History lessons

In June it will be thirty years since I came to School No. 1, a girl of 22 with a red diploma. My first pupils have grandchildren now. Some of them were killed, in 1992 and in 2007. Some are in Chicago. One is a deputy head of the district and still writes with mistakes. All of them were my children.

For the 8th March in my school every year the 9th class prepares a "women's lesson": not flowers, but biographies. This year they chose Toktokan the doctor, the first woman who drove a tractor on the Kara-Buura state farm (the pupils found her through the district newspaper of 1958), and their own grandmothers.

The girls made posters. A boy made the tea. Nobody laughed at the boy.