Tree Girl by Ben Mikaelsen Ch14

1. Highlight 5 vocabulary words that you do not know and write the definition in the margin.  Label each with a (V).

2.  Ask 5 questions in the margins.  Label each with a (?)


3.  React to 5 events in the text.  Label each reaction with a (*).


4.  Make 5 connections to the text, text-to-self · text-to-text · text-to-world.  Label each with a ©

5. Highlight 5 quotes that reveal characterization. Label each with a (0+<). Tell what each reveals.

As the months passed in camp, new refugees arrived with fresh stories of more military death squads and new massacres in the cantons and pueblos back in Guatemala. Each day more people were being taken from their homes never to be seen again, and more refugees on the trail were coming under attack by the soldiers. Still, we feared that the Guatemalan Kaibiles would soon attack our camp in Mexico.

We lived in fear, but by year's end the number of trucks arriving with donated food and supplies had more than doubled. Aid workers began construction on two rows of sheet metal buildings for the oldest and the sickest refugees. Still, it was dangerous collecting food. Strong people muscled their way to the front of every crowd, while the old and the weak watched helplessly. Sometimes whole families waited all day only to watch the last truck drive away empty.

One day I ran to an arriving truck. Before a crowd formed, the driver crawled from the cab. He carried a stick, and as I watched, he scraped a long line in the dirt from the truck out across the open ground. "I give food only to people who stand on this line,” the driver shouted.

At first refugees ran and jostled for positions the line, but soon everyone waited patiently. I what the driver had done. Usually, the old and sick never had a chance. Until that day, the only place a line formed was at the water truck, because they a single faucet.

Other drivers must have seen what happened. Soon, all trucks refused to unload unless we formed a line. When this happened, lines began forming even before the trucks arrived. Overnight, collecting food ceased to. Take up all of my time. For the first time, I noticed refugees standing or sitting around camp, visiting with one another.

With the extra time, I found myself restless, unable to run from my emotions and thoughts by working every waking hour. In the evenings I took Alicia with me when I went to listen to the men talk about life outside the camp. Because of my age, and because I was a female, I might as well have been invisible during these discussions, but on the nights that Mario Salvador stayed later than the rest, I would sit and talk with him. He reminded me of Manuel, though younger.

Because of Mario, I found new hope in the future. Mario never talked about toilets that flushed or swimming pools. He spoke about the children and the tragedies that war brought to them. He spoke of the Indios and of self-worth. For the first time, I allowed myself to recount events from the night of my quinceañera.

I shared memories of the night I returned to our canton from market, and I allowed myself to speak of the massacre in the pueblo. Mario listened to patiently, nodding kindly to show his understanding.

He even wept quietly at times.

Seldom did Mario speak of himself except to say that he had lost his wife to the soldiers. "L loved her very much," he told me.

One night I asked him, "When do you think the war will end?"

"Which war?" he replied.

"I know only about the one with the soldiers and the guerrillas," I said.

Mario shook his head: "That's only one of many wars. For you, being a female is a war that you'll fight all of your life. For both of us, being Indio is a war fought even before the soldiers came."

I nodded. I had been fighting so hard.

Mario continued speaking. "Three years ago, the rains failed to come where we lived. Our crops grew in fields of weeds. Finally, in desperation, my brother Edgar, and my father, they decided to travel to the western coast to pick cotton for a season. This frightened me because I'd heard how the rich Latinos treated the Indio.

They rode for a whole day in the back of an overloaded truck to the coast. The patron who owned large farm where they worked, he treated my brother and father like dogs. They had worked for only a month when one day the patron had airplanes spray chemicals on the fields without warning. Chemicals landed directly on Edgar and two other workers. When the spray cleared, the three couldn't breathe, and they gasped and held their hands to their faces.

"The patron claimed he had personally warned the workers, but Father told me later the patron wasn't even in the field that day. For three days Edgar's skin blistered and he struggled to breathe, so father brought him home. For a month the curandero did everything she could to heal Edgar with herbs, but nothing helped. His breathing became very shallow and he finally died.

"We were helpless to do anything, because we were only Indios. Our voices and our lives meant less to the Latinos and to the government than even the dogs. I don't think the patron would have ever sprayed his dogs. There was nothing we could do when Edgar died except bury him and say our prayers."

Mario stared at the ground as he spoke, his voice growing hard like mud in the hot sun. “After Edgar’s death Father returned to the farm, but the patron refused to meet with him. The patron claimed that Father was a troublemaker and that if he didn’t leave right away, he would be arrested. And so Father left without even an apology from the man who had killed his son. An Indio has no right to complain.”

"I'm sorry;" I said.

Mario nodded. "We have many wars and many enemies," he said.

Because of our talk that night, I found myself the next day thinking about my people, the Indios, while I stood in line waiting for water. Here in the camp, and whole generation of children was growing up with no education of any kind. They weren’t learning to weave, plant, or cook. Nor were they learning to read or write. They were growing up as beggars, knowing only the dirty hand-to-mouth existence of a refugee camp. That day, waiting in line, an idea formed in mind.

