Things that Make Me Sad...

Jailed.

"To the wrongs that need resistance, To the right that needs assistance, To the future in the distance, Give yourselves." --Carrie Chapman Catt

Few things shock my anymore, but something floored me yesterday:  this report of Zambian prison conditions by Human Rights Watch.  

I'm helping Mary from Chikumbuso put together a grant proposal for her sanitary napkin project.  The local Rotary club recently gave them $7000 worth of materials for these kits.  Mary needs an additional $7000 to train and pay single mothers to sew the reusable pads and distribute 1,000 kits to school girls and women in prison.  Mary is passionate about this project.  She tells me that menstruation forces girls (especially in rural Zambia) to skip school, and inmates to dig a hole in the ground and squat for days.  

I wanted to see if this is true, so I started researching.  I found the report about the prison conditions, and my heart sank.

I'll cut to the chase:  there are children in Zambian prisons.  Babies.  If a single mother is arrested and her kids have nowhere to go, they go to jail with her.  

Wait.  It gets worse.  They must share the meager food ration assigned to their mother.  

The worst part is that the justice system is so painfully slow that people (children, too!) can languish in jail for years before they get a hearing.  As a result the facilities are busting at the seams.  Lusaka Central's Prison was designed for 200.  They have 1145 inmates.  People sleep sitting up and in shifts.  TB and other infectious diseases rage through the population, because they lack adequate medical care and sanitary supplies. 

It's tough to imagine children "living" in such horrid conditions, and I wish had a magic wand to fix this atrocity.  But oddly enough, I have hope this situation can and will be changed.  Not sure how, quite yet, but I'll keep you posted.