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1 Kings 17:8-24
Psalm 146
Galatians 1:11-24 Luke 7:11-17
In today’s old testament reading, God tells Elijah, during his travels, that he will find shelter and food with a widow at Zarephath. When he meets the widow and asks her for some food, she says, “As surely as the Lord your God lives, I don’t have any bread—only a handful of flour in a jar and a little oil in a jug.” Yet when she opens her home to him, she is able to feed him, her son, and herself. But then her son grows ill and dies. What has God done, she wonders, to take my son at this time, after this miracle? Elijah prays to God, pointing out the injustice of the son’s death, and he comes back to life. In a parallel story, Jesus brings a widow’s son back to life, and the people say, “God has come to help his people.” And in Psalm 46, the psalmist sings, “The Lord watches over the alien and sustains the fatherless and the widow…”. All of these stories are about new life, about God’s love and generosity, but they are also, in a way, about what it means to be at home.
This is my first full day back at my home in Morris after three weeks in Greece. We spent a week in Athens and Kalavrita, learning about modern Greek history and reading articles about aging in Greece. Then we spent two weeks at a nursing home in Ikaria, my family’s island. Ikaria is a large, mountainous island with some 7,000 residents, not counting people, like my cousins, who come only for the summer and holidays. The island has an interesting history. Throughout modern history, her people have felt forgotten or ignored by the national government; in fact, for a brief time the island declared itself its own nation, even issuing stamps and designing a flag. The island has at two different times in its history been used as a site of exile for political prisoners--even though it is a part of the country from which the prisoners were supposed to be exiled. As a result of this history, Ikarians tend to think of themselves as Ikarians rather than Greeks. Parts of the island got electricity and roads for the first time in 1995. Tourism, the main source of money in Greece, is a fairly new concept in Ikaria, though more and more Greeks and non-Greeks are discovering the island.
This is the second time we have taught a course on Aging in Greece—the first time was two years ago. This time, Andy, the professor who co-teaches the course with me, and I knew what to expect to some extent, and we were greeted warmly by residents who, surprisingly, remembered us, as well as by staff who two years earlier had been a bit wary about what we would be doing.
The staff are loving and caring, but there are only three on each shift, and they have to do the equivalent of all the work that nurses, CNAs, office staff, kitchen staff, and janitors/laundry attendants do in American nursing homes. This leaves little time for personalized attention. Still, the staff know the residents well. They know, for instance, how old they are, what village they are from, what led to their coming to the home. Sometimes, they know more details—the teacher’s beating that led to one resident’s difficulty speaking, the troubles in another’s marriage, another’s heroic escape from the fire that devastated the island in 1993.
Most residents are there because there simply is no family left on the island to care for them; they either never had children, or their children, like so many young and middle aged people in rural communities throughout the world, have left for better opportunities in cities in which the elders could never imagine living. In a country that, in general, has moved rather rapidly from a collectivistic to an individualistic way of life in a relatively short span of time, elder care outside the family is a new concept, one not readily accepted by most. Families whose loved ones are in the nursing home are sometimes ashamed, and sadly, this shame may keep them away. And the Ikarians are wary of the home--it is too much a reminder of their people's, and the island's failure to care for the aged.
I had a disheartening conversation with two elders who lived on their own in Therma. The conversation was unsolicited, but they both took me aside at the bakery, where my students and I often gathered for a piece of tiropita or spanakopita after returning from the nursing home. They told me that the Greek ways were changing. An old man told me that he has been mocked by teenagers when he walks through the village--he has heard them shout, "Hey, old man, what are you doing here?" "We are a people who get very old, we Ikarians," he said. "We live past 100. What will we do now?" The woman wept as she told me that the Greek-Americans are more steadfast in their adherence to the old ways, the respect young people used to have for their elders--she said the nursing home, and the fact that Greek-Americans are the first to volunteer there--is proof of it. Both told me they feared getting older; they didn't want to bother their children, who lived in Athens, but what would they do when the time came?
We spent a great deal of time talking about the implications of this cultural shift, as well as how we, as outsiders, could complete projects that were culturally appropriate in this context. We asked hard questions, questions we could not always answer. But most importantly, we took the project moment by moment, day by day, and did the best we could to be present. We tried, like Elijah, to have faith that we could create change in the lives of the elders, and the elders reciprocated, inviting us warmly into their homes and offering us whatever they had, as did the widow in the Old Testament story.
I will never forget walking down the sloping, narrow road toward the nursing home on the first day. Right away, the residents from two years earlier knew us; they held out their arms, kissed the students on both cheeks, thanked us for coming back. Andy and I went into the kitchen to greet Rodopi, a resident I’d loved deeply two years ago, who had wept on our last day at the nursing home and said, “I won’t be alive when you come back.” She is 100 now, and she was overjoyed to see us, smiling her one-tooth smile and raising her arms in praise to God. I began to weep; there was no way to hold it back. She asked then about Clara, a student from two years ago with whom she’d had an especially close connection. I had to explain that Clara had graduated and was no longer a student, but that she sent her best wishes.
