Beyond Belief (8 page)

I was also required to make a special concoction called Cal-Mag for everyone to drink before bed. The Cal-Mag’s formula, first concocted by LRH, consisted of calcium, magnesium, apple-cider vinegar, and boiling water, which would then be cooled down. It was intended to be a clear drink; however, I didn’t know the difference between a tablespoon and a teaspoon, and I would incorrectly add a tablespoon of magnesium instead of a teaspoon, making this already horrible-tasting drink murky and smelling almost exactly like dirty feet. During mealtimes, it was my responsibility to take the meal to anybody who was in isolation.

If someone had a cut, I would clean it with hydrogen peroxide and patch it with a Band-Aid. If it was a hot day, I made sure salt, potassium, and cell salts were available for the kids. If anyone complained of a headache, other ache or fever, I would usually give him an assist. Assists were the special procedures created by LRH that I had been introduced to at the nursery in L.A. They were supposed to help people have better communication with their bodies. In addition to the touch assist that we had done at the nursery, there was also the nerve assist, which was like a very light massage. There were lots of similar assists written by LRH and designed to help people with all sorts of ailments, from colds, fevers, and toothaches to even psychological things, such as bad dreams. In my post as Medical Liasion, I would do as many as I could.

The assists were based on Scientological principles that the Thetan controlled the mind and the body. There were some procedures, like asking a kid to explain his bad dream over and over again, that were supposed to help him get rid of its hold on him. There was also the belief that people got colds because of a loss, so I would ask, “Tell me something you haven’t lost lately?” as a part of the cold assist, reminding them of things they still had. There was a giant handbook that had everything from a toothache assist to a temperature assist.

If it seemed as though someone was more seriously ill, I would tell an adult, and an adult would usually visit isolation to see how things were going. I never went to the doctor the entire time I was at the Ranch. The only time I witnessed a doctor’s visit, I was accompanying a friend who needed stitches, and wound up fainting at the sight of blood. At least once, they did have a nurse come out, and everyone was given the MMR—the measles, mumps, and rubella vaccine.

One rule that was firm, however, was that no matter how sick a kid was, we never used drugs to relieve pain or reduce fever. Drugs were considered bad and weren’t even available. Antibiotics were fine, but you would have to go to the real doctor to get them, which was pretty rare. There were times when I was extremely sick with a high temperature (102 or 103 degrees) to the point of nearly passing out, even vomiting, and I was simply told to drink fluids and get rest. As a kid, I was not responsible enough to take care of myself and follow these orders; once I even tried exercising to get better because my brother told me this was the best way. I have no idea if my parents were informed when I was sick, but I never heard from them when I was, unless I had a chance to tell them about it on a Sunday. Most of the time, though, I was able to stay pretty healthy. As I became a more experienced MLO, everything became fairly routine. Looking back on this time, it’s difficult even for me to understand how a seven-year-old child could be entrusted to do a job like this. I hate to think what might have happened if a child had been extremely sick and I hadn’t realized the seriousness of it enough to say something to an adult. However, I didn’t feel unqualified or unprepared, because this was the only way I knew to do things. They supposedly told me how to care for kids, and I learned how to follow their instructions as best I could.

Post time, when I was on duty as the MLO, was the most enjoyable part of my day, because I liked taking care of the other kids and making them feel better. The adults taught me that there was a practical, clear solution for all medical problems. In many ways, they treated illness as if it were the same as hunger or a lack of toilet paper—it was simply an obstacle on our journey to become Sea Org members. The solution was to rely on the people who made the food, supplied toilet paper, or, in my case, helped my fellow Ranch kids become healthier.

Breakfast was at eight-thirty. We ate at assigned tables; each table had a Mess President and a Treasurer, who collected one dollar here and there so that we could have extra condiments, such as honey or jelly. They were on sale at the canteen, and we could purchase them ourselves or pool our money and purchase them as a group. Because there was a no-sugar policy at the Ranch, these were rare commodities that went fast. The meal was over at nine, and the dining room/dishwashing process began. We all had cleaning stations. Some kids did dishes, others did sweeping and mopping, some cleaned the tables, but everyone had a chore.

