man made tribulation

                                               MANMADE TRIBULATION

Weather report in television is what most people don’t toil with in prison in China. It is part of everyday life of most of us. not that we are in control of lives there, but because we are in charge of our clothes and so on. The decision to take your clothes outside or not depends on you if the officers see it fit to open the back yard door or not. Another reason why most people focused on weather report is that, no one likes going to the dining hall for meals. Eating food in the dining hall is headache. Officers keep hurrying you along. you are not only hurrying to meet the deadline or is it deadtime, you don’t have opportunity to reserve food for the night known as “after news food”. In all seasons, weather can be prisoners friend when adverse atleast in china. In prisons like Chinese, where it is programmed into your head from day one that you must accept education through labour, it is through labour that you gain point you will use to cut sentence. You must work to go home. adverse whether or not. Well the district I found myself in as foreigner, happens to be doing farming work last year, and the weather in northern China can be extremely excruciating in June to august. When the sun comes out, it will be shinning at the same high intensity for about thirty minutes or more without breeze times at 30⁰c. you will be given straw cap as a defense against that devilish ray. If you add extremely dry land and crude implement you are given to tackle those formidable adversaries, You will begin to understand why there are many silent psychos inside there. you will be given shovel which will serve as your mower, tractor, tiller and harvester. Rain refused to fall, so you have to use hose to water the ground for days before tilling. It will take about another three to four days before cultivating which will on its own take the same three to four days to be completed. All under the gamma ray. once planting is completed, the weeding work will start. This is refers to as eternal weeding “for it never stops”. I was calculating the amount of water being wasted there in the name of irrigation. If eventually rain falls there, it will not be enough to penetrate the hard ground. farming will be said to be done by artificial rain. In the sense that eighty - something percent of the water comes from hose pipe and not rain fall. The system there works like this: the officers in the district level will have to go out and source for companies and discuss with them and if everything works out well, the central authority will approve and tell the district how much they will be remitting to the central authority each month. The company will then move their goods to the prison and someone from there has to be coming to the prison every working day to suspervise their work. If they are satisfied with the work prisoners do, they will start shifting more work to the prison for they make excess profit from prison. Prisoners in turn likes the work somehow too. They benefit financially and psychologically too.with it,thinking will set in. over there in prison, central office pays every prisoner tewnty rremenbi every month, if your behavior is good. so if you need the money, it is for you to make sure that your behavior is good as assessed by district officers. Then if your district is luckey to land any good company outside, the district will be paying also. The said amount depends on the greediness of the officers controlling events there at the district level. Atimes, the district will conspire with the company management to deceive central authority and the district will be gaining more without the knowledge of the prison authorities. It happened in the foreign district between 2011 to 2013 before central office sent their spy among them inform of rotating officers to different districts and after their spy penetrated them and spent six to seven months reporting back to the authorities. They at the districts level, atimes, their ambition will get on the way of their money making and the other officer will became jealous and start feeding information back to the central authorities. Atimes, some senior officers will want to become white shirt officers before their time and will start kowtowing to the authorities. In case of district four incident, the leader was asked to be remitting twenty-five thousand remenbi every month he told them that he will be remitting thirty. He was later given white shirt. Other officers became angery and reported back how much they were actually making and ended up throwing spanner into their own works and chair making was stopped by there authorities.

If the destrict could not land any company the prison management will approve, The money central authority will be given them to run their district will reduce drastically. So, districts in desperate move for money, will start looking inward for sources of money. that is how farming, painting fences, grass cutting and sweeping of the prison vast compound always come about. In winter, clearing of snow in public places are available too. The officers like other district that are into farming, sells their harvest to the kitchen department. The kitchen department usually; control such transaction. unlike the one coming from outside They don’t have hundred percent control of onces there is excess harvest from the farmers, or products that general public refuses to buy. it is law in China that government establishments like prison, schools, e.t.c. must buy some percentage of that product so, that the farmers will still remain in business next year. So times, prisoners will be eating one kind of food prepared in different ways for a month. If kitchen rejects the district farm products, the inmates and interested officers will have to share it. Summers in prison is another thing in northern China in terms of sunshine. The heat wave is not a one off thing, it is daily occurrence for three months and number of people that go to hospital on weekly bases usually increased. A times, fifty percent of the in mates will register to go to hospital intentionally just to escape working under the sun. It came to a time that officers came out with the system of inmates submitting written notes why they want to see doctors and if the reasons don’t hold water, medicine will be brought for them by the inmate incharge of dispensing drugs to reduce the number of inmates dodging another day in heat wave.