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In Reply to: Any One Know About Uncle Dan from Argentina? posted by Jackie on February 24, 2007 at 06:38:14:
I remember Uncle Dan and Auntie Joy. Their brood came to Argentina from the United States after having rejoined the Family.
I believe they arrived some time after the whole "Searchers" push, although I don't know if they were re-recruited by Faithy's "Searchers" team.
So they would have gone to Argentina after The Family stopped promoting sex with children and FFing. I am not sure how long they were out of the Family and how long they were back before going to Argentina.
I do remember them from the days of the DTR, which was one of the hellish times in the Family for the psychological torture. I don't recall them ever being the shepherds though.
I recall them being teachers at a school the cult had set up for the children in the area. I recall a time when the cult decided that all of us kids who had been full-time, unpaid, medically neglected menial laborers and pavement-punding fundraisers for years should get an hour of "school" every now and them because, shucks, some of us had trouble with, like, reading, or math.
I remember one time after a full days' work the teenaged ones among us sitting in a room and Uncle Dan trying to explain what algebra was. I also remember him giving me some kind of diagnostic test that they started to have after persecutions so they could shore up on that front.
I always looked at Uncle Dan and Auntie Joy and scratched my heads. For once, kids had teachers who knew how to teach. But what were they doing in that hellhole? They seemed to be a lot more centered than most people I grew up with, and I had felt for years, as I went from childood toward adolescence like I was in the middle of sheer hell with no way out. And these people had gotten out and dragged back their kids? -- Who may I say, were very nice and never did to me some of the horrible things done by other kids who had been in TF the whole time and not backslidden.
In other words, Dan and Joy seemed educated and therefore rather smart to me, yet at the same time sheer plumb idiots for having had some kind of normalcy after leaving and then choosing to go back.
I guess the Zack Prendergasts of the world can't really say on their resumes that they ran a Victor's home, and the Dan Suttins can't really say that "Centro Rural de Estudios of Buenos Aires, Argentina" was actually a commune of the infamous child-abuse and variable-extremeness sex cult "The Family", where they were teachers trying to bring some true learning to kids in need of learning -- but also in need of adults stopping their cooperative life-destroying cultic endeavour.
But maybe the home-schooler market understands isolationist groups and at the end of the day feels kinship, even if the groups have "radical" practices.
My experience was that Uncle Dan and Auntie Joy never personally abused me, they were just one more part of the lifeblood of a system that destroyed my childhood and left me with crippling effects.
