Clamor en Chino

There is an international sign language used in prisons all over the world that transcends spoken word differences and is its own distinct mode of communication for people behind bars. Cedar Tree, Inc. went into the California State Youth Authority Prison in Chino where we had inmates set aside their gang affiliations and write poetry. Many of them were more adept at signing their personal poetry than writing it. Hence, the writing workshop evolved around signing codes of the imprisoned and using this code to translate even the hardest poems. It was a great success. The workshop was the basis of a human interest story on ABC News with Peter Jennings.

Moving the River Back Home

"Somebody took the river, and they moved it because they owned a big ranch and they wanted to go diving. And when that river was moved, it disrupted everything around it and that particular section of the river died. I see children's souls as rivers that have been moved and so my job has been and will be to take that part of the river that's been moved in their soul and move it back to its original channel." "We came in to work with these kids to do a writing workshop that (was) much more than just reading and writing-those were the essential groundings that we used to work with. But once we set the grounding up, we actually tried to become facilitators, where they themselves began to take their own souls, they take their soul back through writing, through words and through reading and begin to nourish their souls again with questions about their existence in the world and how they should act and who they should be and which way to go and what choices to make."-- Jimmy Santiago Baca from Moving the River Back Home