Inside the walls – Stories from a women’s prison in Bolivia

A young child wipes the tears from her mother's eyes. The woman is recounting her story and how through JusticeMaker Marisol, she has some hope for her situation. She is currently being held in Obrajes, a women's prison in La Paz, Bolivia, along with her five youngest children.

Preamble: I am continuing to document two human rights projects for International Bridges to Justice (IBJ), an international human rights organization which funds locally developed programs around the world to help people understand their rights and the justice system. I have been documenting the work of two women in Bolivia, South America, who won Justice Makers grants for their projects through IBJ.

This post is part of the documentation of a project by Veronica Marisol Quiroga Pando, who I refer to as Marisol. Spanish to English translation of interviews was done by Eliana Barragan. No identities of subjects are revealed due to the social stigma associated with being a female detainee in Bolivia. To donate to help continue Marisol’s work, click here.

Inside the walls…

The rain is pouring down outside and it is cold inside the unheated concrete room.
 The room has stacked plastic chairs at one end, ancient-looking computers pushed against the wall and covered in protective plastic dust jackets.
 Justice Maker Marisol has told us they offer classes in the room, including basic computer classes.

Marisol and Eliana Barragan, acting as a translator, sit at a small square plastic table, as women they are interviewing take turns in seats at the table.
 We have been in the prison for six hours, and it has been exhausting.
 I feel cold and drained of energy, and I can tell I am becoming numb – a natural reaction perhaps to so much sadness and so much emotion.

Yet Marisol is still animated, meeting each interviewee with compassion and she listens attentively to yet another woman tell her story, a difficult story because it is a woman seeking her help with a new problem, not one of the many women Marisol has met through her workshops who she already works to represent.
 This happens constantly while we are in the prison walls.
 When Marisol leaves the room to find another of the women we are to interview, a middle-aged woman, well-dressed but walking with a cane, comes in to look for her. The inmate holds a folder full of papers, and she wants to speak to Marisol.
 When we leave the room, into the common courtyard area of the prison, women approach Marisol to ask for her help with their case or specific concerns.

One woman rushes up to thank Marisol, hugging her and then us as well. Marisol has helped the woman secure a day pass in order to attend the funeral of her father, who recently passed away. The woman’s eyes are red and swollen, and she has been waiting anxiously while Marisol worked on the problem, meeting with a judge and obtaining required papers. Marisol had to cancel our morning appointment to work on the case this morning before we came to the prison, and we had then waited for her in the courthouse, as she finalized the permissions, which thankfully, she obtained.
 Then we took the minibus which brought us here, to Obrajes, a women’s prison located in an upscale neighbourhood in the city of La Paz.
 After handing over our cell phones and identification documents, our bags were given a quick search and we went through a second, unassuming doorway and emerged into the prison proper.

We are immediately introduced to a woman I will call Tasha, she is an elected official amongst the inmates, who helps to manage the inner workings of the prisoners, and she greets us warmly. 
The open courtyard within the prison is bustling with people, inmates, visitors and children give the place a much more social and relaxed atmosphere than I had at first expected. 
I have been restricted from taking photos anywhere but inside the interview room, and so I leave my camera in my bag as we watch the children play and women busy themselves. 
Two women sit next to each other on the cement walkway, crocheting industriously, others chat in groups, some sit behind small kiosks, selling food, snacks and drinks.

The women in the prison can earn money at various jobs, and the women who have been there the longest usually fill these positions, creating somewhat of a hierarchy within the prison, according to Marisol and Tasha.
 But we are not in the prison to learn about its inner workings or the conditions so much as we are there to speak directly to the women who Marisol has been working with, and hear their stories in person. To learn how her work teaching prisoner’s their human rights and how to work within the justice system to ensure their rights are being upheld can change these women’s lives.
 Which is what we have spent the six hours within the prison doing. Women come in, sit down and answer our questions about their situations and how Marisol’s workshops have helped them, how her assistance is changing their situation or simply their perspective, giving them something they had far too little of – hope.

One of the women Marisol is helping gives Marisol a tearful hug before leaving the interview room after recounting her story. Each woman was not only grateful to Marisol, but also to us for hearing their stories.

