Echoes of the White Giraffe

“You all go home early for a change,” said Teacher Yun. “Let us teachers take care of the rest. No need for you to come back this weekend. We will finish up, and on Monday, we can use our new classrooms.”

Our teachers were so thoughtful to let us all go home and have the weekend to ourselves. This would be the first Saturday and Sunday we would not be working at the site since construction had begun several months before.

How glad we had been when Teacher Yun first found this small plot by the seashore, in an area of Pusan where many refugees, including Bokhi, had settled. Teacher Yun and a few other teachers from the Ewha School in Seoul had managed to flee to Pusan, and they were anxious to teach refugee students like Bokhi and me. We were even more anxious to resume our studies. We had not attended any school since the war began, over eight months earlier. Pusan was so crowded that there was no place for us to gather and study, so we had decided to build our own classrooms. When Teacher Yun found this site, we quickly began to build our small school, using whatever materials we could find. We collected driftwood, bricks, stones, rocks, pebbles, and even shells. We carried these things to the building site, while we dreamed of having a place to sit and study, protected from the monsoon rains, the howling winds, and the scorchingly hot sun. Now that dream stood right before us.