The second muster, which began at nine-fifteen, signaled the beginning of decks, or the labor-intensive projects. They lasted almost four hours, until twelve-forty-five, Monday through Friday, and all day Saturday. This added up to twenty-five hours of deck time per week, but if you included the time we spent at our morning posts, and the time we spent white-gloving the entire Ranch on Saturdays, that brought the total hours we were working to more than thirty-five hours a week: a full-time job, and we were only kids and young teenagers.

Unlike our posts, which were specific jobs that rarely changed, the decks had us working in small groups; the projects themselves changed constantly. Depending on how many projects there were to be done on any given day, we were all divided into units—and worked with our units. It didn’t matter how old you were, everyone worked on these labor projects.

Each unit was assigned a kid who was in charge, and he or she had a sheet of paper that laid out exactly what the project consisted of, how long it should take, and the tools that were needed. The projects themselves varied from the fun ones, such as doing the laundry or cleaning the swimming pool—often considered one-person jobs—to weeding for fire protection, rock hauling, planting trees and other plants, and digging irrigation trenches.

Often there was landscaping involved. We would spend long hours on dig-and-plant projects, using a shovel to dig five-foot holes for each of the hundreds of new trees in the tree nursery, sometimes in pouring rain and hail. We worked in teams to haul hundreds of trees all over the property, plant them, and make sure they were properly fertilized. On hundreds of days, we planted the hills with an ice plant called red apple. We’d weed and irrigate a hill, lay burlap on it, and then one kid would dig holes with a pickax while another would place the plants into the holes.

Rock hauling to build stone walls was another arduous deck project. We would pick up rocks from a creek that ran nearby and put them into a pile, where another group of children would load them into a wheelbarrow and carry them to the site of the newest rock wall. Once the rocks were in place, yet another set of kids would lug around cement bags, and the older, more skilled kids would use the cement to secure the rocks in the wall.

Because the buildings on the Ranch were older constructions, part of the renovation job of the Big House involved loading piles of roofing by hand or shoveling them into wheelbarrows and taking them from the Big House demolition/construction site to a huge hole, about a quarter of a mile away, where it was to be buried. The insulation itself was brittle, about an eighth of an inch thick, and would crack like cement if you hit it on a rock. It was a reddish, pinkish, brownish color. On at least one occasion, we were told that some inspectors were coming to the Ranch, and there was a big rush to hide the giant pile of roofing, which seemed a little odd, but we did it nonetheless.

When we weren’t planting, constructing rock walls, or moving debris, we frequently pulled weeds to keep the Ranch safer in case of brushfires. The parched desert land around the Ranch was peppered with scrub that could easily catch fire during the dry summer months, and so, for fire protection, we were required to pull out weeds by their roots along several miles of the road. No matter how hot it was—temperatures were often well over 100 degrees—the older girls couldn’t wear tank tops or sports bras because they were too suggestive, which was confusing, because the boys were allowed to take their shirts off. We were always told to wear gloves, but none were ever provided, at least to me, so I, like many kids, had a thick layer of brown, chapped skin between my forefinger and my thumb from holding the rake.

To cope with the heat, there was usually cold water, as well as the salt and potassium tablets, which were supposed to keep us hydrated. Kids would take four or five of each because none of us really knew how they were supposed to be taken. At least I didn’t know. So we just took them because we heard they helped prevent overheating. We were also allowed five-minute breaks, although they were few and far between.

