Christmas presence

I’ve been a member of Mothers’ Union since I retired from teaching in 2009 ago. I had moved from an inner city area to a place called Wymondham in Norfolk and I thought the first thing to do is find a church and the second thing to do is find something to get involved with. I like what Mothers’ Union does. It’s social and everyone is so supportive of each other in our branches, but at the same time we look for things that need to be done in the world and in our local area. At the moment I’m a trustee and the social policy coordinator for the Diocese of Norwich. That means I’m the person who looks for projects that Mothers’ Union could be involved in, and disseminates that information among the members.

GOOD GIFTS

One of the projects we’re involved in is called Angel Tree, which is run by the Prison Fellowship. It’s a ministry with local prisons and provides gifts for the children of inmates who might not otherwise be able to send presents home to their families. The reoffending rate in British jails is absolutely shocking; it’s like a revolving door system. Sometimes prisoners have a home to go back to when they get out, but often they don’t. Research shows that if they manage to keep in good contact with their families during their sentence, they have a much better chance of not reoffending once they’re out again. It’s better for the children as well. If a parent disappears to serve their jail sentence, the children don’t always understand - they might think it’s their fault, there’s a lot of anger and they can really go to pieces. We know that offenders shouldn’t have done what they have done, and they deserve to serve their sentence. But the children didn’t do the crime and yet they suffer. Mothers’ Union members like a practical project as well as the opportunity to pray for people, so we thought, ‘We could do this.’ We started in 2011 and agreed to organise 30 presents for the inmates of HMP Blundeston, one of four prisons in the area at the time.

ANGEL DELIGHT

But when it came to it we were overwhelmed by the generosity of the members and we had offers to buy 60 presents! We would have sent the surplus to one of the other local prisons but one is just an assessment centre, one is for sex offenders so there’s an issue with sending presents to children, and the third one at the time didn’t have a regular chaplain. So we sent our surplus to support a prison in Peterborough. For the next couple of years we supported Blundeston and Peterborough, but then Blundeston was closed. In the meantime we had been keeping our eye on Wayland, the one that didn’t have a chaplain, in the hope that an opportunity would arise. And eventually it did. It was my fellow Angel Tree helper Elisabeth who discovered that there was a new chaplain, thanks to her work as an official prison visitor. When she got in touch she got a very friendly response, so this will be the first year we’re involved with them and we’re very excited about it. As I write, we don’t know how it will go because you’re juggling unknown quantities, you don’t know how many requests the prisoners are going to put in and how many presents Mothers’ Union branches are going to be able to get between them. Fortunately if we can’t fulfil all the requests, we can send them to the Prison Fellowship and they can deal with it. And if we have more money than requests, we can send the money in or help other prisons, so it all works out in the end.

REWARDING AND WORTHWHILE

The way the project runs is fairly simple. I get the requests from the prison and I transfer the children’s first names, their ages and their interests onto a little card - so you might have, ‘Ellie, four, who likes Peppa Pig’, or ‘Jamie, seven, who likes Transformers’. The cards go to the members and they go out and spend £10 on the present and maybe some wrapping paper. They don’t actually wrap them up, because we need to check that they’re appropriate. The members then bring the presents with the little tags, the wrapping paper and £5 cash for postage to our national council meeting in November, and Elisabeth and I have a wrapping morning to get them all wrapped. Each parcel has a Christian book put in, which is supplied by the Prison Fellowship, unless the prisoner opts out - and very few of them do.

I’m so pleased to be involved with Angel Tree. When I was a teacher, I had one or two children that I taught who had a parent who disappeared off to jail, and they were shattered by it. And even when the parent came back, they were upset again. I still remember those children very well. The best thing about it is that we’re focusing on the children and trying to ease the way for some families who are pretty much up against it. It’s an incredibly rewarding and worthwhile project, and if other dioceses are at all interested, they can get in touch with us and we would be very happy to help them get it set up.