The Angel of Bang Kwang Prison (9 page)

I still relied on my ‘supernatural voice’ to direct me to someone in need of my help. One day Nina and I were walking by a hospital. It was a glorious afternoon and we were chatting away about work when I suddenly found myself interrupting our conversation and telling her that we had to go into the hospital because there was a foreigner who was in desperate need of help. Nina knew better than to ask any questions and we immediately turned and walked into the building. I led the way and headed towards the emergency room. No one stopped us because they thought we were from a foreign embassy. I discovered later that they had called the British embassy and were waiting for its official. We barged right into the room to find, lying in pain and heightened distress, an English guy, Malcolm.

The smell was dreadful; Malcolm was in his prison uniform of considerably dirty shorts and top which allowed us to see his leg. It was huge, rotting away, and there were signs of gangrene; he had blood poisoning all the way to his thigh and the doctors were preparing to amputate. He didn’t seem wholly conscious at first—when I think of the pain he must have been in—but when he realised I was talking English he managed to furnish me with a few details. He had been arrested in Songkla for something or other and had been jailed there. Unfortunately his passport had expired and many months had passed before he was eventually brought to the immigration office in Bangkok. His embassy were trying to help him but since he was a little unstable mentally, they were having a difficult time of it. He had nothing to help himself be released or get him back to England. He was stuck in limbo and now he was about to lose his leg.

The doctor was approaching and Malcolm grabbed my hand and whimpered not to let them take his leg. I assured him that Nina and I would do our very best by him. I turned to face the doctor who told me sternly that he would be performing the amputation immediately. I nodded respectfully and begged the doctor for a respite of 24 hours. I asked if they could try dosing Malcolm with large amounts of antibiotics and vitamin C, and put him on a high nutrition programme, and just see if that made any difference. Malcolm was crying and kept saying, ‘Please, please, please.’

Thankfully the doctor was a reasonable man and he agreed to the treatment. We sat awhile with Malcolm until he was calm enough to sleep. The next day we returned to find that his leg had noticeably decreased in size and was looking mightily better.

The day I met Treasure was a good day for me. He was a male Thai ex-nurse in his 40s and I met him at the chicken shed rehab centre. He stood by himself and watched me silently as I chatted with the other inmates. He was in bad shape, having spent the last 15 years of his life as an out-and-out heroin addict. Most of his teeth were gone and he was horribly emaciated, with dark circles around his eyes. When we finally got talking he told me how he used to steal prescription drugs from the hospital he worked at, in order to deal with stress and exhaustion, and after a few weeks of this he became a full-blown addict. He couldn’t function without the drugs and, inevitably, it cost him a job that he loved. He told me that he was struck by my honest and open approach to the other addicts. I was even more up-front with him because he was a nurse.

I told him, ‘Look mate, you know more than anyone else what damage you are doing to yourself so it’s ridiculous for me to tell you what to do. You already know the truth.’

Those simple words reached him and, I’m proud to say, helped him to become clean for the rest of his life.

I nicknamed him ‘Treasure’ because to me he was a little gem that had been dug out of the dirty, dung heap of addiction that had been his life. He watched his girlfriend haemorrhage their baby down a toilet and had been badly affected by this. By the time I met him he had spent three years behind bars at Klong Prem prison and looked severely ill. We became good friends and he started to help me with my various projects.

I was putting together a big anti-drugs programme, with General Sarang, the deputy chief of police, which was going to involve politicians and young celebrities. We wanted to raise the issue in parliament and were inviting top ministers, university professors and celebrities to help us achieve as much attention as possible. Sarang called a big meeting to discuss what we had to do and I went along with a Thai friend.

The meeting dragged on for hours; everyone present seemed anxious to speak for as long as they could, which was fine, I suppose, except for the huge fact that it was obvious not one of them had either seen or taken any drugs, or had had a conversation with an actual addict, ever. They could have all the theories in the world but there was no way an addict or rebellious teenager, bent on experimenting, would give them the time of day. I stifled a yawn. Just as the afternoon was coming to an end, the General called out to me.

‘Khun Susan, you haven’t said a word. It’s your turn now before we finish.’

