El Abra Prison

If I ever play a future game of "I Never" with friends I will probably lose, because of this one simple fact and thing that I did. Only time will tell if I will regret it or not. But the trunp card that people can pull on me now is that I don´t think there are many norteamericanos who have been in a Bolivian prison.

Maximum security prison, actually. Its name is El Abra. But, like in Monopoly, I was just visiting. The point of me going with my colleague Fito (a Bolivian engineer) is because we had to deliver new specifications on the rocket stoves to some of the prisoners there, who run a business there manufacturing the exterior parts of the stove. In order to reduce production costs, the outer dimensions of the stove have been made smaller to be able to cut more stoves out of the same pieces of sheet metal. Our task was to cut out and assemble a model stove with the prisoners to make sure everything fit together. In the middle of a rather heavily armed circle of Bolivian police, who wear olive green and look a lot more like an infantry regiment than your average unit of U.S. beat cops.

Actually, the prison workshop and business is a wonderful thing to do, especially in Bolivia where rehabilitation for lawbreakers isn´t exactly a federal priority. I don´t know if the average reader is acquainted with Johnny Cash´s song "Folsom Prison Blues," but I was kind of humming it internally during the whole experience. I actually really wanted to go here, because I haven´t been inside any prison before and I wanted to see what it was like with my own eyes. There are prison experiences, of course, which make all the hardship I´ve experienced so far seem like a ride on the merry-go-round. To give prisoners the dignity of work and earning their own money, not to mention the financial support this provides, is a very good thing that Cedesol and Sobre la Roca does.

And now, on to the activities of the day.

To get to the prison, Fito and I had to take the economy mode of transportation, called a Trufi or a route taxi. A Trufi is a 15-passenger van which drives a specified route through the city just like a bus. A ride costs around Bs. 2, compared to 7-10 Bolivianos on average for just your regular taxi. For me, 7-10 Bolivianos is still less than $1.50, a fare that would make any Manhattanite actually catch fire with jealousy, but for a lot of working Bolivians, the fare´s still a steep price to pay. Just a small thing that illustrates the wealth gap between us and our South-American cousins, to give you a bit of perspective.

At UD, a rule states that you can only put 12 people in a 15-passenger van for safety reasons. I´ve been in one that had 17 people in it before with one person sitting on the console between the driver and front passenger and another on the floor by the sliding door, but I´m not saying when or where in order to protect the guilty. I was not a decision-maker on that particular trip, so no one needs to come knocking on my door demanding an explanation. But that particular trip pales in comparison to the return trip from El Abra, when I counted 22 in the van at one point. That sets one steep record.

Anyway, the Trufi took us to El Abra, which sits in a suburb on the south outskirts of Cochabamba. Although when I say "suburb," I mean "shabby little town with dirt roads and open sewers in the streets." In an ironic reversal of American cities, the affluent of Cochabamba live downtown or close to it and the less fortunate classes live on the outskirts of the city. As a minimally related side note, some American urban planners and smart growth advocates would do well to consider this when they draw up plans for revitalizing inner cities. The point of all those plans is to create cities and communities for people and turning suburbs into the new slums in 20 or 30 years time is not what the term "sustainable development" annotates. But I digress.

We pulled up to El Abra, squeezed our way through the people standing by the taxi door like corks from a bottle, and made our way through the dusty road to visitor processing. There Fito explained to the guard on duty what our business was, which strangely enough resulted in a little small talk, and then we were searched. We then handed over our photo IDs. For Fito, this was his national identification card, for me, my UD student ID. Funny, I guess that little white card does sort of define me now. The guard wrote down Fito´s card number and for a moment I thought he was doing to write down the 8-digit code on my ID, despite the fact that it´s currently nearly 2,000 miles away from any place where it would have any meaning whatsoever.

We got our forearms stamped and were conducted inside the inner fence, and met the foreman of the prison workshop. He took us to the place where they cut and bend the sheet metal for the sides and bottom of the stove, using some very non-automated tools, like tin snips and folding presses which, incidentally, came from the Netherlands somewhere around Arnhem. Seeing all that made me happy because these tools are the ones you use to do an old-school kind of machining that isn´t dependent on complex technology and therefore doesn´t fail when a stepper motor chokes, like with some plasma cutters I know. For the whole morning, Fito and the foreman marked out the stove sides on sheet metal, cut them out with tin snips (think a second-grade skill, only cooler because the scissors are bigger and you´re cutting galvanized steel instead of 8x11) and folded the edges to stiffen them in presses.

They spent the whole morning cutting parts, leaving me largely out of it. Unfortunately, I didn´t feel assertive enough with my Spanish to cut in and I´ve never really cut sheet metal into parts before so I was afraid if I demanded to help out I´d probably screw up somewhere. In second grade I was very good at math and spelling but not the final word in precision when it comes to cutting straight lines.

In fact, I got very bored because the work took longer than expected, partly because after cutting out every single part according to the exact design specifications the foreman suddenly said that there was a problem: the folded edges on the stove sides were too narrow for screws to penetrate and had to be roughly doubled in size. I´m no machinist, but I seem to remember from my Autocad days that you can safely design a hole to be at least its own diameter away from an exterior edge and be perfectly fine when it comes to structural integrity, at least for light-load bearing applications like this. That makes a 3mm hole in a 10mm fold perfectly legit. But I wasn´t exactly making the call on this either.

So we cut new parts with new dimensions and that took the rest of the morning and then the afternoon, until 2:00 on a Saturday which is excessive by any means. We also ate lunch at the prison, which was a bad move. It led to a headache, fever, and chills in the afternoon, diagnosis by Señora Elizabeth, Bolivian host mother and default family practice physician, in the evening, and bed rest through all of Saturday night and Sunday morning. I think the screening of Spanish-dubbed episodes of Dragonball Z in the prison cantina may also have had a part in it. My compañeros asked me if we had this in the states, and I said yes. I added that it was weird because it was a Japanese TV show dubbed in Spanish, so the words didn´t fit how the mouths were moving. Then I realized it was anime and the words never fit how the mouths are moving. Then my compañeros asked me if I watched the show myself in the States. I told them no.

After lunch and a bit more work finishing the parts, we reversed the entering process and I got my trusty student ID back. Here in Bolivia it doesn´t mean much but back at UD it has served as house keys, RecPlex membership and towel collateral, and meal ticket as well as a host of other useful purposes. In a little less than two months it will be gladly back in action again.

Outside the prison we waited for the record-breaking Trufi and rode our ridiculously cheap but crowded way home. And that´s the story of how for six hours on one Saturday in June I was in a Bolivian prison.

Maximum-security prison, actually.