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Prisoners make toys for charity

This year, the gifts go to children at a Ruskin emergency shelter .

By S.I. ROSENBAUM
Published December 25, 2006

RIVERVIEW - Maritza Payano doesn't know whose child will play with the chicken toy she made.

It won't be her own kids, whom she hasn't seen in four years. But it doesn't matter to her.

"You have to think about the other kids like they're your own," she said.

Payano, 30, a former drug dealer, is serving a six-year sentence at the Hillsborough Correctional Institution in Riverview.

She has at least a year to go.

She arrived in Riverview earlier this year and signed up for the carpentry class, thinking that it would help her when she got out.

She learned how to make a box and how to make a shelf with lacy fretwork. She earned a scar on her thumb while making a wooden chess set.

Then the teacher, Jack Cardwell, announced that the inmates were going to make toys for needy kids.

Payano thought the chicken toy looked cute: a little chicken with a wheel at the bottom and a pole handle, so a child can push it along the floor.

She thought it would be easy. It wasn't. She had to learn how to use the scroll saw, how to hold the wood gently so it wouldn't jump, so the moving blade wouldn't get stuck in the wood and start to burn it.

Payano is a perfectionist, the kind of person who opens a bag of chips right along the foil seam. She got frustrated, she says.

But she loved working in the woodworking classroom. Sawdust got into her hair and her pockets. The room smelled like the pine wood Cardwell uses because it is cheapest.

Sometimes, she says, they'd hold a piece of wood to the sander just for the smell.

The 16 or so women in the class talked as they worked on the toys.

They all had children at home. For some inmates, Payano says, the subject of children is taboo. Not in woodworking class. They loved to tell stories about what one woman's son said, what another woman's daughter did.

Payano has children, three of them. When she first went to prison, she didn't want them to visit her. She didn't want them feel the way she did as a child visiting her own father in prison.

"I can't see putting my children through that," she said.

They keep in touch by writing letters. The letters don't come steadily. The kids say they're too busy.

For all the inmates, holidays are hard, Payano says.

"I just put a mask up and pretend like it's just another day."

But when she was working on the chicken toy or a piggy bank or a miniature chair and table, everything else faded out.

"You don't have time to think about the outside world," she said. "You're in there and you're just really focused on the wood, how you're going to cut, how you're going to measure it, how you're going to draw it. It takes you away from everything. ... You're in a whole other world."

There was a time when the carpentry students could send their creations home or give them to guards and wardens. No more. All of their products have to stay on the prison grounds or be donated to charity.

This is Cardwell's second time organizing the toy drive. This year, he said, the class made a record 77 toys, from Noah's arks to rocking chairs. Last week, they were sent to the Mary and Martha House in Ruskin, an emergency shelter for women and children fleeing domestic violence.

For Payano, donating the toys was a way of repaying small kindnesses. This year, her kids will receive toys from a church that donates gifts to inmates' children.

"I can give my time in making these projects," she said. "I do it with pride."

S.I. Rosenbaum can be reached at 813 661-2442 or srosenbaum@sptimes.com.

[Last modified December 25, 2006, 05:50:21]