Now I had to be careful. If you want to impress Thais and get somewhere with them you have to remain polite and friendly, so I resisted the urge to shout out my impatience with everyone in the room and instead begin by paying tribute:

‘What an honour it is for me to be among these dignified people that are so concerned for Thailand’s youth. I really appreciate being allowed to be present even though I’m a foreigner.’

So far, so good. ‘However, I do have one problem with this meeting—we have not once spoken about an actual person. No one has met with an addict.’

I got carried away then and my eyes welled up with tears; my colleagues were shocked, crying, or showing emotion in public, is a very ‘un-Thai’ thing to do. I couldn’t stop the flow of my tears so I just kept talking. All my previous dealings with addicts had filled me with genuine compassion and concern for their welfare; this was a very personal subject for me.

‘We need to get these drug addicts on a stage and let them talk about their own lives and experience with drugs. We need to make heroes out of the reformed addicts. They have fought almost impossibly huge battles to wean themselves and their bodies off drugs. They are the only ones who are truly qualified to warn young people about the unimagined perils, financially, emotionally and physically, that accompany addiction. And, by the way, we need to care about the drug addicts—treating them like criminals is not helping them in any way. This programme has to go further than academic theories.’

There was a stunned silence as I took my seat. One of the professors to my right reached for his handkerchief from his jacket pocket, saying, ‘That’s the most touching thing that I’ve ever heard. You’re not a Thai and yet it seems clear to me that you care more about my people than I do.’

He blew hard into the hankie while others started to nod and smile at me. The General actually made me repeat every word I said so that it was loud and clear what we had to do. Before the meeting finished the agenda of the programme was changed, making it much more relevant to reality. At the next meeting I brought Treasure along. He was given a seat of honour and addressed the meeting about his own addiction and subsequent battles against it.

That was probably one of the high points of Treasure’s life but he was not allowed to enjoy it for too long. His story, and our friendship, was to take a tragic twist. One day he was nursing a guy, a former fellow addict, who was infected with the HIV virus. Treasure was trying to re-insert a drip into the guy’s blood stream that would pump glucose into him, which he needed to stay alive. The patient lost his temper and was physically trying to prevent his nurse from attending him, trying instead to wrestle the drip from his hand. It’s not exactly clear how it happened but somehow he managed to stab Treasure with the drip—the drip that had previously been inside his infected body.

I felt my stomach hit the ground when Treasure rang me to tell me what happened. Up to then he had been off drugs for a few years and he had got his life back together, with a new job, new-found self-respect and a new girlfriend that he was mad about. A certain amount of time had to elapse before he could be tested for HIV and as soon as he was ready I went with him to a private hospital where they would be able to test him and give him the result on the same day. If he had gone to a public hospital he would’ve had to wait an obscene amount of time thanks to red tape and bureaucracy—my two pet hates. Nobody else knew about it, and I was glad that he let me be with him.

They took a blood sample almost as soon as we arrived and then we were free to settle into the plush surroundings of the reception area, which resembled a 5-star hotel. After a couple of hours I went to the desk to ask if the results were back yet. The two women on reception wouldn’t look me in the eye and hurriedly told me that the results weren’t in yet but it wouldn’t be much longer. I returned to Treasure who was trying hard to conceal his fears from me. After another hour of tiring chit-chat to fill in time I approached the desk again and asked about the results. Again they wouldn’t look at me. In fact, this time I would go as far as to say that they both looked very nervous as they replied, ‘No, not yet.’

Something was wrong and they were hiding it from me. Treasure must have guessed by my face that something was up and he nervously appeared at my side. The two women tried hard to look over us, left of us and right of us, but never right at us. It was incredibly frustrating and I was starting to get upset so one of them shrugged and began, ‘We have found some abnormality.’

This was the Thai way of preparing you for bad news. They started off with something small and ambiguous so that you could brace yourself for the damning actuality. I lost whatever little patience I had left by this stage.

‘Oh come on! He’s HIV positive, isn’t he? You know he is but you’re just not telling me. Look me in the eye and tell me that he isn’t.’

Again they resisted putting us out of our misery even though it was wholly obvious now what the situation was to all of us standing at that counter. Treasure glanced at me and I could feel myself wanting to cry. He looked resigned to his fate while I desperately tried to keep some semblance of hope alive between the two of us.

‘No news is good new, right?’ he smiled shakily in reply.

