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Hi, I'm Carmen Acevedo Butcher, and welcome to learning how to see. We're glad you're here.

When I was 19 and in college, I applied to be a summer

missionary. My motivations were a genuine desire to be of use to someone who needed my help,

maybe to learn English, a hope to better my speaking of Spanish, a wish to spread the gospel, as I misunderstood that then,

as a teenager raised in the Southern Baptist Church, and a yearning to travel because I was from

a very rural part of Georgia. My mother made all my dress clothes, as we did not have much money. My father was

unwell and physically abusive, and I wished to escape all this. Plus, beyond visiting my Cuban

relatives in Miami during summers, I had not been beyond Georgia and Alabama,

and felt claustrophobic in my understanding of the world.

My life felt like a prison then.

Growing up in three southern U.S. states where women were not seen as of much worth,

and my brown skin from my Cuban-American father made me feel

like an outsider. On my Baptist International Missionary Application, I put down I hoped to attend law school,

and I wanted to serve in a central or South American country. At the interview, I was asked a whole lot of

questions about my goals of being a lawyer, which made me realize maybe I really didn't want to be a

lawyer. Weeks later, after imagining travel to somewhere outside the country, the letter arrived, and I was deeply disappointed

to see I'd been assigned to a maximum security correctional institute for women in, of all places,

South Georgia, only three hours drive from my college. To get to the prison, we had to take a long, dusty road

out into the isolated, unincorporated community of Hardwick, Georgia. I came with the notion

that the women there were different from me, and I didn't know it at first, but on some level,

...