The only two women who remain dry-eyed in their gratitude for Marisol’s work and the recounting of their difficult circumstances are two immigrant women from Ecuador, caught for robbery after they ran out of money on their trip to Bolivia.
 The two women seem defensive, and Marisol explains they are heavily discriminated against within the prison because they are not only foreigners but also because they are lesbians, and a third woman captured with them is of African descent.
 But the five other women we interview all shed tears of both gratitude and pain as they speak to us.

Every woman we speak to is incredibly grateful for the help Marisol has provided them, assisting them in forwarding their cases and ensuring their rights are being upheld.
 In most of the cases, Marisol is working to obtain conditional releases from pre-trail detention, which can be for as many as three years in some cases.
 While there are supposed to be limits on how long prisoners can be held without trial, these limits are not always adhered to, and prisoners can be lost in the system, unaware they had the right to at least conditional release before a trial. This is the ignorance Marisol is working to change.

“When [Marisol] comes, it is joy for us,” said one women (translated).

A detainee wipes her eyes as Marisol (right) listens to her recount her story and the difference Marisol has made.

The woman explains how before Marisol took her case, she and her sister were unsure of where to turn or what they might be able to do.
 They report they were defrauded by one lawyer who promised to help, but after being paid a retainer, did nothing on their case, a reportedly common practice according to Marisol and may of the prisoners we speak to.
One of the sisters was visiting the other when a drug lab was raided in her sister’s home, in a part of the house which had been rented out to a man to help support her, as she was in debt.
 The one sister was aware of the drug activity in her own home, and had reportedly taken the risk due to debt, but had not told her visiting sister. This is what they tell us, explaining it was only tragic timing on the sister’s part to be there the night the raid took place.

“I thank God for giving me the opportunity to help you,” said Marisol (translated) to the sisters.
 Some of the women admit they were first reluctant to trust Marisol because of previous warnings or experiences of unethical lawyers. But by teaching them their rights, the detainees become less reliant on the advice of lawyers and more capable of ensuring any lawyers they do hire are fulfilling their obligations. Another woman tells us how she was arrested because her husband fathered a child with his stepdaughter (the interviewee’s eldest child) and she didn’t report him. She seems to have lived in fear of him, saying he abused her, and she also had five other children at home he was the sole supporter of.
 Uneducated and poor, she did not feel confident enough in the system to help her, so she and her five younger children are now in prison for her husband’s actions (he is also in prison somewhere else).
 Her youngest child wipes tears from her mother’s eyes as she tells us her story.

The stories are tragic, and heart-wrenching, filled with sadness and regret and I am glad when afterwards we step back through the door and retrieve our identification and cell phones.
We have the luxury of leaving, and I am at least comforted by the knowledge Marisol will be back.

A tale of two sisters

The mother of Maria and Lydia lead Marisol into the yard of their home in the barrios of El Alto

