Escape

I followed my students out to the overgrown area that slowly, with hoes, rakes and machetes, is becoming the soccer field. Normally, I would have been teaching at this time, but the vice principal had declared all the students of the school would be working this morning. And, in the hierarchy of our school system, I did not have the power to refuse him. 

My vice principal and I do not have the best relationship. He thinks it’s funny to talk to me in languages he knows I don’t understand. I abhor how he carries out the primary function of his job: disciplining students. Today, he is the one who has the power to make me stay and watch students weed and cut down trees for two hours.

I stopped under a tree to evaluate my plan for sneaking away. 

“Are you going to work too?” one of my students asked.

I shook my head. “I’m going to go home,” I said, tracking the movements of the vice principal. If I left now, would he see me? I watched him pass from group to group.

“Do you have to work again this afternoon?” I ask the same student.

She shrugs. “If the vice principal says to work, then we have to work.” We both knew no student would ever refuse.

I stood there for a few moments longer.

“Madame, what are you waiting for,” she asks. As I watch him disappear behind a grove of trees, I decide I can make a break for it.

What she doesn’t realize is that I, too, am a little afraid of the vice principal.