NEWS STORY: Report details abuse of missionaries children

c. 1998 Religion News Service UNDATED _ The screams from the first- and second-grade classroom could be heard throughout Mamou Alliance Academy. The teacher would fly into a rage _ sometimes toppling desks and children _ for infractions as small as a child not knowing how to pronounce the word vegetable. When Dorothy Wormley was […]

c. 1998 Religion News Service

UNDATED _ The screams from the first- and second-grade classroom could be heard throughout Mamou Alliance Academy.

The teacher would fly into a rage _ sometimes toppling desks and children _ for infractions as small as a child not knowing how to pronounce the word vegetable. When Dorothy Wormley was really angry, her former pupils told a church commission, bathroom passes were withheld and 6- and 7-year-olds would spend the day sitting in their own feces and urine.


But who was going to report her in this school for missionaries’ children nestled among the hills of Guinea in West Africa?

Not the school nurse who was forcing boys to take part in secret post-bedtime shower sessions.

Not the dorm parent who would beat children so bloody that in a playground game named after him and his wife, youngsters challenged each other to come up with the cruelest punishment imaginable.

And not any of the other adults who feared their own expulsion in a system that could not comprehend “good Christians” committing such abuse.

In a watershed set of reports obtained by the Cleveland Plain Dealer, an independent commission of inquiry appointed by the Christian and Missionary Alliance concluded that these abuses and scores of other acts of repeated sexual, physical and psychological abuse occurred at the school. In all, the school served about 200 children of missionaries from the U.S.-based Missionary Alliance, Gospel Missionary Union and other missionary organizations throughout West Africa between 1950 and 1971, when it closed.

The portrait that emerges from the independent inquiry, church disciplinary reports and dozens of interviews with Mamou alumni, their parents, church officials and former staff, is of a missionary community so focused on saving the souls of Africans that it was unaware its own children were being forced to endure the kind of hell on Earth that would have challenged the imagination of Charles Dickens in 19th century England.

It could be a historic turning point for a Christian community that has largely been content to dismiss child abuse in the church as “a Catholic problem” because of well-publicized cases of pedophilia by Catholic clergy in recent years.


“Mamou, when all is said and done, is going to be the Auschwitz of MK (missionary kids) boarding schools,” said Dianne Darr Couts, a schoolteacher from Akron, Ohio, and a Mamou alumnus.

Mamou was chosen as the site of the boarding school for the children of missionaries serving in the West African countries of Mali, Guinea, the Ivory Coast, Upper Volta, Liberia and Sierra Leone in part because of its temperate climate and fertile soil.

Set in a mountainous region of Guinea, the academy offered students in grades one through 10 both physical beauty and an oasis from the oppressive heat and the heightened exposure to disease at the mission stations where many of their parents toiled.

However, the very isolation of this African paradise _ days’ travel from the mission field of most parents and in a place where the exchange of telegrams could take weeks _ also allowed widespread physical and sexual abuse to persist for decades, investigators said.

The commission of inquiry of attorneys, therapists and lay people documented horrific acts of abuse against scores of students. Among those reported by the commission:

_ Floyd Bowman, houseparent during the late 1940s and early 1950s, forced children to eat their own vomit. The commission said he punched a first- or second-grade child in the face, leaving a black eye. Bowman was deceased at the time of the inquiry.


_ The Rev. Dellmer Smith, the housefather at Mamou from 1955 to 1957, sexually abused at least five girls during post-bedtime “tummy rubs” in the girl’s dormitory, the commission of inquiry reported. Based on witness testimony, the panel also concluded Smith used part of a heavy rubber tire to inflict regular, frequent and bloody beatings _ as many as 48 swats at one time.

The commission reported Smith “completely and categorically denied any wrongdoing. He indicated a belief that the alleged incidents of abuse had been fabricated and reported by certain former students who desired to injure his reputation.” Smith refused to comment for this article.

_ Dorothy Wormley Bortel, the first- and second-grade teacher from 1958 through 1966, was found by the independent panel to have engaged in an “ongoing reign of terror and sadistic behavior.” The abuses included throwing over desks with students in them, and shaking, slapping, hitting and pulling them from the desks by their hair.

In a letter from her attorney, Wormley Bortel said she had “a clear conscience” about her work at Mamou Academy. She did not respond to a request for an interview made through her attorney.

She refused to meet with the investigative panel, but her attorney said in a letter to the panel that she “has searched her memory and cannot recall any instance where she acted inappropriately to a student, either emotionally or physically.”

Wormley Bortel also said through her attorney that “she understands how some of the former students of Mamou Academy could certainly have emotional problems that they are still dealing with as a result of long periods of separation from their parents.”


Overall, what the report makes clear and what former students most vividly remember is that Mamou children _ already traumatized by being taken away from their parents for nine months at a time when they were as young as 5 _ were forced to live in a constant state of terror.

Using a regimented system of bells that began ringing at 6:15 a.m. and kept ringing in intervals as short as five to 15 minutes until bedtime, Mamou school officials had children follow a labyrinthine set of rules for everything from folding their napkins to the amount of toilet paper they were permitted to use, former students said.

Children were punished for using more than four sheets of toilet paper at one time and punished if their underwear was soiled. They were punished if they got up during rest time to go to the bathroom, and if they wet their beds, they were publicly humiliated _ even forced to wear a diaper on the playground.

