Turn and Exchange

Originally written in the Fall of 2005 as a 'creative nonfiction' assignment for a writing class.

TURN AND EXCHANGE

            Michael kicks the soccer ball away from his friend, and he starts to run with it.  His friend playfully begins to give chase, and Michael sees this as he glances over his right shoulder.  So Michael goes faster with the ball—he's a natural.  The trace of a mischievous smile is now forming on his lips, but hindered slightly by the clenching of his jaws. His eyes are wide.  He's hit his top speed in the span of about three seconds and nothing's going to catch him now.

            Michael is an African prince, a Kenyan warrior.  His beautiful face bears a royal quality.  When he stands, he stands.  He does not slouch.  I doubt he had to work hard on his physique, a build which some American guys are literally dying for.  There is an almost seductive quality to his eyes, something I might find unnerving if I believed he actually wanted anything from anyone.  He has a reserve about him.  He doesn't need to talk much, but when he does he does it with a moderately loud voice.   And when he smiles…almost a celebration of life itself.  He's not a bad kid really.  He is often respectful of his elders, but can't help but have fun with his peers.  He is eighteen.  He is strong.  He has his whole life ahead of him.  He is also quite incarcerated.

            Michael came to me on his own.  If he was referred by the youth ward's chief attendant, Nicholson, I wasn't told ahead of time.  But Michael certainly did give me a heads up.  In the first week I spent in Belize's lone state prison, I was thrown one boy after another.  Somewhere in that mix, Michael marched in with a demeanor all his own, almost an automated rhythm.  He interrupted the current session and stood before me with the straightest of postures and with a clear agenda—"MAI TEHN." (my turn)  It was not a request and yet, it was not a demand either.  He pronounced it in the loudest, yet clearest English he could muster, which was no small matter.  It nearly betrayed his Creole accent.  He was not being rude, mean or impatient.  He just was.

            My gut reaction was one of amusement.  "May I finish here first?" I asked, humoring him.  He responded with a slight grunt of exasperation and promptly turned on his heel, marching back out as automated as he had come in.  Had I known then what I know now, I would have found that moment to be one of the most profound of my time there.

            For Michael to give that grunt of exasperation told me many things—burden, expectation, anticipation, patience, hope—among other things.  It was all the more poignant for the fact that Belize, among Latin America in general, has a much different orientation to time than one finds in the States.  Clocks are just guidelines much like yield signs on freeway ramps.  The same quality of impatience isn't found south of the U.S., and when you're in prison…I can really still only imagine what time means to you when you're in prison.  But even Michael's cultural orientation to time, so very foreign to me, couldn't hide this weight he was carrying.

            As soon as I walked the other kid out of my little make-shift office, Michael followed me back in without so much as a prompt from me and without missing a beat.  "I nee' so' cahn'sling, mon."

            And so we began.

            Michael speaks Creole of course, which is what most native Belizeans speak whether they be of African, Mayan, or European descent.  The official national language is English—the mark of the British rule which occupied for hundreds of years.  There are still pockets of Spanish and Mayan spoken in certain communities and in families, but the presence of these languages couldn't prevent the evolution of a dialect among the African slaves.  They formed it by borrowing from their native tongues and emulating their English-speaking overlords.  And while it is English that is still taught to all the kids in school, it tends still to be Creole that they speak.  This initially presented a real problem for a missionary wanting to practice psychotherapy with a bunch of juvenile delinquents—they could understand every word I was saying to them.  At times, I was lucky if I could make out every third or fourth word they said to me.  Fortunately, they were patient.  Some of them even must have been used to having to translate—not Michael though.

            "I am wared sohntaim, mon," he said, not looking directly at me.

            I stared at him for a second.  "You're… 'worried' sometimes?"

            "Ya', mon."

            I nodded slowly and proceeded cautiously.  "What about?"

            "I 'as en a gan'."

            I paused another second, staring at him.  "You were… 'in a gang'?"

            "Ya', mon." We both nodded.

            "I 'as wared mi get in trob' wen I liv hea."

            This went on for another half hour.  It did get easier, but every time I talked to a new kid, it seemed like it was a different game of interpretation each time.  Life in Belize had been pretty easy outside of the prison as far as a language barrier was concerned, but then I'd been dealing with the relatively educated.  I'm certain that at some point after finishing a conversation with one boy and walking him out, I returned to my seat, dropped my head, and gave a slight grunt of exasperation.

            Five months earlier, my buddy Satch returned from his first trip to Belize.  He was certainly more sunned than I'd ever seen him and he was excited about the two months he had spent there.  He had been recruited by a Presbyterian minister working out of Amarillo who had needed a handy man at his mission 'outpost' in the Caribbean to handle all things electrical, plumbing, or construction related.

