The power of second chances

Across Southern Africa, prison inmates are often treated as the lowest of the low. On a VSO project designed to support them, Lucy Taylor meets three people who show that, given the right support, anyone can put their past behind them and build a bright future that benefits all around them.

Once a month, Catherine Mungate would board a packed bus for an 800km journey from her home in Epworth, a town just outside Harare, Zimbabwe’s capital. The destination was Mozambique, where she would pick up a package of dagga [marijuana] and return home.

As she bustles about her impeccably neat kitchen in a sunshine-yellow Hawaii t-shirt, wiping the nose of her youngest granddaughter before they prepare tea together, Catherine doesn’t look like a drug-runner. In fact, it was her mother-in-law, a dealer herself, who recruited her back in 2008.

“The economy was very bad in Zimbabwe at that time,” Catherine remembers. “My husband was out of work and we had young children. [My mother] said dagga was an easy way to solve our money problems.

 “I never expected I would go to prison. When I was sentenced to 36 months, my main worry was for my children and elderly parents, as I was the only breadwinner.”

What followed was deeply traumatising for Catherine. Her first days in prison were bewildering, with fellow inmates taking advantage of the new arrival and trying to scare her with stories of contaminated food and officers pouring lice over prison blankets. But worse was to come.

“My parents took it all very badly. My mother had a stroke from the stress, and passed away while I was serving my sentence in 2015. I didn’t attend the funeral: my relatives did not want me to find out that while I was in prison, my sister had been selling my clothes and possessions for money, my husband had left me and my children now were home alone. The youngest was just one year old.”

Leaving prison after nearly two years was as much of a shock as being sentenced. On 26 May 2016, an amnesty released 2,000 inmates, including all female prisoners.

“The first I knew I was leaving was that day. I was very happy but unprepared. I walked out with nothing except the clothes I was wearing,” says Catherine.

With no money, phone or family waiting for her, Catherine had to hitch a ride with some other released prisoners in the direction of Epworth, and walk the rest of the way home, where she finally learned the extent of what had happened: that her children had been largely alone, fending for themselves, this whole time.

“My children all hugged me saying, ‘Mummy, mummy’. But a little later my young son admitted that he had forgotten me, that he was just copying the others saying ‘mummy’. That was very difficult for me.”

Yet more difficult times lay ahead. When Catherine wondered how she was going to keep her head above water, she often felt hopeless.

In Zimbabwe the reoffending rate is very high, a sign of under-developed rehabilitation services and the dire state of the economy.

‘In the most recent amnesty we had this March maybe 50-60 prisoners had reoffended within a week. The system is not successfully rehabilitating prisoners,” says Doreen Kamwendo, 33, a VSO volunteer social worker working with released prisoners.

“There is a lack of community preparedness to accept them back, a lot of stigma. For a struggling community, while these people are in prison it’s ‘one burden off our shoulder’. When they return, it’s ‘one more mouth to feed’.”

Doreen is working with VSO’s partner the Zimbabwe Network of People Living Positively (ZNP+) to improve the level of psychosocial support for former prisoners, working through ‘empowerment circles’ where prisoners share their problems, and receive training and support to start small businesses.

Thankfully, that’s just what happened to Catherine. A few months after she finished her drug-dealing sentence, she was invited to join a VSO-supported ex-prisoner association.

“A group of 35 of us meets quarterly,” she says. “They shared with us strategies on saving and business training.”

Through the project, Catherine was also supported with 100 chicks and feed to start her own broiler chicken enterprise. Business is going well – she sells six batches a year making a profit of $150 each time, after bills and school fees for her children.

“I feel I am fully rehabilitated now,” she says. “It feels good to have this business, and to share what I have learned with others.”

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A clutch of hand-painted signs is nailed to a tree on a Harare street corner at jaunty angles: Thatcher 0267823456823, Plumber 08263891273, Tree cutting 08472389724. Zimbabwe is looking for work: Less than 10% of people here are in formal employment. The rest are engaged in informal odd jobs, farming, buying and selling and so on.

“Our economy is not performing well in general,” says Superintendent Jabulani Chuma the officer-in-charge at Harare Centre Prison, “That’s why we tell our inmates: ‘Upon release, there is no point looking for a job, you have to become employers yourselves. You might have to work on the road to start with, but you can start from anywhere. We are looking to produce entrepreneurs here.”

In the vocational training workshop here, inmates learn trades like welding, carpentry and tailoring, while providing useful services for the prison (producing uniforms, fixing vehicles) and private clients (furniture, school desks).

Baby-faced inmate Robert*, 29, is putting the finishing touches to a wardrobe, which he has made himself using machinery provided by VSO. It will be his last project here; he is three days from release. “I got my Level Three in carpentry while being here,” he says, “I’m hopeful to use this upon release to support my family and have a better life.”

VSO-supported training like this, in prisons across Zimbabwe, does seem to be supporting rehabilitation and giving former inmates a chance to give back to the communities they once wronged.

After the local asbestos mine closed near Mashawa around 2011, Patmos Masocha, 41, found his work servicing tyres had nearly completely dried up. He turned to crime to make ends meet, selling stolen electrical copper cables, and served a three-and-a-half year sentence in Mutimurefu Prison in Masvingo. There, he was able to continue his education through VSO-supported auto mechanics training.

He and another inmate student, Witness Tigere, began talking about setting up a garage together. Their dream was to build a successful business together – and if they were successful – provide training and opportunities to other local people out-of-work and struggling. VSO’s project provided some support in the form of some tools and welding machine to get them started, but wasn’t easy at first.

“The police would harass us. They would come unannounced to search the garage, in front of customers. It was very frustrating,” says Patmos.

Their perseverance paid off though: business is booming, with clients including the police and the village chief. They’ve trained three apprentices so far – all of them former prisoners.

“It still happens that people come here and want us to get involved in some illegal trading or whatever, but we say no. I am proud of what we are doing here. I’m never going back to prison.”