Not needing words

When I went home last week it was to see my aunt who's been sick with cancer since late spring. Making the decision to leave the program for 10 days wasn't easy since sometimes getting in and out of a culture is tricky. But the transition has gone smoothly, and I couldn't have done it without the people on both sides -- my family in SoDak and my good friends and my Senegalese family here. And Tuesday I found out just how lucky I was to have made the trip home. My aunt died in the hospital Monday afternoon in the middle of a huge South Dakota snow/ice storm. The weather left my family immobile and many of them without electricity and some who didn't even know of her death until a day or two later. And like so much in South Dakota, even her death is connected to the weather.

Hearing the news that day with my fingertips pressed into the headphones of my Skype headset, I felt myself flailing, wanting to hug and be hugged, wanting to touch my people who are reeling and hurting from the loss of someone who is so large in all of our lives. Watching the Dakar forecast flash 82 degrees and sunny, I kept dipping and coming up empty, the call was finished, I felt far away, and I didn't know how to grieve grasping empty air until suddenly I was surrounded by those here who've come to mean so much to me here. Being kissed and hugged and patted and touched, I moved from one person's arms to the next crying and talking about Barb, about her curiousity, her love for life, her farm, her L-shaped couch, about holidays in her warm underground house, about her mile-a-minute questions, about how she always made me feel home, about how much she loved all of us, her family. I used all the languages I know to say--French, English, Wolof-- how it hurt, but really it was one of the first times since I've been here that honestly I didn't need a word, I was just simply understood. And most of all, I realized after all these months, what it means to have a second home.