Oh, the people you'll meet!

When you’re sharing an armrest with someone for a few hours, and you have to get up and let them by to pee several times, you can’t help but talk to them, so that their bladder-filling rate isn’t the only thing you know about them. That is how I met the prison-worker.

His prison is in Nampula City, and offers opportunities for the inmates to take secondary school classes, and join dance, theater, or music groups. All great ideas, but in reality much weaker than they could be, he explained, which led him to his question for me: Why can’t Peace Corps send volunteers to teach in the prisons?

I didn’t get into why PCVs don’t work in prisons – actually, I had never even considered the possibility – but it does bring up some interesting points. Would you work in a prison? Would you treat the inmates the same as other secondary school students? Would it align with Peace Corps’ objectives to send volunteers to prisons?

(reiterating disclaimer: these are completely my own ponderings, not speculating anything on behalf of Peace Corps itself)

Most jails that I’ve heard of in Mozambique are not as high-functioning as this one sounds. The jail in Nauela is literally just a place for tying people up while the police decide what to do with them. It’s an old building shaped like a castle that may have been something beautiful in colonial times, but now it’s all overgrown inside and has no roof. There is one small circular room where prisoners wait with their hands tied behind their backs, with just the dirt ground as the floor. So this conversation with the prison worker was all the more interesting.

He admired Peace Corps for its promotion of sustainability. He lamented that a group of Italians had started the prison music group and provided some instruments, but didn’t involve any Mozambicans in the planning, so when the Italians left, the prison community didn’t know how to move forward with the group. For every project we do as volunteers, we’re required to have counterparts, Mozambicans who co-lead the projects or groups, who can continue after we leave – and help us avoid cultural blunders.

We talked for much of the plane ride, sharing small bits about our completely different lives. He studied Rights and Law but likes science, and wanted to hear more about neuroscience, and needed to know whether I was psychologically analyzing him as we were speaking. He started teaching 6^th grade at 16, because at that time, no one in the country had degrees, and few even finished high school. He eventually found his way to the prison.

As we were sipping our Sprites on the rocks, he announced his new life decision.

“I’m going to quit my job,” he declared, “and become a volunteer.”

We are a compilation of everyone we meet.