The Prison Book Club (4 page)

I felt better about the new meeting space.The guards were now in the same building—about twenty-five metres down the hall. And the officials hosting us—the prison chaplains—had a glassed-in office overlooking the book club meeting area, so they and their panic buttons would always be within reach. But it was still a depressing environment. Newly consecrated as a chapel, it was little more than a spartan mid-century school classroom with cinder-block walls painted an institutional shade of sky blue. A wooden cross and altar stood at one end of the room and a few religious books from different faiths filled a bookshelf at the other. The book club had to meet at a time when the chapel was not needed for faith gatherings of Catholics, Anglicans, Wiccans, Jews, Muslims, Rastafarians, Salvation Army or other groups. Like some parts of the prison I'd passed through, the air there smelled of organic decay—sour and fungal—despite its daily cleaning, and the lighting was harsh.

As I walked in, the men were setting up a circle of metal folding chairs in the centre of the room. Soft furniture was discouraged because it could conceal contraband. As the inmates straggled in from lunch, they poured themselves coffee from a Bunn-type coffee maker and looked around for the store-packaged cookies that Carol bought for each meeting. Home-baked pastries were forbidden because they could contain files, saws and weapons. (A year later I learned that British chef Gordon Ramsay had set up a baking program
inside
the British prison HMP Brixton, and though the point was primarily to provide work experience and to produce baked goods for sale to
outside
cafés, some treats were destined for inmate consumption.)

The volunteer contingent had also changed since my last visit. Derek, a former CBC Radio classical music host, and a neighbour of Carol's on Amherst Island, had replaced Edward as Carol's co-facilitator. Derek had been born into the Mennonite faith. The Mennonite Central Committee's social justice causes include prison visits. He was a natty dresser, with smart leather loafers, tortoiseshell glasses and designer jackets. I could tell that his style would make a big impression on the men. And his sonorous radio voice would be ideal for reading passages of the books aloud, which, in time, he did as a way of introducing the next month's book.

That time, I was able to relax enough to absorb the book discussion.We were reading
Three Cups of Tea: One Man's Mission to Promote Peace … One School at a Time
by Greg Mortenson and David Oliver Relin, a book that Carol had chosen. Published four years earlier in 2007, it was a feel-good non-fiction account of how Mortenson, a destitute American mountain climber, built schools for girls in Pakistan and Afghanistan through his charity, Central Asia Institute. It and his 2009 sequel,
Stones into Schools: Promoting Peace with Books, Not Bombs, in Afghanistan and Pakistan
were both
New York Times
bestsellers, and by the time we sat down to discuss
Three Cups of Tea
in March of 2011, Mortenson had gained a kind of pop cult status as a humanitarian. The book had become required reading for U.S. troops deployed to Afghanistan. U.S. president Barack Obama even donated one hundred thousand dollars of his 2009 Nobel Peace Prize winnings to Mortenson's cause.

According to his book, Mortenson lost his way while descending K2, the second highest mountain in the world, on the border between Pakistan and China, and wound up in the village of Korphe in northern Pakistan, where the villagers nursed him back to health. In thanks, he promised to return to build a school for the girls in the village. He had seen that boys who were educated tended to migrate to the cities for higher-paying jobs, and he had an idea that educated girls would be more likely to stay in their villages and impart their learning to others. Given that back in the United States, Mortenson lived out of his car for a year in order to save money while trying to raise funds for the school, his focus on helping others really caught my attention, just as it had intrigued thousands of other readers.