Satch had been grappling for more than a few years of what to make of his life.  He'd had certain interests, talent, and skills with no real direction that gave him any purpose to speak of.  My situation was not unlike his, I was just on a much different track than him.  My problem, if nothing else, was too many interests with too many directions to choose from.  I did have a purpose in mind however, but the road getting there was slow-going and it was not that hard for me to get impatient.  Especially when I found myself in a two-and-half-year graduate program—diving right in and at full time immediately after receiving my Bachelor's—which invited me to do nothing but think about what to do after finishing.

  It was incidentally and arguably the most challenging few years I'd yet had to face.  It was now January 2004 when he returned, and I was starting the last semester of the program.  Timing is everything.  Over those few years I had lost a couple of grandparents to cancer.  The social network that had seen me through from the end of high school to the end of college had suddenly disbanded and slowly had to disperse (everybody seemed to want to go to California).  I think there was a fairly substantial heartbreak in there too somewhere.  All that coupled with a graduate program—any graduate program—can be a recipe for an unpleasant 'quarter-life' crisis.  On top of that, I had little time for any vacations having to go to summer school and living on a tight budget—I hadn't traveled outside of Oklahoma in all that time.

So, when my best friend announced his intentions of returning to Central America in a more or less ongoing capacity and stated flatly that I would be going with him, I don't think I pondered the prospect for too long.  "Sure…I can do that," I told him.

But what would be my function?  I would have been happy at that point to be shoveling wet cement for the whole summer.  It would have been release after two solid years of books.  But after Satch's boss in Amarillo had heard what my field of study had been, he had another idea for me.

"They could use a counselor down there," he said.  "They have a prison…one prison."  He went on to explain that the state had turned responsibility for its care and operations over to the local rotary club, Catholic-based in origin, who had volunteered after the increasingly awful conditions the facility found itself in—an understatement really.  Since the switch, educational and workstudy programs had been implemented.  A faith-based initiative began to head all rehabilitation efforts.  A sense of community had been fostered.  The turnaround was reportedly phenomenal.  All of this I remember him saying, but I was in no state of mind to be picky.  I needed a change of scene and I needed to feel useful.  I needed to grow up, and quick.

Satch had told me about Creole.  "Really bad…bad English," he'd said.  This was true in a sense, but this was also an American perspective, and an opinion also held by the more elite class in Belize.  I had underestimated the language barrier as an obstacle to the tasks I had in front of me as I prepared for the trip because the idea of actually counseling came along late in the game.  But underestimation is a given when jumping into another culture.

Another thing I underestimated was a barrier with yet another culture—this one with a much more familiar and homegrown presence.  Satch and I were supported by (and therefore represented) the Presbyterian Church (USA)—a moderate mainline denomination which accommodates conservative and liberal elements alike (for better or worse, Satch and I fell into the latter description).  But we were hardly the only American missionaries and in fact there were all manner of groups visiting which tended toward a very conservative evangelical tradition.  Periodically, I got to experience them first hand as they would come to the prison.  They spent a morning or afternoon engaging the youths in praise and worship music, offered their testimonies (most invariably involved an abusive drunken father), witnessed personally to the boys (who were especially partial to the teenaged girls among the groups—many conversions there to be sure), then conducted a half-hour explanation of some out-of-context bible passages.  And they were gone shortly thereafter.  On to the next.

"I'm not a fan," Marc responded when I asked his opinion of this mysterious trend.  Marc was my age, originally from Colorado, and from a rather liberal Catholic order, the Jesuits.  He was in the middle of his two-year mission—the standard length of time most young Jesuits would choose to embark upon.  I was very curious to know his perspective.

"They're here for an hour and they leave," he said flatly. "And they don't seem too interested in really getting to know anyone they talk to."  Marc would go on to explain some tenets of his order's tradition of evangelism, the pinnacle of which being the exchange taking place between two people of different stations in life.  What the active evangelist learned from interacting with the person to whom he or she ministered was at least as important, if not more, as what the evangelist had to share.  Something about this sounded good to me.

Marc came to teach.  The direction of the youths'("da' utes") education was placed in his hands.  And teach them he did, and when he wasn't teaching he served as very firm counsel himself (sometimes interpreted disciplinarian).  Marc was Latino, from Colorado, of stout build, and had dreadlocked hair.  All of this paired with a stern attitude when needed consequently made for a much more commanding presence than my passive WASP-ness and scrawny frame could bring across.  But even he could only do so much with sixty unruly teenaged boys in one big meeting area serving as classroom.  There were always some who could use some additional attention.  One such was Michael.

There was that hope I saw in Michael when he first came to me—something within him that I saw as workable, and it was therefore impossible for him not to become one of my favorite people there.  But it seemed that I too could only do so much.  I addressed Michael's concerns and anxieties as best I could.  He would be out of prison and back in Belize City to help his family in eighteen months' time.  But how was he going to stay out of the gangs? he wondered.  How was he not going to be drawn back in?  He'd made enemies before being sentenced and his only recourse may be to rely on some of his former fellow hoods for protection.

