Monthly Archives: October 2014

Miedo (Fear) and Culpa (Guilt)

Eric and I had dinner with our sweet friends Beth and Dustin last week, and Dustin shared a bit of blogging wisdom with me. Dustin has been keeping a blog…or maybe more than one…for years now. Another friend of ours had apparently complained to Dustin that the blog was only about Dustin’s opinions. Dustin’s response? That’s the point of a blog! If you don’t want to hear what the blogger wants to say, you stop reading the blog. Problem solved.

I think that’s what I need to remember as I start my little blogging adventure. It’s weird to write about yourself. It’s uncomfortable. It’s like writing a college essay or a cover letter over and over. Throughout our lives, we’re told not to talk about ourselves but rather to be good listeners. To listen to what others have to say and to encourage them to share what is on their minds. But you know what? That would make for a very boring blog.

So here goes…I’m going to [attempt to] get over my insecurity and stop wondering what y’all (or you…if it’s only Mom reading. Thanks Mom!) are thinking about me as you read. Because you know what? If you’re bored or if you hate it, you’ll just stop reading. And I’ll never know the difference.

There are several reasons why I’m nervous about this move.  I’ve never just not had a place to live in the States.  I’m the one in charge of finding a permanent place to live, buying a car, and joining the hospital (more on how that works…well…when I figure it out).  I’m the one who speaks the language, but when I speak it, it ain’t pretty.  Driving down there is ridiculous, but metro won’t get me to work.  They say everything in Panama takes three times longer than you expect it to take.  And Eric has a trip to the Czech Republic scheduled for the first week of February, so I’ll be on my own for a week.  Eek!

I know, I know…poor Julie, she’s moving to 80 degree weather in the Tropics.  I get it.  I’m also really excited.  Don’t get me wrong.  It’s just coming up really soon!

My impending departure from my current job at North Carolina Prisoner Legal Services is also hitting me a lot harder than I expected.  For those of you who don’t know, I’ve been a civil rights attorney here for nearly four years now, and I’ve worked on post-conviction criminal cases for a little over a year.  To be clear, my clients are all prisoners.  There’s a chance that one or two of them are innocent and wrongly convicted, but most of them are guilty.  And most of them admit that they are guilty, even the post-conviction clients.

But these are my guys.   They’ve been through hell.  I wrote a long explanation of all that they are and all that they’ve been through, what they go through each day, how hard their lives have been, how completely forgotten they are…and it was beautiful and touching and poignant and exactly what I wanted to say.  And then WordPress flopped on me and I lost my draft.  And I cried because I had poured a lot of my angst and anger and frustrations and fears and embarrassment and shame into those lost words.  I’m going to have to come back later and explain the complete guilt that I feel over abandoning these…dare I say friends? …that I have made and fought for over the past four years.  But for now, I’ll say these few things.

It is so important to me that people understand how important prisoners are as people.  They are people.  Do you get that?  When I first started reading letters from these guys, I didn’t quite get it.  The first time I went to meet a guy though – a second degree murderer at that – I got it.  Let’s call him John.  John was the most cordial and respectful man, even though he was housed in the most intensive control unit in the state.  He could not have been more courteous to me, and he even sent me a thank you note for the visit afterwards.

These guys look to me and my colleagues because, in a lot of situations, we are their last hope.  We may be the last chance they get to claim innocence and escape a sentence of life in prison for something they didn’t do.  We may be their best chance to prove that officers are continuing to beat them up even though they have severe mental disabilities that prevent them from being able to control much of their behavior, yet do not have access to proper medical care.  We may be the support that they have because their families abandoned them years ago.  So when we cannot help, it hurts like hell.  They do not take our rejection of their cases lightly.

When I have a close professional relationship with an inmate, however, and I know I am about to have to abandon him after fighting along side him for years…I can’t imagine how some of these guys take that.  They don’t cry about it.  They get angry.  They feel hurt when no one is around to see it.  They tell their next attorney they don’t trust them because that Paris woman left them and she didn’t know what she was doing.  I lose all my credibility by leaving.  Credibility that I’ve spent years building.

There’s no way to explain my leaving to my clients.  I can’t even justify it to my own social justice focused heart.

And…here come the Sarah McLachlan lyrics in my head…”Hold on, hold on to yourself.  This is gonna hurt like hell.”

 

Cinta Costera

Apartamento Numero Tres or Third Time’s the Charm?

After another disappointing apartment loss, we found a third temporary apartment for January and February! I’m going to go ahead and post it here in hopes that if it’s going to fall through, it’ll fall through quickly.  I guess the good thing is that I’m not as in love with this one as I was with the other two. Eric made a good point: If we had started off in a place that we absolutely loved, we would be setting ourselves up for disappointment when we move to the more permanent place in mid-February. He’s right.