For a full slideshow of the images related to this story, go to: Slideshow

The younger sister does most of the talking.
We have traveled to the “barrios” (suburbs) of El Alto, just outside La Paz, to a poor neighbourhood of dirt streets and low brick buildings, to hear the story of these women.
The one who speaks first is clearly the leader, the stronger sibling, but though she is more outspoken and forward, still she breaks into tears as she tells the story of her and her sister’s detention.
The sisters, we will call them Maria and Lydia, were arrested along with their brother.
They were in a town where they return from La Paz to do the only work they have ever known, which is harvesting the leaves of the coca plant.
They were seasonal farm workers, and went to the fields to work for two or three weeks at a time to make a marginal living.
Maria, the younger, but stronger sister, says a friend had given her two bags of coca leaves to dry – which is perfectly legal in Bolivia, where the leaves of the coca plant are distinguished from the refined hard drug cocaine. In Bolivia, there are many traditional uses for the coca leaves, and the indigenous peoples chew the leaves to relieve everything from stomach aches to altitude sickness. The mild effects of chewing the leaves or drinking them as tea, is not at all the same as taking the refined and illegal drug cocaine.
But while it was legal for the siblings to have coca leaves, the coca leaves they had were found to be stolen, and so the three siblings were arrested and charged with having taken the bags of leaves.
Maria said when she saw her friend on the street when they were with the police, but her friend pretended not to know them, and they were taken away.
The brother, after appearing before a judge, was released, serving only eight hours in custody because he suffers from developmental disabilities, but he still has to sign in every two weeks, a form of conditional release.
The two sisters, however, were held for 10 months, and had been incarcerated for four months without trial when Maria attended one of Marisol’s JusticeMakers workshops in prison.
The workshops were to educate the women in the prison on their basic rights, and also about the rights of their children, some of which had changed with the new constitution in 2009. The changes were an attempt to alleviate a problem created by a predominantly machismo culture, where it was not uncommon for men to have children with women and then refuse to acknowledge as their own, and therefore avoid paying to support the children they had fathered.
The new constitution attempted to address the situation by allowing mothers of these children to declare the father and file for support, and put the onus now on the fathers to prove the child was not theirs by requesting paternity tests.
Both of the sisters were single mothers and Maria came to Marisol to learn how she might be able to obtain child support for her daughter. The father of Maria’s child did not acknowledge the child as his, and Lydia is also separated from the father of her son.
But after Marisol helped teach them their children’s rights, she also asked them about their situation, and the women told Marisol the story of their detention.
They did not even realize before speaking to Marisol their right to a fair trial, their right to representation and their right to timely execution of the law.
Maria breaks down, wiping tears from her eyes and hugs Marisol when she reaches this part of the story, repeating how ignorant they were of even these simple things.
She describes how they grew up in the countryside, in poverty, and their indigenous mother, who was given to a man more than 20 years her senior when she was only 11 years old, did not even know how to read and write. Their mother had her first child at 13 years old and had 12 children in total, eight of which still survive.
They had no knowledge of the law or their rights within the law.
Only through Marisol, did these women learn their producing certain documents proving they had a family, a home and a job, could then help them obtain conditional release until their trial.
This was an incredible relief for both, but especially for the younger sister, Lydia, whose son had been sent to live with his allegedly abusive father while she was in prison, and she was traumatized not only by the experience of being incarcerated, but also by the knowledge her young son may be living under very harsh conditions.
The two sisters were thankfully released after Marisol’s intervention on their behalf and assistance, and Lydia and Maria were both reunited with their children.
Maria’s 11-year-old daughter had been living with her grandmother in difficult conditions as well. The grandmother lives with her youngest daughter of about 20 and this daughter’s children whom she must care for, though the elderly grandmother herself is in poor health.
Lydia’s 11-year-old son was also returned to her from his father, and on his body, they said they saw the evidence of his treatment.
Lydia is barely able to speak she is still so sensitive to the impacts of her time in prison, and so she whispers parts of her story quietly, often looking at the floor and crying as she speaks, and Maria is worried her sister needs psychiatric help to heal from their time in prison.
The two sisters also still await a trial, which leaves the problem hanging over their heads, and Lydia lives in dread of returning to the prison and sending her son back to his father.
Marisol still helps to support the sisters as they continue to navigate the system, and hopes they soon can get a trial date so the women can get on with their lives.
She will argue for their release based on their story the leaves were given to them by a friend to dry. However, she says if the women are convicted of the theft, they would likely get two years.
While this would be unfortunate, even this would be a conclusion which then Marisol hopes would allow the women to get on with their lives which are now stalled in limbo.

Hasta luego, La Paz

A young girl runs across a street in the tourist district in central La Paz, Bolivia.

It was a fabulous change to leave the cooler, wetter weather in La Paz for Cochabamba, a city known for its pleasant climate and good food.

I haven’t posted more on the work we’re doing here because I’m waiting for some to be published elsewhere first and I also still have a lot to process and just confirm details.

So far, in Cochabamba, we have seen parts of a very public trial of a local man accused of shooting the killer of his son when the justice system did not fulfill his family’s hopes for justice. The accused is almost regarded as a hero, proving the population is perhaps a little frustrated with a justice system they see as not always effective.

We have also visited the San Sebastian prison for men here in Cochabamba, an interesting and enlightening experience I will write more on later.

