the landing

After a few shouted phone calls, I coordinated the drop-off by American Airlines peeps, of my suitcase at the office. This didn't stop the woman who works the door from scaring the bejesus outta me by pretending it didn't come. whew! such a sweet face, and so sarcastic and so young.

this morning we headed from the office to the prison with the most established computer lab and studio, and the one where the radio is currently being broadcast from.

The first striking thing about Tower Hill was how relaxed people seemed. I tried to have as few expectations as possible, but one thing (maybe left over from prison movies and TV shows, which are, of course, dramas) was that people are constantly tense, upset, or aggressive, or that tension is on the surface, or constantly threatening to break out. Watching people wandering around (the prison being open-plan in the morning hours), hanging their arms up on the fences to watch us, having conversations with each other or calling out to my teammate (the other intern here), it reminded me that boredom is probably as much of a problem as anything here.

Inmates were wearing street clothes, basically - t-shirts (or occasionally vests) and shorts. This was disconcerting in that I could forget I was in a prison for a minute - especially as all of Jamaica was physically pretty alien, so the prison environment didn't seem that much more alien. For a moment it was simply a place, large dirt enclosure with fences around it and building around that, with a lot of men, mostly in their 20s and 30s, hanging around. Then I would see a guard, or some barbed wire, or some other sign that changed the image my mind was trying to build.

The guards wore uniforms and badges. At the front door one had an automatic rifle (as do, I think) those up in the towers. But the rest of them were unarmed, and mostly fairly large men in their 40s. In demeanor most were serious, of course, but most of them seemed to see their job as a job - and didn't project a visible concern or identification with their role as jailors. Some also appeared to have some almost cameraderie, or at least understanding, with inmates as opposed to outsiders like us. Not that it was liking, necessarily, but it highlighted the closed society that many people say a prison is. At times guards were more careful to distinguish themselves from the inmates (and us) in demeanor or in asserting authority (the ability to move people around or move themselves around, especially.) I found it difficult to know how much to smile, or how relaxed to appear. I wanted the guards to think I was serious, and the inmates to know I took their position seriously. Talking with people one-on-one (although I had little chance to do it this time) was easier than deciding on what to project to a group.

In the SET space, the main room is a meeting room/computer lab, secured from the outside space by a simple lock. People were constantly knocking during our meeting, and coming in and out. Partly perhaps to see the new female faces (any female faces seemed to be a source of mostly quiet excitement).

As we sat in the main room, I could see the sound studio through a window - there's a stage and some men with a saxophone and a drum set and bass noodling about. The radio station, through a door by the entrance is a small room with 2 cd players and a laptop digital dj program, and two microphones. the computer lab has a slew of PCs and 3 macs as well. Only two of them were set up. The rooms are all airconditioned, a mercy in the sticky heat. As we came in, the large table in the middle was strewn with newspapers, and a crew of men were sitting around them with notebooks,writing away and leafing through the paper.

My teammate told me they are the news team, every day they read through the newspapers, note down the good stuff, and read it through on the radio in the afternoon. fantastic. Sports, weather, news relevant to folks listening. They were very serious and all covered quite a few pages.

I only was formally introduced to two of the inmates, but the atmosphere in there was generally quite good. People seemed focused and serious, and also positive: there were just moments when I would realize again the unusual situation we were all in, and that I was perhaps making it easier for myself to relax by assuming too much about the people around me. Not that people were secretly worse than they appeared, but more that their experiences and knowledge are in such different realms than mine - even though we can all meet in the same room (and laugh about the different pronounciations of -ough in english), their experience with literacy, their relationship to education systems especially are as far from mine as possible. I didn't even begin to think about whatever the experiences were that brought them to the prison in the first place.

It's kind of an amazing gift that we were able to be relatively easy with each other because we are to some extent having common goals. I'm trying to keep clear that having common goals is completely different from having common background or common understanding.