The atmosphere is festive. In an overcrowded courtyard, women cordon off specific areas for their domestic chores and personal space. Tiny mirrors are fixed to trees near plump plastic bags burgeoning with soap and combs, and makeup and extra shirts. El Salvador’s afternoon sun bakes the washed plates and bowls that lean against tree roots, and air-dried clothes hang like a valance across a stretch of twisted twine.
A few women sit in the shade in front of sewing machines, stitching quilts or purses or tablecloths that will be bartered for food or sold for income; others sway through the humid air in cotton hammocks.
There’s even a matrimonial shed on site, tucked behind a doorway of corrugated aluminum, for a conspicuous tryst. A boisterous Pentecostal worship service plays out in the shade, the electronically broadcast altar call drowning out a more sedate Anglican Eucharist at the opposite end of the enclosure.
There's a festive spirit, especially on Sundays and Thursdays -- family visiting days -- except that the women are prisoners.
“It is not anything you can conceive of in the United States,” said Elizabeth Evans, an Episcopalian originally from South Carolina, who started visiting the prison in December 2003. “The conditions are so much different.”
Evans taught school in Guatemala for a year and in Honduras for two years before arriving in El Salvador 18 months ago at the invitation of Martín Barahona, bishop of the Diocese of El Salvador and primate of the Anglican Province of Central America. She serves as missioner in residence for the fledgling Anglican mission of San Lucas in San Miguel, which is 140 kilometers east of San Salvador, and has initiated several street outreach programs.
Remove tattoos, return to society
During her first year, Evans taught English in one of the city’s poorest neighborhoods, where she began sewing buttons on the well-worn shirts of students and teachers alike. She works with the Aldea San Antonio orphanage run by the Franciscan sisters and also began a tattoo removal project.
When Evans first entered the San Miguel Penal Center, she couldn’t miss the obvious privations of prison life. For infractions that range from public drunkenness to murder, 72 women sleep in one long room, served by a single toilet and bathing area. The women are doubled-bunked, with a few sleeping on the floor beneath the lower berth. They are padlocked in between 6 p.m. and 6 a.m. and padlocked out during the day. According to Evans, the prison meals are so cold and wretched, many inmates cook the food that their families provide on kerosene stoves and preserve rainwater in spare soft drink bottles, mostly for drinking and cooking meals.
As if to remind the incarcerated women that things could be worse, the men’s facility, just over the towering brick walls, teems with 500 inmates who sleep on mats at night and are crammed into dark and dank quarters unfit for a fraction of that number during the days.
But Evans, who was ordained to the diaconate in June 2004 and will be ordained to the priesthood in December, witnessed something else when she first went to visit a single prisoner last year. She saw a glimmer of hope and an indefatigable sense of community among the women -- and those who minded them.
With a Lutheran pastor, Evans began to hold weekly religious services, which the warden attends. Evans brings scarce supplies to the women and offers their families sleeping space in her house when they visit from a distance.
The prison ministry also lets Evans extend another important ministry in San Miguel: the tattoo removal project. A year ago, the government of El Salvador passed a stringent anti-gang law stipulating that anyone marked with a gang tattoo would be denied the all-important national identification card. Almost immediately, Evans began working with dermatologist Dr. Edward Mendoza to remove the offending signs from people’s bodies.
“If a person wants to reincorporate himself into society and he’s covered with tattoos, it’s a problem,” Mendoza explained. “It inspires fear and limits opportunity when people see the tattoos.”
“Tattoo are not adornments here,” Evans added. “The only people who have tattoos are gang members.” Evans now brings the doctor into the prison when an inmate is interested in removing the gang insignias.
“We are going to start bringing the children [from the orphanage] to the prison for visits,” said Evans. The women appreciate more contact with children, and the images of jail can help keep the kids on the straight and narrow, she explained. “You can’t find two more disenfranchised groups than orphans and prisoners.”
In a country named for the savior and marked by the stigmata of suffering, the Anglican Church is trying to make an indelible mark on the poor and marginalized.
The Tattoo Removal Project, and much of the Anglican ministry in San Miguel, is supported through the Diocese of El Salvador by Fundación Cristosal, a Vermont-based Episcopal resource and support agency for El Salvador. For more information about Fundación Cristosal and the work of Elizabeth Evans in El Salvador, see http://cristosal.org/,