An everyday superhero (for justice)

Preamble:

For those who don’t know, I have escaped the beautiful but cold Fort to travel to Bolivia, in South America.
This is not a pleasure trip, and the intention is to help document two projects here being funded by the international non-governmental organization (ngo) International Bridges to Justice (IBJ).
The projects were two of many “JusticeMakers” who were selected by IBJ for $5,000 grants to implement local initiatives the applicants had developed to help further justice in their countries.
I arrived after a short stopover in San Francisco to do some preparation, and I am writing this three days into the experience. This is the first of a number of pieces I will be writing during my travels, and I will also be attempting to photograph the two projects as well.

Since arriving in La Paz, I have been following JusticeMaker Veronica Marisol Quiroga Pando (for the sake of brevity, I will call her Marisol) to document some of her work for IBJ.
Already I am in awe of what Marisol does.
Despite being the mother of five children (one has grown up and moved away but she still has three sons at home and a daughter, son-in-law and two grandchildren living in an adjoining home) and having a husband who is in very fragile health due to rheumatic fever, Marisol works unbelievable hours, and is incredibly dedicated.
Her job as a human rights advocate puts her fighting for the lost women of her country.
Poor, indigenous women, incarcerated for crimes they may or may not have done are often abandoned by families ashamed of the intense social stigma associated with being a woman on the wrong side of the law.
Without support from the outside, they have no ability to obtain the required documents which could help further their cases or allow for reduced sentences.
Often they do not even realize they have rights within the system, such as the right to representation or a fair trial, and they may be detained without trial for months or even years.
Their treatment within the justice system can also at times be terrible and without an advocate on their behalf, these women fall through the cracks.
From the moment I met Marisol at the airport – after midnight she had come to meet me with her son in tow – it was clear this woman has a heart of gold.
She and her son got me settled at the hotel, and made their way in a taxi across the city back to their home.
The next morning she left her house at 6:30 a.m. to head out of the city to meet with women in need of her help (the poor and mostly indigenous city of El Alto is where many of her clients live, just outside La Paz).
She met me at noon after returning from the meeting, to take me to lunch before walking me through the courthouse in La Paz.
Seeing her in the courthouse, navigating a system bogged down in bureaucracy, like many countries around the world, is something to behold.
She is always polite, and speaks calmly, but she is also clearly very strong and assertive.
Even though I understood few of the details of what was said in her interactions in the offices, she is obviously very diligent towards the women she advocates for.
She explains carefully in Spanish to me about the woman she worked to get medical attention for while the woman was incarcerated.
It is a tragic story, and after much work on Marisol’s part, she finally got the surgery she desperately needed.
Marisol goes from one room to the next in a building crowded with people in lines, trying also to navigate their way in the system, each room she visits is filled with young clerks surrounded by stacks and stacks of files.
Stapled pages piled upon one another representing case files, some with names in large tabs sticking out from them.
When the case files become too thick for staples, and because there are no file folders, the clerks sew the pages together, and I watch one young woman stitch more pages onto a file at least two inches thick with a large needle and string. On one shelf I see files which have become bundles, tied together by string like old-fashioned parcels.
Yet despite the apparent chaos, Marisol asks for files and they are miraculously produced for her, after rapid searches through stacks on desks or piled high on shelves.
She flips through and asks clerks to acknowledge a particular page or answer questions, she makes notes in her book before returning the file and moving to the next room.
I sense her frustration when we leave, the lack of progress on her cases is very difficult for her, but still she smiles and prepares to catch a minibus to the prison to visit some clients.
When I ask Marisol later about her work, her eyes get soft.
She explains slowly to me how the women she works to advocate for are victims within a system struggling to overcome poverty, discrimination, corruption and bureaucracy.
She calls her project very tiny given the many women and their families caught in the system with no one to turn to, and yet I have already seen evidence of the large impact her work can have on these women’s lives.
She calls the problem huge, and looks heavy with the weight of it.
Her eyes are near to tears when she speaks of the women’s children, in a culture in which the women’s role in the home is integral, a family with no mother is not a family at all in many cases, and the impact on the children then can create further issues. A cycle perhaps not unlike what happened to children in Canada taken from their parents during the days of residential schools, and which we know now can create problems for generations to come.
Her motivation for what she does is clearly not only to help women struggling to navigate a system on their own, but also to help their children.
With no safety net for these children, they may be left to fend for themselves, and Marisol stresses to me the importance of conveying the greater social impact certain sentences or treatment of women can have.
This is only the tip of an obviously huge job this amazing woman strives to do, fulfilling a role at great time and sacrifice to herself and her family, and this is only what I have managed to gather with broken Spanish.
In the coming weeks I will attempt to document more of her work and some of the stories of the women and their families.

