Angie’s Story: Letters from Prison

Card work, a way to inspire, therapy for boredom. While garden work became very therapeutic for the body, card work became also a means to express my thoughts, my struggles and aspirations for me and for the people around.

I started first with cut out letters and symbols then later found the garden weeds and flowers a very good material for the cards. By utilizing what is to be thrown out, dried pressing them in books, then mounting them in board papers, thus produing all kinds of creative art work. No two cards are alike. Every single one becomes an expression of creativity, every quotation, an expression of what I stand for.

Quotations were taken from memory quotes or as a result of reflections on different aspects of prison life or taken from books, magazines I read. As i go on reading I pick up the passages and excerpts I found striking and this becomes food for thought not only for me but for the people around. The quotes with the mounted weed art forms beautifully indigenous cards for all seasons. These cards have attracted my co-inmates and personnel and when they need me they ask me to write messages too. Either love notes, birthday greetings or christmas messages. I enjoy doing them, a way to integrate with my co-inmates and keep my mind and pen busy. These cards has also become points for discussion among us.

People from different places around the country and from abroad have also found attraction in the cards. They too had been inspired.

These card work besides being food for the spirit has also been a source of self-reliance. From here other rehab projects had been sustained such as beadwork and sewing.

Prison reflections, my hope and aspirations.

To be imprisoned is to be placed in a very limited space, limited world. Yet, these prison walls, these iron bars and barbed wires can only imprison the body but not our minds, our thoughts, what we stand for. We still have the wings of freedom that we can soar whenever we want to. Prison life becomes a test of our inner strength and courage, our stand for the truth and for the cause. And to work for a cause imprisonment becomes a consequence of that commitment, that option in life. It symbolizes what people who stand for the truth would go through at the enemy’s hands.

There are times when for months, I didn’t get my visit or call or a note of concern and this made me feel forlorn and forgotten but always I come out ressurrected with the great faith and hope I’m not alone in the struggle. Here I remember the many victims of human rights violations, the disaparecedos, and those that have given their lives for our country. In silence they have undergone agony and pain. They are the ones that inspire me in these moments.

Lonliness, boredom, anxiety, self-pity, enticements for compromise and convenience, lone of ease and affluence, fear of sacrifice- all these are grave temptations to make us bend and get cowed. But to bend is to give up our integrity, to follow the path easily travelled, to water down the solidity of our commitment.

We must be ready to take the yoke of sacrifice when it is necessary even to death!

While in prison we should never loose our interest and enthusiasm. It is when we stop being enthused with what is good, what is just, what is true and beautiful, that we also stop dreaming, we stop our struggle and we stop being creative. This is the time when we lose our hope and our spirit becomes dull. Enthusiasm is what taken us away from the desperations of prison life. This is what sustains our struggle.

Two years of prison life is too long for an elderly woman like me when I should be doing more productive work for our people. So I plead and hope that my captors would give me the justice and freedom I most await. There is really no sense and no humanity in keeping a 62 year old woman in jail.

Lastly, I would like to give my grand salute to the people who have given me their wholehearted support I most need in these dark moments. -to my brothers and sisters, my closest kins, my friends and co-workers, human rights advocates, writers and medical personnel, church people- they all have inspired me and given me the courage and kept me posted and in touch with the outside world. They all have given me the support and courage to go on despite the terrible situation.

Let me end my letter with this quotation, “In the face of freedom caught in chains and the harsh brutality we encounter, the burden of the heart is heavy but we should continue to struggle no matter how painful is our suffering. We should never lose hope”.

Love in the Struggle,
ANGIE