Plus, this place really is pretty great. Two bedrooms, two baths! We don’t need all that room, but that just happened to be the place that worked out best for us, in terms of price and availability. I have nothing to complain about. i think my lack of excitement now comes from three different places. 1) We’ve been burned a few times, so I don’t want to get too emotionally invested again. 2) The photos are not quite as bright and professional looking as they were for the other two places. Again, probably a good thing because my expectations will be more reasonable. 3) I’m just plain getting nervous about going. Like, really nervous. But that’s a whole other post, and I’m not sure I’m ready to share that one.

So, where is this new place? That’s one of the great things! It’s closer to the water, closer to where I’ll be working, closer to a grocery store, and closer to metro. Here’s another map. I’m getting more tech savvy…slowly…and we’re at the point of me being able to do a screen shot of a google map and draw really fancy circles on it.

Red circle - Lost apartment Blue circle - New Bella Vista apartment Black circle - UN Office

Red circle – Lost apartment
Blue circle – New Bella Vista apartment
Black circle – UN Office

The red circle is where we were originally planning to stay, in a neighborhood called El Cangrejo (“The Crab”). It’s near where we stayed when we visited last January.

The blue circle is the location of the new apartment, in a neighborhood called Bella Vista (“Beautiful View”). Better name than “The Crab,” right?

The black circle is the location of the UN Office where I’ll be working. It’s about a 6.1 km from the apartment, which Google Maps adorably tells me will take 11 minutes for me to drive. In Panama traffic, I’m guessing there’s no way it’ll be less than 45 min. We’ll see.

And now, some photos of the apartment.

United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC)

So…while we work on figuring out where we’re going to live, I’ll update you on the job situation.  Or rather, the volunteer position situation.

I will be working at the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) Regional Office for Central America and the Caribbean in Panama (ROPAN) in their Criminal Justice and Crime Prevention Group on the Criminal Justice and Prison Reform team.  I hope that explains why it takes me a minute to decide how to explain it when you ask me where I’ll be working down there.  I have no idea which of those phrases are the most useful.  I think UN and prison reform are the most descriptive.

I began to bother this poor woman on the Criminal Justice and Prison Reform team via email in January of this year.  I was pretty surprised to find that she was so easy to get in touch with.  I haven’t tried, but I can’t imagine that it’s that easy to access folks in the UN office in NYC.  She was amazingly responsive and kind, but told me over and over again throughout the year that there were no positions available.

I finally told her in September that I was willing to volunteer my time.  Surprisingly, those were the magic words!  I skyped with her the following week – in embarrassingly horrible Spanish.  I mean, uncharacteristically horrible.  I’m no expert in the language – hence this whole trip – but this was really awful.  She actually asked me to switch to English.  I expected her to switch too, since the academic papers of hers that I had read had been in English.  Turns out her English is as bad, if not worse than, my Spanish, but I was just so off my game that she was desperate to help me out.  We compromised by each speaking out native language.

There’s just something about talking on the phone in another language that is so terrifying!  Had I been able to see her face – it was not a video chat as I had expected – I think it would have been easier somehow.  There’s some bit of comfort that is lost when you aren’t able to see someone’s face.  Silences are more painful too…maybe because the other person is unable to see your struggle with words, so you imagine that they have no idea what you are doing?  I think that’s what happens to me.  I assume they think that I have disappeared or just decided I was finished talking mid-sentence.  Oh, it’s just so horribly awkward.  I don’t do awkward.  Eric can handle awkward.  I can’t stand it.  It may be a really long year for me.

Anyway, I still need to review all the resources that UNODC ROPAN has on their fantastic website, but through the efforts of the team with which I’ll be working, the prison population has decreased in Panama, staff is (at least marginally) better trained, and human rights violations are beginning to be addressed.  The implementation of the program began in 2010, so it’s exciting for me to be able to see all of the progress that has already been made before I get my hands in it.

On another note, Eric and I spent some time out with the Young Adults group from my church – yes, I finally officially joined, so I can call it my church – last night, and it was ridiculously encouraging to talk to them about our plans for next year.  Not only did they ask questions about where we would be, why we are going, and what we would be doing, but several folks even encouraged me to keep up with the blog and said they were interested in keeping up with us next year.  After years of floating around – sure, spending six years at one church, three at another, but never joining one – it’s refreshing to be reminded of why it is so important to do more than just sneak in right at 11 on Sundays and rush out right after the benediction.  I’m very comfortable with that routine.  It’s easy.  It’s risk-free.  It doesn’t take much time.  It still lets me get in my time with God each week.  But gosh, there’s just plain more to it than that.