Mexican teacher protects children during drug shooting
A primary school teacher in Mexico has been praised after she kept her pupils calm by singing songs as a shootout took place outside.
Martha Rivera Alanis was presented with a certificate on Monday to recognise her bravery in ordering her class of five and six-year-olds to lie on the floor of their classroom, before engaging them with a song from television show Barney & Friends.
Police said gunmen killed five people at a taxi rank just outside the Alfonso Reyes kindergarten in Nuevo Leon state on Friday
“Of course, I was afraid, but I tell you, my kids get me through it,” Rivera Alanis said after a ceremony hosted by the governor of the northeastern province of Nuevo León.
State governor Rodrigo Medina de la Cruz gave her a framed certificate which he said recognised the teacher’s “valour, devotion and courage to confront a risky situation.”
“It shows us the path to follow in difficult times that our state and our country are experiencing, and it is with examples like this that we have to keep advancing,” he added.
A one-and-a-half minute clip from her mobile phone was posted on twitter showing Rivera Alanis’s 15 young pupils lying face down on the floor.
Rivera is heard soothing the children amid loud bursts of gunfire, telling one young girl: “No, my love, nothing is going to happen, just put your little face on the floor.”
The teacher then began a song from Barney & Friends: “If the rain drops were chocolate, I would love to be there, opening my mouth to taste them,” the class sang as they lay on the floor.
“My only thought was to take their minds off that noise,” Rivera Alanis told reporters on Monday. “So I thought of that song.”
Nuevo Leon was considered one of the safest places in Mexico until recent years when shootouts and killings blamed on drug gangs have increased.
Since 2006, 37,000 people were estimated to have been killed in drug-related violence in the whole of the country.