by Jo Piazza
The Bush administration, too, doubted Sister Dianna’s credibility.
In one cable to Washington, then-ambassador Thomas F. Stroock, a newly arrived political appointee of the president, wrote that he rejected her claim that the man who led her out of the secret prison was a North American who spoke Spanish poorly and cursed in English.
“I know something happened to her in Guatemala,” Mr. Stroock told Washington Post reporter Frank Smyth over the phone from Wyoming. “What I don’t know is what it was. I don’t know whether to believe her or not.”
“I felt betrayed,” Sister Dianna later told me through anguished tears. “I don’t think I have ever really shared with people how betrayed and hurt I felt by my country and my government. I think I learned to hide my feelings. I had more than a hundred and eleven cigarette burns on my back and elsewhere. I had proof,” she said. “When I think of their accusations, those words are like having cigarettes put out on my body all over again.”
She was taken to her parents’ home in Grants, New Mexico, her mind foggy and thick with amnesia from PTSD caused by the trauma. Sister Dianna described all of her memories as intermingled with the torture.
“Every part of me ceased to exist,” she said.
When she walked through the small adobe house, a woman she didn’t recognize fell at her feet.
“Mi Hijita,” she wailed. It was her mother. Sister Dianna backed away. A man, her father, threw his arm around her. He reeked of cigarettes, which only served to remind her of the burns freckling her back and shoulder blades. In that moment, the smell of burning flesh overwhelmed her. She kept her mouth shut, pretended to know them.
When she returned to her community of sisters, she couldn’t remember having been a nun.
“For a while I thought I didn’t belong in this community because I didn’t have memories, and I thought, Why am I here if I don’t remember?” she said. But the sisters were supportive. They shared pictures and letters she had written to them. She slowly began to remember that she became a sister because she wanted to be of service.
In the years after her torture, Sister Dianna looked to the words of Jean Améry, an Austrian essayist and philosopher who was tortured by the Nazis. “Gone was the God to whom I had committed my life. Gone was trust, the very idea of justice betrayed. Gone was all I had believed in. Everything that defined me as a human being ceased to exist,” he wrote about his own experience. Améry’s words brought her comfort. She, too, still felt tortured and uneasy about living in the world. The words seemed written just for her. She took comfort in there being another person on Earth who understood what she went through at the hands of her torturers. Years later she learned that Jean Améry had killed himself. Many times she thought about how easy it would be to take that option herself and end all of her pain.
She had two years of therapy at the Marjorie Kovler Center for the Treatment of Survivors of Torture, the first community-based comprehensive torture treatment center for refugees and people seeking asylum in the United States. It was there that she figured out how to put her experience in perspective and began to find her voice.
In 1996, Sister Dianna camped outside the White House for several weeks, surviving only on bread and water. She wanted the government to acknowledge what had happened to her and to the Guatemalan people.
“Prior to that time I had been trying to obtain information about my case and I was calling on President Clinton and the US government to release documents related to torture in Guatemala,” she explained. She began her silent vigil in Lafayette Park across from the White House, joined sporadically by hundreds of supporters. President Clinton wrote to her on March 29, promising to release “all appropriate information” to her. Sister Dianna spent most of her time sitting silently on a blanket.
On April 5, then First Lady and future Secretary of State Hillary Clinton met with Sister Dianna for a half hour to express her concern and assure her that her husband was determined to get her the information she was seeking.
Sister Dianna only broke down once in front of Mrs. Clinton, while she was discussing how her torturers forced her to put her hands on a machete and cut her fellow captive. A few classified documents were eventually released, accompanied by considerable publicity, but they remained heavily redacted and the identity of her torturers was not revealed.
For her own sanity, Sister Dianna Mae Ortiz had to find a way to move on, a way to put her own ordeal behind her.
“For a lot of years I directed my energy to Guatemala and I thought only of the Guatemalan people. Because of the horror I witnessed, I think I was blind to the torture happening all over the rest of the world,” she said. But then she began to meet other survivors, ordinary people: aid workers, engineers, accountants, doctors, student activists from all over the United States, Asia, the Middle East, and South America.
“Through them, a sort of blindfold was lifted from my eyes. I saw that torture was a worldwide epidemic and I realized the importance of founding an organization that was comprised entirely of survivors of torture who could help one another.”
That realization led Sister Dianna to create the Torture Abolition and Survivors Support Coalition, or TASSC, in 1998. It was a group that allowed torture survivors to speak openly about their experiences as a way to heal. They spoke out to spread the word about torture around the globe and provided torture survivors and their families with legal, psychological, and medical support.
The goal was lofty: to ensure that what happened to them would not happen to anyone ever again. On June 26, 2000, Sister Dianna traveled with eighteen other survivors of torture, from all over the world, to speak with an official of the National Security Council. In a pale-green room in the Old Executive Office Building, just west of the White House, all eighteen of them pled for an end to the US funding and practicing of torture around the globe.
“People tend to think that when a person manages to escape from a situation of torture, it is just like the end to any other story. But . . . for the majority of survivors, the act of survival is far worse than the torture itself,” Sister Dianna told me.
