I SPENT two amazing mornings (Tuesday and Wednesday) with a Roger I have rarely seen in such good shape. I can still see his radiant smiling face when he said to me with an immense conviction “I have absolutely no doubt that I shall walk out of this place a free man”. Later, he stated with the same forcefulness- “I am so so blessed” and that he just wanted to share his blessings – which he does so generously as we all know, buying many things for indigent inmates (from heaters to boil water for coffee to radios, etc), not to mention blessing thousands through his book, and all those like us who have the privilege of being in close contact with him. This was all the more amazing due to the fact that he had just lost one of his closest friends who was put to death during the summer and also because the past summer was probably the worst ever in Roger's 23 years on death row due to the prison administration installing videos absolutely everywhere - to check on the prison officers! Prison regulations (which are constantly changing) are applied to the letter and many officers who e.g. passed various things from one inmate to the other (food, books and other objects) in violation of prison regulations cannot do so any more. To be labelled as "inmate friendly" is a black spot on the recond of an officer!

We talked quite a while about his correspondence. He had just received his new typewriter. He told me he wrote for hours sitting at the end of his metal bunk bed (no cushion), his typewriter precariously perched on a small table fixed in the wall in a most uncomfortable position. He frequently spends from 10 a.m. till 8 p.m. writing non stop to correspondants. He has about 20 regular correspondents, and had a pile of 15 letters awaiting a reply in his cell. He does his best to reply to as many as possible, including high school students doing studies of death row. One major challenge is the price of typewriter ribbons. They used to be $2.00 still recently but have now jumped to… NINE dollars. As the quality of the ribbons is very bad, he only gets 13 pages out of a ribbon, i.e. which puts the letters at 70 cents a page. If the prison wanted to discourage inmates from corresponding, they couldn’t do better. So Roger puts money on the accounts of other inmates who purchase 10 ribbons at a time for him, so that he still has enough money to purchase the food he badly needs for his special diet and also to purchase things for other destitute inmates (coffea pots, radios, food, etc).

NEW BOOK: given the extraordinary impact of the first book based on my correspondance with Roger, Messages of Life from Death Row, both in terms of deeply touching lives everywhere and in terms of fundraising (at least 90 per cent of funds raised for his defense have been generated by the book), last spring I wrote to Roger telling him I would like to write a second book centering more specifically on his spiritual path, based on his letters to a variety of correspondents. My French publisher, Editions Jouvence, was interested (he published the first book in French in 2003, and it is still selling.) So he sent me a list of correspondents and their addresses. I have started working on the project. I had promised Roger that I would translate the whole book into English so that he could read it before I submitted it to my publisher. But after thinking it over during the night he told me the second day of our visit that he trusted me entirely to present his thinking truthfully, without having to submit each chapter to him. As the second book entails much, much more work than the first one (it will be a compilation of many letters to different people around themes like love, forgiveness, etc) I am deeply grateful, as retranslating he whole thing would have been an immense job in addition to the writing. If any readers of this site have received letters from Roger dealing on topics related to spirituality OR PRISON CONDITIONS and were interested in sharing them with me, I would be very grateful to receive them at your earliest convenience.

My British publisher CYGNUS BOOKS (www.cygnus-books.co.uk) has in the meantime just published a normal trade version of the first book for the British Isles, and it has a beautiful cover. I am hopeful it will sell well, and to this effect have opened an account in a British bank where readers can send funds.A first English version was published in the USA end 2009 on internet by BookSurge, an Amazon offshoot.

Roger told me one of the main qualities needed for surviving on death row was patience. Inmates wait literally for hours to be moved back to their cells, so understaffed is the prison (and since they have recently put videos literally everywhere to watch the staff more than the inmates, many officers have left the prison.) He spoke of inmates waiting hours in the shower, naked, with scalding water pouring over them (they have no control over the temperature. Sometimes the shower is so full of steam the inmate has to crouch on the floor to breath through the small aperture close to the bottom of the door. Once during a very hot summer spell Roger spent six hours in the outside recreation yard for with no water and no hat. After visitation, inmates can frequently wait one to two hours in their tiny booths before being taken back to their cells. I remind potential visitors that thanks to Ron Radford's intervention with the prison ombudsman of Texas, we can now take in $25 to purchase Roger’s lunch, which is most useful given the immense increase of prices in the goods in the vending machines. (Ron, one of the best flamenco guitar players in the USA, is the treasurer of the international support group for Roger and also handles all contacts with his lawyer, Anthony Haughton)

What a privilege for us all to know this extraordinary man, who enriches our lives and that of thousands around the globe by his example of spiritual, deeply human and grateful living. One of the last things he told me was “All I try to do is to be happy”. Quite a program anywhere, but on death row Texas, that’s still something else!