Philippines: Fr Shay Cullen on children in jail

It was a dark, overcrowded prison cell packed with the sweating, heaving tattooed bodies of the most wicked-looking criminals you could imagine. I could not see Hakim, the young kid I had come to rescue from this harsh place of human misery and degradation if ever there was one. Then in the dark corner near the stinking hole that served as a toilet, I saw the large staring eyes of this shrunken figure. He was terrified. I looked through the bars, the other prisoners stirred and shouted at me for food, cigarettes, money and drinks.

I motioned to the guard, he removed the padlock and Joan slid back the bolt with a loud clang. "Hakim, come out!" the guard shouted. The boy looked up fearful. He stood on wobbly legs, a skinny skeletal body like a prisoner from Auschwitz, a Lazarus from the grave. He took a faltering step and almost fell over. He was weak, emaciated, half-starved and naked, he had nothing but cotton shorts. The spectre of TB was all over him like a shroud of death, like so many of the others we rescued. He was poverty itself. We guided him out the cell gate, down the crowded corridor to the warden's office and his quivering hand signed the release paper. He was free.

A precious human life was saved, a cast away, unwanted, alone with his dark skin, Afro hair and indigenous features, he was low caste. Now he was saved from certain death. "I came to bring freedom to the captives", Jesus said, and so we all should too and meet Him right there in the likes of the kid with the scabies and the hollowed-out eyes. "I tell you the truth, whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers of mine, you did for me."

The gate clanged shut, he slowly walked free that day in March, out into the blinding, scorching sun, clutching a plastic bag with a dirty T-shirt in it - his only possession. I thought once again of all the useless surplus stuff I had, too much and promised heaven I would finally give it away.

The first stop was for food. Hakim was slow to eat, too weak to chew the first bit of chicken he had eaten in years. The boy looked around him hardly believing he was out of the cells.

It had been ten months without a visitor, ten months with only two short trips to the court. One to be arranged for a crime he didn't know, and although he said he was 15 years old, he couldn't prove it and was marked an adult. The second time in court was to learn that there was no evidence or witness or a complaint to accuse him. But he was still sent back to the brutality of the prison and was forgotten.

He was at the bottom of the pile in the jail since he was a dark-faced indigenous tribal person, a Muslim from war-ravaged Mindanao. Even an enemy and migrant in a foreign land you might say. His village had been burnt, the people fled the fighting and Hakim was taken by relatives on a rusty old ship filled with war refugees and they got separated when the ship hit a reef and many drowned.

He got to Manila and was begging on the streets when he was picked up by the police and charged with theft. It was the usual frame-up so they could claim they had solved a crime and get a reward and a step closer to their arrest quota and promotion. This boy was the most forgotten and discriminated of all. No doors would ever have opened for him unless Mina, Joan and Shiela had undone the bolt and led him out to freedom.

As the days passed, he slowly emerged from the ten-month depression. But the affirmation, acceptance, and friendship of the other boys in the Preda New Dawn Home gave him trust and the small smile grew bigger. He responded to the medicine and the food and the good sleep in the cool shade of the mango tree. He healed. Today he is a college student.

Fr Shay is a Columban priest and director of the Preda Foundation in Olangapo in the Philippines. For more information see: www.preda.org/main/index.htm