Ten minutes into the 19-hour flight to South Africa, the knot fraying in my stomach told me I had made a mistake. The air thinned, my cheeks burned, and my head swelled and raced. I wanted nothing more than to go home.
An hour into my three-week stay at Holy Cross AIDS Hospice, I found myself locked in the children’s ward, alone with three HIV-positive toddlers screaming at the tops of their weak lungs, a pit bull waiting on the other side of the door with his big fangs and bad intentions. I wanted nothing more than to go home.
A year before this panic, I prepared for the risks that volunteering in a South African AIDS hospice and preschool required. Doctors turned my arm into a pincushion, injecting me with the necessary vaccines and an even more vital peace of mind. I stuffed a sleeping bag and packed peanut butter into my suitcase, knowing Holy Cross supplied neither. Most importantly, I readied myself to spend three weeks alone with just my mother in a foreign country with a foreign language and a foreign feeling of being without an escape route. I combed through all the guidebooks, followed all the advice, and covered all the bases, but no groundwork could have prepared me for the actuality of my stay at Holy Cross Hospice. We stayed in the rural Zulu village of Gingindhlovu in KwaZulu-Natal, where roughly 40 percent of the population tests positive for HIV/AIDS. In the 50 square kilometers surrounding our hospice, more than 2,100 children live as orphans. Eleven children often reside in one mud hut. Food is always scarce and water is never clean. Noses are always running. Shoulders are always burdened with the weight of South Africa’s lost lives.
Holy Cross is an oasis for the children of Gingindhlovu, providing four classrooms, two meals a day, and one giant escape from grief for the village’s three- to-five-year-old orphans. As I worked in their preschool each day, the children showed me that though physical homes remain damaged and destroyed, their sense of place comes from somewhere beyond four walls and a roof. HIV/AIDS had taken their parents—taken their security—but it did not take their spirits or their hope. Rather, they used their past to create a new sense of place within Holy Cross and within their village. As they began to know their new home at the hospice, the children formed a community of shared cultures and traditions, exalting the past practices of individual families and those who came before them. Each day the children sang and danced to traditional Zulu music like their parents and their parents’ parents had, their arms, legs, voices, and souls honoring their ancestors. They did not forget their lost families nor did they settle into their sorrow. They learned from what their parents taught them, matured from unthinkable loss, and borrowed from their pasts for their futures. The foundation of their new home was built upon the solid ground of their personal and cultural history. Each day I taught the English words for colors and shapes, and each day what they learned from their pasts went toward creating their new futures. They taught me a new meaning of the word home.
One month into my first year at college, I have to redefine what it means to be home. I’m no longer up the street from my childhood friends, down the hall from my parents, or underage. Everything’s new, and nothing’s easy, and I’m faced with the choice, or rather, I’m faced with millions of choices about how I want to make this place my home. As my 37th day as a Barnard student dawns, I choose to recreate my own home here as a Zulu child would. Home no longer embodies a physical place. Like the children of Gingindhlovu, each of my experiences and relationships will combine with those of the thousands of other Columbia University students—forming a community of shared yet inimitable knowledge. Home, as I learned in South Africa and put into practice here in Morningside Heights, is beyond a structure or the assets and comforts that fill it.
Take our cultures and customs as our foundation, take our individual passions as food for our souls, take our families and friends as our relief, and together, call them home.
The author is a Barnard College first-year.