Category: Personal

It was starting to get bad. The scent of death was forced upon us yet again, but this time, it seemed to be coming from a place to which we had no access.

We’ve suffered this malodorous intrusion before, a couple of houses back. One was a bit of a false alarm though. We managed to track that down to one of the boys’ school bags, hung on the back of a door for the duration of the summer holidays. That was an unfinished chicken sandwich that was months past its eat-by date. Not impressed, but hey … we could just throw the bag out, right?

The other was a rat that had died in the roof, nestled in the insulation. I managed to get at that one by sliding some external tiles up and out of the way, and just reaching in. I didn’t have to climb through the roof, so I guess that was a plus.

There are only really two bad things about dead critturs in the roof: the smell, and what’s decided to live in them. When I pulled that rat out (I was gloved, and the glove got wrapped around the carcass and they were discarded together), its occupants were writhing around under the surface. It seemed to me that the maggots were just growing instead of maturing. I figured they had to be an inch long. It turns that I may have been exaggerating, but according to this article: https://australianmuseum.net.au/learn/science/decomposition-fly-life-cycles, not by much.

Bringing us up to this event, we thought it was coming from the lounge room … maybe one of the Christmas visitors had dropped some meat behind a couch? Nope. I pulled out everything, and checked underneath. Nada.

Fortunately, Josh got the idea of sniffing up near the roof. I don’t know how he did that … he’s not that much taller than me, and I have no hope of getting my nose up there. OK, we knew roughly where it was, but how were we going to pinpoint it? The problem is that we now live in a two-storey house, and this seemed to be coming from an area between floors. We discussed it over dinner, and figured that maybe removing one the downlights would be the way to go. Because I’m not keen on getting involved in this sort of thing, I put it off until the following morning (today). Then I removed the downlight, stuck my phone up there, and this is the result .

In case you’re wondering, my words were: “Aaah … I think we got it.” Then Josh says “Ah, the camera!”. My words took me off guard when I listened at low volume. Ahem.

After that, it was easy. Albeit disgusting. Disposable glove, surface spray, disinfectant spray, and a lot of airing. There is no way I would have been able to crawl in there, so I’m really grateful for the large gap afforded by the downlights. Fortunately, today is a garbage collection day, and the collectors had not yet been around.

This is a continuation from my original Enesi Yavala article.

Things had settled down, and we’d got on with our lives … poorer, but hopefully wiser. Then the whole question resurfaced. A fellow called me on the phone (I’ll call him ‘Bob’) and said he had been pastoring Enesi, calling him to account, and walking him through a process of repentance and healing. He had access to some accounts set up by Enesi in Australia, and was able to go about making restitution to people Enesi had been involved with. In fact, Enesi had always been who he presented himself to be in terms of a mover and shaker and very wealthy, but was misguided. Nevertheless, he was responding to Bob’s pastoring efforts. Oh, and the web site I had there was making it hard for Enesi to move on.

I was immediately suspicious. Bob had said he had been a COC pastor, so he was a trustworthy guy. He had all the language right, so rather than just dismissing him out of hand, I looked him up. I found two LinkedIn profiles that corresponded with his name and some information he’d given about his current work situation, but they weren’t in agreement about his periods of work (one says he started in January 2009, the other said he started in June 2010). There was no mention of being a pastor. I looked up the companies that he mentioned on his profile … one is supposed to be a humanitarian organisation, but the web site is in maintenance mode; there are a total of six tweets, all dated from July 17, 2012; the Facebook page has no stories. It was registered with ACNC (Australian Charities and Not-for-profits Commission) in 2016, but has reported no assets, liabilities or turnover. There is only one volunteer. The other company mentioned has no web presence at all according to Google, except for references to one of Bob’s LinkedIn profile pages. I’ve kept snips of all of these pages, and will publish them along with the URLs if I believe it becomes worthwhile. It’s possible that Bob has been duped by Enesi too, and I don’t want to damage innocent parties.

So Bob got in contact with me. He told me he’d been working with Enesi, and they were working on restitution. They paid back a close friend who had given Enesi money, so my friend was brought back to zero owing. Bob said that there were two Australians working together with Enesi, and the other was a prominent lawyer who was satisfied that everything was on the up and up. I wrote an email to that lawyer asking if he was actually involved with Enesi or Bob, and didn’t receive a response. Talking to a lawyer friend of my own, he said that I should have received an acknowledgement of that email, and if there was any conflict of interest, the response should have been something along the lines of ‘thanks for your email, I’ll respond in due course.’