I recognized a few inmates from the first meeting: Dread, a tall man with a corkscrew moustache and beard who had three tiny dreadlocks dangling from under a black wool tam; Ben, a slow-speaking but eager book enthusiast whose heavy-lidded eyes drooped at the outer corners, giving him a slightly hurt look; and Marley, who wore a long black crucifix around his neck and wove his hair into cornrows that sprayed out from a central part and were gathered on each side by a tiny clip. Another familiar face was Frank, a middle-aged Italian-born inmate with a deep dimple in his left cheek and glasses; he was a key contributor to the discussions. Frank had brought a new member to the book club: Graham. Blond, big-boned and about six feet four, Graham seemed immediately at ease, rocking back in his chair and gripping the armrests whenever he laughed, which he did often. Also new to the group was Grow-Op, a shy, stringy young man wearing sunglasses, who apparently was doing time for growing marijuana. Sunglasses were popular among the inmates, partly as a way of avoiding direct eye contact and confrontation. Sitting next to Grow-Op was a fellow with a scar on his upper lip, who wanted to talk about his prison time in Southeast Asia for drug trafficking. His name tag read RICK.

Carol opened the discussion by giving the floor to Derek, who asked what we all thought about the central figure in the book, Greg Mortenson.

Dread said how impressed he was that Mortenson had remained selfless and endured so many hardships in his determination to build schools for girls. Several of the other men praised Mortenson's perseverance, despite crippling setbacks. The first time he sent funds for building supplies to Pakistan, many of the supplies disappeared. Later, the villagers said they would take the funds to build a bridge instead.

But the book club members also took note of his flaws. “My impression is he was a big klutz,” said Frank.

“And he bumbles through life in a Forrest Gump–like way,” said the man from the Southeast Asian prison.

Derek agreed, pointing out that Mortenson, like Forrest Gump, managed to show up at key moments that would become historical milestones. “He has tea with the Taliban, meets generals in Pakistan and pays his respects to Mother Teresa after her death,” he said.

But Dread saw it differently. “What I liked is that usually people make promises and never follow through on them,” he said. Broken promises. Dread had put his finger on it. The villagers never expected to see Mortenson again after they nursed him back to health. The men in prison likely had seen plenty of broken promises in their lives, and broken a few themselves.

I then asked the men why they thought Mortenson focused on educating girls as opposed to boys.

“Because women have a big voice in any community,” said Frank. “Women are nurturers, and men are more likely to leave the village once they're educated.” Frank had a wife and children waiting for him.

Ben reminded us that Mortenson had another reason: a gesture in tribute to his sister, Christa. Mortenson had originally dedicated his attempt to climb K2 to his sister, following her death at age twenty-three from an epileptic seizure. But when he saw the eighty-two children of Korphe practicing their lessons on an open ledge with no shelter and no full-time teacher, he resolved that he could honour her memory in a more meaningful way.

Carol said she wanted to think about Mortenson as a hero. “He is so committed,” she said. “What does it take to be one of these heroes?” As on my first visit to the book group, Carol was keen to rally the men's moral selves to see whether the protagonist might be a role model for them. Frank was immediately onside, describing Mortenson as a humanitarian despite his klutziness, and suggesting that his name should be put forward for the Nobel Peace Prize. In fact Mortenson had been nominated for the prize in 2009.

But Graham had a different take than his buddy Frank on Mortenson. Speaking for the first time in the book club, he questioned why Mortenson took advantage of his wife's patience by travelling up to four months at a time. “Nice that she's patient, but he has neglected his family and his personal health, and his relationship with his board members has broken down.” Graham saw someone who had failed his family and was failing on the accountability front too. When Derek mentioned that Mortenson's daughter now travelled with him on his school-building trips, Graham responded tartly: “Is she only going because she wants more time with her father?”

I studied Graham's prominent brow. He had identified that something was wrong with the way Mortenson ran his life and his charity. His acuity caught my attention, as did his facility with words and his confidence to voice a contrary opinion on his first day at book group. Every comment in a book club is coloured with the reader's world view.We were getting Graham's world view and I was guessing that it contained a strongly held belief about family. I wondered if Graham's own father had been as unreliable as Mortenson. It would be months before I got an answer to that question.

“What do you think about his parents?” asked Dread. “They set the stage.” They had been Lutheran missionaries and teachers in Tanzania. While there, they built a school and a hospital on Mount Kilimanjaro. When Mortenson's father died in mid-life, Mortenson's fear of losing his sister too compelled him to step in to care for her.

