Panama: fighting for my life

I was first arrested at the Panama City airport in 2015. They took me from the airport to another site where I was placed in some type of holding cell. It was a dark room with a dirty, pissy mattress. I stayed there for 7 days. I have eczema and my hands were already in bad shape with the heat, but it got worse. The doctors refused to give me my medicine and told me there was nothing they could do about it. I still have skin problems that stem from that experience.

The US Embassy came to see me during those seven days. I just wanted to call my son, he was the most important thing to me. He was 8 at the time, and his 9th birthday was coming up. I was so sad that I wouldn’t be there because I’d been arrested. I thought they would have let me call him or at least let him know that I’m OK, but it never happened. Nobody knew that I was locked up for at least three months. The US Embassy didn’t try to contact anyone on my behalf.

In prison, I was able to get on Facebook and tell people what was happening to me. I was hoping for a repatriation procedure. It was too complicated for me to find a lawyer and I ended up getting a public defender who wasn’t prepared for my case. It took 18 months for me to be sentenced. I had to speak to the court in Spanish, with the little I had managed to learn, and was able to negotiate a sentence of six years instead of ten.

When I got to the prison, they were just getting over a tuberculosis outbreak. I’m pretty sure I got exposed to it. The prison consisted of ten houses that we called “hogar 1”, “hogar 2”, etc. The facility wasn’t what I expected. There were no jail cells, but rather giant dormitories. More precisely, my building was a two-room house with a dedicated area comprising three showers, two toilets and a little side room where we could plug in appliances. I would have felt safer in a single cell rather than having to look over my shoulder every minute.

This place is supposed to hold 50 to 60 women, but in reality held up to 150, which made for really bad living conditions. It was so overcrowded that people shared the same mattress in a bunk bed, four to a bunk in total. For the first six months, I slept on the floor, with a sort of makeshift mattress made from several bed sheets. We changed it every few months. I tried to get off the floor and finally got a shared space in a bunk because of my skin condition.

The dormitory would be open all day from 8 am to 6 pm. During that time, you could go out into the prison courtyard, receive visits, go to administration or medical if you had an appointment, and so on. The yards were just open spaces. There was a basketball court where prisoners played football. During the day, we’d go down to the pitch and hang out in that area.

I was dealing with a Spanish-speaking administration, so it was difficult to understand what was going on at first. There were English speakers from Jamaica, Canada and the Bahamas who helped me understand, but I was mostly surrounded by Panamanians, Colombians and Venezuelans. I ended up forcing myself to learn the language. My goal was to be independent, so that nobody could take advantage of me. It was vital for me to learn the ins and outs to survive.

During my time in prison, I witnessed many arguments and fights. I witnessed rapes, stabbings, self-mutilation, self-abortions and deaths due to a lack of medical care. Six women died while I was there. One time, I was jumped by five other inmates. I think I could have died. There were situations where I had to fight for my life. A woman almost killed me. She tried to hit me with the back of a pan for 15 dollars. There were informal power structures in which some women protected and cooked for other women. Some nationalities seemed to have more power than others. Relationships with the other inmates were difficult, especially as a black woman and an American. Luckily, I managed to get along with the Panamanians.

In the prison, people would catch diseases and infections from rats and insects. One morning, I was woken up by a rat that had fallen on my face. From then on, I slept with a blanket over my head. There was wildlife in the prison yard. I saw malnourished dogs and cats. There were iguanas and lots of rats. Some women would catch the iguanas and eat them. You couldn’t store any paper or clothes under your bunk without a trunk. Otherwise, the rats would get to it. I lost a lot of books and magazines that way. I got an infection three different times. The worst was when I was denied medical care because I didn’t greet the doctor when he came into the office. I stayed with an ear infection for an entire week before being examined. I still have problems with my ears today.

There were drug deals going on in the prison, so I smoked a lot of weed. I spent most of the day looking for ways to make money for food or to get high. It was hard at first because I was getting bullied by other inmates. For the most part I would eat once a day, mostly at night. If I had money sent to me from someone back home in the US, then I would eat more than that. There was a Colombian woman that would come visit me. She befriended me and brought me groceries as well. I could only buy the cheapest food with the money I had, for example, eggs, plantains or sometimes chicken and rice.

The prisoners pretty much did and ran everything. They cooked all the food. They had stores where you could buy clothing, shoes, hair products, even alcohol… it was like an open market in prison. Most of what I had was bought from or given by other prisoners.

Some days we’d wake up in the morning and discover that there was no water. If the water supply in town was cut off or contaminated, the prison would be the last place to receive attention. We had to wait for water trucks to come in. If you had a bucket and could fight your way through the crowd to the gate, you might have gotten a little bit of water.

There are two sides to my story. I value the time I spent serving my sentence because I learned a lot, I grew a lot, and I saw a lot. Those experiences shook me and opened my eyes in different ways. The flip side is that I ended up with a lot of trauma. I’ve been through so much medically. I suffer from post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and depression because of that experience. All these things made me, and broke me.

I’ve been back home for five years now. I created the “Diary of a prisoner“to sell merchandise in order to raise money to help incarcerated women in Panama. My goal is to continue expanding it to help women in the US as well. If you don’t have anybody on the outside to give you money, especially when you’re in another country, it makes surviving prison so much harder. I tell my story so that others can share theirs. We always hear about men in prison, but women in prison need to be talked about just as much. Prison, whether you’re innocent or guilty, and no matter what you did, should not be a place where you are mistreated but rather rehabilitated.