Stolen Land, Broken Promises

Here is the info people keep wanting to know, so I'm giving it to you in a nutshell.  Sophie's parents left her land in Chiang Rai at her family’s village. The people living there were supposedly her mom’s best friends. Well, they wanted to buy the land from her, but Ning and I said she was not prepared to make a decision of that magnitude less than a year after her mother’s death and at the age of 14. The guy kept calling and harassing Sophie though and wouldn’t give up. However, here’s the clincher. Because her parents couldn’t technically own land, he had the deed cause he’s a citizen. So, what does he do? He sells the land to the highest bidder for 4 times what he wanted to give Sophie for it. 400,000 baht and he only wants to give Sophie 200,000. He basically sold her history, her heritage, her inheritance so he could buy himself a car. A CAR!?!! We finally negotiated him to give her 230,000 with the sob story of the fact that we still owe the hospital nearly 100,000 baht, so if he didn’t give us that much, she would only end up with less than what her parents paid for it 10 years ago.  The money is not the point. I don’t care if he HAD given her all of it. He had NO RIGHT to sell it in the first place. He sold the memory of her parents and the only thing of her bio father than she had in this world. AWFUL.

Here’s the reason that I am so incensed about all this. If I had never come here, these are the people Sophie would most likely have ended up with. These lowlife scum who would have taken her in, refused to take her to the hospital and would have sold her to the highest bidder to get a car, never mind the land. She would have either died from TB or been sold to a brothel and died there. That is the thing that really kills me and makes me want to kill him. Not just the idea that he sold her land without the slightest moral quandary, but the fact that if he is that money hungry, he would have not hesitated to get rid of her the easiest way possible to save him the cost of an extra bowl of rice at dinner every night. Terrifying. 

So when people ask me why I want legal guardianship since I'm not allowed adoption with her lack of citizenship, this is what I think of: I want to be able to protect her from people like this with the law backing me up, so no one can say they have a claim to her and then take advantage of her.