By: Madeline

     During my gap year, I spent the summer back in my hometown in Togo conducting interviews for the clinic. Because I was a Hope Through Health volunteer, I was able to live in the compound that was provided for their volunteers. There were several students from Harvard and MIT, a few Peace Corps Volunteers, and some other European volunteers. When I arrived, I met and shared a room with a person who I will call 'Roommate,' a college freshman sent by MIT’s chapter of GlobeMed. Even though I was fresh out of high school and the youngest person in the compound, I still had an entire childhood of experiences living in Kara behind me. This led to a few disagreements between me and the other volunteers, most of which I kept quiet on.       Roommate mentioned one night at dinner that she needed to get her visa renewed – tomorrow – the other volunteers casually assured her that she could simply let it expire and go later this week; that you just had to pay a small bribe and nothin

     I have a good many travel stories, having grown up with a fairly bohemian, nomadic family. On the day that this story takes place, my dear friend Jacob Moore asked me what my craziest travel story is. That day ended up being one of them.      The fall semester of my third year at Rhodes, I studied abroad in Europe. One of the most trying and wonderful times of my life. The program put us atop a mountain in Sewanee, TN for three weeks, in an Oxford College established in the 15th century for six weeks, and traveling continental Europe for six weeks. While at Oxford, we took three condensed courses divided up into two halves, the three courses being Medieval and Renaissance Art, History, and Literature. The modus operandi of the 'euro studs' is to spend a good deal of time working on classes and a great deal of time experiencing British culture and life (keep in mind that this was pre-Brexit, you know, when Britain was a part of Europe). Oxford is a beautiful, magical place

     Now that you're all holed up in your homes in sweatpants and work-appropriate attire from the waist up for your Zoom meetings...      My goal for this age of social distancing and pandemic is to write more. And hike more but that is beside the point. When I lived in Togo, I participated in National Novel Writing Month three times. That is three years of writing 50,000 words in one month. That's insane. Now that I'm in college, I probably write 50,000 words in an academic year. But I find that aside from a few special papers I've written for particularly inspiring classes, most of these written words mean nothing to me. But things are changing now.      Our world is experiencing something that people alive now have never experienced. It is new territory for everyone, and if anyone else shares my feelings about the way COVID-19 is taking over our lives, it feels like everything is out of our control. Three weeks ago I was writing a few bullet points about coronav

    Allow me to start out by saying that Africa is not a desolate and helpless continent seething in its own poverty. Anyone who thinks that when they start reading this might as well stop here because the rest of my little ramblings will sound redundant. Anyone who just said 'Africa is a continent?' should go read a Dr Seuss book. Others may proceed.     I have been in America for a little over a year now, and already, my life has changed a bit more drastically than I anticipated. A sudden accident forced us to suddenly cut all material ties with Togo and uproot ourselves to come here. Although I have had a plethora of embraces accompanied by those dreaded words 'Welcome home,' I might as well be welcomed to a refugee camp. I suppose I have gone through different stages like they say Third Culture Kids do. I've tried being quiet, I've tried blending in, I've tried being even more cultured than I really am, and I've tried the detached cynic bit that mos

     "How lucky I am to have something that makes saying goodbye so hard." -Winnie the Pooh      How is it that a bear of very little brain can sum up in one sentence my thoughts the past few weeks? Never underestimate stuffed animals and the wisdom they possess.       And it's true, this quote has been on my mind lately. I've had a fairly... Unusual... Summer. We had two deaths in the family, I experienced hiking a mountain on a broken hip, and all this while spending two months away from my Papa. Having to leave your home suddenly is just the cherry on top.       For those of you wondering, no we are NOT SKIPPING OUR RETURN TRIP TO AVOID EBOLA. That is the farthest thing from my mind right now, because if there was any way I was fit to travel, I'd be back home right now. And that's what it is to me– Home. I've lived there ten years, I grew up there, some of the most important things to me and important people are there. I can understand the peopl

     Everyone has their faults, and maybe mine will be of indefinite suggestion. It's the case with plenty of first children, and even more with female firstborns. I have plenty of friends who roll their eyes, same as me, when someone jokingly rebukes their herding of younger siblings. It's not a big deal. It's an occupational hazard. But if we stop and think about this, we have to remember something commonplace yet forgotten: Anything can be bad in indecent amounts.       Maybe it's just my nit-pickiness about words, but when we examine the definition of 'bossy', we might find a slightly different idea than what is commonly expressed. BOSSY: adj. fond of giving people orders; domineering. If you ask most people tagged as 'bossy', they're not going to stop and say "Oh, yeah, I take great joy in distributing commands. That's why I do it." It's more of an idea of being helpful. Synonyms of bossy in a thesaurus are as follows: pushy,