We were told that the labor was simply an exchange for being able to live on the Ranch. It was our chance to earn our way, rather than getting things for free. This was important because, as Scientology taught us, our supervisors were actually helping to prevent us from becoming criminals, since only criminals got things for free. Furthermore, this hard labor was training us how to have pride in production, to face tough situations head-on, and to confront MEST, an acronym that Scientology used for Matter, Energy, Space, and Time. MEST was the term that referred to physical objects as opposed to anything in the spiritual realm that had to do with nonphysical things, such as Thetans, thoughts, and intentions. Because we were doing physical labor, we were dealing with MEST, which would someday make us better Scientologists.

Frequently during decks, the adults would wander from project to project to see how they were coming along. Sometimes, they would help out a little, but the projects really were primarily carried out and overseen by the children. In fact, the adults would push us to work harder, faster, and more thoroughly. We were controlling and handling the MEST in our way. Confronting it through physical labor was seen as therapeutic and helped to clear our heads, even though the projects and assignments were often incredibly labor intensive.

Very rarely during my time at the Ranch did anyone ever step forward to say they thought the work was too much or too extreme, probably because the adults did not see it that way. After all, they were the ones who wrote the project orders and determined whether or not we had satisfactorily completed our decks project. If not, we were sometimes required to finish it through our lunchtime. No project was considered finished until an adult or another specially appointed kid inspected it and signed off.

In the end, we either complied with our decks assignments or we were sent to an adult. If we were repeat offenders, we could end up in the HMU, the Heavy MEST Work Unit, where we did heavy manual labor. This unit was for people who repeatedly broke rules or backflashed. The harder work, such as deep trench digging, was reserved for this group. They were also required to eat and study separately and we weren’t supposed to talk to them.

Despite the fact that our Scientology supervisors didn’t seem to think it was strange that kids were doing this kind of work, every now and then we’d come into contact with outside contractors who did. Usually, they were hired to do the more technical projects on the Ranch, like laying the cement for a sidewalk. These outsiders didn’t come around often, but when they did, I always had a little bit of hope that they would advocate for us or that our work shifts would be cut back a few hours or even days. Most of the time, our supervisors just tried to keep us as separate from these Wogs as possible, but once, while the contractors were there, they actually complained when they saw a couple of young kids hauling a railroad tie, because they thought they were too young for that kind labor. What they didn’t know was that, since railroad ties were a featured element all over the property for edging pathways or creating planters, we hauled railroad ties all the time, usually two kids per tie. After the complaint by the outsiders, we were not allowed to work anywhere near hired contractors.

Not surprisingly, the older and stronger we got, the easier the physical labor became. Some children, such as my brother, didn’t seem to have trouble keeping up with the deck work. Justin would usually make fun of me or call me a slacker when I would walk instead of run or complain that I was tired. I was a seven-year-old girl, and he was a fifteen-year-old boy, so it was just different.

I didn’t like the work at all. My legs always hurt, my hands were extremely chapped, and I was usually either overheated or freezing cold, because we worked no matter the temperature. We often wound up wearing shorts in the winter because the funds weren’t there for new uniforms and, as kids, we grew quickly. The rule was that everyone had to run while on decks, so if I was caught walking, I would hear “Jenna, run!” or “Jenna, get to work!” Adults and kids alike would yell this out. There was nothing polite about it. If we backflashed, moved slow, or refused to do a project, which almost never happened, we were told to stop “nattering” (the word LRH used for complaining or talking badly about something) and we would get a chit written on us.

The work itself was never-ending. We would finish a project one day, and then have a whole new one the next. It was incessant and repetitious, like being told every day to push a boulder up a hill and knowing full well that tomorrow another boulder would be there. We were making the Ranch into a beautiful place, but for whom? I’d certainly lost all appreciation for its beauty, and I longed for the days when the Ranch had been more run-down and I had downtime to enjoy it.

To this day I don’t know whether the real motivation behind these projects was the virtually free labor, a way to keep us out of trouble, or to make us better Scientologists. Most likely it was a combination of all three. In the end we were a group of children who devoted hours of every day to doing the kind of physical labor that no child should have to do.