Trash - Andy Mulligan [14]
I hope to stay in the country, but I’m not sure I can.
I should say, by the way, that our school does need new energy, as we’ve been getting smaller rather than larger. It’s hard to keep the children attending class: we have to bribe them with food. Our income’s going down, and the food resources are never regular. It’s also so hot, and around the dry season it gets stifling. The school is made of large metal boxes – the iron containers you see on ships and trucks. Ten were donated to start the Mission. They were bolted together, and windows and doors were hacked out – there it was, an instant metal school. Six more crates were bought, and they made the upstairs. Two form a chapel. Three have been knocked together for a babies’ room, with a little play area in one corner. Half of one is a rest area, and the other half is my office.
I only knew Raphael and Gardo by sight, as they rarely came to classes. Few children do after the age of ten. Their families want them picking trash, and it’s hard to argue that education’s ever going to be helpful – so we lose them. Little Jun – the boy they call ‘Rat’ – I knew better. He would visit me in my office, sneaking up when the other children had gone, climbing the outside like a monkey. I’d let him in through a window, I’d give him the ointments and plasters he needed, and – if he wanted one – I’d let him take a bath. I would have to give him food too, because he was evidently starving. We had a rule that food was only provided at lunch time and for half an hour after classes. I broke that rule for Jun, and a handful of others like him, because I have always said that you have to break the rules. I set rules up; then I break them. Sister Olivia broke the rules as well, as you shall hear.
Don’t put your feet on the chairs, don’t take more food than food for you – don’t take food out to your family. Stay in line, say the prayer quietly, wear a shirt when you’re indoors, wash your feet before chapel – I have to laugh myself, but rules are what we live by even though we all know they’re sometimes foolish. One rule that I like a lot, though, is an unusual one: on the stairs up to chapel, nobody must speak.
Why can’t you speak on the chapel stairs? Let me tell you – somewhere it is relevant.
The steps and the chapel are dedicated to the man whose name we bear – Pascal Aguila – one of the country’s lesser-known freedom fighters. The Aguila family donates a large sum of money every year, and they bought those last six containers for our upstairs. They ask that we honour Pascal’s memory – which is a pleasure as well as a duty. He was a man who fought corruption and was shot to death for his pains, so we honour him several times a day, just by being quiet on the stairs. I find that the children never need reminding. Just now and then, if there’s a boy or girl who’s new, they might be chattering; then you hear a great gust of ‘Shhhhhh’, like a breeze, and everyone is silent. We tell them about Pascal, of course, and his picture hangs over the altar. He was a man determined to build things and make life better. He spoke a dozen languages, yet he was from a poor family. He became a lawyer, but he continued to live in a poor quarter of the city. He took on impossible cases, and won them. When squatters had their houses bulldozed, Pascal Aguila forced the government to find them land. When a building project hired a thousand men and failed to supply them with boots, gloves or hats, Pascal Aguila sued, and forced a change in the law that made the construction industry a whole lot safer. When cholera hit the swamps, just up from the docks, Pascal Aguila forced the