The Angel of Bang Kwang Prison (21 page)

I did my research on DIY divorcing and threw myself into the paperwork. All the boxes were ticked and we went to court where Garth had a nasty shock when he was told the divorce would cost between $500 and $1,000, which I asked him to pay. This was worse than me asking him to divorce in the first place, and he bailed out on me; he refused to take my calls and co-operate any further. During this time he was picked up twice by the police and caught in possession of drugs. Time was running out for him and I was determined to get shot of him as fast as possible.

Once again a good friend of mine came to the rescue and sent me the price of the divorce. When Garth heard that the divorce wouldn’t cost him a penny he was suddenly available to me again. We met up and we decided that I would petition him for the divorce and he would be the responder. We declared our assets to one another—he kept the surfboard and watch while I kept the computer. We had nothing else of value to each other. I couldn’t relax until he signed off every last piece of paper. It had taken me two days to get him to meet me and the lawyer. He was drinking heavily and looked as bad as his days in Bang Kwang. He was on a road to madness and boasted to me about how he was managing to deal drugs in one of the most conservative and right-wing locations in America. I would have found it fascinating to watch the change in him but for the fact he had broken my heart and that of my daughter Talya.

By the time the divorce came through we were back in Thailand picking up the threads of our old life, but a little older and wiser now. On 27 July Larry rang me to say the papers had arrived and I finally received them 16 August; Garth’s birthday. I went out and got my hair cut short to celebrate the end of the story of Garth and me. I think most women respond like this to the end of an affair, they make some physical change as if to signify that they are starting anew. I also took my wedding ring back to the shop where I had bought it, to the girl who had engraved it with Garth’s name and had it removed and replaced with the word ‘truth’. I sent an email to a girlfriend about how I celebrated my ‘Divorce Day’.

… as the day wore on and the evening approached I felt the need to celebrate. Emboldened by this …I marched up the stairs at breakneck speed, very much wanting to take on the world as one does when one has just been set free from the duty of feeling any last shreds of loyalty to one’s ex. I found myself in a neat little Vietnamese restaurant that I love to eat at.

I cannot tell you how many times I have eaten at this place, wishing in agony of spirit that Garth was with me; wishing that we’d be together, that he’d overcome his drug addiction, that he’d learn to open up more.

But now as I sipped my beer the utter loneliness, despair, frustrations and broken dreams disappeared and in their place were feelings of total joy, contentment, peace that I never thought I could know without him.

I was so deliriously happy that I nearly choked on my lemongrass chicken but a mouthful of beer and rice solved that problem. In fact I was so happy I even ordered apple strudel which my budget doesn’t normally allow.

Then the final touch was to go to a movie—
The Break Up
, with Jennifer Anniston and Vince Vaughan, which though it wasn’t a great movie, did make my evening … the solitude, the freedom and the finality of it all was delicious. And I am still, nearly one week later, living off the buzz!

On the day I picked up my altered wedding ring my ex-husband was facing two felony drug charges. It was good to be living in the present and at peace about the past, and have only hope about the future. I had survived. I was still living my dream; poor Garth had traded his for drugs.

He is, at the time of writing, back in rehab, where I hope he finds the will and determination to finally leave his addictions behind.

Chapter Eleven

I wanted to take time out from my own story to write about some of the hugely important people I have met through my work in Bang Kwang prison. I am very proud to write that some of my best friends are criminals—drug dealers, addicts and sex workers. These are the people who have had to overcome great adversity, when everything was stacked against them leading successful, well-adjusted lives. They have so much to teach the rest of us and I feel privileged for their friendship and their allowing me to help them in whatever small way I can. Journalists have labelled me ‘Angel of Bang Kwang’ and I have had to accept that dubious title for the name of this book—dubious in that I believe that there is someone more deserving of this label than me.

I met
Aree
in Bang Kwang. He had spent the previous four years on death row and this had been reduced to life in prison by the time we met. He was the youngest of nine children and had suffered horribly at the hands of his alcoholic father who used him and his obedient mother as punching bags during his frequent rages. As soon as he could, he left home and went to work in Hong Kong in the shipyards where the wages are good but you can work up to 72 hours straight without sleep. Then he moved on to Taiwan and spent a year doing a variety of well-paid jobs, from building roads to buildings. He saved up quite a fortune before returning home to join a friend in his new metal furniture business. Unfortunately, his friend omitted to tell him that he was deeply in debt and, instead, allowed
Aree
to invest half his savings in the dwindling company. The two men desperately tried to keep things afloat and
Aree
refused to run out on his friend. He even used the last of his money to hire expensive, professional workmen to improve the quality of the furniture, but it was all in vain.

A little while later
Aree
had lost almost everything. His health failed him with the stress of his financial woes and struggling business. All those years of manual work and long, gruelling hours had been for nothing. There was nothing for it but to start all over again. He returned to Hong Kong and got a job on a construction site there. Here, he made friends with
Ah Chi
, a friendly Chinese man who actually lived in Thailand.

