Crystal had bought a little thing to bring back home to her mother at a souvenir shop.
It had cost 8 $, but when she paid with a 10 $ note, the saleswoman took the money without giving her any change. 
 Crystal had always had a bad temper if she thought somebody was trying to cheat her.
She wanted her 2 $ back, and started arguing.  The police came - Nobody seamed to understand English - 
She was only a single blond  foreign girl among a crowd of strangers. 
Soon after she was taken away in handcuffs. 
 

"Please - Contact the embassy and let me get a lawyer ! 
 Don´t anybody speak English here?" 

Crystal should have known better - 
Asking for a lawyer is in these countries the same as telling the police, they have made a mistake. 
Such a insult must be punished very hard! 

"You must pay 2000 $ fine for making trouble in our peacefull country, and
another 1000 $ in compensation to the saleswoman."  the local interpreter told her.  

"Then you must let me phone my parents.  They are rich, but they don´t know I have gone on this trip." 

Allowing her to phone abroad is out of the question.
Instead poor Crystal must see all her baggage, clothes, money and jewellery confiscated. 
Then she is sent to prison for life for insulting the authorities. 
 

Two days later Crystal arrives to her future home, 
together with a  bunch of local girls. 

As an attempt  to impede with the growing problem with 
overpopulation, the single-party system has orderet, 
that in some parts of the country, all 
families, with more than one daughter,
 must sent the surplus ones to be 
concentrated in large work camps. 

This also includes rich families. 
Ma Ling walking in front of Crystal, has got a lot of money. 
She is the only one of this bunch, that has been able 
to afford a real women´s prison uniform. 
She will be treated as a queen here. 
 
The not so rich receives randomly either a jacket or 
a par of trousers from a stock of used male´s 
prison clothes.

The poorest are given a thin shift, and 
Those with no money at all, a small rag as loincloths. 
 

Being a criminel, a foreigner and with no money at all to bribe the guards, means special hard treatment in the  prison camp. 
 
From the very first day, 
she is bullied by the other girls. 
She tried to fight back, but the guards seized her, 
and being a troublemaker, Crystal from now on 
had to sleep in a stock beside the piss bucket. 

The other prisoners looks upon Crystal, 
as she is even more disgusting than the bucket. 

The girls are frustrated from knowing they have to 
spend their lives as forced labours, 
with no boy friends and never getting married, 
while their brotheres, with their sisters out 
of the way, now can afford higher educations 
and will get good jobs.  

In this situation it is good to have some one 
in a worse state than one self to victimize.  
 

Every morning and every evening all the girls 
have to line up to be counted. 
Often these roll-calls lasts for hours, because the 
guards usually wants to enjoy their breakfast or dinner 
before bothering going out to count the prisoners. 

The roll-calls are also used to inflict punishments 
for  laziness or other offences against the rules, 
committed durring the day. 

With so many young girls crammed together 
in the overcrowded work camp, it´s absolutely 
necessary to maintain a very strict discipline. 

Even Ma Ling hasn´t been able to completely 
avoid the whip, even she only do light duties.  

But for those who comes from not so wealthy 
families, there are no mercy. 
Any kind of real or just suspected offences 
are punished very hard. 
 

Only 3 months later not even her mother 
would have recognized Crystal. 

14 hours work days, doing the hardest labour,
the endless roll-calls standing outside in all kinds of weather,
the bad food and daily punishments for being lazy 
has taken a heavy toll on her slight young body. 
 

Crystal is fed before she is put into the stocks to sleep. 

Her food is always the same: A sticky lump of 
mouldy rise mixed with pebbles and small splinters of wood. 

Desperate of hunger the starving girl eats it 
as quickly as she can, trying 
to ignore her bleeding mouth and brocken teeth. 

She has only 10 seconds to eat it all, 
while the guard counts down to zero. 

When the 10 seconds is over, the rise she has not yet 
eaten, is knocked out of her hands onto the ground.

Crystal is crazy of thirst , but no money means no water. 
She will have to wait to the other girls have fallen into sleep. 
Then she will with a skilled movement lift her stock,
 lean over  the piss bucket and stick her head deap into it. 
 

"Lazy bitch - Now you will hang there all night! 
Then maybe tomorrow you will work much harder!" 

Rapidly weakened by the poor food 
and no freash water to drink, 
the guards have to punish her 
harder and harder to make her work. 

Hanging here she even don´t 
have the piss bucket to drink from. 
 
Tomorrow she will have to fulfil 
the quota - She has to! 
 

Crystal is not the only girl been punished. 

This girl dosn´t miss the piss bucket. 

For hours she is left standing on her knees 
with the bucket over her head. 
In between the guard hits the bucket hard 
with her baton giving a loud noise. 
She hits it with various intervals, sometimes 
several times in a minute, and other times after 
a half an hour, so the girl never know 
when the next blow come. 
 

Ma Ling has also fallen deaply since she lived 
her pleasant life at home on the rich estate. 

Her brothers and her elder sister have complained to their 
parents, about why they waste the family money
 on their little sister, as they would never 
see her again anyway. 

When Ma Ling tells the guards she can not pay them  
anymore, they get real angry on her, and order her 
to clean the latrines using her dress. 

From now on there will be no more light duties for her.