Graham answered Dread's question by saying that Mortenson's parents, Dempsey and Jerene, were no more balanced than their son, even when they were setting up the hospital. His comments sent me back to the book in my lap and I scanned the chapter on his parents. I saw that Dempsey often travelled abroad for long stretches to fundraise and recruit hospital staff and Mortenson had to stand in as the dad. Perhaps Graham was talking about Dempsey semi-abandoning his family. I looked at him with more interest. But the passage also talked about Dempsey going against the wishes of the many expatriate members of the hospital board by offering medical scholarships to local African students instead of to expat offspring. Dempsey's heart was in the right place, but perhaps he was too much of a loose cannon for Graham.

Carol asked how many of the men had come from families that did some volunteering. One new member was the only one to put up his hand. “My family had a lot of involvement with library work,” he said. But in a strange segue he began talking about his grandfather, who was involved in crime and “got murdered.” We waited, but no one else had a tale of volunteering to offer. I felt a sharp pang of empathy for these men, whose childhoods were so different from my own.

“I'd like to make a pitch for his driving desire to help other people,” said Carol. “The most meaningful thing for me is being here with all of you. I would not have met Marley, for example. I know that fills me up.” She turned to look at Marley and he nodded back with a big ear-to-ear grin. “I encourage you when you're out to see when and where you can help. Be mentors to help kids who might get into trouble.” The conversation lulled briefly.

Then Frank said, “We're afraid to help others, like panhandlers, because they might be scammers.” We sat with that thought for another moment. And then I told the men the story of my father urging me to expect the best of people. And that seemed to inspire Frank. He referenced Malcolm Gladwell's argument in
The Tipping Point
, that if you fix broken windows in a derelict neighbourhood, the crime rate will drop. “Just one window can make a difference,” said Frank.

Graham had nothing to say on that subject, but he wanted to add one more thing about Mortenson. He said that Mortenson's story about being kidnapped by the Taliban didn't add up. Mortenson claimed that AK-47-wielding Wazir tribesmen held him for six days and then freed him and thrust donations into his hands after he talked about wanting to build schools for neglected Wazir children. Graham argued that Mortenson's story boiled down to being extorted by thugs to build schools in their villages. The part about the money—Graham just rolled his eyes. Later, I learned that Graham had some familiarity with the subject. A former Hells Angel, he was serving a seventeen-year prison sentence for drug trafficking and extortion.

After the meeting, Marley walked over to me, his crucifix swinging, and sat down beside me. “God is everything,” he said, his black eyes sparkling. “I believe in Christ.” I think he was imagining that I might share his views because we were meeting in the chapel. I nodded to show my respect. I told him I believed in goodness. Unlike Carol, I was not religious.

The men said goodbye and I gathered up my things, thinking that the book had worked well, even though it wasn't one that our selection committee had suggested.

As we walked out past the main guard station on The Strip, that day's “Strip Boss,” the correctional officer in charge of the guards on The Strip, said that he was reading
Three Cups of Tea
because he'd heard from book club members that it was good and he wondered if he could join the book group. He laughed in a way that made it hard to tell whether he was serious or not.

On the drive back to Toronto with Carol, she told me the story of how the book club was born. It was the summer of 2009 and she was weeding the arugula in her vegetable garden on Amherst Island. She was thinking about her recent trip to Trosly-Breuil, France, to visit the noted Canadian humanitarian Jean Vanier and his L'Arche community, where developmentally disabled people live with their caregivers. Vanier told Carol that whenever she travelled to a new city, she should visit people in hospitals for the mentally ill and those in prison because they were the most marginalized and lonely people in society. Those institutions, he said, were where the greatest suffering in society resided. She looked up from her weeding and sat back on her heels, looking across the water to the town of Millhaven, home to the maximum-security penitentiary through which every federal inmate in Ontario was processed and at which some remained to serve their sentences. Then she thought:
There are thirteen other penal institutions in the area. I should get my sorry you-know-what over there.