Jamaica Observer, Sunday, August 01, 2010

AT 43 years old, Rosemarie has experienced unimaginable misery. Still, she refuses to lose hope.

In the last decade alone, she was imprisoned for trafficking cocaine, gone close to death’s door, due in part to depression, and known what it is like to be homeless.As though that were not enough, she has had to deal with the suffering of three of her four children who were left behind to fend for themselves while she was imprisoned in the United Kingdom for four years.

Dealing with the abuse of her children has been especially agonising, given her own painful youth. She still hurts from the fact that she did not receive an education like the rest of her siblings.

However, thanks to Hibiscus Jamaica, Rosemarie has a new lease on life. She was among the more than 20 women — all deportees from the United States and the UK — who last week graduated from a drapery-making, soft furnishing and business development course funded by the European Union and the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), and administered by Hibiscus.

“Everybody is grateful for what Hibiscus has done for them,” chirped Rosemarie who would only agree to the use of her middle name, because of fear of possible stigma.

“I am thinking of doing a great business from it. From all we have learnt, we can do great business from it and not just in Jamaica but all over the world,” she said, clearly excited at the prospect.

“It is a new door opened. If it was not for them (Hibiscus), I wouldn’t be thinking like this. If it wasn’t for them, it would still be hand-to-mouth. But they have opened my eyes…It is the first step,” she added, noting that she already had a business plan and was looking now to raise some capital.

But Rosemarie has not always had much to be hopeful about. In a recent interview with the Sunday Observer, she recalled the events that had brought her to where she is today. People she considered friends, she said, forced her into the drug trade, and out of fear for her children’s safety and her own she went along with it.

“They threaten me and tell me that because I know too much of their business to bring them down, I have to go into it to prove to them that I won’t let things out of the bag. So that is where I started,” she said.

“I had to do it because I didn’t want them to hurt my kids (all below 15 years old),” added the woman, who at the time was a few months pregnant with her fourth child.

She recalled how difficult it was for her to swallow the pellets of cocaine, all the while dreading how her unborn child could be affected.

“The man (in charge at the time) is a lawman and he walk in with a machete when they couldn’t go down and he (asked) me if I want him to tek the machete and shove them down properly. At the time I couldn’t do nothin’ because he had the gun put down there on the kitchen counter and the machete tek up. He was trying to hit me with the machete one of the time when he see that they (the pellets) couldn’t go down,” Rosemarie said.

“They put a thousand pounds in my hand when everything was done and tell me to tell customs officer that I am going to shop,” she recounted.

Rosemarie said the man’s girlfriend accompanied her to the airport, expecting her to board the flight with her. But she never did. Rosemarie made the journey to England alone and was caught. Her first thoughts were of her children back home.

“They (the police) said I have a phone call. I called the people who got me involved in the trafficking and said ‘look, I am in custody’. I wanted to talk to them first for them not to go after my children. I understand that they said I was lying so people took them (my children) from where they was,” she said. “They said that I steal the money and the drugs, and that’s not true. It is after a while when they did not see me that they said maybe it go so and they just leave it alone. Then my kids started to suffer.”

Her older son and daughter lived with relatives of their father while her younger son lived with friends as his father had left Jamaica by then.

“My 10-year-old daughter, after about two years sat GSAT (Grade Six Achievement Test) and pass for high school and then fell out of school. The big one was going to high school, he dropped out of school. The baby became sick and some stranger have to be taking him to (Bustamante) Children’s Hospital all the time,” she said sadly, adding that her oldest child was soon denied a roof over his head by his father who accused him of being a homosexual.

“I went badly depressed in the prison. They were all in three separate places. The baby was with friends. The big girl was with her father’s family. When the aunt asked the father for money, the father seh she should go an’ ketch man… The big boy, he had to be on his own hustling and bustling. He go by my mother sometimes, I understand, and my mother sell dog food to give him (money). If it is not dog food, he doesn’t get anything. So he was there, not going to school,” Rosemarie said.

