horror.

Horror.
A haunting shriek cuts through the gloomy moment of silence and echoes shrilly off a long cold corridor.  As the cry subsides into eerie stillness, the brown light from a single lightbulb suspended high above flickers and  my corner of the room-like hallway feels colder and darker than just a minute ago. I huddle, seeking the strength and comfort the chipped cement walls give me. These cold walls are my mama. I go to them for  hugs when I need refuge and comfort. They are where I pour out my anger; when I am alone for a moment I recklessly pound and kick on them, giving them my emotions for safekeeping. Because they sympathize. They see the things that happen in this place. The pain inflicted by the stick-wielding  People (although they don't deserve to be called that) who beat me when I can't follow their rapidly barked instructions. The shouted virulent insults they rain down on me in moments of my failure. The way my self worth, my culture, my personality, the people and things I love, and even my body are jerked from my tenuous grasp and buried deep deep under the way they make me be.

My imagination runs wild as I walk through the cold wide hallways of the school where I teach. Usually I see the ancient block walls as opportunities for posters and bright paint colors and things to make it a friendly fun place for children to enter and learn. But  when the Carefree Children go home and the night is approaching and I'm the only one left in the cold shadowy school I think about what other things these walls have seen; to me  the cold foreboding unfriendliness of the building and its bleak surroundings are the picture of Canada's shame, the residential school system. And although I have no proof that it actually was once a place of horror, my imagination, maybe my intuition tells me it was. And if something good can come from the horror of those, it has, making me a better teacher.
That haunting picture of a small one crouched by the icy walls crying for home and love and comfort inspires me to do anything to make this building a happy place, even a shelter from some child's unhappy home life.  That child's scream will echo often through my mind, reminding me to pull my children even closer, to keep them safe and make them feel secure. And When in my mind I'm the sobbing small one hugging the wall because she has no mama, I instinctively love my students a little more, not wanting to think that could happens to any of them. And when my heart is cowering under  imagined insults and cruelty of a piously clothed but wicked hearted human, my inside cries, giving me courage to push aside my impatience and say an extra word of praise instead of reproof.

I have no connection and no scars from the residential school era and am not First Nation myself, but because I know and love people whose lives have been rerouted through horror as an effect of these schools, I feel a tiny bit of their pain.  I wish I could be part them, of their mourning  and overcoming. As it is all I can do is give them support, share a tinybit of courage, and always prayers for them. I silently mourn their losses, love a few of their children, and do my best to make sure none of these horrific things happen to anyone I can protect.
I have a challenge to anyone who reads this. Can this be a Generation of Peace? A Generation of Kindness? A Generation of Acceptance? A Generation of Understanding? And most of all, a Generation of Love? One Generation with *so many names.*
I'm going to be one of that Generation.

says the Sunset Watcher