by Kathy Kelly

Several times, during weekday evenings, students pursuing careers as “correction officers” have peered through the window of our rooms, they tour the compound, visiting various units. Their teacher, an Assistant Warden at Pekin FCI (Federal Corrections Institute), guides them.

I wonder what students think and say after completing the tour.

I’m surprised, myself, at how manageable the room I share with 9 other prisoners seems to be, just now. Sunlight floods the 18′ x 18′ space which contains 6 bunk beds, one single bed, 8 lockers, a wooden table and 4 plastic chairs. It could pass for a dorm at an inexpensive youth hostel. Catholic Worker houses of hospitality across the country similarly try to utilize space to shelter as many people as possible. With warmer weather here, some women have replaced olive colored wool blankets with white bedspreads. This brightens the room. Today is Sunday. Soft snores sound comforting to me, as several women, who worked all week, most earning 12 cents per hour, are “sleeping in” and sleeping soundly.

By Jo Wilding
April 26th

Rabiia lowered his voice and informed us that two of the women are crazy. They talk all the time and their rooms are untidy. They are the mothers of widow-headed households, more refugees from Falluja. White haired under her abaya, toothless, her face lined with the contour map of her life, Fawzia’s eyes lit up at having new people to talk to. She chattered happily in Arabic to Anna who didn’t understand.

Her daughter-in-law Ikhlas is a Kurdish woman with a tiny daughter, Jwana. The strain cracked her voice as she explained that her sister Sena’s husband died two years ago and now her husband is responsible for all of them, without work and crammed into a room in a house which a local man opened up to families fleeing Falluja, near to the bomb shelter where the rest of the family are staying. There’s no kitchen there for eight kids, six women and a man. Sena too started to cry. Four of her children were with her; the fifth staying in Falluja with an uncle.

Beyda, at 18 the youngest sister, fled Falluja with them and another stayed in Falluja where her husband, only 33 years old, died a couple of days ago from a heart problem. Rabiia told us about him on the last visit: he had to be taken by boat across the Euphrates to the hospital because the roads were closed. He spent a day there and then died. His mother is sick and can’t look after herself and his father is too ill to take care of her.

Sena’s daughter Sheyma sat still white with shock, unspeaking, unsmiling, fourteen years old and utterly despairing. She’s left school. There doesn’t seem any point in it. There doesn’t seem any energy to find hope to invest in the future.