One week later, as Mario and sat talking, I suggested my idea. "What do you think about starting school for the children?"

Mario looked at me to see if I was serious.

"We already have a teacher," I added with a smile. "This is our home now, and we might be here for years. The children still need to be educated. Otherwise, being Indio will always be a shameful thing."

Mario nodded. "You're right. Children grow up with nothing if they don't learn pride and dignity."

I knew at that moment that Mario Salvador was a good teacher. A good teacher didn't criticize an idea simply because it came from a young woman instead of from him. A good teacher embraced new ideas, just as Manuel always had.

We talked long that night about our new school. Mario agreed that he would be the teacher and I would help him with the younger students. We hoped we could find some paper and pencils. After having found a ball, I felt certain that I could find school supplies.

"It may take a while before children start coming to the school," Mario warned.

"Many things take a while," said. "Even starvation takes a while."

Mario smiled at me. "I know now why you survived the massacres. You were too stubborn to die."

I laughed, trying to ignore ·the lingering feeling that I had survived only because I was a coward.

By the end of that week, I had made it known around the Quiche section of camp that a school would be starting. I encouraged parents to come as well. Many children would be too afraid to come alone, although by now many knew me and knew each other from playing with the ball.

Our school started in October, a time of heavy rains in the Chiapas area of Mexico, and a steady downpour greeted our first day of school. Children walked through ankle-deep mud to join us. Sitting around, covered with pieces of plastic or cardboard, wasn't as easy as learning in a schoolroom with a black board and desk, but it was better than learning nothing and abandoning hope.

Our first students huddled together, their eyes filled with fear and distrust. Still, their curiosity brought them to us. Standing with no cover, Mario welcomed the small group of thirty children and an equal number of parents that had showed. Then he did something that surprised me. He walked to the side of the group and picked up off the ground an old and flattened carcass of a dead rat. "What is this?" he said, waving the dead animal at the children.

Some children screamed and some laughed.

"It's a baby soldier," Mario said.

The children and parents laughed nervously.

"Tell me-what weighs one hundred and fifty pounds but runs from a mouse?" Mario asked. When nobody guessed, Mario answered, "A soldier without his gun."

Telling "bad-soldier jokes" was Mario's way of helping the refugees to confront and fight back against the monsters that had victimized them so tragically. Within minutes, Mario had others making up their own bad-soldier jokes.

"What is this?" a little boy named Pedro asked, flapping his arms and jumping in circles.

We all shrugged our shoulders.

"It's a soldier without his helicopter."

Everybody laughed at the child's joke.

One parent asked, "What do you get when you mix a pig and a soldier?"

"An ugly pig," one of the children shouted.

"No," the parent said "Nothing. Pigs don’t like soldiers either."

Some jokes carried the sad and cruel irony of truth and crowded too close to my memories.

"What does a soldier do when he goes to confession?" one mother asked. She answered with "Nothing, he just sits there alone because he's already killed the priest."

After the bad-soldier jokes, Manuel found out with playful questions how much each child already knew. Most couldn't red or write, and so we started by learning the alphabet. "A, B, C, D, E," we recited. Manuel used an old plank and some charcoal from the fire to make letters. It became a game for each child to learn how to spell and recognize their own name and the names of others.

To encourage more children to attend the school, I announced, "Starting today, only those children who attend school can play with the leather ball."

When the school first started, I'd been in camp nearly a year and a half. Many changes had occurred, but the most important change for me was the sound of the shouts and laughter of children that had begun to fill the air. I continued to push many things from my mind, but one by one the children around me began to make their way inside my heart. There was little Isabel, who had escaped her canton with only her uncle, Jose. And there was Felipe, who played constant tricks on everybody he met. I came to love Miguel, and Luci, and Oscar, and many more. Each of them had their own unique and tragic stories. Each of them came with their problems, but they also brought their potential.

Alicia sat quietly at school each day. She was nearly six, and some days she held Milagro on her lap like a big sister. She still refused to speak, but I had begun to accept her silence. In camp we had found other tarps, so each of us had our own shelter with ropes and sawn boards to hold up the fronts. Alicia and I slept together.

Each day the children learned more in school, and spent more hours helping Mario to teach them. When the aid workers heard about our little school, they made sure we received paper and pencils. I felt a certain satisfaction working with the students. I had promised my parents to someday teach others what I had learned. At least I was honoring one of my promises.

I was feeling stronger with each passing week, until Mario came to me one cloudy and windy afternoon three months after school had begun. The children had finished their lessons for the day and were kicking the ball in the rain. Already small cooking fires flickered around the dirty camp, hissing and sparking with the rain. I was crouched beside our fire, making tortillas, when Mario's soft voice surprised me from behind.

"Gabriela, I'm leaving the camp," he said.