Day 6: Wheeling, WV

Today was another great day in Appalachia!

We did some interesting things today, to put it lightly. After serving the patrons and having our talks (I spoke with Gary, a man from Binghampton, NY...he had been to Rochester several times!), we ventured out into the West Virginian countryside.

First, we visited the former West Virginia State Penitentiary. Boy, this place was creepy. In fact, the I believe the Travel Channel filmed one episode of the series "Ghost Hunters" here. It opened in 1876 and closed in 1995. Over that time span, 94 men were executed by either hanging or electricution, with dozens others murdered by their inmates. As a inmate, this was not a place you wanted to be.

However, the tour got us thinking: how effective was this prison? And what was its purpose? Was it supposed to rehabilitate people and get them back into society or punish them eternally? With the prison system overcrowded and very expensive, many of us thought that more focus should have been given to rehabilitation. After all, don't we want to help the prisoners rebuild their lives?

After visiting the spooky prison, we traveled to the Harre Krishna Temple. What we saw there was both magnificent and questionable. All of the floors, walls and even the bathrooms were decorated with gold leaf, marble, and stain glass! But we had never previously been exposed to the beliefs and ideology of the Krishna faith, and much of what our tour guide (who himself was a priest of Krishna) said came across as incredibly odd.

Later that night, we invited a group of Church volunteers over to the soup kitchen for a pizza dinner. Many of these kids were similar to us; they were interested in volunteering and had raised money for the soup kitchen. We talked with them about baseball, video games, and other regular topics.

However, there was one kid who was different there. At first he actually seemed pretty normal, but out of the blue he mentioned that he had been at "juvy" before under false charges. He said that his mother (who was on crack) made up fake stories about him so that he would go to prison. The story seemed very odd and we didn't know how much of it to believe, but the story was shocking nevertheless.

I guess life can come at you in unexpected ways sometimes. This idea has been repeated over and over during my week here at the soup kitchen.