I would listen to him.  That was about all I could do.  I also asked him if making peace was even an option they ever considered on their streets.  Might there even be enough time passed a year and a half down the line that they would all be grown up enough not to care about some petty adolescent disputes anymore?  He seemed to ponder these things to himself.  Whether it was of any help or not, I don't know but he always ended our time the same way—he stood up straight with his royal posture said, "Dank yu'," with an abrupt nod of his head, turned on his heel and walked out.

"Oh, he's gotten worse," Marc told me.

"Since when?" I asked him.

"Since you started counseling him," he responded, and it was usually only after my face fell into a scowl that his own face lightened but a little.  Marc had an intensity about him such that when his caustic wit often surfaced, I was always taken off guard.  He chuckled.  "He's been acting out a lot more steadily since I've been here the past year."

"He doesn't go to any of the computer classes or work trainings?" I inquired.

"Well, that would be a problem."

"Why?" I asked.

"Because he doesn't read all that well."

Psychotherapy having run its course for the time being, for Michael and many of the others I saw besides, I assigned myself to helping to tutor.  Again, Michael was the easiest for me to help.  I would, once a day, go over with him some spelling and grammar worksheets Marc had assigned him.  At times he was eager to tackle them, other times he grew impatient quickly.  There were times that the rules to English made absolutely no sense to him and the confusion he felt twisted his face into an unconscious glower always accompanied by "Wha?!?"

As hard as he worked on the grammar, Michael continued to get into trouble.  As respectful as he was able to be, it was very difficult for Michael not to be a clown and even a bit of a pest to the attendants—especially to Martinez, the chief of security and another of my favorite Belizeans, who could often be heard shouting from the main office as Michael was chased out, "Bwai! Mek hes, tek fut!" (Get out now, son.)  It seemed to me that Michael was never happier than when he got the exchange of harassing and then being reprimanded by Mr. Martinez.  He wasn't the only boy in there that needed a surrogate father.

The acting out continued to escalate until it hit a relative breaking point.  Michael got into a fight with another boy who was not as receptive to his clowning.  It was my last month in Belize when I'd heard Michael was to be sent to the isolation ward soon.

A sad reality in psychotherapy is that there are instances in which it isn't really that effective in the simplest of cases, and almost certainly not in a short amount of time.  You have to pick your battles and you have to be able to recognize what you do actually accomplish.  There are priorities, and there is a prime directive and it was here in this very foreign place that it turned out I needed to be so that I could truly realize it for the first time.  When all else fails, relationship.  In a person's most desperate time, was I going to be able to stand in the fire with them without trying to pull them out?  This is the challenge the profession is called to.  And if you truly are in that fire with them and resisting every instinct to give them a quick fix or an easy answer, but just to really be there with them, I can't think of many better ways to get a genuine exchange.  It's the actual doing of it that's the trick.

There was a brief moment toward the end of my tour when I thought maybe I just didn't have enough time.  I had given it a shot, but maybe now it was time to cut my losses, pack up, and go home. Ultimately though, I couldn't accept this.  I had made great strides in the relationship with Michael, but I didn't believe something, a transaction one could say, had been yet completed.  Somehow, I very much needed this…something to be pulled off.  And as I was one day looking over Marc's shoulder as he sorted through some of his educational materials, I saw something.

"The 'Creole Project,'" Marc held the packet up before me.  A group of educators had a few years earlier made an attempt to form an interpretive system of all the grammar and syntax.  They could do this because it was in fact more than simply a corrupted form of English.  Contained in the packet Marc made for me was a very simple fable known to most Belizean school children, written in Creole (or sounded in Creole written in phonetic English) with the English translation at the bottom.

"I wish you had shown me this sooner," I said.

I went to their large activity center where they held their classes, found Michael and put the packet in front of him where he was seated.  "Michael," I said to him, "teach me this."

He examined it for a moment, looking through it.  Then with his abrupt nod of approval looked up at me, knowing it was now in fact his turn.

"O-kay, boss."

* * *

It was my last week.  I was to leave a bit earlier than I'd originally planned and Michael was due to start spending time in isolation.  I called him in so I could speak privately with him in the supervisor's office.

"I'm going back to the States, Michael," I said to him.  "You won't see me anymore."

There was a brief pause before he asked, "Wai yu' goa bock?"

"I'm out of money," I told him with a chuckle.  "And there are some things I need to take care of at home."

"Hmn," he nodded.  "Yu' cahm bock?"

Now that was a good question, and I pondered it a moment before I answered him.  "I don't know.  Maybe someday.  I'd like to."

"Hmn," he said and paused another moment before telling me with a rather self-assured nod of the 

head, "Yu' cahm bock."  With another abrupt nod of approval, he turned on his heel and marched out.  I 

could do little else but smile.  It was not a request and yet, it was not a demand either.