Once again this year, we participated with the Bidesari Association in the ESAN EZ project, a project for the prevention of addictions and risky behaviour among adolescents from educational centres, through 4 training and information sessions in the classroom and in which people deprived of their liberty also participate by giving their testimony.

Our students of Basic VET participated in the first sessions which were led by Miguel Romillo, social worker of the association, and in which they were able to work on the reasons that push them to “consume” and the consequences that they can have, psychic, physical and also criminal when these consumptions lead them to commit a crime.

The day of testimonies was, once again this year, the highlight of the activity. Testimonies that, as usual, did not leave our students indifferent. They talked about how “brave people are not those who take drugs and thus become uninhibited to do certain things, the real brave people are those who are able to say no to drugs”. They reflected a lot on the loneliness of people who end up taking drugs in isolation to escape from problems that obviously don’t go away.

“Prisoners of drugs”

One of the most surprising moments was when they said that they had never felt as free as they do now in prison, because they had managed to have good habits, they had got rid of their addiction, they had started to practice sports, to work,… for them, the real prison had been drugs, which made them not be themselves, made them spend all day thinking about consuming, about how to get the money to buy,… and that really is a real prison.

Now they think about all the problems they have caused for their loved ones, about how to recover their affection and all the time they have lost and, of course, they remember all the people who have been left by the wayside because of drugs.

Now it remains to evaluate the sessions of a project that always leaves a mark on our students.

Bidesari is a non-profit organisation that was created by the Prison Pastoral of the Diocese of Bilbao in 1994. It arose as a response to the need detected to develop an intervention work with people deprived of liberty that would enable them to initiate processes of personal recovery and social integration, from inside the prison, and clearly aimed at their continuity in the normalised community fabric. It was declared of public utility on 5 April 2005. It was declared of social interest on 22 July 2014.