It was like rewriting history. It gave me the chance to reflect

He was detained months before his 18th birthday, first he was in jail where one day “I was as low as the center of the earth”, as he says in his book. Where he had to see his mother in distress and felt her face drop with shame when she visited him for the first time. From jail he went to the Insertion Center. Three years were waiting for him there without him knowing. After a few months, the option of studying while inside appeared and he opted for Social Work. He told his mom about the possibility and she supported him. He decided to study. Eduardo graduated from Social Work and works at ConTextos. He is a Youth Trainer.

He was detained for 2 years and seven months. He was released early...

“The only thing I didn’t like were the things I made my mother go through. Otherwise, I feel like I won: I have a career, I got to know a lot of people, I gained experience, I have a job”.

Perhaps it helped that he studied a university degree within the center. Perhaps it also helped that the judges who gave him his freedom read his book. They know his story.

Eduardo Navarrete is 25 years old. He is from Nueva Concepción, Chalatenango, located in the north of El Salvador. He is an author.

He wrote his book “Stubborn Disobedience” when he was 19 years old and was at the Center for Social Insertion in Ilobasco. He doesn’t read it very often but he remembers writing it in one night, without thinking. It was just a book but a lot of things were going on in his head.

“It was like going back, from the beginning, when I started to derail myself, like at 13 years old. It helped me remember the whole process, how I got along with my mom and how suddenly everything changed.

It was like rewriting history. It gave me the chance to reflect: see how I was becoming, how I got off track and where I was at that moment”.

Vicky Martínez had already started college when she finished at the Insertion Center, “I had already reconsidered my actions,” she says. She tells her story in her book “Our Future is in Our Hands’ , which helped her very much.

“It works - she says - because there are things that perhaps I would never have said to my mother but, through writing, I can. They say that ‘the paper holds everything’ and when you write, you let off steam.”

While she was inside, the hardest thing for Vicky was being away from her family.

And for María Ticas, her mother, the nights without her were agony. She visited her every Thursday and Sunday. She left the house 15 minutes before 5 a.m. and returned at 6 p.m. because from where they live to the Insertion Center it is a three hour journey.

They had breakfast and lunch together and they participated in a family writing process.

“Since I was little I have liked literature a lot and I had always wanted to write a book, but I never imagined that when I got “there” I would have the opportunity.”

“There” is the Women’s Social Insertion Center of Ilopango where Vicky Martínez arrived in 2016. This is where she wrote her book for the project “I am an author” with ConTextos in 2018.

Vicky, Author