Some doors just take time to open: Crossing the one year mark as a Rotary Ambassadorial Scholar

It is hard to explain how month fourteen could be so different from month eleven, but all I can say is that it was, on every level I can imagine. Time transforms, patiently weaving novelty into routine, awkwardness into comfort, turning a foreign place into home. My first year in Costa Rica as an Ambassadorial Scholar came and went, crept and flew by simultaneously. However, crossing the one-year mark and I was suddenly conscious of time. It has been a year! I can’t believe it has been a year! What! When? How? And then the one year accumulation of moment-by-moment learning experiences hit me, as if all of my every day's bundled together into a giant ball and handed itself over for reflection. I been here a year! I have learned so much, have changed so much, and have had so many incredible interactions. The one-year mark reflection has enabled me to see and feel a new dynamic in my experience as a Rotary Scholar. It is like watching a movie for a second or third time; you begin to notice a series of details that you completely missed the first time around. This is what I mean when I say that some doors simply take time to open. It takes time to find them; it takes time to learn how to knock. After nine or ten months, I admit that I was beginning to think that I had seen what there was to see, that I more or less had the country and the culture figured out. And then boom...Costa Rica bumped it up a level, and it was all new again. I realized that while I knew a lot about certain things, I knew nothing about so many others. However, the good news is that this past year had given me a whole new set of skills to go exploring.

One such door that has been slow to open has been that of the women’s prison, El Buen Pastor. I initially applied for entry into the prison to carry out my pilot project Cuéntame! (modeled after the Texas Storybook Project) in September, with the hopes of gifting the books and recordings of the women reading these stories to their children as Christmas presents. However, a series of bureaucratic speed bumps led to an almost seven month delay in the approval process. It deserves mention that the only reason that I eventually got permission to set foot inside El Buen Pastor was due to the fact that I partnered with Seeds of Love, a small non-profit organization that offers psychological services to children of incarcerated parents and their caregivers, which already had permission to enter and recruit new participants. It also deserves mention that the only reason that I knew about them was the fact that I happened to share my idea with my friend who works in the technology industry, exactly one day after Seeds of Love had come to his work to give a presentation. The lesson here is that if you have a good idea (that doesn’t require a patent) and no idea how to make it happen, just start mentioning to everyone you know and meet and eventually someone will have a cousin who can put you in contact with a friend they went to high school with, and before you know it, the ball is rolling. It is a small country.

While waiting for the Cuéntame! project paperwork to be approved by the Ministry of Justice, I spent a few months pouring over the literature and case studies about the growing number of women behind bars all over the world. In general, incarcerated women have a very distinct profile, one that is very different from their male counterparts. The motivating factors that led to their criminal behavior, the types of crimes woman commit and against whom, and their rates of recidivism, are very marked by gender. A large majority of women are in prison for drug related crime (trafficking of small quantities of drugs), have a long history of sexual and physical abuse from romantic partners or family members, and have a history of substance abuse (often as a way to cope with the other forms of abuse), and have little education and/or work experience. Additionally, on average women receive harsher sentences than men, even when they commit the same crime. The specificity of feminine incarceration means that this population has very unique needs and obstacles to overcome upon release, and data shows that women go back to prison at alarmingly high rates. Although this trend is a global one, it is even more exaggerated in Latin America, and Costa Rica is no exception. However, It is one thing to read statistics; it is quite another to be sitting on the other side of the visitation cell, listening to a woman´s life story through a metal grate. The first phase of the Cuéntame! Project was the initial interviews, to get to know the women and understand more about their current relationships and communication with their children. 9 of the 11 women that I interviewed are serving 5 – 8 year sentences for minor drug trafficking. Although it was not the focus of the conversation, I found it interesting that all of them mentioned at one point or another in our interactions some sort of abuse, ranging from incest to emotional abuse to regular beatings and/or death threats from abusive partners. I am not excusing their criminal behavior or activities based on these factors. However, I do think it is extremely important and relevant to explore the relationship between domestic violence/ sexual abuse and criminal behavior.

