(Read Request in Spanish)

Buenos Aires 20 May 2010

Dear brothers and sisters of Susila Dharma Inernational and SD Canada, SD USA and SD France:

It is my pleasure to greet you once more and thank you as usual for the valuable support you have given to the project. SD Canada will meet this weekend and so I’m taking this opportunity to wish you a harmonious, productive and stimulating meeting which will strengthen your vision, mission and goals as a committee. I would also like to thank Virginia Thomas for her availability to communicate directly with projects, the exchange of ideas and her effort to make more dynamic the executive questions surrounding our network relationships. This support is very important for those of us implementing specific projects.

I would like to share with you that since my participation in the All Americas gathering in Amanecer (July 2008), I have felt a strong impulse to re-forge links with my country of birth (Uruguay) and to get involved actively in its social and cultural life.

For some reason and resonance with my inner, many of the project goals in Argentina are becoming difficult to achieve. For example, the agreement with the Attorney General’s Office was not renewed in 2010. Despite this, there is the possibility that the AGO publish a book dedicated to describing the methodology of the work I have carried out with mothers and children in prison. Negotiations are a little complicated, but there are still possibilities that the book gets published.

For the continuity of the programme as a public policy, we started discussions with the National Institute against Discrimination (INADI), and meetings have been positive, but for now there is nothing new on this front.

On the other hand we were able to renew the agreement with the National University of San Martín (UNSAM) which consists of training and coordinating groups of volunteer students studying for a degree in psycho-pedagogy, in order to produce preventive projects in early childhood development as university outreach projects. This will be a slow process, given that the University is only just starting its process of opening up and creating relations with the community in which it is based. We believe that for the second term of 2010 or the first of 2011 we will be implementing the first volunteer programme with UNSAM students.

In brief, everything is quite slow for the Buenos Aires project right now. Meanwhile, opportunities have come up in Uruguay. I have renewed contact with one of the most successful NGOs in the country, El Abrojo, which works in the area of childhood and family, and with which I carried out a pilot ICDP project during 2002 and 2003 in Montevideo. Last year I proposed that we try to work together again, this time on a project concerning mothers and children in prison in Uruguay. They were very interested and we started to stake out the territory. According to the perception of Paula Baleato of el Abrojo, there is a lot of scope for proposing this work in prisons to the Uruguayan government, seeing as it is a priority subject for the current government. These questions culminated in a formal meeting with the Interior Ministry in Uruguay, the Ministry responsible for prisons.

The meeting happened on 12th May in Montevideo and the participants were: Gabriela Fulco (head of Ministry advisors), Marisa Lindner (director of Gender and Strategic Planning of the Ministry), Monica Zefferino (of el Abrojo), and myself.

The proposal consisted of offering the programme “Art and Awareness for mothers and children in prison” to be implemented through the Ministry in Uruguay. After giving them a presentation of the experience in Argentina, which greatly interested them, they invited me to return to Montevideo in a month to give a public presentation of the project with mothers and children in prison and in this way raise awareness among all the public servants who are involved in this field in Uruguay. It is worth pointing out that due to the “prison emergency” that the president has declared a model prison for women with their small children has just been inaugurated in Uruguay. This has the capacity to house 25 mothers with their children (who constitute almost the totality of the mothers in prison with their children in the country).

Considering these circumstances, I’d like to propose the following:

IMPLEMENTATION OF A PILOT PROJECT from July to December in the model prison of Paso Molino, Montevideo, Uruguay aimed at the 25 mothers with their children who are housed in this prison unit.

ACTIVITIES: 2 workshops every two weeks (4 per month) from July to December, which makes a total of 24 workshops.

BENEFICIARIES: 25 mothers and their children in the model prison in Montevideo, Uruguay.

TEAM: I will run the workshops with the help of a team from el Abrojo.

This proposal will allow me to develop the programme in the new prison and demonstrate to the government the positive nature of the methodology and be able to establish a daily relationship with them in order to outline a long-term wide-reaching project (we will propose a 3 to 5 year agreement) in which el Abrojo, the Women Deprived of their Liberty Group (made up of NGOs, representatives of Parliament and Uruguay’s Interior Ministry) and the Ministry of the Interior will participate.

The future plan would have a wide remit and be focused as a national crime prevention plan with a strong impact on vulnerable communities in disadvantaged communities (from which most of the prison population comes). The axes of the intervention would be:

• Preventive workshops in neighbourhoods with high poverty levels and precariousness
• Workshops for women and children prisoners in the model prison
• Workshops in the transit home (where women are placed before being released)
• Workshops with young people in conflict with the law

My proposal is for the Ministry to take responsibility for my contract for the programme. My task would be to train the teams which in the future will implement the programme with these four different population groups on a larger scale and in the medium to long term, and participate in the collective design of the work plan of these teams, with which we would put together a proposal for the implementation and development of the programme, for which we would try to access funding from different international cooperation organizations. This proposal has come up considering the suggestions and ideas of Paula Baleato (of el Abrojo), of the ministry staff with whom I have had discussions and even of Virginia Thomas.

I feel that there are good perspectives for everything to progress in a positive way and that the long-term agreement will be possible.

Thus I also feel that carrying out the pilot project will allow us to show the positivity of the methodology in practice and my presence in Montevideo will allow me to speed up negotiations with the state.

Here below is the detail of the budget necessary for the realization of the pilot project.

ACTIVITY: 24 workshops of “Art and Awareness” for the 25 mothers and their children in the model prison.

Transport: 10 return tickets Buenos Aires-Montevideo for $300 each x 10= $3000

Meals: 40 days at $100 per day = $4000

Transport: 24 journeys to the prison, Minas-Montevideo journeys= $1500

Materials and snacks: $85 x workshop x 24= $2040

6 months of honoraries: $780 x month x 6= $4680

Total: $15200 (US$4.000)

U$ 1 dólar= $3,80

Warm wishes,

Rasjid CESAR
Tierraviva project