Sister Carol Gilbert, OP

PONDERINGS FROM THE ETERNAL NOW

MAY 2004 - #10

Dearest Friends,

This isn't the letter I was expecting to send you this month but sometimes something so horrendous comes along it must take precedence. Such is the following story. In reading my May issue of "Harper's Magazine", I came upon a small piece of interviews conducted by Human Rights Watch researchers in Pakistan and Vivian White, a reporter for the BBC, with recently released prisoners of Camp X-Ray, the U.S. detention center at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.

I was not shocked at the use of tape, cuffs, gas, chains, cages, bright lights, noise, beatings, sleep deprivation and painful positions. What did horrify me were the "injections" and the "pills".

"They injected me. I was unconscious." A. Khan
"They gave us pills that made us feel numb or made us drunk." K.M.
The other method that the guards used to make us quiet was injections. Guards would enter the cell with sticks and masks, and two or three of them would hold a prisoner while one of them injected him in any part of his body. Immediately after the injection, the person would faint. Then he was put into isolation. Twice they injected me and took me to the isolation room, a dark room with cold air blowing." A.K.
"Other countries torture prisoners with electric shocks, but they tortured me with injections. After I received an injection, my eyes would remain fixed upwards, and my muscles would get stiff. I would stay like that for a day and sometimes longer, until I was given another injection, which would relax me, and then I could move my eyes and muscles again. Sometimes they would give me pills after the first injection. I saw other prisoners receive injections as well." S.M.A.

According to the article the U.S. is currently holding about 650 suspects at Guantanamo Bay. These interviews don't sound that different to me than the Nazi experiments. I reflect on the Chinese proverb: " To know what is going on takes sense: to know what to do about it takes wisdom." What do we do with this burden of knowing?

Spring has arrived in all its glory at Alderson. We are in awe as we watch the birds build their nests and smell the lilacs and honeysuckles. The mountains are alive with various shades of green as the trees burst forth. As I write this, I've just seen two Baltimore orioles in one of the huge pines outside the recreation building.

Our population of 1,028 women saw 200 of us sign up for garden plots – two to a plot. We have ordered the seeds and await our planting date. Deep gratitude must go to our team of lawyers who have worked tirelessly with no pay on an appeal these past months. It was submitted on April 30th.

Again, my deepest gratitude to each of you. No one from the S.O. A. (School of the Americas) is coming here and so I sit with the silence and the stillness of within.

I'll close with these words from Historian Howard Zinn, which express our Eternal Now: "To be hopeful in bad times is not just foolishly romantic. It is based on the fact that human history is a history not only of cruelty, but also of compassion, sacrifice, courage, kindness. And if we do act, in however small a way, we don't have to wait for some grand, utopian future.

The future is an infinite succession of presents, and to live now as we think human beings should live, in defiance of all that is bad around us, is itself a marvelous victory."

With deep love,
Carol

P.S. For those who ask about my work, I've been dubbed "The Bathroom Queen Cleaning Lady!"