Argiro, a resident with Parkinson’s, was also in the kitchen, slumped over, her head resting on her clenched hands. I knelt beside her and asked if she remembered me. Slowly, she turned her head and smiled widely and said, simply, “Argiro.” That’s right, I said to her, we share the same name. She unclenched her fingers, slowly and painfully, and I took her hand.
Panagiotis, a man who had not been very engaged in the group projects two years earlier until he got to know Nikki, one of our students, clapped when he saw us, hitting his palm against the stump of his other arm (Panagiotis has only one hand). He, too, asked about Nikki—I had to give him the same bad news. But, like Rodopi, he did not dwell on her absence, but instead threw himself into getting to know the new students.
We gathered on two couches in one corner of the home, and Elenora, the nursing home director, only nurse on staff, and jane-of-all-trades, addressed us, thanking us for coming back. She brought Niki out then—a woman who was a regular visitor at my aunt’s house and knew my family well. She’d warned me at the door that six residents from two years before had died and that Niki was non-verbal because of a recent stroke, but when Niki saw me, she said, “It’s Argie, from Magganiti!” (the village my father is from). I went to her and held her hand, and she smiled crookedly. The stroke had clearly taken much of her strength, but her mind was still there.
Each day, the residents met us at the door, ready for their walks. We rolled their wheelchairs or guided their canes or walkers down the path. Deb (a Greek friend from Morris who was helping to translate) and I helped the students hold some semblance of a conversation during these walks when we could, but often the residents were content to point to a flower they wanted a student to pick for them, or to motion that they wished to be turned so they could see the sea in the distance, glistening in the morning sun.
Next, we would massage the women’s hands. (There are only two male residents currently living at the home). This, too, was an activity that required few words, though again, we would try to engage the residents in some conversation, translating back and forth.
Then the fun would begin—a large group or some small group activities that the students had planned. We made watercolor paintings, talking to the residents about their lives and then painting something that they requested. We made a German chocolate cake, a family recipe of a mother-daughter duo who took the class together. We played backgammon and checkers (Panagiotis always let the student win and always rooted for the underdog). We danced a lot—everything from the Hokey Pokey to the Kariotiko (the island’s traditional dance), sometimes singing the music, sometimes playing a CD. The residents always clapped loudly, tried to sing along. Some tried to dance with us. Panagiotis, for instance, managed to do all the motions to the hokey pokey, smiling widely the entire time. One resident, Katina, new to the home, went to the kitchen and got some plates to throw at our feet as we danced, a Greek expression of extreme joy. "Opa!" she shouted. Then she stood up and shook her hips, holding tightly to her walker.
The students completed three group projects. One group painted a personalized flower pot for each resident. They spoke to each resident about their lives and chose images that reflected those lives—a coffee cup for Rodopi, who ran a coffee shop for much of her life (unusual for a single woman), a church and flowers for Stamatoula, who often crossed herself whenever she would see something beautiful in the natural world. Each resident got his or her own flower to care for at the end of our visit as well. "When these flowers die," Rodopi noted, "I'll plant some basil."
Another group interviewed each resident about their villages and wrote short pieces, which I then translated into Greek, about what they loved best about the village. They pasted a map of the island to the poster, marking the village on the map. These little posters were taped to the walls in their rooms. Despina, the nursing home busy body, laughed at the description of her garden, which was, as she had told us, "rich in onions."
The last group made a collage of photographs of activities the residents did with us; the collage was in the shape of a Greek flag. The elders loved looking at this collage and finding their own images. Needless to say, there were multiple photos of our students kissing Panagiotis on the cheek, and vice-versa.
After working on the projects, we would settle in for lunch, assisting with serving, feeding residents, and cleaning dishes. A student was always assigned to Argiro, but she asserted each time that she preferred to be fed by her friend John, one of the youngest residents. He rarely came out of his room, and when he did, it was only to help Argiro--then he would carry his tray back to his room and eat alone, as he told me, "because the view is better from my window." Each day, Despina, in her 90s, made sure that Maria's apron was tied tightly around her; Maria would smile and nod as Despina not-very-gently pulled it over her head. The nursing home always served a large Greek meal, and the elders said they liked the food. They were bothered, however, by the fact that we did not eat with them; they tried over and over to give us their food. Eventually, we began to accept a little food from their plates, because to refuse to do so is to refuse the hospitality that is so central to Greek culture--and the one gift that they were still able to provide. Like the widow's oil and flour, it seemed that no matter how much they offered and how much we ate, there was still food to go around.
