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BARRY'S NEWSLETTER, 1st January 2002

We brought Barry the second batch of Kentucky Fried Chicken when we visited
on New Year's Eve, the first of our two visits.  We brought a lot - the
total weight came to 4.2 kilos.  Since we brought two kilos the last time,
and the limit is officially 5 kilos, we should have been made to take some
of it out, but the guard just shrugged his shoulders.  We were lucky it
wasn't like Christmas when Lars visited, and a guard was on duty whom Barry
and Lars nicknamed "Little Piggy" because of his size.  "Little Piggy"
refused all sorts of food items, including some which are allowed, and
everyone was mad.  But Barry said this was just temporary duty for him, and
fortunately he wasn't there this time.

In fact we envied Barry his New Year's Eve KFC dinner.  We were supposed to
have a gala dinner ourselves at the best restaurant in Bar-sur-Aube, but
Earl had a bad reaction to one of the medicines he was taking for his
bronchitis - nausea, stomach pain and total loss of appetite - and we had
to cancel.  By New Year's Eve he was well enough to eat a simple meal, but
all the places serving simple meals in Bar were closed.  Every single one
of them.  The same was true for the whole surrounding area.  We ended up
eating our New Year's Eve dinner, if you can call it that, at a highway
cafeteria.  It was awful.  Our sole consolation lay in knowing that for the
very first time, Barry was eating better than we were!

Barry also received some gifts from some kind people which will enable him
to upgrade the memory on his computer and also buy a "galette du roi", the
special Epiphany cake, from the prison store.  And the Iranian terrorist,
whose parents are visiting him for New Year's, shared with Barry some
pistachio nuts his parents had brought.  Barry had never had pistachios
before.  He says he likes them.  These, brought specially, are surely very
good ones.

The American consul visited again, to check on Barry's safety.  It seems
American prisoners have been attacked by Arab prisoners in the French
prisons.  Barry told the consul he has had no trouble, all he wants is to
go home.

Barry is making progress with his guitar lessons.  He has graduated from
"Frere Jacques" and is now working with gospel songs and spirituals, like
"Swing Low, Sweet Chariot."  He says these songs are easy for him, because
he already sang them all in the Presbyterian Church school he went to as a
child.  Since he now knows half a dozen songs, his neighbor no longer
complains.  It was the lack of variety that got to him.

As usual we talked about current events.  We discussed Richard Reid, the
man with the plastic explosives in his shoes, and his conversion to Islam
in prison.  Barry, of course, knows a lot about such conversions, since he
sees them himself at Clairvaux.  He explains them this way: "In prison
there's always some sort of injustice, so when the radical islamists start
talking to these lost, confused guys about fighting injustice, some of them
listen, and eventually end up following the whole path."

There have also been incidents in some of the tough suburbs here.
Strasbourg seems to have this as an annual event - the pictures on TV
showed cars with actual fireballs bursting from them - but there was also
an incident in Vitry-sur-Seine, in the Paris region.  The car burning there
was the local response to a police shooting.  Two local punks did a holdup.
 The cops chased them, one of the punks turned and fired on the cops, one
of the cops shot back and killed him.  The punk's gun was merely a pellet
gun, not lethal, but from a distance the cop could not know that.  We all
agreed that the car burning was an overreaction to this incident, that
something else must be festering in the community.  Of course we do not
know what.  There was, however, one great irony in this affair which Barry
told us about.  One of the burned cars belonged to the daughter of
Jean-Louis, who is in Clairvaux.  Jean-Louis is... a holdup man.