Reading Cathy Park’s first-person account of teaching life skills to teenage boys awaiting trail at Bosasa-Dyambu Youth Centre, outside Krugersdorp in Gauteng, is an uplifting experience.
Inside Outside explores the idea of the search for freedom through Park’s personal philosophy of life.
In the introduction to Inside Outside , Park acknowledges the reality of crime in South Africa and how it affects everyone — the criminals and the victims. Although she felt enraged and scared by the actions of perpetrators of crimes, she wanted to know what set of choices led them to be holding a gun. Her teaching contract brought her into contact with teenage boys outside the law.
Park, who spent five years as a high school English teacher, felt she had reached a point in her life where she wanted to make a difference in society. Fuelled with the fervour to leave her mark on the world, she took a contract at a secure care facility for awaiting-trial youth.
Park’s eyes are opened as she enters deeper into the world of crime and imprisonment. Bosasa-Dyambu Youth Centre is the first privately managed youth detention centre in the country. It was created so pre-trial juveniles could be held in a facility in which they would not come into contact with convicted criminals in prison. The boys at the centre are between 14- and 17-years-old and their average length of stay at the centre is six months.
The centre runs a variety of workshops to equip the 150 youngsters in its care with practical, emotional and spiritual skills that will hopefully enable them to make a legal living and make more responsible choices. Park was in charge of a two-week mandatory life skills programme, which was designed to help newly arrested youths understand their feelings. She recounts her noble undertaking of fighting for the trust and respect of these young offenders through a series of diary entries that span a 15-month journey.
Park taught on average a class of 35 boys and her class was constantly changing with a new flow of faces as new boys were arrested and others left to go to court. The youths she met all have their own unique story, but Park highlights common elements in their lives — misdirected pain, trauma, dire living conditions, abusive backgrounds and personal choices — which led these young men to be in conflict with the law.
For Park it is also a deeper awakening, as the subtitle of the book, “A journey of the spirit through the gates of a prison,” suggests. She must overcome feelings of intimidation from the boys who constantly try to push her boundaries.
At the outset, Park invites the reader to come with her on her journey for answers and search for the meaning of freedom. She even prefaces her writings with a lengthy quotation about the position of the wrong-doer in relation to others from Kahlil Gibran’s The Prophet, as well as her own poem. Her accounts are at times flowery, clouded in the personal metaphor of spiritual searching, but at the same time managing to convey the anger and frustration of the youths she interacts with. She unearths the basic humanity common to us all and discovers how fluidly the roles of teacher and learner shift.