In from the cold

Well, it seems I ran out of time to update this blog and it always seemed perhaps a little redundant when my life was spent making a printed paper widely available in print and online each week.

You could pretty much detail my itinerary by the stories on this meeting, that event or when a photo was taken.

However, I am now on leave from the paper, and so I once again have the time and inclination to update the world on my comings and goings.

The months since my last post have been busy, to say the least, and I have been attempting to try and prepare (with only limited success) for the internship which I am currently undertaking.

While the photo I have posted is from January in the Fort, taken atop Murray Ridge, that is the tip of the iceberg, so to speak.

After spending a week trying to train (hope it helped Jonas…) my worthy replacement, I had one day to pack and get ready to leave the house and my beloved cat in another’s care.

But of course, I couldn’t go without one last half day taking advantage of the perfect and perfectly timed, fresh snow which had fallen just before I was to leave.

So, I delayed packing for at least a couple of hours, while I got in a few last runs on that fabulously fun hill I miss already, Murray Ridge.

The solid base and six inches or so of fresh powder made for rock-star riding conditions, and I could at least leave winter behind feeling I had given my board one more good workout.

Those who would like to see a cameraphone photo from the great day, can check this on facebook: Janna rocks the Ridge

Then I left for Bolivia.

I did stop at San Francisco on the way, to get a few things organized and in order, thanks to trying to keep the costs down by flying the first part on points.

But I’m now in La Paz, Bolivia, for my first time in South America, and it has already been a wild ride.

More to come on that…

While I am missing the Fort, it is helping that it is -40 at home now and I’m in about +15 here.

 

 

Summer storms

This summer has not exactly been “summery.”

With cool, wet weather for the past couple of months, the sun is just starting to shine, but it seems premature to say summer has finally arrived.

It’s a little different up here in that when it’s not sunny, it’s not very warm, in fact, I often feel the similarity between the Fort and the Chilcotin in terms of climate.

When it’s warm, it’s lovely, but if there’s no breeze the bugs are still bad enough you don’t want too much skin exposed.

I have been indoors far more than I am used to, but at least I can step away from the desk and right into my yard and the beach with a few easy steps.

This shot was taken one night when a beautiful lightning storm was raining down over the lake, the shot is looking towards the town, across Cottonwood Beach on Stuart Lake.

I got a few shots just before the rain began to pour down, and in seconds I was soaked just putting the camera and tripod away in the car.

The Rapture

While this is a little bit behind the times, I was just putting together a photobook of my family’s annual Garth Lloyd Memorial Shoot which just happened this particular year to fall on the day of the predicted “Rapture”.

Well, the sun was shining and it was beautiful, and the sound of gun fire was sounding across the fields as my extended family gathered to shoot things (targets, don’t worry).

I thought it was a rather amusing irony my family celebrated The Rapture with a pile of guns laid out on the back of a truck in honour of one of the most brazenly opinionated old-school and secular people I’ve ever known.

I know grandad would have gotten a kick out of it, and so did I.

Life in the Fort

It’s hard to put my new life in Fort St. James into an articulate blog post. How do I relate the extreme shift from living in the Puddle to the Fort? Not that there is such a huge differential between the two places. They are small forestry-based towns, built on lakes in central and northern B.C., with Williams Lake obviously being a bit larger with more services, but in many ways they have some basic parallels.

But my own life has changed drastically, and the culture of the two places is so different for me. I’m no longer a forest firefighter, in a job with youthful cachet making way more money, living an adventure every week. I would spend my evenings biking or climbing or motorcycling when I had the time, the rest of the time I would have countless opportunities for adventure or socializing through work and my local network of family and friends.

