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She’s Going to Capri

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This is a series of posts about Italy, Malta, and Spain that starts here.

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I kept hearing an old commercial in my head.  The refrain was, “She’s going to Capri, and she’s never coming back!” It was for dish detergent or something, and the idea was that it was so fantastic that set women free.  Obviously, the one place you would go if you were freed from dish washing was Capri, Italy.

So even though the rain continued off and on, I was determined to go.  I assumed the famous Blue Grotto would be closed for the season, but I would hike the Phoenician staircase from Capri town to Anacapri, the other town on the island.  The Phoenician staircase was 880 steps, just 80 more than my hike in Amalfi. Once in Anacapri, I would visit sites that were probably similar to the beautiful ones I had enjoyed in the rain in Ravello, such as the Ville San Michelle. If I had time, I would hike to Villa Jovis from Capri town.

I had given up on seeing Pompeii; there just wasn’t enough time.  I wondered if, at the end of the day, I should take the catamaran directly back to Naples from Capri, instead of to Sorrento.  It would take only 45 minutes, compared with an hour and 40 minutes on the Circumvesuviana train.

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Here’s a photo of Sorrento from the ferry dock:

I was standing in line to board the catamaran to Capri and observing the two couples in front of me.  I used to spend a lot of time in Los Angeles and my guess was that’s where they were from.  Either LA or New York, but not Indianapolis.  The first couple was in their 60s, extremely tan, and wearing heavy gold jewelry.  The second couple: the man was in his 60s but his wife was one of those women who had had so much “work” done that it was impossible to guess her age.  35?  45?  60?  I knew I was staring too much but I was fascinated.  This couple, too, was extremely tan and wore lots of heavy gold jewelry.  Both couples were dressed in nautical wear, and the men were wearing baseball caps with longish white hair a la Bernie Madoff or Graydon Carter.  Captains of industry, if not of boats.

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Each time the catamaran sliced through a wave and slapped back down, all the passengers laughed riotously, including me.  It was like an amusement park ride.

After about 10 minutes it got very quiet.  I could hear the tan man behind me explaining to his taut-faced wife how to manage motion sickness.  “Don’t look ahead,” he advised, “stare out the side window, and don’t fight it.  I learned this when I learned to sail.”

Although I had taken an instant disliking to him because he was rich and I wasn’t, I was grateful to hear and follow his advice. I looked back and gave a sympathetic look to his wife but her face remained expressionless.  The ride was over in 20 minutes, which sealed my decision not to take the boat back to Naples.

This is Capri town, and a shot of the water that hints at how blue it might be on a sunny day.

Because of the limited autumn ferry schedules, I only spent about two hours on Capri.  I hiked the Phoenician stairs for 20 minutes in a driving rain, then turned back.  My heart wasn’t in it.

There were signs all over for Vespa rentals.  How fun would that be?!  But not today.  Riding a Vespa would be asking for a broken neck.

Back in town, I had 20 minutes before the ferry departed.  The first restaurant I walked into had no placards advertising sauerkraut.  There were the tan couples, enjoying plates heaping with freshly-prepared seafood.  This would have been it—the best restaurant I’d found in Italy—but I had no time to enjoy it.  I dreaded the return boat ride and thought bruschetta would be a better choice than squid.

 

The sea had calmed, making the ride back pleasant, if rainy.  For the umpteenth time, I thought, “I’ll just have to come back, in summer.”

Don’t Read This Post

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Do not read this post or look at the photos if you think you will irreversibly upset by torture techniques.

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This is a supplement to my last post, in which I described a museum exhibit about torture.  Interestingly, the museum—the Casa Sephardi in Granada, Spain—offered no spin on the exhibit.  It wasn’t a “human rights” museum, it made no call to action at the end. It also did not make light of torture.  It was just straight-out torture, torture, and more torture, leaving interpretation and follow up to the visitor.

There were creepy masks people were forced to wear to be humiliated (as in women who had allegedly been unfaithful to their husbands).

mask-of-shame pigmask-2

The pig mask was, of course, specifically designed to humiliate Jews, who don’t eat pork.  These masks may look kind of funny (as in humorous), but they weren’t.  As you can read in the paragraph in the first photo, they often also had spikes in strategic places, cut into victims’ necks, and the wearers typically died of starvation.

This confirms another lesson about torture that is relevant today:  Torture is rarely used to get security information from terrorists to prevent attacks.  It’s almost always used to punish people and to intimidate others not to rebel.  It puts a chill on entire communities, who stop speaking out and being politically active. It’s the favorite tool of dictators.

