Things That Make Me Feel Safe

Safety has become a hot button issue here. A string of scary and upsetting events that has occurred in the last couple of weeks, including some teachers from the other school in town being robbed at gunpoint on our walking route to school and the owner of a local restaurant being murdered, has made everyone in our program on edge, to say the least. So much so that one of our teachers told us tonight that she feels so unsafe that she has to go home.

We are trying to tackle the gravity of this news. It is very disheartening and all of us are feeling such a wide range of emotions concurrently. At the root of it all, we feel a sense of loss. We spend so much time with one another and to lose a piece of this of this puzzle is very disorienting. This teacher has been living in a great deal of fear (more than we realized) and hit her breaking point. We are sad for her, and sad for us. She clearly feels incredibly guilty for making this tough decision and it is not one that she has come to lightly, nor is it one that anyone would like to have to make.

Above all, though, I feel most sad for this teacher’s students. Many of these second-graders have parents in the states, are being raised by grandparents, aunts, or whoever can take care of them and consistency is seriously lacking in their lives. For some of them, school is the only thing in their lives that they can really depend on and in their little world, that consistency has been taken away.

I also feel angry. I’m angry that we all have to fix this with such little notice. We don’t have a lot of time to make this transition (two days in fact). We all feel overwhelmed already and are just finally starting to feel comfortable in our positions, learning what this whole teaching business is really about. At this moment, this added challenge feels sort of like being kicked while your down.

In times like this it is important that one feels safe. That is the root problem here, right, safety? I am taking the obvious necessary precautions (not taking my laptop on my walk to school, staying alert, avoiding travelling alone, we are trying to arrange a bus service), but there are other, more fundamental ways that I have found to help me feel safe. Most of these things are rooted in my “other life”. For example, my sister just sent a care package with dried mangos and Trader Joe’s trail mix. These make me feel safe…  As does peanut butter, following my friends’ lives on facebook, doing yoga on the back porch of the house, escaping into season 2 of Lost and finding new places to go swimming.

For example, two weeks ago, a past student of SJBS took me to a beautiful waterfall in a town nearby. That made me feels safe. Even more exciting, I just recently discovered that there is a pool in Cofradia. The fact there is a pool at all in this little town (where the only places in town with A/C is the evangelical church and a suspicious chinese restaurant) is incredible. It is no normal pool. It is an incredible pool equipped with beer and snacks. It is built from rocks and makes me feel like I am in the Neverland of “Hook”, the movie of my youth with Robin Williams. Roofio, roofio, roo-fie- oooooo… If you don’t know that reference, go rent that movie. Immediately.

Waterfall #1

I digress.  My point is that I am really trying to get in touch with these little reminders of the “real” non-Cofradia world. This town can feel isolating, and these reminders are kind of like the charms in “Inception,” helping me believe that I am real, and that something exists outside of this alternate universe that I have fallen into where I pretend to be a teacher and everyone stares at me. Okay, that might be a little ridiculous.

Today was a hard day for our team. Losing a member of this team (or family, really) plants the tiniest of seeds in all of our minds that packing up and going home is in the realm of possible choices. When down comforters, warm water, and bock choy seem so tempting already, that seed of doubt can undermine the work that we are doing here. Maybe, though, this whole thing can pull us closer together. Either way, I will grasp on to these little roots with all my might.

The new "spot."