On yon hill where the cold wind blows
Lies my darling Zarene Rose.
The Welfare said they'd take care of you.
It wasn't very often.
They took you away in a cradle
But brought you back in a coffin.
Geordie Frame, brother of the New Zealand author Janet Frame, wrote this sad little verse for his young daughter Zarene Rose. The baby is said to have died in her sleep while in foster care, having been taken away from her parents by "the Welfare".
Were her parents competent to look after her? Not very, going by Janet Frame's own account of her brother and his wife. But... was The Welfare any more competent?
The verse is quoted in the biography of Janet Frame by Michael King.
And of course a flower for the poet Lemn Sissay and the writer Jenni Fagan, who both survived a childhood in Care, and somehow managed to write about it so powerfully in My Name is Why, and Ootlin.
The torture murder of Preston Davey at the hands of his adoptive parents, and in plain sight of the authorities, is the tragic inspiration for this blog.
Oldham Council - in whose care Preston was - say no staff have been disciplined or sacked following the infant's death but insist an independent child safeguarding practice review is being carried out and will report in due course.
No surprise there then. Another review, another "enquiry", and things will go on much the same - well, will likely get worse alas, as broken families, chaos and violence increase everywhere.
I hope those who did not survive being cared for in this way sleep safe in "the everlasting arms", held close in the memory of the most loving Father, Jehovah, and that they have such a joyful awakening ahead of them when the time comes to wake the dead from their dreamless sleep. They will wake up from a nightmare into the peace and joy of the restored earthly paradise. We are promised that "distress will not rise up a second time", so all nightmares will be gone for good.
And it seems a horrendously perfect ending to this sad blog to have just heard that the man who threw a toddler into the crocodile enclosure in Cambridge has been released on bail.
HE HAS BEEN RELEASED ON BAIL. The toddler is in hospital, seriously injured. Whether the child will survive is not clear. But God bless the owners of the crocs who risked their lives going into the enclosure to save him. At least that has given the child a chance.
The Police have told us we are "to refrain from speculation". But its hard not to speculate about just how many toddlers this man will be allowed to attack until he is safely locked up somewhere.
Well, as our speaker at the Kingdom Hall reminded us today, "it does not belong to man who is walking even to direct his step". (Jeremiah 10:23) And surely surely there is no excuse for not seeing the truth of those words, after the ongoing tragedies that human rulership is causing on the earth.
We need God's will to be done on the earth, not that of imperfect humans.
The Speaker today brought back another memory from the past. He was African, from the Congo I believe. One of our last holidays in our travelling days was to South Africa for a friend's wedding. It was my first and only time in Africa - and we fell in love with the beautiful Cape. At that time - 20 years or so ago - there were a lot of Congolese immigrants living there, selling things at the roadside. We stopped and bought some wooden carvings and found that they all seemed to speak English well - as did our brother today.
He spoke from the heart too.
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