Home.

It's half-past twelve and the rest of the house is asleep while I work on my latest shawl. I can hear the frogs croaking outside and the breeze from the fan is cool on my otherwise hot skin. As I knit, I am reminded of the many evenings I have stayed awake in this house in Diamond Vale, while my grandparents were asleep, and I'd be up late studying for an exam I had to take at Providence Girls Catholic School or I would have been writing a story or something. Sometimes, I just stayed up late to watch television, and in those days, there were only two television stations!
There is something about this house that holds me with so much love. Maybe it's the fact that I spent four years here, maybe it's because it's my grandparent's house, maybe it's because it's in the land of my ancestors - maybe it's a combination of all that and more, but I truly do feel at peace here.
I was so sick when I was in Denmark. My job really stressed me out. My body felt so out of whack. And it was so surreal, because while the management knew that many of us were stressed out due to the fact that we did not have classrooms to teach in and they did nothing about it, what they did do was put up posters around the school that looked like this:

stress poster that was all around the school where I used to work. 

It was really a strange experience. I often wonder if we know that stress kills, why is it okay for our employers to stress us? Why is it okay for schools to stress students? For anyone to stress someone else? Why is it acceptable? 

I've been really thinking about my former students a lot since being here in Trinidad. First of all, experiencing how it feels on my body to be "home" makes me realize even more how blessed I am because a lot of my students come from countries that for one reason or another, they can't go back to. Whether it's war or some other political reason, going home for so many other human beings on this planet is just not as simple as jumping on an airplane and doing so. That really sucks. It ought to be a human right for everyone to be able to go home. Being estranged from one's home is a foundational trauma, and no one should have to experience that. And then to think that they make it to Europe and have to jump through hoops just to be able to survive. There's this one student I think about a lot lately. She's in her late 40s, early 50s and she's from Somalia. I remember when I first started teaching her her face was so closed, she seemed so far away. I would chat her up whenever I saw her, just wanting her to warm up, to be present, to see that I was seeing her. And she did. I really miss the way she would smile and laugh at me. I miss my students a lot. They deserver so much better than the experience they had and I wish them the best in all that they do. It was really infuriating seeing how many were treated - it's like a lot of Danes don't seem to understand that their jobs are actually dependent on the presence of immigrants. Who would all the Danish as an additional language teach if it weren't for immigrants? I can't stand how so many in our culture in the west, act like it's a problem that we have immigrants, when it's our governments who have gone over there and created instability, and many assume that these folks don't have a culture and history when in fact many of them come from cultures that's much older than ours and in fact, in many ways, superior. It really pisses me off. 

I think about this one student I had who was 14 when he was forced to leave Afghanistan and walk to Denmark. He doesn't know if his family is alive or what. He's now 21. I don't understand that if we're so much better and our lifestyles are so much more superior, why are we not doing better by folks who are here because we were there? And the stress that so many must be going through- besides leaving war-torn countries and having to undergo family separation, then we make them jump through hoops to have any kind of life. It's truly disgusting. 

So I feel really privileged and blessed that I'm able to be home. I feel really lucky that I can walk outside and see the same mountains that I have always seen when I walk outside this house for the past 40 years. And I will always speak up for the human beings who cannot do this because as I have mentioned before, this ought to be a fundamental human right. And we need to start ensuring that every human being is able to exercise this right.  I'll take the west more seriously when they start valuing the lives of Black and brown people as much as they value their whiteness. 

Over and out, 

Lesley-Ann