In 2002, Sister Dianna wrote a memoir entitled The Blindfold’s Eyes. More than 500 pages long, it features a picture of her on the cover, a small cross at her collarbone, her eyes laden with an inescapable pain. In 2010, she wrote to President Barack Obama to ask for the president’s leadership in ending the country’s involvement in any kind of torture anywhere in the world.
That letter went viral when the actress Mariska Hargitay, a star of the series Law and Order: SVU, read it aloud at a fund-raiser.
“Dear President Obama, on November 2, 1989, I was burned with cigarettes more than 111 times,” Sister Dianna had written. “I was raped over and over again, and that was only the beginning. Mr. President, from anonymous graves voices still cry out. . . . Torture does not end with the release from some clandestine prison. It is not something we ‘get over.’ Simply looking forward is not an option for us . . . memories cling to us. . . . No one fully recovers from torture. The damage can never be undone. We have been beaten, hanged by wrists, arms, or legs, burned by electrical devices or cigarettes, bitten by humans and dogs, cut or stabbed with knives or machetes. And this is only a sample of what has been done to us. What a cruel irony that it is the tortured one and not the torturer who feels shame.”
For more than ten years, Sister Dianna served as the director of TASSC. In 2012, she decided she needed to take some time for herself to continue her own healing process. Nevertheless, the idea of taking any kind of time for herself makes her uneasy.
“I kind of feel guilty about it,” she told me. “The idea of just being able to be still and breathe is frightening.”
I had sent Sister Dianna an e-mail with my questions before we spoke because she told me she had difficulty remembering some of the things that had happened to her and thinking about the questions ahead o
f time helps to jog her memory. One of the questions I wanted to ask her was whether she had any regrets. Once we got on the phone, she told me she thought about that question for a long time before she was ready for our interview.
“Even after all these years, I still travel back in time and I continue to ask the same questions. What would Jesus have done under those circumstances? And each time, the answer remains the same: He would have continued to journey with the people. I have no regrets about the situation,” she said, her voice cracking. “Am I happy my dignity and human rights were violated? Am I happy that the brutal acts of those who are children of God shattered my life to the point that I am afraid of my own shadow? Of course not.
“I am not comparing myself to Jesus. I try to follow the Gospel and live the Gospel. But I do believe that on some level I took my place on what I refer to as a modern-day cross. I see the world with new eyes.”
8.
I Want to Run a Laundromat Before I Die
If we really believe in the resurrection, then we have
to believe in second chances. Nobody comes out of prison saying,
“Wow, I really hope I screw up again.”
—Sister Tesa Fitzgerald
I love going to prison,” Sister Tesa Fitzgerald told me as we strolled down Twelfth Street and onto Thirty-Seventh Avenue in Long Island City, Queens. “You can taste the hope in the prisons. The women are appreciative and welcoming. You get a real sense that people are working to change their lives.”
Everyone for a ten-block radius knew Sister Tesa. They belted out, “Hey Sister T!” and in turn she would greet them by name with bear hugs. Even the neighborhood stray cats curled themselves around her legs as she walked with a measured gait. She knew their names too. Sister Tesa is the honorary mayor of this neighborhood just a half mile inland from the East River, tucked behind the red-and-white striped smokestacks of the Con Edison power plant.
This is Hour Children territory, Sister Tesa’s nonprofit dedicated to helping moms connect with their kids while they serve time in prison and then aiding them in the rebuilding of their lives and families when they are back on the outside. The name “Hour Children” comes from the fact that jailed mothers get only an hour at a time to visit with their kids.
We stopped to greet one of Sister Tesa’s employees on the street. Almost everyone who works for her, in her hair salon, her food bank, and her thrift shops, is a former felon. Sister Tesa shuttles back and forth between her home and office in Long Island City to prisons in upstate New York on a weekly basis. The outpouring of love for Sister T is the same at the prisons, where the guards all know her name. The inmates cheer when she walks down the corridor, pressing notes of gratitude into her hands.
She cries with the women who don’t know whether their kids will want to see them or speak to them again. When babies are born in the prison, Sister Tesa is the one who takes them out of its walls for the first time and she raises them as her own until the women are released.
Sister Tesa works with an annual budget of $3.6 million—a mixture of grants, donations, and government funding she refers to with a growly laugh as “grant stew”—and she is adamant that it is never enough. With that money the Hour Children staff and an army of volunteers run five communal homes, where former felons can live with their children once they are released. From prison halls to the outside, they are a full-service operation. Over the past twenty-five years, Hour Children has provided help to more than nine thousand mothers and raised thousands of children. Sister Tesa starts as an advocate in the prison, providing counseling to get the women ready for the real world. Once they are released, she takes care of everything and anything that could be a stumbling block for these women, from finding affordable housing to securing a job, finding the right doctors, and obtaining the right medication. No detail of a woman’s life is overlooked. They are given clothes, taken to the salon, and taught computer skills and even office manners.
The difference Hour Children makes is clear. More than 29 percent of New York State’s female ex-convicts are eventually rearrested. For women taken in by Hour Children, that number drops to 3 percent.