I found out later that the women were trying to locate a doctor and counsellor to tell us that, yes, Treasure was now carrying the HIV virus. They were afraid that if they told him he might take the news badly and try to kill himself there and then in their posh hospital. Therefore, their only concern was for the hospital’s good name and not for a man who was waiting to find out if his life, as he knew it, was over. It was night-time when we gave up for that day and wearily left the hospital.

It was to take a mind-numbing couple of days before someone was available to confirm the news, which was absolutely criminal as far as I was concerned. I took the news, which had taken so long in coming, very badly; he was one of my best friends and I relied on him a lot. He was an excellent nurse and had a great way with people, especially children. However, my feelings for him were seriously challenged a short while later when I heard that he had married his girlfriend without telling her he was HIV positive.

My head was in a spin over what to do. I felt it wasn’t my place as Treasure’s confidant to divulge his status to her so I did the next best thing and pleaded with him to tell her, threatening that if he didn’t tell her I would be morally obliged to do so. At the time I thought I did my best but there was a lingering, niggling doubt that I could’ve tried harder for the completely innocent woman he married. He promised me he would tell her and I chose to believe that my job was done. Very quickly after that they were gone; they moved south and I never saw either of them again. He did send me a beautiful letter in which there was no indication that he had told her the truth. It troubles me today that I just didn’t tell her myself; if it ever happened again I wouldn’t waste time wondering if it was my place to tell or not. But I have to recognise that there are some situations in which I cannot help.

Chapter Five

I imagine that when most people think of Bangkok, somewhere in the first couple of things that jump to mind, in between monks and sex shows, is prison. Being banged up behind bars is never going to be easy, but I’m telling you now you particularly do not want to end up in a Thai prison.

Nina and I were so happy about the hospital visitation programme that we wanted to extend it to other areas where people might be lonely, or in danger, and, therefore, in desperate need of our help. It was a very fortunate thing that I knew the commander of one of the prisons that held a lot of drug addicts, Bumbud Prison, and we approached him with our visitation programme. Once again I was glad to meet a man, in charge, with vision, and he welcomed our proposal and gave us
carte blanche
to do as we wished.

Bumbud used to be one of the most notoriously rough prisons in Thailand, and was the first port of call for people arrested for drug offences. In the good old days new inmates were tied and stretched between two trees or else beaten severely and brutally in front of an audience. Thankfully, it isn’t as bad now; the commander was a fair man and had worked to improve conditions in the prison although it was still fiercely over-crowded. He took us on a brief tour of the grounds, and that was nerve-wracking in itself. It was very open plan, with just a low wire fence between us and the prisoners out exercising. I couldn’t help noting how easy it would be if someone wanted to attack us. It felt like a very long walk indeed as the watchful eyes of a few thousand prisoners were upon us, right and left of our vulnerable path way.

However, I started to relax as I watched men smile and call out to the commander, who was not in the least bit intimidated by these rough-looking men. He maintained a healthy relationship with the men because he still respected them, inmates or not, and they responded in kind. It was a good lesson for Nina and me—at the end of the day every person on the face of this earth is a human being with basic rights, and most of the time you can make life easy for yourself by treating others as you would like to be treated yourself.

We followed the commander to what he called the ‘Heart To Heart’ house, which was the rehab centre that he set up in the prison. It was usually frequented by the younger inmates, the addicts, as opposed to the traffickers and sellers. They were more fortunate nowadays as before they would have been thrown in with the general prison population, thus making them easy prey for the drug dealers. It was a really good thing now that they were separated from the other tougher elements and got some sort of rehabilitation, and a much less severe penalty. There was already some sort of group therapy in place and Nina and I wanted to improve it, with weekly visits, and broaden its agenda to include bringing in families for therapy so that there was a good communication between them and their sons. It makes a huge difference to a young addict if the family are brought on board. The shame of it is when young prisoners feel like nobody cares for them anymore; whether they’re on drugs or not, or whether they’re even alive or not. On the other hand you might have to remind the family that this ill-clad, emaciated prisoner is still the child they brought into the world, or the sibling they used to play football with. Some parents have to fight their disgust at their son being arrested for being a drug addict—it’s not easy for them to show up and be instantly supportive.