To reinforce my point, here’s a photo of a set of branding irons.  The “crimes” for which people were branded included “slave”, “blasphemer”, and “rogue.”  Really—Rogue?  I can think of a dozen friends of mine who would have been branded by now.  I could have been branded as a blasphemer a hundred times over.

branding

The exhibit proceeded to get worse and worse.

It included the iron maiden (not the rock band), thumb screws, chastity belts (for men and women; with and without spikes), the saw (victim hung upside down and sawed down the middle starting from the crotch), the iron bull (victim forced inside a hollow iron statue of a bull under which a fire was slowly built), the rack—with a without spikes—which pulled the victim’s spine and other joints apart one by one; the cage, in which victims were locked and suspended from a bridge where they were exposed to the elements and starved to death.

I will leave it to your imagination to figure out how the spike was used:

spike

I didn’t take photos of most of it; it was just too horrible to share.

If you have read this post, you are either very brave or a weirdo.  Or you are one of the over 50% of Americans who think that torture is okay.  If, like me, you don’t agree, please go to the Center for Victims of Torture website and sign the Reject Torture declaration.  Thanks, and I promise that the next post will be about Italian food or art or something more uplifting!

Dakota Bound

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I’m on a road trip! No, not to New Orleans. Believe it or not, I am going to meet with three potential donors in Sioux Falls, South Dakota. Yee haw!

Here’s the deal. The Center for Victims of Torture, where I work, does psychotherapy, physical therapy, and social work for survivors of torture and war trauma. We do it in groups in Jordan, for instance, because all the clients speak the same language. We do it on an individual basis in Minnesota, because clients come from 36 different countries and speak myriad languages which must often be translated, which doubles the time everything takes.

This is all good as far as it goes, except that there are an estimated 1.3 million torture survivors in the US alone. We do a lot of training to try to equip professionals outside of CVT to recognize and help torture survivors. But there’s also no way we can train every doctor, social worker, cop, or immigration officer that might come into contact with a survivor.

People have been talking about doing something with technology at CVT for years, but without funding that’s just dreaming. Part of my job is to find new sources of funding, and that’s what I hope I’ve done. I won’t bore you with the details, but there are three HUGE international development innovation funds that we hope to tap. To do this, we need to find partners who know how to reach patients in remote or difficult to access situations. That’s why we’re going to South Dakota.

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It’s so important, when you’re trying to get people fired up about complicated ideas, that you have the right people on your team. My co-pilots on this trip are a colleague who is from Sioux Falls and whose father has opened some doors for us, and CVT’s clinical advisor for our international programs, who is Kenyan and a PhD psycholgist. He describes the needs this way:

In Nairobi, there are thousands of Somali torture survivors living in the slums who are not there legally, under the protection of the United Nations. They literally cannot leave their dwellings during the day, because the Kenyan police will round them up and shake them down for bribes. Which would you choose: Pay a bribe, or be sent back to Somalia where you may face certain death? They may not have iphones, but could we develop a text-based therapy intervention?

Among the survivors who are in Nairobi legally, there are many Congolese and people of other non-English speaking nationalities. Kenya is an English-speaking country. The refugee kids may have already missed years of schooling due to being forced to serve as child soldiers and living on the run or hiding. Now they spend 12 hours a day in school—regular school, plus an extra block of time added on to learn English. They have survived unimaginable horrors. Many of them need psychotherapy or physical therapy, but they don’t have time for it. Could we develop a game-like therapy intervention that would appeal to youth?

CVT also works in Dadaab, the largest refugee camp on earth, in northern Kenya near the Somali border. Its population is about the same as Minneapolis—about 350,000 people. Could we do tele-therapy with them—either mental health or physical? If so we could reach so many more people. We could also use videoconferencing to train our own and other organizations’ staff.

 

“Do they all have smart phones in Dadaab?” I asked. I have been to Nairobi but not Dadaab.

“I don’t know,” he replied. “We would have to do a survey to determine who has the old Nokias, how many have smart phones. The Chinese are making big inroads into the African market with cheap smart phones. Most Kenyans use their mobiles for everything. They don’t have tablets or desk tops or TVs or land lines. They’ve basically skipped over those generations of devices and they do everything on mobiles.”

I love projects like this. They’re big, messy, uncertain, and complicated. They require me to work with people with whom I don’t normally interact. They may have big payoffs. And in this case they require a road trip.

Jew Be a Verb

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ANNE

A story line throughout the third season of Orange is the New Black is the character Cindy’s conversion to Judaism.

