Back to reality...

I’ve been back for two weeks now and in just two weeks have managed to be floored again and again by the lives of the youth I work with in prisons. It has been a sobering and heartwarming homecoming to return to the prisons here. I have re-encountered the same youth that I left two months ago, exactly where I left them, with yet more of their young lives swallowed away by the same 4 walls, the same faces, the same mindless routine.

They’ve welcomed me back into their cells and their hearts and have given me an even closer look at the fury, fear, resentment, and longing for love that reside there and struggle for power each long day locked up. The more I work with these young people, especially with incarcerated males (who have much grimmer prospects of “making it” based on the politics of repression and elimination that are practiced by “anti-gang” squads here), the more I am enraged and saddened by the fact that most of them will simply not make it.

The youth who manage to get out of jail whom I’ve kept up with and who have genuine interest in turning their lives around end up simply running for their lives each day. Ironically enough, this is not primarily because rival gang members will kill them (thought that is a very real threat), but because the police force will do so first. If the police do not manage to “disappear” these youth coming out of detention centers, they will detain them upon spotting them in the street (or drag them from their homes in the middle of the night) and pin them with any crime that has happened within a credible radius. These youth will then be sent off (likely without fair trial) to spend 30+ years in the hellholes that are the overflowing adult prisons here.

 I wish I were exaggerating, yet this has been the story of even the most studious and driven young gang members that I have met in this ministry thus far.

 Loving and working with these youth means answering their startled phone calls telling me that the police opened fired on them for no reason at all, and that they barely escaped the bullet-spray. It means listening to their whispered fears that as soon as they get out of jail to finally live with their young wives and infants they are terrified that the police will pull them out of their beds at night and take them far away from the children they’ve so longed to love in a way they were never, ever loved. It means watching them grimace, lost for words, while describing the way they’ve witnessed slow deaths, wishing I could erase it all and rewrite the whole script. It means giving them constant affirmation, because it just might be the first time they’ve ever heard anything of the sort.

Blog entries are probably supposed to end on some upbeat quote like Disney movies, but many of these young lives end on no such note. I just ask that you find them and love them in cities near you and listen to their lessons and longings.

An entry I wrote a month ago and am just now publishing here... :)

Hello friends, family, and Crispaz supporters. (disclaimer: for some reason this won't let me put spaces between paragraphs sorry for this one long paragraph...) I hope this finds you well, wherever you are! I just wanted to write a quick update about the work I continue to do with Crispaz’s generous support. These past few months have been a whirlwind, hence the lack of blog entries, but they have been quite full of activity. As Maria explained, we have been working with male youth in a detention center doing art therapy workshops, and we have also been working with amazing young women a minor’s detention center in Ilopango. The young women we work with are so full of life and dreams yet most of them serve 5 to 15 year sentences for crimes they may or may not have committed. Since the maximum sentence for minors was raised from 7 to 15 years, youth coming into the centers are even more overwhelmed and have less motivation to “change” knowing that they will be living so many years within the same walls. Our work consists mostly in one-on-one sessions with about 30 of the women in the center, where we listen to their fears, secrets, aspirations, and often unspeakable pasts and simply write as they speak. Through this simple exercise the girls realize that they are already poets and that they speak of a wisdom that comes from lessons learned in the streets, one that has everything to do with a gritty reality far different than that which scholars paint with their prose. Having done this exercise repeatedly for a year and a half with the majority of the women in the center, we can see that the culture of the center in itself is beginning to change slightly. Girls come to us with 10 poems that they’ve written on their own, wanting us to type them and give them back to them for their portfolios. They tell me things like “I was so sad one night I did not even want to exist, but there was a tiny ray of light shining onto my bunk bed so I got out my pen and began to write. Here’s what I came up with, I don’t know if it’s any good…” And inevitably the ensuing words speak of doubts, insecurities, hardship, and a longing for a God that they perhaps have yet to feel fill the spaces of neglect and abuse these women have suffered for years. Others will tell me, “I was bored to death in computer class because all we do is play solitaire, so instead I wrote these poems, I don’t know if they’re any good…” And again their words shock me as they reveal themselves as the poets they have always been, yet perhaps are finally expressing for the first time. At times this work can be exhausting, overwhelming, and can seem like such a tiny drop in the bucket of ignorance, abuse, and discrimination that plague these women’s lives, yet there are always rays of hope that illuminate our work in the Center. Recently as I was leaving, one of the young women who I have come to love as if she were a long-lost sister of mine told me “You know, I barely know you, but I feel that you are one of those people who has really marked my life, because you’ve helped me to discover who I really am.” Her words floored and humbled me, and I left with such a feeling of gratitude. Despite the multitude of setbacks and despair we encounter in our work, if I can facilitate others’ discovery of their true selves, their loving, well-intentioned, God-like selves, this work is well worth the effort.