Police found more than half a million “yaba” pills, an illegal methamphetamine and caffeine cocktail popular in many parts of Southeast Asia, in the house he was renting in southern Thailand.
“I spent 20 years, five months and 15 days in prison. I was sentenced to death, along with a person who was executed by lethal injection.
I knew I was next, that I was going to die.
There were enough yaba tablets in that house to fill a complete truck. They were not mine; but it didn’t matter.
I arrived at prison and everything happened quickly: they accused me of drug trafficking and sentenced me to death. Back then, I was ready to die.
Stigma of the death penalty
For the next two years, I had to carry a sign at all times that said Death Penalty. I faced death for eight years. But it was during the last two that I accepted it as they put me in a special training course on how to deal with the countdown to death.
That same year there was a big flood and I was transferred to another prison. It was there that I was told that I had been granted a royal pardon for my death. My Nigerian friends were also forgiven. We were nine people. We bake a cake.
Mariyam Tadein shows a video of her entire village coming out to welcome her after her release from prison.
We were relieved to be alive, although I felt like I was already dead, because I was facing the rest of my life in prison.
However, I told myself: this is going to be a long wait, so I better focus on something.
I learned to sew in prison classes and then they put me to work. The more I worked, the more meaning I felt.
I focused on the pattern of the fabric and the thread. Thread by thread. Daily.
I also got privileges at a prison I shared with 4,000 other women, like showering later that day. Life became easier.
The most difficult moment for me was when I was transferred to Songkhla prison in southern Thailand. The other inmates were very poor.
Inmates in a prison in southern Thailand participate in sewing courses.
It was hard for me because at some point my family stopped coming to visit me. They thought he would remain in prison forever. What was the point of visiting? My husband moved on; he remarried. It was very difficult to discover it.
I am very proud of how I was able to focus on work. I would focus on the different patterns.
I wouldn’t allow myself to focus on my story, on what led me to prison. Or about my husband’s new life. I couldn’t change that. It was already done. I needed to move on.
When I felt the bad thoughts coming, I went back to the fabric, back to the pattern.
Patterns of life and death.
Everything changed during the tsunami of 2004. I was told to sew cloth bags for the bodies. I continued cutting a lot of fabric because there were many deaths.
That’s how I got distracted from my own life. I would focus on the pattern.”
In 2021, Mariyam, aged 52, received a second royal pardon for good behavior and was released. The owner of a sewing company who had previously trained prisoners offered him a job. Today, at 56 years old, she works and sews, and lives with her children and her husband, with whom she is reunited.
The United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) has provided vocational training equipment to nearly 60 prisons in Thailand, enabling access to practical skills such as carpentry and sewing, improving opportunities for prisoners during and after incarceration.