The corporation that runs the prison is cutting costs by purchasing brown, lumpy slop in giant bags that they pass off as food. One prisoner figures out that the frozen kosher meals are pretty good, and soon a group of prisoners are claiming to be Jewesses in order to eat kosher.

When the prison notices the uptick in kosher requests, it sends in a rabbi to suss out who is a genuine Jew. Cindy, who is Black, begins to read up on Judaism. At first she just wants to pass so she can keep eating kosher. But then something grabs her, and as she studies she becomes serious about converting to Judaism, and well, this is one of the few happy endings in the series. It wouldn’t be a happy ending to born again Christians, and we Jews aren’t in to converting people, but I am moved when anyone finds meaning.

I heard in this scene many of the same things that led me to Judaism. Like Cindy, I was raised in a faith in which pretty much Everything was A Sin, and fear and guilt ruled the day. You didn’t ask questions, you did what you were told by the men who ran the show, some of whom were molesting your friends. If you sinned, you went to this same man to ask forgiveness and it was granted by him and after I mumbled three Hail Marys.

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I think there’s a perception that Judasim is just like Christianity, except without Jesus. It’s not.

In liberal Judaism, which includes the vast majority of Jews in the world, there is no hell and little emphasis on sin. The idea is to do the right thing today, because it’s the right thing—not to avoid hell. If you screw up, it’s your responsibility to make amends to whoever you have hurt and to make your peace with God, if you even believe in god, because a lot of Jews are atheists. Confused? Well in Judaism it’s your responsibility to study, ask questions, and wrestle with all the big issues to figure out what makes sense for you. No one tells you what to think or do. Rabbis, who include women and gays and lesbians, are teachers and have no authority to forgive you.

Judaism doesn’t prosthelytize. We don’t care if you agree with us or not; we don’t care if you are a Christian or a Buddhist or a pagan. Just don’t try to convert us, thanks.

Instead of using the word charity, we talk about justice. It’s not an option, and it’s not about writing a check. It’s about doing, fighting, and pursuing justice. These principles are one reason why I’ve been able to look at the Israeli-Palestinian conflict from all sides.

Of course there are plenty of Lutherans and Catholics and pagans and agnostics who are also motivated by social justice.

There’s more, but like Cindy, the main thing that attracted me to Judasim was an inexplicably strong feeling of recognition. Like Cindy said, “I feel like I found my people.”

After I had studied for several years with a Rabbi and a group of fellow seekers and yes, learned elemental Hebrew, I converted—which is a five-minute ceremony. My mother attended the Friday night service in which this took place. Just before we left for synagogue, she said, “I guess it makes sense, you converting to Judaism, since your father’s family was Jewish.”

What!? She had known I was studying all along. She didn’t have any details, and since my dad died 47 years ago and we’re not close to his family, and I have no time or patience for family tree research, it will just remain a question mark.

When I told a rabbi this story once, she said that she hears stories like this often, and that there is a theory that all the Jewish souls lost in the Holocaust have sought refuge in the people who are converting, whether they’re in prison (Cindy) or are unwed teenage moms living in subsidized housing (me, nearly 40 years ago).

Breaking Free, Mom-Only Version

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ANNE

It’s been nearly two months since I’ve written a post.  For those of you who began following this blog recently, I’m Vince’s mom.  He and I co-wrote this thing for a year.  I had been posting every other day for over a year.  He sent me hand-written pages and I typed them and posted, alternating between his content and mine.

When Vince was released from prison, I checked with him every other day: “Do you want me to write a post?” and he’d reply, “No, I’ve got it covered.”  I asked him several times to give me a couple days’ notice if he wasn’t going to post on a given day.

I winced at his typos and sloppy spacing.  But Breaking Free was his blog too, and he was really unloading some powerful content—stuff he had not been free to write about in prison, some heavy experiences and emotions.

It was kind of a nice break for me.  Vince wrote that he wanted to take his writing in a different direction, and I started thinking about what else I might blog about eventually—maybe something fun like travel.

I felt blindsided when I read his post in which he announced that he was done with the blog—right now—for personal reasons.  I have no idea what the personal reasons were.  When I tried to discuss it with him he said, “You weren’t writing anything anyway.”  Aargh.

I was pissed.  I was hurt.  He hadn’t given me a heads up, so I had no content ready.  And when there’s no posting on a blog, readership falls off quickly.  I had invested over a year of my life in conceptualizing what the blog would be, figuring out the technology, keeping it fed, and getting the word out about it.  I watched as the readership stats shriveled with each passing day of inactivity.  It was like sitting by the bedside of a dying loved one, patting his/her hand, and feeling powerless to do anything.

