thoughts on the whole prison thing

K well I'm scanning again (letters from the 17th of April, lord it makes me so sad.) and so I have a tiny bit of time to write.
I'm glad we're doing more at ITTC now. Like today I started writing up the pamphlet taht Olimpia and I are doing for the new prisoners in PFC. We're going to have a meeting about it with Heidi in a little bit, when she gets here at 4. We still have lots of work to do on it but at lest something concrete is done. Plus I said this already but yesterday the prison visit was so much better tht we were DOING something, haha. Cuz before we had a lot of time just sitting there after interviewing the women for the pamphlet. Now we're hurrying trying to do as many letters as possible, we have such a huge pile, and Olimpia spent the morning sending the urgent ones and now I'm working back at the beginning of the pile, aka April. =[
Yesterday a bunch of new girls were interveiwed, doing their prelimiary survey info thingy, and Olimpia was doing translation since they only spoke Spanish. There was one from Spain and was only 18. God. Really hits home seeing these young girls, people YOUNGER than me in a prison in a country totally foreign to them. Dunno. But the work that ITTC does is really great. Something I've learned here is that people in prison are people too. It seems a simple enough statement, btu the reality of it is that unless you have some job which deals with prisons, you put blank faces on prisoners, assuming they're "bad" people, and then just stop thinking about it. But, as I'm sure I've said before, most of these women are more victims than anything else, and if they are, just here in this one little prison in São Paulo then how about all the other millions of people in prison the world over? Granted Brazil is notorious for its unfairness etc in its prison systems, but still it just makes me think about how many poeple are caught up and victimized by systems and organizations that are so much bigger than them.
Anyway haveta go this whole getting a visa to go to France thing is still killing me. Who knows maybe I'll end up at ND next year after all, at this rate France won't let me in. Hah.