Of turtles, and death, and gold

This is the turtle that the kids found on the beach near the school, tangled in a fishing net, a few months ago. The poor thing's got a big tumour (you can see it if you look closely) on its left forelimb, probably due to water pollution...

Many things land on the dirty strip of sand that runs along the school... most of them sad reminders of the brutal and dirty reality our students live in.

The day when the body of a young teenager, dead, strangled, landed on that beach, I stopped, horrified, to think. What a violent, brutal world these kids live in. How close to death do they live! And what kind of a person does living so close to death and dirt make you? What becomes of your perception of life, of people, of good and bad? Every time I go to the school I hear a new story, the terrible life story of one of our students. Many lost their parents to drug trafficking, killed, assassinated. Many live very close to drug trafficking and are probably directly involved in it, maybe acting as couriers or sentry: they're the ones who crack fireworks when the police arrives in the favela, to warn the dealers. (The noise of these fireworks regularly wakes me up at night, coming from all surrounding favelas.) Many of the kids also live far away from their parents, who had to leave them with an aunt or neighbour to go and look for work far away.

What a hard, unforgiving life. I wonder then: how do these kids even manage to come to school, to sit and listen, even undisciplined as they are, to our lessons? If this is the only world they know, what can they expect from school? Surely, nothing. Least of all, that it should help them get out of that world of theirs. They know they're bound to remain in the favela, and perpetuate the situation... Who cares about school then....

But no, we cannot think like that. And many students are there to remind us that there is hope, that there is gold among all this dirt. The bright, the curious, the avid students, they're gold. And there are some in this school. They're the ones we have to work for.