I was waiting for inspiration (and time) to write.  Then I read one of those Facebook quotes—it was by Albert Einstein or Fred Flintstone or a maybe a fortune cookie—something like, “If you wait for inspiration you wait in vain.”  That snapped me out of my procrastination and resentment.  Hey, whatever works.

Co-blogging with Vince created a natural cadence, a tension, and a story arc that was a pleasant surprise.  I’m not sure how it’ll go with just me, but we’ll find out.

They

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VINCE

Today was my friend’s daughter’s birthday. Audrey turned 10, which officially marks the point at which you can write numbers instead of spell them. Exciting! Anyhow, for whatever reason, a few other people from down in Southeastern Minnesota where I lived for a number of years, were sending me pictures of myself from back in the day, when my main source of nutrition was beer and weed. It brought back a lot of good, fun memories. In these pictures, I wasn’t engaging in illegal activities, and it appeared that for the most part I wasn’t hammered drunk. In  one I was hugging Audrey (the birthday girl) when she was maybe three or four, and she had a huge smile on her face, which she almost always does. I don’t have children, so she is the closest thing to it for me and I was there with her growing up for years. I was around for seven of her first ten years, missing the first and last two.

I miss all of my friends from the Fillmore County area. But with her I feel as if I left her without an explanation or understanding of why I was gone. I left the area because I got hooked on meth again, because somebody I used with many years ago moved to Fountain and I just went for it. It happened so fast. It took six months from the time I first used to stop talking to my friends, get fired from my job, and start selling. I managed to get a job in Lanesboro for one season but I cut all ties with the area once the tourist season was over, and went to work on the road full-time as  a meth dealer. I lost my apartment but I didn’t care, I didn’t plan on going back.

I wrote to a lot of my friends when I was locked up. Not all of them wrote me back as much as I thought they should have. I don’t know why I expected them to after I just threw my life in the trash and left them all without a word, but I did. I wrote Audrey a few times. I tried to explain to her what I had done and where I was in a way that a nine-year old could understand. I don’t know how well I did but it must have been alright because she wrote me back. Twice. And those letters made me feel like I still had a soul.

Every period in my life when I abused drugs, and sold them, something happened to me. A transformation took place in which I was no longer able to care about people. More specifically, my family, or any close friends that would not have approved of my drug use. When my friend died (the one I wrote about in a post recently) I had no emotional reaction to it. I remember getting the call from her partner and my first honest thought was, “Fuck. She owed me $300.” Then I went over to see Christie and when I arrived she seemed quite nonchalant about the situation. She had just come back from the grocery and liquor stores, and she asked if we could get high and we did.

It was not uncommon for a person’s life to be crumbling down around them and have no care in the world. People losing their children, their homes, their loved ones, but continuing to do anything other than get a job to get high. And of course there I was ready to listen to their story and sell them a bag. It took me a while to get over the fact that I didn’t have any morals. Thankfully I worked on it in treatment.  I can relate this in the opposite way to how A.A. works for people. When we were getting high we associated only with those types of people because we could understand each others’ pain. We didn’t do anything constructive about it, but we can now. And we are. I am. And as hard as it is for me to deal with society as a whole right now, there is a small group of people I meet with every Tuesday, Wednesday, and Saturday nights that understands me just as I do them. I wish I could go to more meetings. But that’s my topic for the next post.

A Visit, at Last

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ANNE

I went to visit Vince on Sunday, for the first time in over eight months.

Given my last experience with visiting, my subsequent six-month ban, the fact that my last four letters to him were destroyed, and that he’ll soon be released, I thought I could skip this visit.   But he really wanted me to come.  I’m his only visitor, so he hasn’t seen anyone from the outside for a long time.

Friends made suggestions for what I should wear to prevent a repeat of the unfortunate “low-cut blouse” episode.  A nun’s habit, suit of armor, a sleeping bag, a burqa … the list went on and on and it was all very ha, ha, ha but I was really very anxious.  It’s indescribable unless you’ve experienced it firsthand—the feeling of being at the mercy of a stranger in uniform—the powerlessness, uncertainty, and fear.  And I’m not even in prison.

Problem was, I don’t own a T-shirt or a button-up shirt or a turtle neck.  I don’t like clothing that constricts around the neck.  I was inspired to put on one of my uncle’s dress shirts—the uncle who died in December whose shirts I took for Vince.  I could have fit two of me inside it.  The sleeves fell down six inches below my fingers and the shirt tails fell to my knees, but it I could button it up to my neck.  Maybe it would bring me good luck.

