From: Michael F.
DECLARATION UNDER PENALTY OF PERJURY
PURSUANT TO 28 USCA 1746
I, Michael Fidler declare and state as follows:
Name of Program:
High impact
Location of Program:
Mexico
Period of Internment (MM/YY to MM/YY)
07/2000-10/2000
Declarative Statement
I really don’t know how to start this other than to say i would never wish what I or and child that has been to one of these camps on any one. My parents, well my mother and stepfather who continued to abuse me after i came home, signed off their parental rights to this camp and sent me there. I’m not saying that I was any better of a kid than anybody else who went to any of these camps. However I wasn’t in my opinion a very badd kid. I was actually worse after and then I was before. I had ADHD and PTSD And my parents didn’t care enough to take the time to give me hope they didn’t care enough to care for me they couldn’t handle me therefore they sent me away. I’m remember getting off the plane and I think it was 2 guys picked me up at the airport drove me from San Diego to Mexico. I remember was so stressed out that I fell asleep on the drive there and didn’t wake up till we reached the gates of high impact. When we got there we walked in with my stuff over to the male side and they stripped me out down to my underwear sat me down on the table while they went through my stuff that I had in my I believe it was a green or Gray plastic tote from like Walmart. I read the rules. I was then escorted around the mails section shown the bathroom all the areas that I was allowed to go and allowed not to go. I was then told to get down on my stomach face down in the dirt hands behind my back and legs bent and told that when ever they told me to get down that was the position I was to get down in. I remember I was there by myself when I got there there were no other boys yet. I saw a lot come and go. I was there for 3 months and I remember the whole time I had braces and never once saw dentists when the rubber bands broke the wires started breaking the little square metal pieces that held the wire fell off and my gums and cheeks were scraped and bleeding. They shaved my head, I remember the gave me a back pack and made me fill the entire thing with sand. Every pocket. And i had to wear it from the time i woke up to the time i went to bed. Speaking of going to bed. We slept (on a piece of carpet in a sleeping bag with no pillow) and ate (breakfast was plan boiled oatmeal/oats, lunch was beans and rice, dinner was boiled chicken and rice) and did our class work in a military like tent in a cement slab.
I also remember being forced to cut my hair. I had long blonde hair and had never had my head shaved. I remember telling them no I was not going to cut my hair and they threatened me, I do not remember how, but I basically gave in and they shaved my head. In doing so I have a scar on the right side of my head from surgery from when I was born, It ended up getting sunburnt and became itchy. So because I was scratching it it would bleed and then scab over and It would get irritated again and I would scratch it again and it would bleed and so the only time it rained was the day they put me in the dog cages because they told me to leave it alone that I tell them itched and they didn’t give me medicine for it, they never gave me sun screen, so I scratched it one day and they made me go in the dog cages for 24 hours. So there i was in just my underwear and my back pack full of sand. And it rained all night.
I remember the work that they made me I would have to shovel a pile of dirt from one spot to another with no rhyme or reason to why I was doing it. We would also have to do what they called finger picking which they would give us a bucket and we word go around the area picking up anything that basically wasn’t dirt and we had to do this on our hands and knees for a couple of times A-day at least an hour each time. We would also have to rake the sides of the tent and one side of the area that we lived in in those areas that we raked we were not allowed to walk on.
I recall one day before we were going to bed they said to get a good night sleep because we were getting up extra early in the morning and we had something different we were gonna do, aside from waking up in the morning getting in line brushing our teeth cooking breakfast doing our finger picking and raking chores and then doing our classwork for an hour and then our laps for an hour and then our classwork for another hour and the cycle continued throughout the day with breakfast lunch and dinner in between. So on this particular morning they woke us up extra early there was still dark outside they got us up I put my backpack on, I remembered there was a few boys with me at this particular time so I was the only one with a backpack full of sand, so they got us up extra early no breakfast and the entire day from spacesick Li Sun up to Sun down we went down the road to the neighbors and we picked vegetables all day. Now I do not like squash or zucchini or cucumbers or pickles and a member that was one of the things that we were picking was cucumbers or some kind of squash and I remembered that night they made this soup with what we had picked and I had like 3 bowls full of this stuff I was so hungry the only thing we had that day was our little ball of water that we were able to fill up through the faucet.
I was 14 if I remember correctly when I got sent to high impact I’m 34 now I still to this day have triggers and flashbacks though be certain times in the morning if I get up extra early and got out side the smell of the morning air will flash me back.
I give WWASPSurvivors permission to use this statement. I declare under penalty of perjury that the foregoing is true and correct. Executed on(date: MM/DD/YY):
8/12/2020
