We walked through the kitchen, where the children prepared meals for staff from the fruits and vegetables that they labored to grow. Then we went into the dining hall, where the children ate the mush that gave the school its colloquial name: the Mush Hole. We stopped in the basement, where priests would instigate and then bet on fights between the boys. We heard stories of fights that went “too far” and of children who didn’t return to their beds. One story about the Mush Hole that I have heard several times is about the orchard: that trees were planted after children went missing as a way of
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