One night, over a couple of beers,
Ah Chi
asked
Aree
if he would be interested in making some quick and easy money—all he had to do was carry a couple of kilos of heroin from Thailand to Europe.
Aree
immediately refused, saying it was much too dangerous and he didn’t fancy risking the death sentence.
Ah Chi
replied that there was no death sentence in Thailand and that the maximum jail sentence was five years, so
Aree
would be out in two and a half.
If
he got caught.
Ah Chi
also fervently promised to look after
Aree
if he was arrested, cheerfully reminding him that Thailand was a ‘corrupt country’ so there really would be nothing to worry about. In return for his service and personal risk
Aree
would receive pocket money, US$8,000, return flight tickets, train tickets to travel around Europe and another $8,000 on his return to Thailand.

Aree
wasn’t easily persuaded and he told
Ah Chi
that he would have to think about it. A few weeks later
Aree
had almost forgotten about the offer but his luck took an unfortunate turn when he ended up undergoing surgery on his stomach after days of copious vomiting and fainting at work from the pain. He needed two operations, which left him physically weak —too weak for work. Consequently, he was in dire financial straits. As soon as he was able, he sought out
Ah Chi
to take him up on his offer. He felt he had no choice.

He ended up on death row in Bang Kwang prison, with 300 inmates squeezed into 16 cells. There was little space to move and
Aree
was struck by the paleness and listlessness of his fellow cell-mates. Three times a week, for one hour only, the inmates were allowed out of their cells for fresh air, to collect their food rations, and wash themselves and their clothes. The water was pumped from a nearby river and was usually dirty and full of a variety of insects. The insects also turned up in the food; no matter how hungry you are it still difficult to swallow the unrecognisable vegetables, which have been soaked in rotten fish soup, and the accompanying brown rice that wriggles on the plate thanks to the busy insects laying their eggs or defecating in it. He was driven to picking up and washing every single grain of rice to make sure that he wasn’t eating worms or larvae. Naturally, he suffered greatly with his ulcers and was prevented from receiving the proper medicine that he asked a translator to send in to him.

I asked him once what he missed the most about the outside world and he replied;

‘Everything. In the daytime you can talk with people and you are always surrounded by the other inmates, yet you can still feel very lonely. In the night time I miss seeing the sky full of stars and the moon. I miss seeing nature; life in here is so unnatural.’

The biggest thing I could do for
Aree
was to feed him. Every day I went to the Non bakery and they kindly gave me heavy bags of leftover food—so heavy with cakes, pastries and bread, that I strained my neck and arms carrying these bags to the prison. Then, I saw that the local Pizza Hut did an ‘All you can eat’ night every Tuesday. The manager and staff were horrified when I marched in and asked them what they were going to do with the food that wasn’t eaten. They wondered at a white, foreign woman being so poor and desperate that she had to beg for leftover food. It turned out that the food just gets thrown out at the end of the evening. When I explained that it was for inmates at the prison they gladly let me take away the uneaten pizzas—that was another heavy bag. You just can’t imagine how magnificent a cold pizza or stale pastry is to a starving, demoralised prisoner who spends most of his meal time removing insects from his dinner. It makes him feel human again to be eating, as it were, proper, civilised food.

One time I scored really well on the food front. My friend Mila and her husband worked with the Canadian embassy in Bangkok, and she also frequently visited prisoners in Bang Kwang. She invited me to a party to celebrate Canada Day, which was held in a fancy hotel in Bangkok. It was a great party with lots of people, party games and lots of gorgeous food, from a huge selection of roast meats to sweet cakes. I sat with embassy staff at a table and they were asking me about my work. I filled them in and made strong hints that they could be doing the same things in their positions. Anyway, there was a tonne of food left over so Mila and I asked the staff if we could take it. The manager refused, initially, saying that it was against hotel policy. I think the staff had their eye on it instead. Mila and I went to work on him and he, eventually, gave in, just to be rid of us.

Well, there was so much food that the staff had to get me a trolley so I could put all the bags into a taxi; I could barely fit into the passenger seat of the car. I paid the driver extra so he would help me carry the bags into the reception desk at Bang Kwang. The checking-in process is slow and it was a while before all the bags were cleared to be brought in, involving me running back and forth from the desk to the visitor’s section. But it was more than worth it to the guys inside.

Aree
tells me that his life has improved considerably since I came into his life and he is certainly one of the people who keeps me going when I’m feeling low. He was very close to Garth and me, so close that we ‘adopted’ him. There’s something very special about this guy and I rely on him a lot to help me with other inmates I can’t reach in Bang Kwang. He humbles me with his dignity and sense of pride, which remains untouched even when he is struggling around in his heavy chains. He has managed to maintain his sanity through his long years of imprisonment, on death row, in solitary confinement, and in an over-crowded cell, by cooking for a western inmate who has since been released. It has been a long, lonely struggle for him since he is one of a large number of prisoners who hears, and receives, absolutely nothing from his family.

