Neema placed a blank sheet and three pens on the table, then looked at Timo.
“Today you choose who stays in this room. You can choose me, Amina, both of us, or no conversation at all.”
Timo looked at Amina long enough that she knew the answer before he said it.
“Auntie should wait outside first.”
Something dropped inside Amina’s chest. She had spent days following routes, receipts, versions and permits to reach a point where Timo could be heard. Now the space he needed did not include her.
“Okay,” she said.
She left and sat on a corridor bench with her phone on silent. Through the frosted glass she could not make out what happened inside, and she did not move closer.
The first minutes felt long. Questions kept forming in her head—Kijani? The videos? Seven days? Phones? Letters? Every one of them mattered to the case. That did not mean she was entitled to ask them.
Inside, Neema gave Timo the paper and told him he could simply draw the places he had been. He did not have to describe what happened in each place.
About twenty minutes later, Neema came out.
“Timo wants you in now. I will read only what he has agreed can appear in the official summary.”
Timo had drawn three boxes: **Main**, **Kijani**, **Main**. A van connected the first two. Beside Kijani were seven small marks.
Neema read the approved summary: Timo had been moved from the main campus to Kijani and back; his first cycle involved seven days; progress videos were recorded using cue cards with opening sentences.
Timo nodded.
“Other parts of the conversation about family conflict and his feelings are not included,” Neema said.
One section of the paper had been blacked out.
Amina did not look at it twice.
“Fine.”
Timo watched her carefully. “You don’t want to know?”
“I want to know many things. Not everything I want belongs to me.”
“What if it’s important?”
“Neema will act if there is a safety issue she has to act on. But this case should not force you to repeat things you do not want to repeat.”
Timo rolled a pen between his fingers. “The videos were boring.”
Amina wanted to ask whether he had been forced. Instead she said, “The summary says cue cards. Do you want anything else about the videos included?”
“Not now.”
“Okay.”
Neema pointed to the seven marks. “Tell us what these mean, only as far as you want.”
“We would go there, stay, then go back,” Timo said. “It wasn’t exactly seven days for everyone. My first time was seven.”
The hand signal from the visiting room now had meaning without anyone forcing it into one. Amina wrote only: **Timo confirms first Kijani cycle = seven days.**
“And the route?”
“Van. We did not have our phones.”
Amina did not ask whether the phones had been taken by force. “Can that go in the summary?”
Timo thought. “Say we didn’t have them. Don’t say they stole them.”
Neema changed the wording in front of him.
That small edit showed Amina the difference between this process and the scripted progress videos. Here Timo could change the sentence adults were writing about him.
Near the end, Amina asked, “Is there something you want me to do that is not about the case?”
At first Timo shook his head. Then he looked at his papers.
“Letters.”
“What letters?”
“Only if you want to explain,” Neema said.
“We wrote letters. Reflection letters. Some to parents, some to ourselves.”
“Were they sent?” Amina asked.
“I don’t know. Sometimes we put them in a box.”
He described a large box at Kijani. He had never seen stamps or a postal bag. He had assumed staff sent them.
“Do you want that in the summary?”
“Yes. The box was at Kijani.”
Neema drafted a sentence and read it back. Timo removed the word “confiscated” because he had not used it, replacing it with “collected.”
Ruth was waiting outside when the interview ended. When she learned that Timo had first asked Amina to leave, pain and relief crossed her face together. Amina let Neema explain only the approved summary.
For the first time since the complaint began, Timo was not the final piece of evidence in someone else’s case. He was deciding which parts of his life could become a record.
Before leaving, he called Amina back.
“One thing I forgot. That box wasn’t empty. There were lots of letters. A lot.”
Neema did not ask whose. She asked whether Timo wanted the county to trace the box as a property and records issue. He said yes, on one condition: other children’s letters were not to be opened because of his case.
Amina wrote that boundary down. If the box was found, they would begin with inventory tags, dates and custody, not the contents.
He tells them about a box of unsent letters.
#