STORIES: Whatever Lola Wants

LOLA, GUINEA. During the summer of 2011, I spent 11 weeks with Les Mêmes Droits pour Tous (MDT), a Guinean human rights and prisoner advocacy organization that provides free legal assistance to illegally detained men, women, and children. Near the end of my stay, we drove from the capital of Conakry to Nzérékoré, Guinea’s second largest city located in the southeast near the Liberian border to visit the local MDT offices and prisons. When we arrived in the small prefecture of Lola, the Justice of the Peace informed our team that there was an entire family being held in prison. The ten-year old boy has been accused of killing his stepfather, and as a result, the police had arrested the entire family, including the boy’s father, mother, three-year old brother, and one-year old sister. The mother and father were assumed complicit in the boy’s actions, and the government determined that it was best to lock up the entire family in order to protect them from the villagers who sought retaliation for the stepfather’s death. Our team stopped by a local market to purchase clothes for the children. One could not help but notice the sign behind the guards: “The prison is a factory that trains men. It is bad but necessary.”