He’s an intelligent, thoughtful, young man who has never complained once to me and has stoically remained drugs-free even when all around him are developing habits to cope with imprisonment.

There is no way on this good earth that he should be serving a life sentence and I’ve worked hard to draw attention to his plight. He feels much more positive knowing that he has people out here who support and care for him. He receives lots of letters now, mostly from people he has never met, and even receives gifts of books. It has given him a new lease of life. If only his own embassy could be that forth-coming. I can’t mention his nationality (he’s not Thai) since he’s still in Bang Kwang but, suffice to say, they have only visited him a couple of times and that was way back in the 1990s.

My work is made a lot easier by the amount of good folk who write to me and ask to be put in contact with someone who needs a friend. All I have to do is pair them up with a prisoner who will especially thrive on receiving letters or gifts of toiletries and books. It is a big responsibility however, since I have to be sure not to recommend someone who is out to deceive. Nevertheless, it’s hugely rewarding for everyone involved and I would urge anyone reading this book to contact their embassy in Thailand, or go on the internet to the excellent website www.foreignprisoners.com if they feel they could write a few letters to someone who hasn’t seen the night sky in, literally, years. Readers can also look at my webgroup which can be found at http://groups.yahoo.com/group/onelifeatatime, to read past newsletters and to see how changes in th eprison are taking place.

Just imagine being banged up for the rest of your life. Apart from the obvious things like loss of freedom, bad food and absolutely no personal space, try to imagine the horrific boredom of the day-to-day existence. If you can do that, then you can surely appreciate the difference made by receiving a letter.

I first met
Peter
when he was holed up in Building 2 in Bang Kwang with Garth. I was introduced to him in the visiting area and took to him immediately. He, in turn, introduced me to his wife,
Anne
, and also his parents. Back then the visiting centre was out in the open and you really had to shout to be heard by the prisoner you were visiting. The regular visitors would greet one another like old friends and would discreetly wink in comradeship and nod in the direction of ‘fair-weather visitors’—the earnest back-packers, colourful Nigerian visitors and saintly-looking missionaries.

Anne
, along with inmates and families alike, used to call the hippie back-packers ‘the banana visitors’, because they turned up to give bananas to inmates as if they were caged monkeys in a zoo. I remember one loud, obnoxious American guy lambaste the prisoner he was visiting, for the first time, calling him a ‘freaking idiot’ for ending up in Bang Kwang—how he thought that this was helpful or, even, news to the guy is beyond me.

Then, there are the other misguided young male visitors who obviously don’t know what to talk about, so they regale the inmate with tales of their Bangkok sexual exploits. It is like they are following the rules of some underground travel guide to Bangkok;

a) sleep with a Thai prostitute,

b) visit an inmate in Bang Kwang.

I listened in disbelief one day to a young guy loudly boast about how he refused to pay Thai women for sex; he always got freebies. Ugh! There was no sympathy or interest in whoever he was visiting. Not all of them, fortunately, have this attitude; others would come out visibly upset after their visit and would make a generous donation out of their limited travelling budget. Other people have continued to make a difference after their visit. They mightn’t be able to afford to send money but they campaign and draw attention to an inmate when they return home and write frequent letters to let their compatriot know that he hasn’t been forgotten.

But, as in most walks of life, the vulnerable have to be protected from the scams. I was asked one day to help an inmate who was in need of a life-saving operation. There was a campaign already in place and thousands of dollars had been collected for the prisoner. I met up with some of those involved and asked why they didn’t contact the guy’s embassy and the Department of Corrections to get the operation organised. Then I found out there was no illness, no life-saving operation required, and not only that but the embassy—which shall remain nameless—were in on the scam with the prisoner. They were going to take a cut out of the money raised. I discovered all this after a guy from the embassy arranged to meet me to discuss the case. When we met, in a public place, he grabbed my breasts—something which I’m sure he has done many times before with other unsuspecting girls.

After I went to the DOC to hurry along the process, I finally met with the ‘sick’ guy himself to tell him what I had organised and he completely freaked out at me. I knew then it was all a scam and walked away. I have a policy that I don’t get involved in things like this. It’s not my place or duty to expose fraudsters. I have to look after my personal safety on the outside. I did manage, nevertheless, to deter one generous, wealthy Australian woman from pouring thousands of dollars into this guy’s fund. She wrote to me to ask about the operation and, without bad-mouthing the guy, I advised her that there were more deserving projects that her money could make a huge difference to. She ended up sponsoring quite a few projects over the next few years and proved not only to be a great material supporter but an emotional and spiritual inspiration.