A Day in the Life of an Ex-Gang Member

I tried lots of programmes in different prisons before I tried Changing the Game, the gang intervention programme, a group therapy, which I was offered whilst I was in Grendon Prison. It was run by Dr Carine Minne and Paul Kassman and I think it worked because in Paul I had someone I could relate to. Paul grew up on the streets and he could have been involved in gangs, but he turned his life around. It felt much better talking to him than to a man in a suit trying to tell me how to behave when he didn't know what was going on in the prison, or in life in general for the likes of me. That was one of the first programmes I did which made me see things differently. A group of ten of us met every week for group therapy in the prison with Dr Carine and Paul.

But to go back to the beginning, I was born in Congo, DRC. We are a very wealthy country but for some reason which fascinates me and which I don't understand, we are not wealthy. No mobile phones can work without the cobalt mined, often by children, in the DRC, for example.

Anyway, my dad was not a politician but he was involved in politics. He had a lot of friends in high places. He was an architect and I had a good life. We had a chauffeur who used to take us to school. We could afford chips and burgers, things like that. Things changed one day when a new coalition came into power and my dad was on the list of people they arrested who were affiliated with the political power going out. My mum is Rwandan, she is a Tutsi. When they found out she was Rwandan, they arrested her as well.

We were left with our auntie but she got scared because everyone was being arrested so she left us. Us was me and my eight siblings. We have two sets of twins in our family. The oldest twins, J and D, went to look for my parents at the police station. They killed my brother, J, for, well, for being his father's son. My sister D was imprisoned with my parents. My dad managed to get word out to his friends and after two days they came to get