Teacher Beatriz asked us to write essays about our parents' professions. Some wrote about their mothers' professions because they had no fathers and others, who had no fathers and no mothers, organs, had to write about their uncles' professions. And teacher Beatriz would put a band-aid on the crust of the orphans' wound "our uncles are our fathers too".

There was, in the class, a boy named Dércio, whose father worked in a cookie factory. All of us in the class, awestruck, listened to Dércio reading his essay - we all wanted to have a father who worked in a cookie house. "Beautiful essay," said teacher Beatriz.

Emanuel talked about his mother who was a cook on the railways, Judith described beautifully the activities of her father who worked in the Mozambique glassworks. The orphans were the last to read the essays, it was a matter of order because even the teacher said "first the essays about our fathers, then our mothers, and then the others will follow". The others were the ones describing the uncles' professions.

The orphans in the class would eat their lips when we talked about our mothers and fathers. They felt the pain of having to dig distant uncles, uncles they never saw, uncles who lived in the wilderness. And the uncles, tattered, with shreds of unemployment over their heads, would appear barefoot in newsrooms with their humility hidden with their hands behind their backs like hotel porters.

We who wrote about the professions of our fathers and mothers read the essays right at the beginning of class. The orphans didn't present their essays until after the break; it was necessary to separate the moments and the essays. And they submitted their essays together because they had something in common: they had no parents.

After the break, the orphans, with the words mother and father in the back of their mouths, started reading. They read with long pauses, because they had to put together the scattered sentences in their old notebooks used in previous years. They jumped from sheet to sheet, piecing together the meaning of the sentences.

One of them spoke of his uncle who carried huge baskets in the Xipamanine market. He talked about his neck that always jammed, about his hair that was always well straightened by the baskets, and he couldn't say exactly what his uncle's profession was. And the teacher Beatriz opened parentheses and helped the orphan: "he is a human cart carrier".

It wasn't only the lack of parents that identified the orphans in the class. At snack time it was possible to see them eating the buttons of their own shirts, moistening with their tongues the cream glued on the packages of cookies that Dércio threw in the trash. We snacked and they got dirty repairing old pens; stretched out on the patio they would run only to dispute the tap when it was turned off by the guard. Water was enough for them.