We worked a lot with these parents and guided them in their ambiguous, yet understandable, reactions to their errant children. The boys were being punished enough in being locked up so there was no need to shower abuse on their heads and remind them how much shame they had brought to the family, or that their mothers cried themselves to sleep every night. If someone took that attitude with me I would want to top myself. Guilt can be a highly dangerous tool and best left in the drawer; from my experience compassion and forgiveness are much more effective in helping someone to heal and reform.

One week I challenged the guys about being really honest with themselves. I told them that they would never win a battle against an addiction with vagueness or ignorance. Nina and I asked them to keep this in mind and write down any deep, dark secrets from the past that they had been harbouring, that might be preventing them from getting on with their present and future. They could change their hand-writing and didn’t have to sign their names to it. The pieces of paper would only be read by Nina and me and once we read them we would burn them without divulging one word to a third party. It was a great success, with the inmates confessing serious crimes from murder to more trivial ones, such as swearing at their mother. The innocence behind some of their worries astonished me. One guy asked if there was something wrong with him because he couldn’t resist spending time looking at his reflection in the mirror, and did that mean he was terribly self-absorbed?

Some of the secrets revealed made me appreciate their bravery in facing up to it. It can’t be easy for a little toughie to write about how he slapped his mother around and now wants her forgiveness. I appreciated their co-operation, seeing in it a commitment to their rehabilitation.

Unfortunately, our good works came to an abrupt end. We visited the inmates every Wednesday, but one week Nina had to see her mother that morning so we asked the commander if we could come on the Thursday instead. It then transpired that, on the Wednesday, at the exact time that Nina and I should have been walking towards ‘Heart To Heart’, two prisoners jumped over the wire fence to ambush the garbage truck. They threw the poor driver from his vehicle and then took the wheel and drove the truck through the prison wall, wounding and killing other prisoners.

The newspapers were full of the tragic events on Wednesday evening. I shook as I read about it; if two defenceless women had been there they would surely have been taken hostage, or worse, and the prison guards would have had no choice but to come out shooting to kill. It brought home to me that Nina and I were risking a lot with this type of work. I looked across at my daughter at the dinner table and sent a silent prayer of thanks that we had postponed our visit that day. Shortly after, the prison was closed permanently to the public, which ended our programme there.

The closing of Bumbud didn’t end my connection with inmates; in fact a whole new life was opening up to me with new opportunities and challenges, some personal and some professional. The months, and then years, were trickling by. My daughter was healthy and thriving and I found my work stimulating, if never-ending. Sometimes I did try to resist the direction that I was being taken in but it was always in vain. My work was starting to bring me attention from local and international media. When asked to give interviews I would decline, preferring to remain as anonymous as possible so that I was free from being judged or having the expectations of others put on my shoulders. However, I decided one day to take advantage of the situation presented to me. I spotted a young, well-dressed guy loitering around when I was on one of my visiting programmes. I asked him if he was a reporter. He asked me how on earth I knew; I laughed and replied, ‘Just a guess!’

He had a nice way about him and I instantly felt he was genuine and trustworthy, so when he shyly asked if he could have a few words with me I agreed. However, as I looked at him I had an idea for his feature.

He was tall, perhaps 6ft or more, and he had an athletic build, lean and muscular. I told him that I wanted him to accompany me to a slum that I had been planning to visit for a while but had been too nervous to go to it alone as it was a particularly rough spot. I warned him that I didn’t know what kind of reception we would receive and had no idea what I was going to do once we reached it, but I was compelled, nonetheless, to make a visit. The slum was below the train tracks of Pra Ram VI Bridge. It was mostly hidden from view behind the gleaming buildings that housed numerous businesses and was surrounded by Bangkok Metropolitan Administration’s beautifully manicured gardens. I had recently spotted the place from the bus and the squalor just screamed out at me, in sharp contrast with the nearby business offices.

The inhabitants were a pitiful lot; I had watched a few stumble from their shacks half naked and completely out of their minds on drink or chemicals, and this was at approximately 10am on a beautiful sunny day. My journalist friend seemed delighted with my request, but before we headed out for it I visited a generous woman who ran her own bakery. Typically, I left her shop with all the day-old cakes and buns that I could carry. I couldn’t do my job as well as I do if it wasn’t for people like her. Laden down with our treats we went on our merry way.

