My 2nd Atlanta Write Club Winning Story about the first week of GLOBE Academy

Write Club:  You get one topic and 7 minutes.  My topic:  War.

Here is the audio if you want to listen along with the read:
http://writeclubatlanta.com/write-club-atl-episode-105-the-mortar-of-civilization/ 

War

By Michael Otieno Molina

The first week, mierda.  It is still the first week.  Every morning I wake up to the dark and dream that it’s Labor Day or Thanksgiving or Christmas, sweet baby Jesus Christmas.  But it’s still only the first week.  Already the smell is swollen in my nostrils.  It is the smell of huffed taxidermy, stuffed geese and bears and pumas and foxes.  The fur.  The fur.  The sweat-mudded fur of kindergarteners in from recess after three days of rain.  The first week of a start-up charter school is war.

Day 1 - 1100 hours 

A teacher calmly walks into the office.  A boy is on the floor.  He is seizing.  He is epileptic and he is seizing.  “Call his mother,” I say as I power walk down the hallway to her door and see children sitting calmly.  The co-teacher is next to the boy, her hand floats under his head.  I relieve her.  Are you okay?  The boy is not responsive.  His eyes are rolling up into his forehead, his pants are wet with urine.  I pick him up and carry him to the nurse’s room.  We don’t yet have the funds for a school nurse so I sit him on the chair.  He slumps into his shoulder.  His mother arrives and apologizes for the scare.  Tears bubble up from her throat as she describes how it feels to see him like this.  He was only diagnosed a few months ago.  Poor mother.  Poor child. 

Day 2 – 0930 hours.

The playground is flooded.  A pipe has burst and the playground is flooded. This is a language immersion Kindergarten through 3^rd grade elementary school.  This means that on every other day the children spend the entire day immersed in French, Mandarin, or Spanish.  This is our second immersion day and the children are frustrated with trying to understand their teachers, teachers frustrated with trying to comfort away their first days of school anxiety in Mandarin or French or Spanish.  This is our second immersion day and all the teachers want to do is step outside and breathe and cry a little and see that the sun still shines… all the little people want to do is go outside and run and scream and spin and fall and get up and laugh and dig for worms… all I want to do is see them on the playground that I and 50+ parents spent months weeding and cutting and weeding and cutting in preparation for this moment… All I want to do is see them play and the playground is flooded.  

Day 3 - 0900 hours

Reports of Pediculosis Capitis.  Head lice on day three.  A big snaggle-toothed boy has arrived at school a day after his mother discovered the little blood-suckers climbing through his hair.  His mother sent him back too soon.  We must check him and every child in the class for nits and lice.  We must do so without scaring them, without shaming the boy.  We must rid the room of the furniture parents had donated and moved in to the classroom only days ago.  He tells me his mother works at a hospital.  My mother works at a hospital.  But it doesn’t matter.  I found lice in his hair and he has to go home. 

Day 4 – 1200 hours 

30 shots fired at an elementary school in our district and we weren’t notified.  One mom, the wife of a man who has cut our grass and donated a projector and a P.A. system comes in the office frantic.  She has walked into the front door, which is propped open for a late delivery of computers the teachers needed three weeks ago.  She is anxious and furious that she just walked in the building.  “Did you hear?”  She asks tensely, trying to control her fear and anger as she walks past me to begin checking the other doors of the building herself.  “Do you know what’s going on?”  I didn’t.  There is an active school shooting at a school a mile from my house, the school my daughter is zoned for, where she would be if I hadn’t enrolled her in GLOBE.  Thirty shots fired.  This mom leads me through the building to check that every door is locked.  Two of them are not.  Her face is hot with fear.  “My son needs to be safe.”  At pick up she holds the entire line to suggest calling post, walkie talkies, to ask about the PA system, lockdown procedures.  She doesn’t care that people behind her are waiting.  Her son must be safe.  “There are people who hate what we are doing, Michael.  Did you see the story on CNN about the International Community School?  There were crazy people in the comments talking about race mixing and race war.  My son is half Black and he must be safe.” 

Day 5 – 1800 hours. 

The end of our first day without major incident.  My wife calls but the cell phone signals are no match for the old sixties cinder block we are wrapped in.  She calls back immediately.  I hear her voice and my daughter screaming in the background.  The call fails.  Something is wrong.  I run out of the building and call back.  “Maya broke her arm.”   The call drops under the weight of my heart.  I tell Ms. Murray the building is hers in jump into my car.  I call back and hear my daughter whimpering.  We are on our way to Dekalb Medical, come now.  Call fails.  I race to the emergency room to find my daughter’s wrist contorted.  She is screaming.  I hold her face to mine and say quietly that the pain is the beginning of the healing.  12 hours and two hospitals later, we are home with a child who has never had Tylenol now doped up on one dose of morphine, two doses of kedamine, and the fatigue of two attempts at resetting her wrist.

Saturday

Community meeting with angry neighbors, all three of them.  They have sent a list of complaints to every school board member, the state-wide coordinator of charter schools, and the GLOBE Academy governing board chair.  The letter is dated August 14^th 2013 – our first day of school.  The letter bemoans traffic and parking inconveniences that may happen in the year 2018, when we grow to use more of our 9.79 acre campus for Kindergarten through 8^th grade.  The letter demands the potential problems be rectified before they occur.  I ask the three angry neighbors,

“please describe the specific impacts our school has had on your family or lifestyle in the seven days since we have been opened.” 

One has had to change his morning jogging route. 

One has to leave for work 10 minutes early. 

I take the side of my hand and carve an imaginary line across the table.  “Here is the line,” I say.  “You do not have a seat at the table in the decision of whether or not we will expand.  That decision is made.  We need and want you at the table to help us figure out how to expand with the least possible impacts on OUR neighborhood.”  I was tired from the first week of a start-up charter school and I had no energy for politics.  I felt like George Bush after September 11^th.  You are either with GLOBE or against GLOBE.

The first human technology was language.  In language, humans converted the energy of grunts and moans into words the way computers convert ones and zeros into information.  Language was the Internet before electricity, it is where we searched for meaning, for joy, for truth, for understanding.  Language bore the stories that taught fire and taught medicine and taught philosophy.  Language is the driver of human evolution, the all spark, the engine of human understanding and the catalyst of human potential.  Language is the mortar of civilization and war is what happens when language fails.   

My name is Michael Otieno Molina and I helped launch the GLOBE Academy, DeKalb County’s first and only free, public dual-language immersion charter school.  I work for the future of the world.  I poured blood, sweat, and tears into empowering generations of children with multi-lingual, mutli-cultural fluency so they can access multiple repositories of human knowledge.  I am Mike Molina and I did a tour in the war to end all wars.