Wed. April 26th- Supper time at our kitchen table with one brother worker, my husband Bob, and myself. The conversation went to Morgan and our frustration about how her abuse has been handled. This man whom we have trusted (silly us) proceeded to explain to us that Morgan’s inappropriate touching from an older sister worker on two separate occasions was NOTHING, that he has been touched on the leg by others before and she is just sensitive. Yet again we found ourselves explaining that it wasn’t “just a touch on the leg”. Just imagine that this was an acceptable behavior… we’d think twice about who we sit next to in the dining shed or at our very own kitchen table. No, I’m sorry, I will not sit by quietly and allow these untruths to be told. Since then, I have heard this same story being shared amongst friends; one first-hand and one incident second hand. I’m assuming there has been more but I don’t know that. Workers are believed, they are “the workers”.

Thursday, May 4th- Bob was contacted in the afternoon for a meeting with 3 of our brother workers at 7 pm. Bob asked that we have witnesses and meet at a different location than our own home (which later was taken out of context and said that we didn’t even want them in our home). We later learned that they were coming from a meeting with the overseer. When we sat down with these three men, we had our other daughter and son-in-law on speaker phone from NZ as well as two other witnesses. The first remark made was, “We just came to talk about convention”, indicating that this wasn’t about Morgan, but whether we are going to have convention this year at Woodstock. One worker indicated he was asking because Bob had made a remark that there was corruption in the oversight. It was stated that Bob was talking to a lot of people and telling them the overseers are corrupt. The actual comment Bob made was that there is corruption within the overseers (we all know we can’t make a blanket statement about any group of people) and people all over the world who are reading what is happening can put these facts together for themselves. My hope is that it keeps going until all the ugly is cleaned out, overseers, workers, and friends. This is unacceptable. The overall purpose of the meeting was to tell us there will be no Woodstock convention at least for this year. I mentioned during our meeting that it would be impossible to talk about this without bringing Morgan’s story into it, so the meeting was long with no progress. The moral of all of this is that this is what we get for speaking up. Not only have we planned for convention but everyone else looks forward to it and has made plans to come to Woodstock; now they’ve all been sent a warning.

Friday, May 5th- I sent our brother worker a text to stop spreading stories minimizing Morgan’s abuse. I sent him the definition of and the laws in Canada about slander. I indicated to him that we had shared the news about their decision to not hold convention at Woodstock. My response from him was, “It’s not definite about convention, I asked about no convention this year. I was talking to the overseer this morning and it’s not yet definite.” No response to my comments about slander. I reminded him that he was definite last night when he said there would not be convention at Woodstock for at least a year. This was stated multiple times in front of 6 witnesses.

We are frustrated and discouraged to have to fight so hard for truth to be told and for these things to be taken care of. We are sorry to everyone and so sad that the workers feel that the truth being told will hinder convention.