we were going to be persecuted by the 666 Satan Police. They made up stories about what was happening back in our home countries and because we didn’t have access to news or communicate with family back home we didn’t know any better!
They separated you from your kids and sent them to ‘Teen Camps’ or different houses for the different age brackets. This happened in some places more heavily than others but where I was, at age 12 I was going to packed up and shipped off to Japan or Thailand. If a parent was thinking of leaving, they had to take into consideration the fact that they may never see their child or children ever again. Thankfully our family left when I was 11 1/2 yrs old and the potential separation was a contributing factor to us leaving.
Because we were in foreign countries with no real reason of being there, and with little to no money, we were often there on false visas. I remember going into this secret room at the back of a tea house with Dad and handing over cash for a set of false visas for our entire family. That was tricky to explain when I needed to go with Mum to the Australian Consulate to get my Passport renewed before coming back to Australia!
Basically, they had everyone by the curlies and leaving took a lot of careful planning and preparation.
Living on the Run
When I was comfortably back in Australia I watched a movie called “Running on Empty” with River Phoenix in it and it brought me to tears. For one, River Phoenix and his family were in the COG as well and they gave vast amounts of the money he made back to the group. I was crushed when he died as I knew the struggle he must have been going through on the inside just to exist but then to throw all the chaos of Hollywood into that just absolutely ruined him. He felt like a brother even though I’d never met him.
We lived on the run which sounds astonishing when you consider that we were a family with 7 (at the time) white, street performing kids in India, but that’s the truth. We moved house frequently. The longest stretch of time I ever lived in a single house by the time I was 12 was 6 months and that was in Jabalpur. Most of the time we didn’t even unpack our little suitcases. I shared a suitcase with my brother that would easily fit into the carry on baggage guide at the airport. We had a small collection of Lego and that was it.
It was different from house to house but for the most part, in order to not bring attention to ourselves we only went outside to play for 1/2 hr every week and it was in small groups. We had to stay quiet all the time which was hard when there could have been up to 25 kids in any one commune. We left the house in staggered Rickshaws so we never all went out at once. We often moved in or out at night.
We had “Flee” Drills regularly where we had to listen for the alarm to be raised, grab our little “Flee Bags” and get outside to a distant gathering point. We’d be timed and do it more than once if it was too slow.
We did training on what to do if we were picked up by Police and questioned away from any parents. Someone would pretend to be the police and they’d be rough with us and simulate putting pressure on us etc and we had to give the right response or we copped it… We were constantly vigilant about what we said and we were always looking out the back of the Rickshaw to see if we were being followed home.
I remember once we were hitch hiking in India and actually got picked up by a car and the 2 men in it were asking what we were doing in India and after a trained response from Dad they asked if we were in the COG! Well that put the whole area into a spin and the city got basically vacated within a couple of weeks.
That is one crazy way to live as a kid. I’ve heard people talk about the virtues of keeping kids in a stable and safe environment in order for them to develop and learn. Well, I wouldn’t know. I had to rely on the guidance of my kids Mums around this aspect.
It is astounding to me each and every day when I see my kids with the basic stability and luxuries of modern life like going to the same school for the whole of Primary or living in the same house for as long as they can remember and they’re 8 or two houses and they’re 11! They get to enjoy routine and have a favorite food or way of having their milk warmed in the morning in winter. Having their own room with their own things in it and relying on us to tell them what to be careful of in the outside world. I treasure their innocence and I find my own in it again each and every day I live with them.
So, so different, in just one generation.
