The Chilean religious Sister Nelly León Correa she won the Zayed prize for human brotherhood thanks to her 25-year commitment alongside female prisoners. “I shared the pandemic with them in prison: they are wounded people who need an opportunity”
«I was twenty-one years old when one day, while I was doing my internship as a religion teacher in an elementary school, I witnessed sexual abuse by a janitor against a seven-year-old girl who had left class to go to school. bath. It was that episode that made me understand that I wanted to dedicate my life to defending the dignity of the most vulnerable women.” Sister Nelly León Correa, a Chilean nun from the Congregation of the Good Shepherd, knows how to speak calmly and with a decision that gets straight to the point. She will be due to her years of experience – now 25 – in often extremely difficult situations, alongside inmates in the country’s prisons: first in Valparaíso, for six years, and then at the Women’s Penitentiary Center in Santiago, where she still works today.
Right from prison, in the small office reserved for her as pastoral assistant, Sister Nelly, who recently received the Zayed Prize for Human Fraternity established on the occasion of the historic meeting in Abu Dhabi between Pope Francis and the Grand Imam of al- Azhar, tells me his story via Zoom connection. Behind her is the blackboard where the workshops and training sessions for the inmates are pinned down.
Born 65 years ago – the last of eight siblings – into a peasant family in the village of Peralillo, in central Chile, Nelly grew up in a context of economic hardship but full of warmth and faith. Having lost her mother at 17, she managed to finish her studies and moved to the capital to become a religious teacher: to support herself, she worked as a housekeeper and then in a laundry. It is precisely in this period – we are in the midst of Pinochet’s dictatorship – that the young girl realizes the violations of which the poorest girls are often victims, and which go unpunished: no one reported that janitor, who was simply, and discreetly, removed from school.
“Until then I had never thought of becoming a nun,” she says. «I had a boyfriend and we were planning to get married and start a family. But in that period my certainties began to waver. Thanks to my spiritual director I met the Congregation of the Good Shepherd, which is dedicated to accompanying women in vulnerable situations, especially those deprived of freedom. So I began my training with a religious community that operated inside a prison and, since then, I have fallen in love with this mission.” In 1983, without the consent of her father, Nelly entered the Congregation and eleven years later she took her final vows. After several experiences alongside the most disadvantaged students, in 1999 she returned to working full-time with prisoners: since 2005 she has worked in Santiago, where she created, among other things, the foundation “Mujer, Levántate” (“Woman, stand up”), which accompanies prisoners on their path to rebirth and reintegration into society.
Who are the women you meet in prison?
«These are mostly very poor people, with stories of mistreatment and abuse behind them, even within the family: events that make them profoundly vulnerable, to the point of sometimes committing crimes. More than 55% of them ended up behind bars for drug microtrafficking, others for robbery. They are not associated with large gangs, they commit crime mainly due to poverty or as a result of drug addiction. There are many mothers, especially young ones: here we have two pavilions, which currently accommodate fifteen women each, reserved for pregnant prisoners or those with children. Children are born and live in prison until the age of two, after which the State is responsible for looking for the closest relatives to bring the children back into the family unit. However, it is not always possible, due to the complicated stories of these mothers, some of whom also come from the street.”
You maintain that a woman never stops being a mother, even if she is in prison: what does that mean?
«Here the constant worry is always the same: “How will my children be?”. For example, if we distribute personal care products, or give a mother a pair of sheets or a set of towels for her birthday, she will not use it, but will put it aside to give to her children when they come to find it. This is why, with our foundation, we make sure to create occasions, the Christmas party, or Children’s Day, in which mothers can spend time with their children. Not only. We work to ensure that, thanks to the presence of one of our operators, interviews can be organized in intimate contexts, where minors do not have to be subjected to invasive searches, which leave them traumatised.”
During the Covid-19 pandemic, when it was not possible to enter and exit the penitentiary, you decided to stay behind bars for 18 months so as not to abandon the inmates: what did you learn from that experience?
«That I too am a fragile woman like them, who has only had one chance of a different life. We all risked getting sick, but I didn’t feel like returning to my community knowing how much they needed someone to take care of them not only from a material point of view – which was also important – but also from a spiritual point of view: someone who would give their hope, who consoled them in moments of greatest pain, who continued to pray together with them… All this strengthened my passion for this mission even more.”
How was the “Mujer, Levántate” foundation born and what do you do?
«From the beginning of my involvement in prisons I realized that the majority of women who left prison always ended up returning there. And when I asked them “why?” they always answered me the same thing: “No one is waiting for us outside”… They were alone, without anyone to help them put their lives back together. So, together with a priest who supported me and ateam that we created little by little, we managed to carry out this project which today is based on three main programs: one inside the prison, one post-penitentiary and one linked to a temporary shelter for ex-prisoners who cannot return to prison their families due to too precarious or critical situations. The journey in prison, which is called “I build my future”, begins a couple of years before the end of the sentence: we have four professionals who follow around thirty inmates for series of workshops on personal and relational, psychological and spiritual. Women can reflect on their anger and how to control it, work on the gender violence they have had to suffer, and then acquire important skills, for example how to manage their money. It is a personal journey: we support them, we encourage them to discover their own abilities and resources, we offer them new tools but women are the protagonists of their own transformation.”
The impact of the programs is such that only 6% of those who benefit from them commit crimes again, while the national recidivism rate is 50%. How do you support women who have returned to freedom?
«For those who need it, we have this temporary residence where, for a period ranging from six months to a year, one of our operators helps the ex-prisoner to reconnect with social networks “outside”: from healthcare to educational opportunities to rebuilding ties with the family and in particular with children. And then we take action to look for work, sometimes procuring scholarships from other organizations to guarantee the necessary training. For the first two years of freedom, we accompany ex-prisoners in all aspects of their daily lives, until they are able to fly alone. And there are many positive stories of women who have managed to rebuild their lives. Like Paola, who recreated the bond with her four daughters, she has a job and collaborates with her foundation, bringing her testimony to the prisoners, to tell them that it is possible to get up despite the past. Or Natalia, who when we met was very aggressive, violent, and after a long journey she was reborn and today studies at university. I have learned that when you give a woman an opportunity, from the bottom of her heart, it can make a big difference in her life.”