Eighteen months after the birth of her fourth child, a girl, in a Manchester prison, she had to wage a legal battle to keep her. It was a battle she eventually lost; her child was taken into foster care, which was itself a challenge.

It was while in prison that she learned of Hibiscus through a confidante. Hibiscus tracked down her oldest son and offered him help. Through Hibiscus’ support, he was able to get back in school and managed to complete his high school education.

The other two children in Jamaica were not so lucky. It was not until she returned to the island in 2003, having served four years of an eight-year sentence that Rosemarie was able to reunite with all her children.

But she landed in Jamaica without any money to go beyond the gates of the airport.

“Some higglers were coming, I think off an American flight, and I told them ‘I don’t have a dollar, I’m coming from prison and I have a baby here’. All of them start taking $500 and give me. I got around $6,000 from them.”

She paid a taxi to search for her mother’s place where she had to sleep on the floor, Rosemarie recalled.

She first found her oldest child and he, in turn, helped her to find the other two children. Soon, the family was back together.

But there was no happy ending, not yet. They children got depressed and ill from getting wet when it rained and from sleeping on the floor.

When their health problems were resolved, Rosemarie’s sister gave her a room from which she was soon evicted.

“She asked me to leave but I still didn’t get anywhere to live and she throw me out. She put out the clothes and I put them back in because I still don’t have anywhere to go,” Rosemarie said, laughing now.

About nine months later, she got a place to live. To get money, she set pride aside and started begging old friends for help. Then she started selling jerk chicken, saving enough to lease a piece of land on which she built a one-room dwelling.

“The windows were battened up, the door was nailed up. We had to pull out the nail every morning and nail up back every night when we going to sleep,” Rosemarie recalled. That room is now a three-bedroom house and home to her and three of her four children.

“All I have is my kids. My kids, they are my whole life. My kids are the ones who keep me going. If it was not for the kids, maybe I would die and gone. And I believe in God, too,” she said.

“I am still hurting about my kids’ suffering. That is why I still take anti-depression tablets. I am (also) trying to heal myself from my childhood. Right now my childhood (pain) is very strong. I want to put the past behind; I don’t want to remember what happened,” she said.

“I don’t hate her (my mother) but I can’t keep the bond too strong. (And) I don’t trust men; I don’t have a boyfriend…” she added, noting that she ran away from home as a teen and had been raped by three men.

“I want to heal myself, I want the past to go.”

And between Hibiscus and her children, it is happening

Accra Daily Mail, 26/10/07

Mr Kwamena Bartels, Minister of  Interior on Wednesday bemoaned the rate at which massive quantities of drugs, were being shipped into the country and said government would make the necessary amendments to. PNDCL 236 to deal with the current trends.
He said the situation was as a result of the increased efforts of Drug Enforcement Agencies .in Europe and Latin America to rid their countries of the trade forcing drug cartels to seek alternative routes in Africa. Mr. Bartels said the government was collaborating with the World Customs Organisation (WCO) and the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) to assist to implement the global container control project at the main harbour in Ghana for profiling. The Minister was speaking at the launch of the Hibiscus anti-drug trafficking campaign in Accra which is being supported by the United Kingdom in collaboration with the Government of Ghana. “I wish to assure you that we have the political will to implement the provisions of the International Conventions we are signatory to,” he said and commended their partners for their support in training and provision of equipment. Mr Bartels appealed to government’s partners to support the Narcotics Control Board with the establishment of Treatment Centres for the treatment and of rescuing them from the destruction of drugs.
He noted that currently the Psychiatric Hospitals provided treatment for addicts but the stigma attached to them prevented many from seeking early help.
He urged all stakeholders to increase the awareness through education and campaigns since it was only though that the country could make progress in the fight against drug abuse and trafficking. Dr Kim Howells, UK Foreign Office Minister said the United Nations spent about 300bilions dollars a year on drug related cases and that the UK sought to work with countries affected by the drug trade. He said the rate at which West Africa was being used as trans­ shipment point was worrying and urged Ghana to combine her efforts with the European Union, the UK, UN, Interpol and other agencies to curb the menace.

eva t

At the moment there are over 350 Jamaican women in UK prisons, 60 per cent of the foreign national women currently held here, mostly for smuggling drugs into the country. Despite harsh sentences of up to 15 years the women keep coming in ever-greater numbers.

