Tree Girl (16 page)

I knew at that moment that Mario Salvador was a good teacher. A good teacher didn’t criticize an idea simply because it came from a young woman instead of from him. A good teacher embraced new ideas, just as Manuel always had.

We talked long that night about our new school. Mario agreed that he would be the teacher and I would help him with the younger students. We hoped we could find some paper and pencils. After having found a ball, I felt certain that I could find school supplies.

“It may take a while before children start coming to the school,” Mario warned.

“Many things take a while,” I said. “Even starvation takes a while.”

Mario smiled at me. “I know now why you survived
the massacres. You were too stubborn to die.”

I laughed, trying to ignore the lingering feeling that I had survived only because I was a coward.

By the end of that week, I had made it known around the Quiché section of camp that a school would be starting. I encouraged parents to come as well. Many children would be too afraid to come alone, although by now many knew me and knew each other from playing with the ball.

Our school started in October, a time of heavy rains in the Chiapas area of Mexico, and a steady downpour greeted our first day of school. Children walked through ankle-deep mud to join us. Sitting around, covered with pieces of plastic or cardboard, wasn’t as easy as learning in a schoolroom with a blackboard and desk, but it was better than learning nothing and abandoning hope.

Our first students huddled together, their eyes filled with fear and distrust. Still, their curiosity had brought them to us. Standing with no cover, Mario welcomed the small group of thirty children and an equal number of parents that had showed. Then he did
something that surprised me. He walked to the side of the group and picked up off the ground an old and flattened carcass of a dead rat. “What is this?” he said, waving the dead animal at the children.

Some children screamed and some laughed.

“It’s a baby soldier,” Mario said.

The children and parents laughed nervously.

“Tell me—what weighs one hundred and fifty pounds but runs from a mouse?” Mario asked. When nobody guessed, Mario answered, “A soldier without his gun.”

Telling “bad-soldier jokes” was Mario’s way of helping the refugees to confront and fight back against the monsters that had victimized them so tragically. Within minutes, Mario had others making up their own bad-soldier jokes.

“What is this?” a little boy named Pedro asked, flapping his arms and jumping in circles.

We all shrugged our shoulders.

“It’s a soldier without his helicopter.”

Everybody laughed at the child’s joke.

One parent asked, “What do you get when you
mix a pig and a soldier?”

“An ugly pig,” one of the children shouted.

“No,” the parent said. “Nothing. Pigs don’t like soldiers either.”

Some jokes carried the sad and cruel irony of truth and crowded too close to my memories.

“What does a soldier do when he goes to confession?” one mother asked. She answered with “Nothing, he just sits there alone because he’s already killed the priest.”

After the bad-soldier jokes, Manuel found out with playful questions how much each child already knew. Most couldn’t read or write, and so we started by learning the alphabet. “A, B, C, D, E,” we recited. Manuel used an old plank and some charcoal from the fire to make letters. It became a game for each child to learn how to spell and recognize their own name and the names of others.

To encourage more children to attend the school, I announced, “Starting today, only those children who attend school can play with the leather ball.”

When the school first started, I’d been in camp
nearly a year and a half. Many changes had occurred, but the most important change for me was the sound of the shouts and laughter of children that had begun to fill the air. I continued to push many things from my mind, but one by one the children around me began to make their way inside my heart. There was little Isabel, who had escaped her cantón with only her uncle, Jose. And there was Felipe, who played constant tricks on everybody he met. I came to love Miguel, and Luci, and Oscar, and many more. Each of them had their own unique and tragic stories. Each of them came with their problems, but they also brought their potential.

Alicia sat quietly at school each day. She was nearly six, and some days she held Milagro on her lap like a big sister. She still refused to speak, but I had begun to accept her silence. In camp we had found other tarps, so each of us had our own shelter with ropes and sawn boards to hold up the fronts. Alicia and I slept together.

Each day the children learned more in school, and I spent more hours helping Mario to teach them.
When the aid workers heard about our little school, they made sure we received paper and pencils. I felt a certain satisfaction working with the students. I had promised my parents to someday teach others what I had learned. At least I was honoring one of my promises.

I was feeling stronger with each passing week, until Mario came to me one cloudy and windy afternoon three months after school had begun. The children had finished their lessons for the day and were kicking the ball in the rain. Already small cooking fires flickered around the dirty camp, hissing and sparking with the rain. I was crouched beside our fire, making tortillas, when Mario’s soft voice surprised me from behind.

“Gabriela, I’m leaving the camp,” he said.

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

M
ario’s words struck me like a fist, and he saw the shock in my eyes. “I’m returning to Guatemala to fight with the guerrillas and the resistance,” he said.

“I don’t understand,” I stuttered, struggling to comprehend his words. “What about the children?”

“You can teach them,” he said. “Fighting with the guerrillas against the soldiers is the best way I can help my country. The soldiers have become an evil force, more evil than anybody ever imagined.”

“When did you decide this?” I asked.

“When does a cup become full?” Mario said. “This
cup has been filling for a long time. More and more Indios have joined the resistance, and I now believe that is our only hope.”

“And when are you leaving?” I asked.

“Now,” he said quietly.

I broke down in tears and hugged Mario. “Can I go with you?” I pleaded.

He took my face in his hands and kissed my forehead gently. “Your place is here with the children. Be the best teacher you can. You’re a very special person. Maybe someday I will see you again.”

