Madeleine Cova would arrive at the high school before the bell rang, and the students would already be waiting for her in groups.
“Made, bless you”, they called her. She taught Spanish Language and Literature in La Guaira and was the homeroom teacher for a second-year class at Juan José Mendoza public high school. Her students told her about their problems during recess, invited her to their birthday parties, and noticed if she arrived one day unusually quiet. On June 24, the double earthquake that shook the north of the country claimed the lives of more than 230 of those children, whom she calls “my children”, and another 200 remain missing.
Today people ask her why she is still so sad if her family is fine, if nothing happened to her. Cova cannot find another word to explain it: grief. She blames herself for not organizing an outing on that holiday, for having traveled to Caracas just when they were searching for her students beneath the rubble. In her WhatsApp statuses, she dedicates songs to them. “It’s as if a part of my body were missing”, she says, still shattered.