Most of these women are mothers and they suffer the pain of separation as well as severe anxiety from worrying about their children’s welfare, as they are

likely to have been . the sole providers. Stressed by these concerns the women are prey to illnesses caused by the extreme cold, lack of sunlight, strange diets, loneliness and an alien, hostile environment.

Yet they were not deterred by the possibility of this suffering, thousands of miles from home, because the conditions in which they are forced to live in Jamaica make even this hazardous enterprise seem worth the risk.

Unlike the stereotype fostered by some media, these drug couriers are not frivolous young women our to fund a jet set lifestyle, but impoverished mothers     in     their      thirties attempting to support their average three or four children. Predominantly they come from the ghettos of Kingston, St Catherine and Montego Bay where unemployment is endemic and the struggle for survival often violent and brutal.

In an economic environment where the absolute basics of food and shelter are expensive and health and education are no longer free, even educated and employed women with partners find it difficult making ends meet.

In the old days in Jamaica a single mother was able to leave her child in the country to stay with grandparents or other relatives whilst she worked in town and sent them part of her wages. Now rural poverty has driven people to town where the cost of living is so high that even the employed find it difficult to manage.

Desperate

It is quite clear that a number of these women and men have resorted to desperate measures. While drug smuggling is a dirty business, which cannot be condoned, few would relish the choice between this admitted evil and watching a child die of hunger or a slow wasting disease.

Yet this is the rock and a hard place in which many of our poor mothers, sisters and daughters are caught.

Should the most vulnerable in society be forced into such untenable positions? Many of the most            fortunate,         for understandable reasons, condemn this ‘vile’ behaviour which so tarnishes the image of the country, damaging the essential tourist trade and scaring off foreign investment.

Since most Jamaicans are religious, even if they are not convinced by arguments based upon social deprivation they should recall that only those without sins should dare to cast the first stone. Are we doing our Christian duty to our fellow citizens when we allow them to live in the conditions now existing in the ‘mashed up’ areas downtown?

Many may be tempted to reply that they escaped similar poverty through hard work and sacrifice.

But in the changed, austere economic environment of ’structural adjustment’ such escape is no longer probable.

Women caught in the poverty trap tend to stay trapped, prone to illusions of escape through drug dealing and other crimes or to intimidation by men even more desperate than themselves.

It is no longer feasible for poor parents to place their hopes on children ‘making good’ through education because education is now an expensive business. This is the real tragedy of the women in prison here in the UK, that they are ‘criminals’ as defined by the law, but also victims of societal circumstances beyond their con­trol. Deprived of the love, care and support of parents and home the children receive their educa­tion in the mean street, where their skills are honed through guns and violence.

Challenge

The challenge for the Jamaican Government and international agencies which claim to support them in fighting the drug trade is to invest in the people in order to eradicate poverty, since this is the true cause of the women’s mis­deeds. Eradicating drugs is not the answer, Jamaica does not pro­duce the cocaine that is smuggled out of the country but Jamaica’s poverty is used by the cocaine producers as a means of supplying naive and desperate ‘mules.’

Punishing the women harshly has not worked, because they act out of need not evil, 90 per cent of Jamaican women in UK pris­ons arc first time offenders, reli­gious people who do not them­selves take drugs. By punishing them with very long sentences the British criminal justice system is indirectly punishing innocent chil­dren, this is likely to provide a fer­tile recruiting ground for a new generation of real criminals, even more desperate than their poor mothers and create a cycle of ever increasing deprivation.