Additionally, the interviews have been very emotional, as I only say the word children and the tears start to well up. All of them say that being separated from their children is without a doubt the hardest part about being in prison. Each person receives 4 ten-minute phone calls a day, but ten minutes is hardly enough time to have a deep, meaningful conversation. The conversation is often a check-up: how was school, are you eating, did you do your homework, are you behaving, etc. They tell me it is hard to deal with the stress of prison life and often times they feel depressed, but they try their best to not cry or be emotional during the phone calls or visits, because it makes their children cry. It is especially complicated in the wake of difficult questions such as, “When are you coming home?” or “Why can’t you come home?” I had one mother ask me, partly in a rhetorical tone and partly seeking an answer, ¨“How do I explain to my child that I killed someone, that I took a life?” I did not have the slightest idea what to say. While the women are adamant about not wanting to ever come back to prison, about wanting to make up for lost time with their families and start fresh, it is evident in the shake of their voice or the wringing of their hands that they are not quite sure about how to do so. Given their personal histories, and knowing that in Costa Rica social reintegration programs are completely non-existent, it makes it all the more disheartening when they express their fears and concerns about release.

After the emotional heaviness of the first phase of the project, Phase II was a nice relief, full of laughter and loving kindness. The recordings required a great deal of creativity, as the lack of security and quiet space inside the prison meant that we were trying to record in the midst of absolute chaos, smack dab in the middle of the modules (that house about 100 women each). The women were also a little nervous about being recorded while reading into a microphone, so I photocopied the books so they could spend the weekend practicing. Each woman also prepared a short letter to read before and after the story to each child, which took a little guidance at first, but they all turned out to be incredibly beautiful. In order to drown out the background noise, a friend of mine suggested that I construct something out of cardboard box to create a barrier. In theory, it was a good idea, although the reality of trying to convince someone to read a book with a cardboard box over her head while holding a microphone is not as easy as it sounds. However, I must say that the utter ridiculousness of the box, in that the first couple attempts to record were often impossible due to fits of laughter, served to relax the woman, and they seemed to forget about the microphone. It always a precious experience to sit and laugh with another human being, and even more joyous to hear laughter echoing throughout the module. Luckily (for the sake of the recording quality) on day three, I managed to get my hands on a more high-tech unidirectional microphone, making the cardboard box obsolete, as we no longer had to worry about the noise. With each recording, I am more and more excited to gift the books and the Mp3 player with the files to the children. The next step in this process will be to edit the files, which is a tedious task that I am not quite sure how to do, but have begun asking everyone that I know, and so the ball continues to roll.

It is an unparalleled opportunity to see a side of Costa Rica that even most Costa Ricans never see. None of the women in my graduate program have ever set foot in the prison, and so it opens up a new dynamic between us, for me to be explaining to them what it is like. In Spanish, conoce means that you know, or that you understand. Here is Costa Rica, the hipster crowd uses a new term, conoche, and it means that you get it, that you really know what is going on. I was sharing my experience with a colleague over coffee, and she just starting smiling and told me, ya conoches Sarah, ya conoches. It was a nice compliment. Often times it is impossible at the beginning of a process to even fathom just how much it can change you or your trajectory. The line between insider and outsider, foreigner and native, Amercian and Costa Rican, is not as obvious as it was a year ago. While I am content with the progress of the Cuéntame, my conversations with the women have opened my eyes to another real need for reentry programs and initiatives in the prison and the community. I am taking advantage of the fact that my foot is in the door, and am currently in the process of requesting permission to begin a participatory research group to develop a series of classes and support groups that deal specifically with reentry. I am grateful to have another year to pursue this goal. This door would not be opening without the opportunity of being multi-year scholar. Instead of preparing to wrap up and go home, I am still diving into Costa Rica. I only have one year left, and time, as always, is of the essence.