Free Beyond Belief by Jenna Miscavige Hill

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