The hour-and-a-half-long drive to Willow River went smoothly and I arrived a few minutes before visiting hours.  The gate was closed so I pressed the intercom button.  A voice told me to leave the grounds and wait on the highway until visiting hours started.  I looked at my cell phone and said, “You mean, in four minutes?”  “Yes,” he answered.

A year ago I would have made a sarcastic remark but I wasn’t going to take any chances.  I said, “Okay” and backed down the drive.  I killed the engine and reflexively reached for my cell phone, then realized I had not left the grounds so I started the car up again, drove out to the highway, and sat there on the side of the road with my emergency lights on as cars and trucks zoomed by me.

After four minutes I drove back in and the gate was open.  This facility is much smaller than St. Cloud or Moose Lake.  There were no bars, metal doors, metal detectors, or guards behind plexiglass.  My hand was shaking as I filled out the visitor-request form, but within 10 minutes I was waved into the visiting room and there he was.  When I hugged him I could feel how much weight he had lost.  “People would pay to come here!” I said, laughing.  “I know, mom, I’ve never been in such great shape in my life,” he said.

“And by the way, I just got a demerit because you arrived early.”

What a splash of cold water!  Vince got a demerit because I arrived four minutes early.  It would be one thing if I had known this was a no-no, but I had checked the visiting rules online the day before and they said nothing about it.  “Don’t worry about it, mom.  That’s just how how it is.  There’s no way of knowing what the rules are until you break one.  They’re looking for a reaction, and I won’t give it to them.  Just don’t show up early when you come to pick me up on my last day.”

“If I were staying in longer, you could do a video visit,” Vince told me.  “They’re promoting it heavily—one hour for only $99.95!”  We burst out laughing at the absurdity of it, but he explained that a hundred bucks was cheap for the many families who had to drive from Chicago and pay for hotel rooms.

Our two hours together flew by.  I drove home and felt completely drained.  Two hundred miles, two hours with my son, two weeks til he comes home.

Happy Holiday

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VINCE

[Note: there is a lag in Vince’s posts due to him having to mail them and Mom having to type and post them.]

Happy Labor Day! Today is a special day for prisoners. We get two meals instead of three and no recreation time, and no showers. But the same number of guards, if not more, are on duty. Who wouldn’t want to get time and a half?! Not even those of us on the cleaning crew get to leave our cells today. I am jealous of those lucky enough to have TVs. I would go steal one from the guy three cells down, here for sexual assault of his 16-year-old niece, but here they call that extortion. I would be punished rather than rewarded. I wonder if the COs tell people on the outside that they protect child molesters and rapists. Personally, I would be embarrassed.

I mentioned us only having two meals today. Well they are pretty big meals. Brunch consisted of one cup of cereal, 16 oz of milk, 8 oz of OJ, coffee (horrible), two English muffins, a cinnamon roll, two turkey-sausage patties, two slices of American “cheese”, scrambled eggs and what I think may have been an attempt at a potato-less corned-beef hash with turkey instead of beef. I feel fatter having written that. I do not know what dinner has in store for me but I know it is just as much.

Visiting Rules

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ANNE

In order to visit a prisoner, you have to fill out a form and be approved. This can take “several weeks”, whatever that means.

So I go to the website to get the form and it advises me to review the rules for visitors, which is seven pages long. There is a separate grid that lists the consequences of breaking various rules.

There is the obvious stuff like, I’m not allowed to bring him a birthday cake with a file baked into it. I’m not allowed to bring in drugs, tobacco, weapons or ammo or simulated weapons or escape paraphernalia. I guess that rules out that coil of rope I was going to give him for his birthday, ha ha.

Long list of clothing restrictions, including those related to gangs, like “no hoodies.”

Once I’m in, I am not allowed to threaten or use abusive language … ooh, I can’t use written abuse, either. I’m not allowed to bring anything in, not even my car keys or a Kleenex, so how would I write something abusive anyway?

My favorites: No masturbation, mutual masturbation, oral sex, or sexual intercourse in the visiting area.

There is a whole nother set of rules for child visitors.

This is going to be a whole new world for me, I think, unenthusiastically. I assume many of these rules were written because someone did something that was “disturbing to others” to use their term. I fill out the form and mail it in. At least there’s no charge for this, as there is for writing, calling, and emailing.

PS: I just found out I’ll be going to Turkey, Jordan, Israel, and the Occupied Palestinian Territories for work over the next couple of months.  I want to give the prison-visiting experience the full attention it deserves, so most of the posts for the next month will be Vince’s, until I have time to dedicate to writing.