Sister Tesa’s office is always cluttered, but during the holiday season it is packed with toys, bikes with training wheels, Barbie dolls, video games, and the odd Rainbow Loom—all for the kids in the program. The walls are a panorama of photographs of children, ranging from wallet-size to eight-by-tens. There are girls in dance costumes, boys smiling with gaps in their teeth, high school graduates, and babies—so many babies.
“They’re all my babies,” Sister Tesa told me in her thick Long Island accent that waxes and wanes depending on whom she is talking to. Put her in front of a local politician and she drops almost all of her r’s and g’s. This mix of babies—black, white, Latino—belongs to the prisoners who have gone through her programs. The photos trip over one another, and as I gazed at the wall, she named each child and told their story. Julia, just eight years old in her photo, has since gone to college at the University of Vermont and lives in New Jersey where she is now “engaged to a wonderful man.” Cyrus is a handful, but he just got the best report card in his class. All over the room are Catholic tchotchkes, including a candy jar in the shape of a nun that reads heavenly habit, and a small sculpture of two nuns in full conservative dress wearing sunglasses and riding a motorcycle. The inscription reads, if you follow all the rules, you miss all the fun.
“Isn’t that the truth?” Sister Tesa said with a laugh when she noticed I was reading it. “We break the rules all the time.” Two cats purred at her feet. Richie, the gray one, and Romy, the black one. They could have fit into a teacup when one of Sister Tesa’s volunteers gave them to her eight years ago. Now they live the life, each with his own wicker bed at opposite ends of the nun’s office. They drink out of a fishbowl that has no fish. “They’re my partners,” Sister Tesa told me, reaching down and stroking Richie’s back. They’re always here and they’re part of the action. Everyone associates me with them and them with me.”
The furniture in the office is all secondhand. “I barely ever buy anything,” she announced proudly, running her hand over her desk. The Hour Children empire includes three thrift shops in Queens, all staffed by former felons and filled wall-to-wall and floor-to-ceiling with inventory. Everything from a white baby grand piano to a sheared beaver cape to an armoire believed to be from Brittany in France is there looking for a new home.
The largest of the stores used to be a nightclub called Studio 34, which some of the neighbors described as “hell on earth.” Sister Tesa noticed a For Rent sign at the closed club while she was on one of her walks around the neighborhood, on a hunt for a bagful of her favorite samosas. She made a good deal with the landlord of the defunct club and turned it into a new revenue stream.
“We needed to get rid of four bars, a dance floor, and a lot of questionable rooms in the basement,” Sister Tesa told me about gutting the old hotspot. “I don’t want to know what they did down there in that basement.” She gave me a very knowing look to indicate she knew exactly what was going on in that basement. When it was finished, every square inch was used to move secondhand loot. Maximizing value is Sister Tesa’s forte. Everything she wears and everything she lives with has been donated. Her stores also clothe all of the women and their children, including her thrift store manager Luz De Leon, who met Sister Tesa while serving ten years in Bedford Hills Correctional Facility for manslaughter.
“Tesa is a smart cookie,” Luz confided to me in a conspiratorial tone. “She taught us all how to sell anything.” She taught her well. Luz managed to sell me that sheared beaver cape the first time that we met.
Prisoners are released without any clothes. Sister Tesa’s women don’t have pajamas to sleep in or suits for interviews. “We have anything they need,” Sister Tesa said gleefully, rummaging through the shelves of the shop. “We have sweaters and suits and coats.
At any given time we have twenty strollers. And we have bling,” she said with delight. “Everyone wants some bling.” She pressed a sparkly necklace into my hands. “It’s only five dollars. You should buy it.”
Sister Tesa believes in both second chances and in the fact that most of the women she works with never deserved to be in prison in the first place. “If they just had better lawyers, they wouldn’t have gone in. If they were the Lindsay Lohans of our life, things would have been different for them,” she explained with a touch of derision in her voice, either for the system or for Ms. Lohan, the actress who has consistently been able to avoid serving jail time for her many felonies. Most of Sister Tesa’s women got sent away for a drug-related crime or sometimes burglary, often committed to get money for drugs. She sees it all as bad timing and even worse circumstances.
“A lot of it is the drug culture. It can lead to such negative behavior. The women become targets. A lot of them didn’t even use drugs. They were just in the wrong place at the wrong time, and then their entire family pays for it,” Sister Tesa said with a shake of her head. “These are good women. They made mistakes, just like the rest of us.”
Sister Tesa grew up poor in a working-class Irish family in the Five Towns of Nassau County out on Long Island. Her parents were Irish immigrants who made education and faith the cornerstones of their lives. Her mom was the gregarious one. She could make anyone laugh. Sister Tesa is more like her father—slightly reserved and introspective, yet witty and warm. She claims that she didn’t have one singular moment when she knew she would be a sister. It was more of a long and drawn-out calling that has been with her as long as she can remember.
“It was this inner sense that this was a good thing for me to do. It wasn’t an aha! moment, where I woke up and said, ‘Hey I want to be a nun today.’ It was just a constant calling from God.” She didn’t talk much about it with her family until she actually went off and joined the Sisters of St. Joseph, who’d taught her in both elementary and high school.