And then, as suddenly as he had appeared, Mario turned and walked away, throwing my world into complete confusion. Mario had no right to leave. Teaching the children was a dream that he and I had shared. It wasn’t my dream alone. I didn’t want the school to be my responsibility. And what if Mario was hurt or killed?

Without thinking, I called Alicia to my side. “We’re leaving also,” I said, not knowing where we would go. I hadn’t admitted it, but Mario had been my only reason for staying in the San Miguel refugee camp. Now that he
was leaving, I suddenly wanted to leave also. Without Mario, I didn’t want to teach the children. Somewhere I would find a different home. I felt a sudden emptiness inside of me. I craved to live again as I once had as a child in the cantón. I missed my old life, and I missed my family. I wanted to return to happier times before the soldiers and before the massacres.

Alicia watched me with big, curious eyes as I rushed around taking down our tarp and folding up my old blanket. As I worked, I justified leaving in my mind. This camp had nearly destroyed my pride and dignity. Our cantón had been clean, not dirty with human waste and apathy. Our homes in Guatemala had lush green forests and mountain streams and colorful birds, with roosters crowing before daybreak. I dearly missed the planting season, when everyone, even the children, helped to carefully place seeds into the womb of our mother earth. Those were the memories of my heart.

But even as I wrapped tortillas into my shawl, I knew my memories were only simple and familiar things that I craved to relive. They were like stories
that old men tell to help recall their youth. They were no longer real.

I was glad that María, Carmen, and Milagro weren’t in camp. They would have made it much harder to leave. I did write them a note that said simply, “I’ve left to find a home.”

Thoughts kept boiling in my mind as I finished preparing. Only one thing was real in my life: this moment. I was a refugee in another country, with no rights, no future, and little respect. But I didn’t plan on going to the United States of America.

My world back in the cantón had been the earth and sky and those things that nature provided. The sun was my father. My mother was the moon and the earth. All that I needed, the sky and the earth provided.

The gringos didn’t know this same mother or father. They knew only a world of cars and computers and televisions, the things that they had created. The land they lived on didn’t hold the sacred ashes of their ancestors or the sacred fluids of their children. I knew that I would never understand the path I followed into the future if I failed to understand the path of the
ancients. It seemed very sad to me to think that some would so quickly trade the rich traditions of our Mayan past for the modern conveniences of a future in America.

With everything I owned wrapped inside a shawl on my back, I took Alicia’s hand and walked quickly from the camp. My restlessness was that of a lost person who searches for a home that no longer exists. I was confused and torn between memories and dreams, between hope and fear. Anger and dissatisfaction demanded that I leave the camp, but I didn’t know where leaving would take me.

Leaving frightened me greatly, but not as much as staying. I had no money, and Alicia and I would have to travel however we could, walking or begging rides in the backs of trucks. Still, I was determined to do anything I had to.

The tortillas I’d made would last me for a few days, and after that, life promised little. Mexico was a very large country, and all that I owned I carried with me. My only connection to the past was a mute six-year-old sister who depended on me for everything. It
frightened me that once again everything familiar was being torn away and separated from my life. María, Carmen, little Milagro, all the children I’d helped, and yes, those who had helped me, all would soon fade to memories in my mind.

I knew María and Carmen would be hurt by my sudden leaving, but I wasn’t their daughter. What about their dreams? Their futures? Did they want a refugee camp to be their home forever? In any case, they would survive without me. As for the schoolchildren, they weren’t mine. Nor was Milagro, even though I had helped to care for her. I would miss little Milagro, but María would care for her. Alicia was my only real family, and I was willing to sacrifice everything to find a place we could truly call home.

To reach the highway, I needed to walk through the middle of camp. I walked rapidly among the tarps, the slatted wood lean-tos, and the plastic tents that now made up the San Miguel refugee camp. Much had changed from that day when I first arrived nearly two years earlier. Life was still hard, but children now laughed and shouted. People waited patiently in lines
for supplies that were brought to their section of camp. The dead-body trucks no longer drove through camp each morning. They even had a small clinic set up in a trailer. The line to see the nurses sometimes stretched far across the camp.

“Hello, Gabriela,” people called as we walked from the camp.

“Gabriela, come play with us,” the children called.

“Maybe tomorrow,” I called back.

Today, it seemed that everybody recognized me. They waved and called out as I walked faster to escape.

“Come here, Gabriela,” one woman called to me. “Look at this.”

Because I had passed very near to the woman, Vera, I reluctantly stopped to watch her son writing with a pencil on a piece of paper. In big block letters he had spelled out THOMAS. He looked up at me and smiled through missing front teeth. “Thomas,” he said to me. “I can write my own name.”

“Very good,” I said. “You’ve worked so hard.”

“No,” said his mother. “It’s you who has worked hard. It’s you who started the school and brought the
teacher and the children together. Because of you we have a school. That’s why Thomas can write his name. Thank you.”

“Tomorrow I want to learn my last name,” Thomas said. “Will you teach me?”

I fought back the emotions churning up inside of me. This was a refugee camp full of dreamers who lived on false hope. I was leaving this place and following real hope. There was nothing wrong with wanting to find someplace that could be a real home for Alicia and me. But even as I struggled with my emotions, I still didn’t know where or what home was.

I nodded to Thomas, but I lied. I was leaving.

When I reached the edge of camp, it was almost dark and I didn’t know where to spend the night. It would be dangerous to travel the road at this time. Without giving my decision much thought, I walked with Alicia out away from camp toward a large machichi tree on a nearby hill. After dark, we would sleep under that tree, then rise early before dawn and begin our journey to another place.