Mandel Old Woman- It’s Making Me Hurt
And one thing I never knew, I never knew… I never noticed this one thing that happened to me. It was just that when we shower, and when we shower the, well his name is, umm, Mr. Bolton. I still know, I still know Mr. Bolton, umm I don’t know, to this day I still I don’t I don’t want, I still have regrets against him. I don’t know. it’s hard to forgive. I don’t know. I just… I don’t know, I just pray about it. I don’t know what’s going to happen. I don’t know if he’s still alive. And anyway ,what’s an awful thing like, umm like I just found out for myself by looking at it… like that’s, that’s, I think kind of sexual, sexual abuse. Him standing there just looking at us. You know showering and touching us and, you know, our ears and… you know. We have to use a, like steel, like those hard steel brushes to scrub our, our umm like our elbows and our knees.. and you know we can’t get any cleaner than that. You know, scrubbing and there’s just red marks on our elbows, knees, and you know… that’s very awful. You know its, it’s these things, there’s lot of things that I could, you know, could keep talking, and talking. You know, the things that like.
And at nights you get hungry but what are you supposed to eat? We don’t get nothing. We’re in bed about by 4, 5 o’clock in the evening. We don’t even have playing time outside. You know just maybe half an hour… and there, he’s still staying there just watching over us over the window. And I don’t know what, I don’t know what’s going, become of that. I mean what I’m saying… Every move you know, he’s right there, and you know. We can’t do nothing. And at the same time, I never knew, he gives us um I think olive, that olive… I think it’s that olive oil or whatever. I never knew. Cod liver I should say cod liver oil. And I never knew, I never, never, that I don’t know what that does to us. I never did like that. And like umm yeah, so I didn’t like that. The soda to brush our teeth. We have, to umm… and we can’t have any rips on our clothes or anything like our runners, or like our, like our clothes they are ripped, we get punished for that.
And yeah, there’s so many things I don’t know like, umm… Just give me a minute… umm that’s kind of bringing bad memories. It’s making me hurt. Just a minute.
[long pause, speaker very emotional]
Yeah, it’s just so awful, it’s making me hurt and angry, coming back to it. I really want to finish this interview. You know I was just thinking about it.
Just give me a minute.
[long pause, speaker very emotional]
I say that wasn’t our home I mean, that was our home. We never got to see our parents.
I think I’ll just end off here.
Okay.
-Mandel Old Woman
Notes:
Oral interview with Mandel Old Woman. Conducted, translated, and transcribed by Gwendora Bear Chief. Old Sun Community College, May 5, 2022.
