English school

Here are a couple photos from English school!

 

I am really glad for this opportunity I have to teach English.  I teach 2 nights a week; first a Level 1 class for 2 hours, then a Level 3 class for 2 hours.  The semester is for 12 weeks, or 24 lessons. 
Can you see the students wearing their nametags in the second picture?  I made them nametags because I figured I would never learn all their names otherwise.

Prison Visit

Recently I was allowed to tag along to prison with a lovely friend here who does prison visits.  For years she has been visiting the prisons in and around Bamako weekly.  She goes to both the women’s prison and the men’s prisons, but I asked if I could see the women’s prison because that sounded a little less scary.
 I wasn’t sure what to expect exactly, but I expected that it wouldn’t be nice.  I had images from movies in mind – tiny cement cells with puddles of fetid water, each with a single starving prisoner chained in the shadows to ancient rusting shackles, or a bigger space packed shoulder-to-shoulder with disturbed looking characters that you wouldn’t want to turn your back to for a second for fear of being shanked.
Well, the women’s prison was nothing like either of those scenarios (thank God!)
It was more like a really really awful summer camp that you would never want to be sent to.

I took this picture of the gate, but there are no cameras allowed inside now,  so the rest of the photos are ones my friend took a few years ago.

We drove up to the gate that has a big sign above it and is surrounded by high stone walls that go far in either direction.  My friend is a familiar face there, so they let her in without question and since I was with her I followed her in.  I thought I’d have to show ID or have my purse searched or hear the rules explained or something.  But I just walked right in and at the end I walked back out just as easily. 
The first thing I thought was that it was really big.  There are a number of buildings and a lot of big open space.  On the edges there are vegetable gardens.  And secondly I noticed some small children playing and I was surprised by that.  I hadn’t realized that there would be kids in the women’s prison.  They can stay with their mamas until they turn 4.   I was told that there are generally between 100-150 women in the prison, and 20 or so children. 
We went to the buildings surrounding a central courtyard that had groups of women sitting and chatting and crocheting doilies or braiding hair.  The women were wearing normal clothes (except for one topless woman I saw) and just seemed to be hanging out.  It is obviously a very minimum-security setting.  There were dozens of plastic buckets strewn about.  I learned that each woman has her own bucket for washing (herself and her clothes presumably) and that they each know which one is theirs.  The buildings have rooms with 4 to maybe 10 beds in each room.  Some of the bigger rooms might also have a pile of foam mattresses so those who don’t have a bed can find a place to put a mattress on the floor at night.  The smaller rooms with only 4 beds are for women with babies. 
We went around and greeted everyone and my friend gave out cookies that she had brought to the little kids.  The women who were interested in attending the study started gathering in a meeting room with benches.  We went around to every room and found a few women sick in bed.  One of them was from an Asian country and spoke English, and I was able to talk to her in English.  It would be awful to be in prison in a foreign country and not able to speak the language, and then on top of that to be sick in bed.  We headed over to the meeting room and saw that about 15 women were there waiting.  My friend led the women in lively songs to start the meeting and then there was a teaching.  Because some of the prisoners are not from Mali, there is the need to translate the teaching into a few different languages.  My friend’s colleague taught in Bambara, she translated to English, and I listened to her in English and translated into French.  

After the women receiving a gift of soap, one of the English speakers came up to me.  In tears she told me a bit of her situation and asked me to remember to pray for her.  She had already been there 3 months and was still waiting for a court date.  I think that the worst part of being in prison for many of the women is just waiting for who knows how long to find out what will happen.  I asked what kinds of crimes the women were there for since the security is so minimal.  I saw one woman in a police type uniform and two men in plain clothes in an office watching tv.  Some of the young girls in there, maybe only 14 and 15 years old, had been house workers for families with money and the families reported them and had them thrown in jail after some money or an expensive cell phone went missing.  Some women are in prison on drug or prostitution charges.  But I was told that there are a few that are there for killing their husbands.  So a pretty mixed crowd!

I found the prison visit experience to be very interesting and I’m glad that I could go and see what it’s like there and see what prison visiting looks like.  It is really the sort of work that puts our beliefs into actions, and I so appreciate the dedication of my friend who let me tag along with her.