At the entrance point to the slum one had to pass by a shabby hut where the district’s garbage collectors hung out. I felt a little nervous when I saw them all out, enjoying the morning sun, in shorts and surrounded by empty, and full, cans of beer. Now this could go either way, but I quickly decided to disarm them with friendliness; there wasn’t enough room for us to skulk by and there was absolutely no way I was turning back now. So I put on my best smile and bounded up to the group with my bag of cakes, greeting them in Thai.

‘
Sawasdee ka
?’ (Hi, how are you?)

The men looked up in considerable surprise at this blonde, female westerner waving pastries at them and addressing them in their own language. However, I passed some unspoken test and they smiled and invited us to join them.

‘Sit down and have a beer with us.’

I sat down alright but politely pointed out that it was a bit early in the day for me to have a beer, and that my stomach would never forgive me. They giggled at this and continued on with their drinks. They called for their families to join them and allowed my new friend to take photographs of their kids. I thanked them for this and told them that I wanted to visit their community to see if I could be of any help. I had a feeling that these guys ‘controlled’ the slum and its people, like a sort-of slum mafia. In other words, if I had these guys’ blessing—that is, protection—I would be safe to visit and talk to whoever I wanted to. They graciously told me that I was free to enter and even got to their feet to go in with us.

It was a sad, sad place, with drug addicts sitting listlessly in front of the corrugated-iron boxes they called home. Elsewhere we saw and heard drunkards singing, shouting at the sky and each other; shrivelled up men who had gambled away everything they had; bruised women and children, possibly the wives and offspring of drinkers and lots of feeble elderly people without teeth or much in the way of flesh. It could have been a depressing and oppressing experience except for the fact that when they saw me and the journalist offering cakes there were welcoming smiles and lots of laughter. At one stage the journalist nudged me and said, ‘Seriously though, it’s so bad here what could you possibly do to change it?’

It was an obvious question, but if I stopped to ask myself that every time I faced a situation like this, there would be no point in me leaving my house. I shrugged for an answer and suggested that we keep moving.

There was a little bridge a few metres away at the edge of this slum and when we crossed over it we found ourselves in a second one, the neighbouring community. This one, however, was clean and organised. We had arrived on a good day as it had been declared a community-clean-up day and the industrious folk were out, in their boots, digging out trenches to drain the garbage and waste. After some further investigation we discovered that this slum even had its own bank, where parents could take out loans for their kids’ education or for setting up a family business, interest-free. Everyone had put in what they could afford so that it was invested back into the community. What a world away from the first slum, which was mere metres away. It was really interesting to see what people, no matter what class or social standing, could achieve, once they decided to work together. We located the school, which almost straddled both slums, and met with the abbot who worked with the kids. I told him that I didn’t have money or property to offer him, but asked what I could do to help. He was a kindly man who could make a quick decision.

‘You could teach the children English?’

‘Done!’ I replied.

He told me to return on the Monday morning and tell the head teacher that he had sent me.

This was a start of a programme that lasted six months. I taught three classes, one after the other, one day a week. I even recruited two teaching assistants. There were two illegal aliens hiding out in a Bangkok refuge—one was from Africa and the other was from Jamaica—who were given sanctuary by a small Catholic organisation. Both were well-educated, highly intelligent men who were bored to death and had nothing to do except wait for their immigrant status to be approved. Perfect!

This was a very special project for me because although I mightn’t actually be changing life in the slums, as the journalist had hinted, I was at least building bridges. The kids were really appreciative of our attention and effort; some of them really blossomed under our tutelage. Instead of fearing foreigners and their foreign languages, they discovered that they could learn about them, thus dispelling their fear and instant hatred. We included the other teachers in our work and used games as a fun teaching tool. The kids hugely enjoyed geography, and seemed anxious to learn about the world outside their slum. That was the most important gift we could give them; the knowledge and inspiration that they didn’t have to live here forever—they could break out of the depravity and poverty. The walls of the school were adorned with their class work and inspired the kids to take pride in their work. Some days were trying, when some of the kids would arrive to school with black eyes or bruises inflicted by their drunken parents. I had to face up to the harsh fact that I couldn’t fix every thing or save everyone, but I could try to make a small difference using what I had.