Almost six years ago I decided I wanted to be a volunteer, but didn’t know where. I made some calls but most places treated me as if they were doing me a favour by answering the phone. Almost all said they would call be back in a few months.

E. Fry was different — I felt respected and valued from the beginning. Although I’d never considered volunteering in a detention centre, I soon felt a conviction that the women in “the system” were the women I most wanted to support.

I joined the recreational program at the West Detention Centre and on the first Wednesday of every month I go to “the West” to play board games and have snacks with incarcerated women.

My first night was hell. Claustrophobic and intimidated by institutions of all shapes and sizes, I was terror stricken. Would the women be angry? Violent? Confrontational? Would I have to call upon the old “street smart” me who could sneer along with the best of them?

But here we were the first night, playing Scruples. My anxiety was such that when it was my turn to play and I was asked a question, I couldn’t understand it. They read it again and again to no avail. Everyone waited and waited until I stuttered out something non-sensical.

When the crisis passed and I got my bearings, I began to see that “the West” was nothing like what I feared it would be. I started to relax. In fact, the women were not focused on me at all. There was a woman among them who had learned that day that she was pregnant. She was stopping over at the West on her way to the Prison for Women in Kingston. I’ll never forget her. She kept crying. She was such a bundle of confused emotion — sad and vulnerable, quietly distraught, and reluctantly happy.

Seeing how supportive the women were — how they took care of one another — was a valuable first experience for me. My job that night was simply to make sure that the cups were filled with pop and the bowls filled with chips, which was fine by me.

The evenings are not always easy. Occasionally there is a rift in the group. Sometimes there’s a woman who challenges us. But there are also many evenings when we laugh and laugh; when the mood is so light it carries us away.

But I never want to go. I don’t like it there. It smells like hospital food and everything is the worst possible shade of beige.

Yet I go. I go because I have become good friends with my fellow group members Kathy Topper and Linda Weichel; I go because after every evening at the West, whether it went well or not, the women say “thank you for coming”.

While the recreation nights at the West may provide a diversion for the women there, they are also a diversion for me; a chance to look outwards, rather than inwards. They have become a part of my life and I expect, in some way, they always will be.

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