Olga Heaven is Director of the Female Prisoners Welfare Project (FPWP) Hibiscus. The organisation is a registered char­ity and has an office in London.

by Olga Heaven

The media in Europe and America have the habit of making their citizens think that Jamaica is a war zone which is a grave danger. The ‘documentary’ featuring Kingston Public Hospital   shown   here   on prime time, for example, was like the American sitcom Mash without the humour. While millions get mugged here without anyone crying ‘foul’, a single tourist who loses a purse in Jamaica is cause for panic headlines. Recently the Mirror newspa­per splashed a story about the number of passengers of Air Jamaica carrying cocaine. A month earlier a story had appeared in Jamaica about the number of couriers on all airlines, including British Airways, the national carri­er; but the paper failed to mention this.

More            importantly       the Jamaican government, alarmed by the reports, had looked for ways to solve the problem. With the help of the British govern­ment, they installed ion scanning machines at the airports, organ­ised specialist training for police and customs officials, introduced sniffer dogs, and co-operated with the UK government on poverty alleviation programs to get at the root cause of the drug problem. But none of this good news appeared in the Mirror or any other British media, because to the sensationalist press only bad news is good for business.

Vulnerable people

I know a little about these things because I am a Jamaican living in the UK who, for the past two decades; have been involved with charities which looked after the welfare of women caught up in the drug trade. This long expe­rience has taught me that while the women must take responsi­bility for what they have done; in many cases they are very vulner­able people who are as much vic­tims as perpetrators of this evil trade.

Hibiscus was founded under the umbrella of the Female Prisoners Welfare Project in 1990 to cater for the very special needs of foreign national women in UK prisons, most of them drug couriers. They were poor, badly educated, single mothers in their mid- thirties with 2 to 3 children, for whom they were the sole bread-winners. Far from home, they were stressed, disorientat­ed, anxious about their children, and incapable of defending them­selves.

Because the British prison sys­tem was designed to punish men from the UK, it had difficulty dealing with even their own women; the influx of a large number of foreign women pre­sented the system with added problems. FPWP/Hibiscus pro­vide counselling to these women,

assisting with advocates and interpreters, helping them to maintain contact with home, and preparing Home Circumstances Report for court appearances.

When Hibiscus was founded the problem was centred in Nigeria. Jamaica has now become the centre of distribution and has resulted in increasing numbers of Jamaican couriers or mules ending up in UK prisons and most of Hibiscus clients are now from the island.

As a result an office was opened in Kingston in 1993 which has dealt with the prob­lems of hundreds of women pris­oners and their dependents. One of the most important functions is to provide information through posters, workshops, conferences, and interviews with all the Jamaican media.

Campaign

Hibiscus recently made a 60 second animated film to be shown repeatedly on Jamaican TV as part of a campaign to con­vince women/men in the ghet-toes about the futility of the trade. With a powerful story line, showing how unscrupulous barons trap vulnerable women mired in poverty into sacrificial victims. Hibiscus could never have succeeded without the full co-operation of the Jamaican and British authorities who have been seriously affected by the drug trade. Voluntary organisa­tions, businesses, and concerned individuals have also been gener­ous with their time, and other contributions, which have all gone to make this country, despite its problems, into a much better place.

Over the past five years I have visited at least twice a year on assignment and have been pleas­antly surprised to see the positive changes the country has been making. On my last visit I was pleasantly surprised to travel on the new highway from Kingston to Mandeville. My hope is that the country will be as successful in improving social infrastruc­ture, in providing education, health, housing and jobs to reduce the poverty which is one of the major causes of crime. My work with Hibiscus and other charities concerned with the wel­fare of women prisoners has been motivated by the desire to give fellow women a chance to suc­ceed. In the course of this work I have been confronted with unbe­lievable horrors; what guilt must a mother feel, locked up in a cold prison cell thousands of kilome­tres away from home, when she blames herself for not being there for her young, vulnerable child. While giving ourselves credit for the little we have been able to achieve, we must never relent in our efforts to stamp out an evil which destroys some of our most vulnerable citizens, and diminishes all of us as human beings.

t.good@fpwphibiscus.co.uk