I stole the Cameroonian’s sorry excuse for a Polish-English dictionary the day before my transfer. I mean, I could’ve pinched an apple or two, or a tube of toothpaste from the lesbian, but at that point, the dictionary seemed more like a life-saver than a bucket of nourishing apples. It was tattered beyond recognition, missing a bunch of alphabets, but it would go on to save my neck more often than once.

I got to mingling with the cell mates. It housed two camps at war with each other. In the first corner, a bespectacled hunchback and her aide- a toothless recovering drug addict who bore a striking resemblance to a ventriloquist’s dummy. In the other corner, a balding old vulture of a woman with chronic respiratory disorder.

She had this persistent-annoying-dry-hacking-whooping cough that just made you want to gorge your ears out. It was worse at night. We never could get any sleep because she was coughing up her lungs and farting at the same time.

Her aide, a twenty-something year old thug serving her third year in detention for murder.(I know this because when I asked her what she was in for, she drew an imaginary slit across her neck)

The last one, another toothless alcoholic with a limp.

These women were very ill and very sick in the head.

At first, the bald head and the thug seemed nice. The thug was kind enough to move top bunk and let me bunk beneath her. The bald head specifically warned me in sign language never to venture to the hunchback’s camp. If there was an “or else clause”, I’m really not sure, but she did instill the fear of God in me. I never even as much as glanced at them.

I was promptly offered a cigarette which for some reason, I couldn’t refuse. I don’t know- peer pressure maybe, but all I wanted to do was fit in. Using my dictionary, we had a meaningless conversation about what brought me to Poland, and then to detention, to how hot Africa really is, and to whether my skin was made of leather.

I proudly handed her my court papers so she could see the kind of jobs I was pulling and perhaps earn a little respect off her. Her ugly vultured face registered stupefaction, and so did the others after she’d read my felony out loud to them.

With my dictionary, she made it crystal clear they’d put me away for at least 8 years. “Yeah, whatever. I can do the time on my head” I replied , brushing her off with a cursory wave of my hand.

Next morning I was woken up by a malnourished, anorexic-looking guard. Her head was way too big for her scrawny little neck, making her look like one of the powerpuff girls. She hustled me out of bed to meet with the gynecologist.

God knows where she got the strength to let a scream out of her lifeless body: “JaneDoe! Ginekolog!!!”

I beseeched her in the name of whatever god she worshipped to let me throw decent clothes on but she was having none of it.

I normally slept in a filthy piece of rag that was a night shirt once upon a time and I was mortified to venture out looking like a harried mopstick, not with all the tanned, sweating muscular testosterone lurking outside.

I suddenly remembered all the times I’d sworn to myself “I wouldn’t be caught dead in this or that” -boy did I eat my words.

As usual, I turned on the water works and followed her tail between legs.

On the way out of the last gate, I stole a quick glance at a mirror in the hallway, and I looked far worse than I’d imagined. I was the perfect poster for a UNICEF-save-a-child-campaign.

Once outside, the cheering began. Walking to the clinic meant you had to walk all the way past a caged legion of screaming males and females alike, past a couple of male prisoners sweeping the grounds, past a couple of male prisoners off to or back from dinning, and worse, past a couple of shirtless, sweaty males playing basketball.

So I took a deep breath and basked in the morbid ridicule. It was wilder than a Nirvana concert. The entire one-and-a- half minute walk across that lawn seemed to last an eternity.

A few seconds before arriving at the clinic, right opposite the basket ball court where the males had stopped their game to begin barking and pounding at the steel nets, I saw something which sent my heart straight to my throat. I saw toddlers. No, not a hallucination, I actually saw little kids ranging from about 0 to 3 with their mothers, all caged up in a hen-like looking barn fenced off by steel wire ring nets. These were children born into the system, and to think that the poor innocent infants were held against their own will sent icy cold shivers running down my spine.

So there I was face to face with the allegedly best prison Gynecologist in a country of 32million people, both of us staring at each other speechless. She didn’t speak one word of English, nor did I of Polish. It was a lost cause. How could I possibly explain to this woman what I was suffering. She tried to speak Polish very slowly, hoping I’d perhaps understand her, but I wasn’t blessed with the gift of tongues.

She later gave up and gestured for me to undress so she could perform an ultrasound after which I was sent to the nurses for a series of blood tests.

Later that evening at dinner time, a nurse came in to administer medication to the inmates. I was called upon ,and using her two fingers, she gestured for me to insert a suppository into my ‘I-wasn’t-so-sure-where’ before bedtime.

Now, I’d used and only heard of vaginal suppositories so I simply inserted it into my cunt vagina before going to bed. This medication would continue for three days, but little did I know I was only worsening my condition.

Because of the language barrier, I’d been inserting a rectal suppository into my cunt vagina instead of my asshole anus. Call me stupid, but how on earth was I supposed to know it was an anal insert???!!! If she’d turned around and drawn an imaginary arrow into her asshole rectum, perhaps I’d have understood clearly what she meant. She simply stuck her index finger in the air and it could’ve meant a thousand things, so I simply took it as “stick this in your cunt. vagina”

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