"Do you ever feel that way?"

For the last two days in English 10, we've been watching Hotel Rwanda. The sophomores have been good sports about watching a film about genocide in the springtime, so close to the end of the school year. In an otherwise painful, intense, and difficult movie, there are a few moments of levity, one of which is when the hotel manager asks a hotel maid to care for twenty-six orphans who were brought to the hotel as refugees. The orphans are small children, packed together in a small room, many are crying, have runny noses, and are totally and completely alone.

The hotel manager pats the maid on the back and asks her to care for them. When she asks how to do so, he tells her to bathe them, feed them, and put them to bed. When he leaves her alone with them, she takes a few steps towards them, smiles, and gently says, "Okay babies..." in a way that shows both her knowledge and fear of the fact that she has a very tenuous hold on control--that at any second, they could break out into mass chaos.

The kids always laugh, grateful for this gift from the director. Stephen, a soph with a couple of ear piercings, braces, and death metal t-shirt who was sitting next to me (the movie powerful enough for him to actually turn off his ipod for the class period) laughed and said, "Good luck, man, she's alone with, like, 30 of them."

I nodded as he cocked his head and said, "Do you ever feel that way?"

"Yes, Stephen," I replied. "I absolutely do."