Then they started putting more pressure on me to take the original web page down. After the initial contact, neither of them attempted to contact me, but worked through my friend. Information that trickled through was that Enesi was starting to move in bigger circles, and my page was causing him embarrassment.

‘[A prominent ex-banking figure] is helping [Bob] with this [transfer of funds] in New York this week and with Enesi’s status and heritage role is a key figure to endorse the funds release. The problem is any blemishes on the reputation or character of Enesi to endorse these funds is detrimental to him being able to approve this funding. Enesi is currently doing business and feels strongly the web presence of the negative report has hurt his business potential re-establish himself in the marketplace and especially now with 3rd party partners in business (corporately) are being maligned and hurt also.’

Then they went on about being grieved over not having been able to talk to me (I had received no calls, texts or emails from either Bob nor Enesi after April 20, 2018), and that they were taking legal action to shut the site down. My friend recommended that I take the site down before litigation began, and said that they were very serious. Enesi wanted desperately not to have this as a legacy to our relationship. I chose to ignore this advice, as I believed at the time that the threats were empty.

Time passed …

On August 6, 2018, I sent an email to my friend saying that the domain name I registered for Enesi (eyavala.com, for which he never paid) was going to expire, and I wasn’t going to spend money to renew it. I had put a redirect on that site so that when you visited it, you’d be redirected to this site with the text ‘Content pending’. In my email I explained my take on things:

• that Enesi had not changed;
• that my web site was making it difficult to dupe other people;
• that he had either duped Bob or engaged him as an accomplice;
• that they were using him (my friend) to put pressure on me to take down the content.

I understood that he saw things differently, and that he wanted me to extend a level of grace to them. I did that, but I had conditions. I wanted to know how long it would take them to make good on their promises. A bit of back and forth, and the content was removed from Google and Bing search results, and I told them I wanted two things: first, a date by which they would provide a plan of when they would deliver the second thing; and second, their plan to fulfil their promises including dates and amounts.

On August 10, 2018, this turned up:

Enesi was in a bad accident 2 and half weeks ago and not contactable until today – 3 dead, small taxi van – he was asleep in back seat and woke up in a wreck – 4 broken ribs – slow recovery (heavily medicated for pain) , he is catching up on all the communications since then –

So me being me, I went and searched for the image on Google (did you know you can do that?) and found this article … they didn’t mention Enesi’s name.

September 3, 2018 I followed up, asking if they’d come back with a timeframe. Apparently the lawyer was stalling the receipt of ‘such large sums’ into his trust account because of the banks’ tight scrutiny of funds transfers from foreign contries. Enesi was ready and willing, but waiting until the lawyer was comfortable. Having said that, it would be shortly or the end of the month.

October 11, 2018 I followed up again. I said it sounded like the old delays, so I was going to put the content back up. My friend and I discussed this for a bit, and I agreed to hold off until today (November 5). Nothing has happened, so the pages have gone up.

There are a couple of things that I’m expecting when these pages go up:

• ‘Take it down or we’ll get lawyers involved’
• ‘We were just about to get back to you with the plan!’
• ‘We were just about to transfer some money, but now that the content is back up, we can’t in good conscience do that’

I’ll put transcripts of whatever communication is received from either Enesi or Bob on this page, regardless of any instructions to the contrary.

This page was originally hosted on http://eyavala.com. Because the domain expired, and I wasn’t inclined to spend money on renewing it, I’ve pull it into my blog as of August 8, 2018. It stayed as a draft for some time, and was published on November 5, 2018. Please see my round 2 article for more details. Updates applied to this article are in italics.

I’ve reduced this site to pretty much this page, because I have a story to tell.

Who am I? Just a guy that Enesi got to buy this domain name, and help him set up a web presence. Since then, he’s disappeared, and I’m finally getting around to telling this story. Enesi, if you ever read this, know that I’m not particularly angry … the money you received wasn’t particularly necessary to my wife and me, but I’m forced to wonder at the truth of anything you said.

Enesi turned up at our church, and told our pastors that the answer was “Yes.” God was going to provide the funds we so desperately needed. Enesi said that he was a businessman worth a lot of money, and he had something like $600 million stored around the globe, and he was going to give some of it to the church. It was locked up in various accounts: some in South Africa; some in the US. He was on the run from the Fijian government, being in political exile. He had a story to tell about how God had woken him with a dream, and how he had to leave Fiji at moment’s notice, but if you’re reading this, you’ve probably heard the story.

