Title: For afters, how about a black magic pudding?
Source: The Australian, 12/24/2002
Author(s): Stephen Romei
AN: 200212241011919513
Database: Newspaper Source
For afters, how about a black magic pudding?

Edition: 1 - All-round Country
Section: Features, pg. 011

I WAS going to have another dig at the scientologists today, but decided, as it's the season of goodwill, not to bestir the bewildered.

That judgment is based on the call I received from scientologist Cyrus Brooks after last week's column, in which I said shareholders in James Packer's companies might like to know whether he has joined the L. Ron Hubbard fan club.

Brooks, speaking as a community relations officer for the Church of Scientology in NSW, compared that modest suggestion to ``what the Germans did to the Jews'' during the Nazi era. Further, yours truly was ``like a white man who doesn't know what it's like to be black''.

Elevated argument, for sure. Yet on the simpler question of whether Packer was undertaking auditing sessions with the church, Brooks was less animated. ``I am not going to answer personal questions about any scientologist.''

So, we remain no wiser. But let's leave the scientologists behind and take a Tom Cruise-sized step to another issue: witchcraft in the Democratic Republic of Congo.

This Christmas, about 14,000 Congolese children are homeless, having been evicted by parents convinced their offspring are sorcerers.

In this deeply superstitious, civil war-ravaged and dirt-poor nation, children are the scapegoats for yet another African disaster.

We know this because of some good reporting by the BBC's Jeremy Vine, who has spent time with families who believe their children are casting spells that make machinery fail and so on. As Vine reports, the 14,000 ostracised from the family home are the lucky ones.

Some children are killed by their fearful parents.

Others end up in the hands of a bible teacher-cum-exorcist who calls himself Prophet Onokoko. He casts out the evil spirits by making the children throw up objects such as bars of soap, dead prawns and live fish. As Save the Children representative Mahimbo Mdoe told Vine:

``What's going on is purely and simply child abuse. Children are made to vomit up things that are inserted into them unnaturally.''

Sorry to be so unfestive, but such are the stories I notice at Christmas.

Like the one from a few weeks back about the 42 Bangladeshis crushed to death outside a warehouse in the stampede sparked by a philanthropist's offer of free clothes to the destitute.

That one led me back to a wonderful story published in The New York Times Magazine in March 2001, in which reporter George Packer traced the journey of a T-shirt from a charity shop in Manhattan to a village stall in Uganda.

The T-shirt ended up on the back of Yusuf Mama, a 71-year-old husband of four and father of 32, who paid $US1.20 for it. Asked why he chose that shirt from the many on sale, he replied: ``It can help me. I have only one shirt.''

An estimated 800 million people will go to sleep hungry tonight, according to the UN. I'm not saying they should spoil our Christmas -- and I for one will be drinking to Dionysus tomorrow. But perhaps we might think about them in the New Year, at that time of resolution.

Copyright 2002 / The Australian
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Source: The Australian, DEC 24, 2002
Item: 200212241011919513

--- "If there is anyone here I've failed to insult--- I apologize." J. Brahms

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