Nowadays, my week is slightly more predictable, with certain days each week being dedicated to writing and laying out and editing the paper. Yet I feel like I have mini-adventures all the time, and my  job is so interesting, constantly meeting new people, hearing new stories and getting to work on my photography. And while I don’t have the same extensive network of family and friends here, I also don’t seem to have much time to worry about it.

I went out boating on Stuart Lake for the first time this week one summery afternoon. I stole away to enjoy the sun before another evening meeting, and it was fabulous. Stuart Lake is incredible, with huge cliff faces and it’s right outside my door.

It’s just an amazing place and I’m celebrating my time here, getting to know the people and their stories is sort of a different adventure than I’m used to, but I’m going with it.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Life Changing, continued…

This post is continued from the previous one…

 

At the time it didn’t even seem like a sacrifice, just a necessity.

I lived close enough, it was less than 15 minutes by bike, and on a bike I could ride right to the door of my lecture hall, while with a car I had to park almost 10 minutes walking away, because I could never afford to pay for parking in on campus lots.

For my early morning classes, I remember riding to school in my usual black cloud of morning misery (I have never been a morning person, just ask my dad), and then getting to school with a big grin on my face, euphoric at the early morning sunrise I witnessed in the cold crisp air.

After school, I would sometimes race my roommate down to the grocery store, where she’d be stuck in long lines of the student cars escaping after class, I could ride up past all the rows of traffic to the lights and beat her there.

Now, it wasn’t all sunshine and roses, I’ll admit.

There were rainy mornings when I thought it was a little ugly, but once I had the right gear, and changed into dry clothes in the washroom before class, I was alert and awake, something I never managed to achieve when I drove to morning classes -I didn’t drink coffee in those days.

But besides the wake-up factor, the low cost factor and helping the environment, I changed my body completely.

All without even realizing it.

While other people paid for gym passes, I was getting fit without even  thinking, heck I thought I was just getting to class.

That bike managed to get me back to a more energetic and vigorous self, and I began to become more active in other ways as well, because funnily enough, it didn’t seem so darned hard to do those things anymore.

That Nishiki mountain bike became my undisputed champion of dependable travel. I think I changed one tire on it the entire time I had it, somewhere around 10 years.

Eventually I gave that bike to charity, after the station wagon had long ago given up the ghost and I had nothing but my Nishiki while living in Nanaimo, B.C.

Somewhere that same bike might be changing someone else’s life today.

In fact, I think it is.

Life Changing

Part one of Two.

This post and the following one are previews to the upcoming bike art show in Williams Lake, all bike-related art…

I was recently contemplating some of the bigger shifts I’ve made in my life, done while pondering where I am, how I got here and where I’m going.

It occurred to me that there are a few things I’m passionate about and am always trying to convince other people to try, knowing nothing but good can come of them.

One of those things is an active lifestyle.

Now, staying fit was not always as natural for me as it is now, and while I’m not exactly in peak physical condition, I maintain a fairly healthy and active lifestyle for the most part.

This was most definitely not always the case, but one great thing truly changed my life.

That thing was an old-school ‘90’s era Nishiki mountain bike.

While I didn’t realize it at the time, in my first years at university, I was in a bad way.

In my first year, I lived in residence. A frequent problem for students, the hectic schedule and cafeteria food combo joined together with the metabolic changes that occur between the ages of 18 and 21 meant I became very unhealthy in an incredibly short amount of time. I wasn’t hugely overweight, but I had no energy and spent very little time actually getting any real exercise.

But I had always been naturally athletic in some ways, and so I didn’t really notice much, until I tried to do certain things, and living in residence, I never had to go very far.

But the shift came when I was in my third year, I lived a bit further away, and I was deadly poor.

I was living off of inadequate savings and student loans, sleeping on a foamy in the living room of a one bedroom apartment I shared with my friend, and I couldn’t afford much food, let alone insurance and gas for my beater station wagon.

So I had to park the car and ride my bike.

TO BE CONTINUED…