Judy Darr, a Mamou alumna from Charleston, W.Va., remembers one day folding her clothes neatly on top of the bureau but forgetting to put them away. For such an act, she was beaten with part of a truck tire for every piece of clothing left out.

One child “threw up his oatmeal every day, and they made sure they gave him plenty of oatmeal,” she said. “If you had a problem, they doubled it.”

Not even the classroom offered any respite, particularly for the youngest children.

Sheryl Ajas, an alumna from Canada, testified that she remembered the fear welling up within her and other kids when a first-grader repeatedly mispronounced the word vegetable.


“Suddenly Miss Wormley began screaming and grabbed the edge of the table, upending it and sending children and books flying. She then fled to her desk and, weeping bitterly, called on us to clean up `our mess.”’

In the final scene of these almost daily dramas, the children would be ordered to line up at her desk, apologize and hug and kiss her.

Even after bedtime, the children were not safe. That’s when the sexual abuse would occur, former students told the commission.

Added to all the physical and emotional abuse, in the case of the Rev. Richard Darr who now is a United Methodist pastor in Greenwood, Ill., were visits at night from a junior high school boy who would reach under the covers and force the frightened first-grader to touch the older boy’s penis. In one incident, Richard Darr was dragged into the older boy’s closet and forced to perform oral sex.

Parents who were commanded by mission agencies to send their children to Mamou were told to focus on the biblical story of Abraham, who stood ready to sacrifice his son Isaac at God’s command on top of Mount Moriah.

But in the biblical account, God stays Abraham’s hand. At Mamou, there was no such protection.


“Was Mamou Alliance Academy worth the price I paid?” Richard Darr wrote the investigative panel. “No! A thousand times no. You see, I’ve been through my Mount Moriah experience. I’ve been to that lovely hillside. And I was sacrificed there.”

The first reports of abuse started coming into Christian and Missionary Alliance headquarters in the late ’80s. By the mid-’90s, a group of alumni had begun working to bring pressure on the missionary groups to investigate Mamou.

In 1995, the group staged a public protest at the Alliance’s annual meeting in Pittsburgh. The Alliance has more than 300,000 members in some 2,000 U.S. churches, and more than 1,100 overseas missionaries from the United States.

In consultation with Mamou alumni, the church appointed the independent five-member investigative panel, which launched a nearly two-year investigation.

Seven former staff members and two former students were found to have physically, sexually or psychologically abused children at Mamou. In some cases, more than one kind of abuse was committed by the same person.

Among actions taken by the Alliance, church officials said they are developing independent means of investigating future charges of abuse, they have apologized for the abuses committed there and they are planning a reunion of Mamou alumni next spring to help the victims heal.


“We started out by begging you to do the right thing, and I think we’ve done the right thing,” the Rev. Francis Grubbs, appointed by the church to head an internal committee investigating Mamou, said he told the board of managers at its fall meeting. “I hope it sets a model and a pattern others can use.”

But other missionary groups have reacted differently.

The Gospel Missionary Union, which required many parents to send their kids to Mamou, has not formulated “an official response,” said Jerome Youdarian, a member of the board.

Unlike the Missionary Alliance, the Kansas City-based Gospel Missionary Union is not a denomination of churches, but is solely a mission agency. The union currently has 340 overseas missionaries from the United States, who receive funding from individuals and independent churches.

The passage of time and the fact the abuses occurred in Guinea make civil or criminal suits nearly impossible, say advocates for Mamou alumni. What they want from mission agencies is to admit the abuses occurred, say they are sorry and to take action to prevent future abuses.

(OPTIONAL TRIM FOLLOWS)

“You can’t say there was no Holocaust. It was there. It was by intent. It was by design,” said Mamou alumnus Howard Beardslee, now living in Westfield, Mass. “Whether you want to hear it or not, you inflicted a great deal of pain on a lot of people.”

Twenty, 30, 40 years later, in broken marriages, addictions and attempted suicides, many former students of Mamou still struggle with what are believed to be the traumatic effects of a childhood spent in fear and trembling.


What helped many of them through years of pain was to return to their childhoods and to acknowledge the suffering they had kept buried inside.

“I hand this shame back,” Darr wrote in his testimony to the church. “It is not mine now. It was not ours as little children. It is yours.”

Advocates say much work remains to be done in encouraging missionary agencies to investigate past abuses at other missionary schools. They also encourage church groups to follow the independent panel’s recommendations to make it easier and safer for children and adults to report abuse and to quickly and decisively investigate any charges of child abuse.

In the meantime, many of the children of Mamou have begun the slow process of rebuilding their lives.

Judy Darr, who for most of her life believed the humiliating putdowns of her intelligence in first and second grade, went back to college and got her degree.

And the nightmares about Dellmer Smith and Wormley that plagued her for years finally stopped earlier this year, Darr said. They stopped the night she was having a dream about being back in Miss Wormley’s class while the teacher was abusing someone.


Only this time in her dream, Judy Darr stood up to Miss Wormley: “I told her to stop treating us like that.

“I told her,” Darr remembers, “she couldn’t hurt us anymore and we weren’t going to take that.”

DEA END BRIGGS

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