ABSTRACT
This story starts in Chile. As a teacher and a conscious objector I arrived in 1987, in the last few years of Pinochet’s dictatorship, to work and live with street kids. Most of them sniffed glue. In one of the slums we ran a rehab center. As many of those youngsters ended up in prison, in the end I was asked to set up our workshops in the jail. It was the beginning of a never-ending discovery of the world behind bars. It was such an eye opener to see that the values I wanted to take in were already there. Inmates started to teach me about patience, creativity and generosity. Their hospitality is something that to this day I keep on experiencing while doing voluntary work in the prison of Antwerp. I never enter a cell without being offered something, a cup of coffee, a Coke, even if it’s a biscuit they have saved from their lunch.
One of the major obstacles in working with people behind bars is the prejudice of society. How could I tell the world that I felt like becoming a better person because of the inmates? Could I even get closer to their soul? If sharing the night and the rotten beans in their cells, I might understand them better and gain credibility to tell the world about prison’s life and the beautiful person every prisoner is.
When I was a teacher in Belgium I taught first grade, the little ones. Once a week I decided to put myself on my knees and look at the world from their height. After that I moved the posters down by one meter. It taught me that you have to get as close as you can to the heart of the people with whom you work. As for a living I work now in a hospital in Belgium. I often think: We should put doctors and nurses on a regular basis in a bed to be washed by others, to undergo an endoscopy or another medical test so that they may understand the patients better. With the inmates it was kind of similar. I had been working with them for 15 years until I spent my first night in a prison and ever since it changed my life.
Writing to embassies, consulates, aid organizations and former inmates with prison connections, I put into a place an agenda that would allow me to spend 12 months visiting the world’s prisons and staying overnight in most of them. For one year I traveled the globe meeting prisoners shackled on death row in Thailand, dying of tuberculosis in Russia, allowed to talk for only one hour a day in Tokyo but also becoming economists behind bars in Argentina or wonderful cooks in Australian prisons. It’s not in the number of prisons I’ve been in since, it’s in the heart of every prisoner, thus of every human being.
