By Grasia Maria Banegas Estrada, Honduras
Here I am lying in my bed, considering seriously committing vandalisim in Demark. Nothing that requires blood, just something that will keep me locked up for at least a year. Recently, I visited a Danish institution for criminal youth called Solhaven. This place is the last stop before regular imprisonment. Solhaven is the last opportunity for young kids to change their criminal ways. The innovative part of the centre is that they use care and involment instead of punishment and consequence in their quest to rehabilitate the young criminals.
Judging from the state of this institution, welfare in Denmark is just overwhelming compared to Honduras. The quality of the homes in which these kids are being taken care of is just too perfect to be called a prison. A normal Honduran would have to work 10 years straight and have two jobs a day in order to live similar to how these kids live. Still they wouldn’t be able to pay for trips to Italy and skiing in the holidays, which are common holiday activities at Solhaven.
Solhaven is indeed a piece of heaven... No average Honduran kid would be able to receive these privileges (not to mention the young criminals), having a room with a flat screen television inside just for yourself, a game room in which you can play pool and minisoccer - this Honduran kids can only dream about. In Honduras, if you are given sentence to prison then you have to share a room with four more criminals regardless of the age and crime they comitted. Have you ever heard the say, “eye for eye, tooth for tooth”? Well in Honduran prisons the word is that if you are sent to prison because of rape, the punishment you get is that they arrange 15 big men waiting for you in a cell to rape you.
So if you see a Honduran girl looking a bit like Pocahontas beware - because I may still be thinking a bit of doing vandalism, since I always have wanted to go skiing on Christmas.