The first thing I noticed going through the gates was how run down it looked. They ushered me inside and I heard nothing but silence in the hallways. There were girls walking around in single file lines from place to place but no one spoke at all. Classrooms were silent. There was no noise at all except maybe the wind or the staff. The staff were all Mexican and did not speak English. The only people there that did were the administrators who were American and turns out they owned the place. I would later learn that all these programs were owned by the same family which operated out of Utah. This was the gate we passed through into the facility and the of my freedom I would see for almost 6 months: I was surrounded by American girls my age and one middle aged looking Mexican woman and I assume told to strip in Spanish. Unfortunately, I didn’t understand Spanish so the lady was becoming more frustrated with me. One of the girls raised her hand and asked something in Spanish to this lady and I guess she got agreement on it because the girl turned to me and told me in English that I needed to strip out of my clothes. I complied and stripped down naked in this room full of girls and this adult stranger. They handed me a sweat shirt and pants that I would have to wear for the rest of my time there. All my belongings and regular clothes were taken away from me for the remainder of my time there. Casa was operating on the bones of an old motel (Ironically, the old motel used to be called Motel California) and every room was jam packed full of dirty mattresses everywhere. They had obviously gone over legal capacity because there were 4-5 dirty mattresses piled on every small 20×20 room’s floor. Some of the mattresses had sheets and some did not. They ended up moving the girls out of the main building to some trailers sitting on the lot. The small trailers would house 40 girls per trailer with the bunks stacked besides each other. Because of the living conditions, almost everyone had lice and scabies and there wasn’t really any treating it. This appears to be a picture of the trailers after WWASP was abandoned. To give you an idea, there’s 40+ beds in this long line and we were all to sleep here with 2 bathroom stalls in the door at the end: There are communal showers beyond that door next to the bathroom stalls. The rules were that we had exactly 7 minutes to shower from the time we walked in dress to the time we walked out and there was no hot water. We often had shampoo or soap – never both at the same time so it made showering pretty quick and gross but most of the time we’re trying to not get completely immersed in the water either because it was freezing cold and the trailers were often freezing so we didn’t want to shiver all night. The entire facility was fenced with 30+ foot walls except the part facing the ocean. There was only a small sliver in a classroom we sat in where we could see the ocean but I dreamed of running out that window and finding a way to scurry down whatever drop there was to get to the ocean and hopefully escape. I’m glad I never tried because what I didn’t see from my point of view was that there was a huge drop which you can see here: One girl eventually did jump off of there but she didn’t escape and instead broke her leg. Unfortunately, it did not change things at Casa or close that school down though the Mexican authorities would later shut it down in 2004 for child torture but it was long after I was gone. This is a more recent photo.  One of the girls from the WWASP group dropped by Casa recently and took photos. Someone obviously touched up the paint on that red fence but beyond that, it looks EXACTLY the same. I was assigned a “buddy” for the first three days who would be exempt from the normal rules of no speaking to explain things to me. My buddy explained that we were not allowed to speak to each other ever. Since none of the staff spoke English, we were never allowed to speak English when we spoke and the only time we could speak was to ask staff a question. The only exception to this rule was when we were in our hourly group a day because one of the American administrators or their wives would be in there with us or this ominous thing that happened once a month called a seminar. There were no therapists. There were no medical staff. We have a “family rep” who would talk to our parents on our behalf. We couldn’t write to friends or whoever we pleased. There was no list of patient rights and responsibilities. It wasn’t a treatment center, it was something called a “behavioral modification center.” We were only allowed to write to our parents and we could not seal the letters – we had to allow our family worker to read them and decide if it would be sent. We could only receive mail from our parents. There would be no communication to the outside world and outside of the one hour of group a day (which was NOT fun – I’ll get to that shortly), there was completely isolation except for the occasional knowing glace at each other or non-verbal communication we could get away with. We could not move or do anything freely. We had to ask to stand up, sit down, use the restroom, etc. Staff were expected to be referred to as “mama” or “papa.”. The facility was coed but we were not allowed