Category: Damien Riley on Teaching

I was very fortunate to take many of my fourth and 5th graders in my starry starry daylight career as a elementary school teacher to the museum. I took them once or twice to the Bowers museum in Santa Ana which has a natural history component to it. We studied the amera Indians and their customs and as we were walking through the art and the docent was leading her tour I noticed one of my little Hispanic students who is actually a transplant she was a mic from children she was the child of migrant worker parents from Salinas county. Somehow she ended up with me.

I always had to have like a caboose parent or another teacher that was with us to kind of keep an eye on the end of the line. Kids wander as you probably know. If you haven’t had them yourself you were a kid did you remember getting lost in the supermarket grabbing hold of a soft hand think it was your mother finding out it was a strange man. Yeah I know if that’s happened to all of us.

We lost track of her we don’t know where she went we didn’t know where she went I should say and when we finally found her she was staring at a pot. I asked the docent as I gather her together and started to bring her back to the bus I asked the docent with the pot was in the house it said well that is apart from guatemala. This is remarkable to me and just gave me the chills because you see this little girl had been transplanted from Guatemala to a day worker and her parents were both missing fingers from being pickers in the Salinas valley. But very recently in her 10 year old life she had been accessing the art of guatemala. She was a little flower from Guatemala. In touch with the art and science and feelings of guatemala. The descent told me that those were the commoners possessions in Guatemala and immediately I was flushed. I recalled what she must have gone through in that third world country and a third world country area. It makes me realize how precious all of us humans are. Also it makes me realize how we take in and identify the things of our home. As long as we’re willing to share and see that as part of our soul we fall apart. We owe our breath to the vehicle of life, the woman. I was extra attentive to Anna of Guatemala the whole year.