Innocent

I told the beginning of Innocent’s story a while back during my first months in Malawi. He is one of many dependants of a woman who has lost 6 of her 8 adult children. With their physical departure each child left her with a few more orphans to add to her household. Innocent is 19, he’s a bright sweet kid who did well in secondary school but could not continue his education because no one was able to pay school fees. He wanted to attend a one-year computer-training course and so with some of the money I received, I paid the fees. His final exams were scheduled for May 2006. In January I went with him to the school to give them a check for the exam fees to ensure that they received the payment on time. In April he was told that he would not be able to sit the exams in May because I was supposed to pay with a bank note and since the school had to obtain the bank note themselves, the fees were not processed in time . . . grrrrr. Of course I went to the school, argued with the school administrator and director but they held firm, it wasn’t their fault that someone from the school failed to tell me this the day I handed them the check, it was Innocent’s fault because he was supposed to know and tell me. Right. Poor Innocent cried in the school office. They then told him he was supposed to take the exams in June from the 26th to the 29th.

Sunday morning, June 25th Innocent’s family called me saying that he had been arrested, had been beaten, and was being held in the main police station. Due to other unforeseen events I didn’t arrive at their house until 3:45pm at which time they told me the station would close at 4. I rushed to the station with a relative and luckily found it open. The police led us to Innocent. They were keeping him in an outside partially covered courtyard, along with two other prisoners, a man and a woman. All three of them looked haggard, cold, with bare feet, and they huddled together on a cement step (winter has arrived in Lilongwe bringing cool night temperatures of about 50 degrees F). Innocent told me that he was accused of stealing the laptop of a foreign student. (His guardian is the housemother at the dormitory of the nursing college and so she lives with her family in a small home built into the dorm.) The student reported a missing laptop and the campus security officer said someone told him that they saw Innocent leaving the building with a bag. Innocent said he did have a bag but that it just contained his books and nothing more. He said at the time of the robbery he was playing darts with friends. He told me that the police had been beating him with a gun. The remainder of my evening was spent trying to find a way to get him out.

First, we went to the arresting officer’s home, who I had been told, had the authority to release Innocent. My biased impression of him was that of a crooked little man with a Napoleon complex; he wanted me to pay him personally the price of the laptop 1,200 British pounds to release Innocent (right). I went to talk to the student, who was quite disturbed by the turn of events but when she asked the college dean what would happen if she dropped the charges, the dean replied that the school would no longer help her with the investigation, nor give her any money towards the stolen laptop. (Supposedly the school was at least partially at fault since they knew the locks on the room needed to be replaced but had not replaced them.) In the end, the student, along with the security officer, and Innocent’s guardian went to the dean’s house. They managed to agree to release him for his exams but he was supposed to return for “questioning” on Thursday. Monday morning, a relative called me to let me know they had released Innocent at 6am. He left the police station and went directly to sit for his exams. I talked to him to him Monday night he sounded sad and tired, and said, “I don’t want to go back.”

Thursday night I had dinner with a group of visiting Americans, they had invited me and a Malawian priest to join them. Our hosts introduced the priest to me as THE spokesperson of the Malawian religious community to the government. Over the course of the evening his passion shone through as he told story after story of his years of advocacy work. Just as he was about to bid everyone goodnight, I told him about Innocent and asked if he knew someone who might be able to help. He made a phone call, quickly explained the story to the person on the other end in Chichewa, and then as he handed me the phone said, “This is the former Attorney General of Malawi.” That knocked the breath out of me. The former Attorney General said he would look into it and took Innocent’s contact information. My fingers are crossed.