Anyway, he didn’t have access to the funds right then because the accounts were frozen by the courts, but he did have enquiry-only access to one account via phone banking. He was at our house, and he got me to go to the Wells Fargo banking web site. He dialled the phone number (I was a little surprised he didn’t just log in with a browser, but hey … security concerns, right?) and entered an account number and a password. He used a menu to get the balance, and it read out a balance of something in excess of $US54M. Later, I came to believe that that was not his account, and the reason he didn’t log in on the browser is that we would have seen an account owner name that had nothing to do with him or his companies.

I did a web search on him, and didn’t find much. I found a link to this interview (wayback machine link as the interview was removed from the ABC site) on the ABC’s web site, and it seemed legit. I found a couple of photos of him around the place, but there were a couple of things that were of concern.

• First, a consultant had mentioned him in a project plan, and then put the plan (and a whole lot of other people’s plans) on a shared drive that Google subsequently indexed and made available to the world. I got in contact with the consultant and told him how to get the information out of Google’s search results, and after a period of time, this happened.
• There is this document (wayback machine link as Fiji’s online hansard now only extends back to 2014) that lists Enesi as a “Cancelled Liquidation Case”, but he was also mentioned as having been found guilty of “fraudulent conversion”, and the denial of appeal is noted here. This fraud carried a suspended prison sentence.

Anyway, over a period of a couple of years, Enesi dropped in and out of our lives, always with the promise that the gift was just around the corner. Reasons why he needed money were:

• He needed to open a “wealthy client” account so he could transfer significant sums into it. That was to cost thousands of dollars.
• He needed a visa so he could get back into the country. I offered to pay this directly since I’d become suspicious by this time. I checked the prices for his visa on the US web site, and it was significantly cheaper than what he said he needed (something like a quarter of the price). He said not to bother.
• He needed help towards airfares to get to South Africa and later Saudi Arabia because the transactions were of such an amount that he needed to be there in person.

He later went to Singapore and said that he’d got his investors together. He sent photos of the office space, and he also sent electronic copies of documents with Embassy seals outlining the investment he was making. Turns out that nothing came of this either.

Something I have discovered since then that he has been involved in a few different schemes, maybe because the church thing had run out (I somewhat doubt it), but it looks like he’s branching out. It also looks like he’s caused some other dramas on the Central Coast of NSW, Australia.

The reason for this page is so that people who are caught up in this web of promises can have a look at what’s down the path. There is a continued promise of great blessing, but also a continued stream of demands. Enesi presents himself as a warm and generous person, and maybe there is hope for him. Don’t know. I do know that the help he needs is not financial.

OK, this is a rant. Pure and simple. I just got tired of people talking about exponential growth, particularly with regard to churches. I’m not against church growth … far from it. But I’d prefer it two steps down from exponential. I like arithmetic growth.

Let’s pick an example that Australian Christians should be able to relate to. Say you start a church, and there are 10 people. Things go pretty well, and at the end of the year, you have a congregation of 100 people. ‘Wow!’ someone says. ‘Exponential growth! Let’s keep that up!’ Exponential growth is problematic, though. It’s either too slow or WAAAY too fast.

Here’s a table with the different simple types of growth that are available.

So how does this work?

Arithmetic growth is pretty easy to calculate. The difference between 10 and 100 is 90, so every year you add another 90. I’d regard this as sustainable.

Geometric growth is pretty easy too. 10 is 1/10th of 100, so every year you multiply by 10. I don’t know how long such growth could be maintained.

Exponential growth is trickier. 100 is 10 x 10, so every year you multiply your attendance by itself (squaring it). Then the sequence goes 10² = 100; 100² = 10,000; 10,000² = 100,000,000, and 100,000,000² = 10,000,000,000,000,000. Clearly ridiculous.

But maybe I’m being ridiculous! Remember I said above that exponential growth can be slow. Instead of going with an exponent of 2 (squaring), we could go with a smaller value. Let’s try a few.

Just so you know, even the ridiculously slow growth of 1.2 turns mean after 2022. The next numbers are 322, 1,022, 4,086, 21,555 and 158,583. So no. Exponential growth is not a good thing.