Another Perspective on Get on The Bus.

If you've read the post below on Sunday's Get on The Bus trip to CMC you may enjoy another viewpoint. Posted below are some thoughts from one of our Mother's Day volunteers. (Thanks Heather H. for letting me post your wonderful testimony.)

When I signed up as a volunteer for the Get on the Bus trip a few months back I had NO idea what I was really signing up for, and certainly NEVER thought I’d be standing up here today. I thought I would just do something NICE & DIFFERENT to honor my mother. Do something that would make her proud. I thought it would be a great way to kick-start mother’s day weekend. And it was. But it was so much more than I could have imagined.

I knew I would be escorting a child to visit their mother for a few hours in prison. I thought I’d meet them at the bus and we’d go, and then we’d come back. What I didn’t know was the PROCESS, the build-up to that day, all the details that go into making the visit possible. When I was handed the paperwork for the child I would be escorting, I was shocked to read that Andrea (her family call her Miesha) hadn’t seen her mother in 3 years. She’s only 16 years old. 3 years in a child’s life, especially a TEENAGER’S life, is a long time.

Like me, Miesha had lost her father a few years ago. There had been no one else to take care of him, so Miesha missed her first year of high school to nurse him and care for him, ALONE. She was 14 years old. After meeting Miesha, her foster mom, her siblings and cousins who ALL live in a small, tight house in South/East LA, I would have done ANYTHING, whatever it took, to make sure she and her brother, Andre, got on the bus to see their mother. ... I became fiercely protective and determined for these children to make sure their visit with their mother would actually happen. Unfortunately it didn’t. Their foster-mother called me while I was en-route to pick-them up at 5am that Friday to tell me they weren’t going. I never found out the reason, but I spoke to Miesha yesterday and she asked me if I’d take her sometime over the summer to see her mother. I hope I can.

However, I did get on the bus. I thought maybe I could visit with Miesha’s mother anyway, but was told that wasn’t possible. Sadly, I heard them call the prison to tell the mother that her children were not on the bus and there would be no visit that day. Happily, this was not the case for the 14 other children (ages 3 to 17) that arrived sleepily that morning. With gift-bags of goodies, toys, t-shirts, Mother’s Day cards and breakfast on the bus, we headed out on the freeway to Chowchilla to the Valley State Prison for Women 4 hours North. The kids ate and slept, played games, listened to their music, and some stared out the windows at the sunrise. They were excited, anxious, impatient and happy. But not one of them was scared. That was just me! The reality that we were headed for one of the largest women’s prison in the world, a pentagon-shaped prison housing 3700 inmates, began to dawn on me.

We arrived and my first impression was of a finely landscaped & manicured concentration camp. Despite the roses lining the entrance, this most definitely felt like a prison - barbed wire, guard tower, high-voltage fences, holding pens and ginormous “War of the Worlds” style search-lights. But the parade of children through the security checkpoints was an awesome distraction. This was a very happy day for them. Even the prison-guards look forward to their arrival. I was amazed to watch them engage the kids – joke with them, let them hold their batons, play with their keys, reassure them it wouldn’t be long before they saw their moms. I had been told that the kids would only get a couple of hours to visit their mothers. We were there a little more than 3 HOURS – a blissful long family reunion for mother and child.

There are happy images of this long, glorious day that I will always remember: a young inmate doing cartwheels on the grass with her daughter; a pregnant inmate pushing her wheel-chaired grandmother up to the vending machines; the inmates constantly touching and holding their children; the inmate who needed help using the microwave to pop her son’s popcorn; the 2 little boys who’d just met that day, with their arms around each other, consoling the other after they’d said goodbye to their mothers; the smiles of the kids on our bus when they received their teddy bears and letters from their moms on the way home.

In that huge visiting hall of the prison, in the hot San Joaquin Valley, I stood to the side and witnessed Love, with a capital “L” – what I believe is the most powerful force in the world. I was seeing – in a prison - what Paul described to the Corinthians – that love “bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, and endures all things.” I was seeing these mothers, these convicted criminals, through the resilient eyes of their children, who didn’t care what their mothers had done to be taken away from them. And for a few hours, I was seeing and feeling God’s mercy and forgiveness.

Ironically, this day was the Feast of St. Pancras – St. Pancras is the patron Saint of Children. How appropriate that it turned out to be a day to honor the children as well.