47/365 - I have met evil

I always talked openly about my primary school teacher.

In Romania for the first four years we have the same teacher, unlike the UK where each year it’s a different person.

Even for that period, she was a monster! They say not to speak ill of the death, but the violence she was capable of was shocking.

Now she would be jailed.

Things like pulling your hair out until you looked disheveled, offending you, slapping and twisting you until the clothes on your tiny body would look like you were on the bad side of a hurricane, smashing your head against the blackboard, hitting you in the head with a pile of books or notebooks and breaking long wooden sticks on your body or hands were a daily sight.

She was highly incentivised by presents and money, and those children whose parents would be generous didn’t get to meet her bad side. Coming from a good family also made a difference.

I lived through this for four years at the start of my school experience and I respect myself so much for not losing faith in education. I think about that age and what I felt when I had to go to school. How much I hated it and how scared I was!

I write about it and I think about the children that are now adults. She had a career of about 40 years - all those children….

One day she came towards me to grab me, I stretched the hand out in defence and it got caught in her necklace. The falling beads distracted her from her mission to assault me. She gave them to me and I took them home to my dad. He fixed her necklace. She said it looked better than before. I managed to escape that time, I was 9.

The irony of this makes me boil to this day.

I am always drawn to kindness, my friends are very kind people! I appreciate them so much, because I have met evil all the way till I left that small town of mine and the more I look back the more I understand myself and the choices I make.