They tried, in fact, to give us many gifts. When I complimented Katina on the green scarf on her head, she tried to give it to me. When I told her I couldn’t take it, she said, "Don’t worry, I have another one that’s black." I said, "I don’t think you should wear black (the color of mourning in Greece). You are a happy person." She smiled widely and said I was right. This was the only way I could think of to get out of the request.
Rodopi tried again, as she had two years earlier, to give us a photograph of herself at 17, beautiful and all dressed up next to her sister, who died years before her. Eventually, I took a photograph of her photo with my digital camera and promised to make copies for all the students; again, this was the only way I could get out of taking the one photograph she has. (I had to promise to also give a copy to her friend Clara from two years before).
They gave us other gifts, too. Katina, for instance, insisted that it was a good thing I wasn’t married, and that if I wanted, she would call my father and tell him so! She told me marriage was slavery, and that I would never be able to travel or do what I wanted if I married. This is, needless to say, an unusual opinion for a 90-something year old living on a small, rural island in Greece.
Maria, another resident new to the home, asked me about Native Americans. I called the Native American students who were on the trip over to talk with her. She admonished them to remember their native language and customs, and not to let the white oppressors take these things away from them. She praised them for going to college. She asked them many questions and studied the family photos they had with them. Again, her open mindedness surprised even me, proving every stereotype of old Greek women wrong again.
On our last full day at the nursing home, we had a party for Stamatoula, who was 102, and Rodopi, 100. The staff made a huge meal for us, and we ate and drank homemade Ikarian wine. The day before, we’d made a pound cake for the event (another mother-daughter creation), and we sang an American happy birthday for the elders. The local paper covered the event, and then I had a live interview with the radio station in Samos—embarrassing because, although my Greek improved immensely while I was there as it always does, my lack of confidence and lack of practice caused me to make all kinds of mistakes. I have to let go of the image of listeners laughing at my Greek and be grateful that we got coverage; I hope the stories will encourage more volunteers to come to the home. As we posed with the two women, I looked around and realized everyone was glowing.
The next day, before boarding the plane that would take us back to Athens, we went back to the nursing home for just an hour to say our goodbyes. It was a rainy day, and all the residents were inside; most of our activities had taken place on the patio in front of the home. We sat in a circle. The students presented their final projects. The elders blessed us and wished us a good trip. And then we sang—the Minnesota fight song, "I've Got Friends in Low Places" (who knows why!), some old Greek folk songs from the island. Panagiotis, the only resident from Samos, sang "Samiotisa," looking into the eyes of the student seated beside him. By the end, all of us were weeping. It was heartwrenching to say goodbye. Again, Rodopi told me she’d be dead the next time I came, and I reminded her that she’d said the same thing two years ago and here she was, still alive at 100. She smiled. Panagiotis held my hand and didn’t want to let go. Maria, a woman with Parkinson’s who was a quiet, calming presence in the home who endured Despina's rather gruff care at mealtimes, whispered to me, “You’re not really going, are you?” Despina said, “Of course she’s not. Of course they’re not going.”
In the end, as the students walked, sobbing, toward the bus, Katina followed us, saying she wanted to be the last to say goodbye. She hugged and kissed the students as they boarded. I was last. She held me and whispered, “Remember, come see me again next year. And don’t you dare get married. Stay single. You’ll be able to go wherever you want, whenever you want. Just put on your hat and go out.”
There is so much more to write. There were the visits with my family—the sadness of returning to my father’s village only to know I could not stay long. A wonderful swim at the beach in Magganiti with three of my students, who then ate a big meal at my aunt and uncle's house and witnessed my aunt getting me in a headlock and saying she wasn't going to let me go back to America. Nights we spent drinking too much and dancing until morning. (Including a night when I had just enough to drink to announce to my students that I only smoke non-alcoholic cigarettes--whatever that means). The owner of the zaharoplasteio, Steve, who generously closed down his bakery to take us to the beach...out on his boat...and who, at least once, saved us from returning to the hotel a little too loud/drunk.
How, on the boat between Ikaria and Samos during our weekend getaway, I felt my mother’s presence, heard her telling me that things were going to be OK, that I would be a good mother. I won't forget the feeling I had in that liminal space between a shore that represents who I am, all of my ancestry, and a shore I do not know--so much like this place in my life, a place in between, with so much uncertain. My time in Ikaria was all metaphor, all beauty and color and light.
On the plane trip home, I remembered, again, that my aunt and uncle’s balcony—the place where my father was born—is where I feel most at home, even though I will always be, in a way, a stranger there, a visitor.
What does it mean to be home? Elijah relied on the kindness of strangers as he wandered the countryside, doing whatever God asked of him. He found places, like the widow's house, where he could do his work and also receive the blessings of another. Jesus did the same, though he had 12 close friends who went with him, and who carried on his work after his death. Throughout the scriptures, we realize that God’s people did not have homes, not really. They were at home wherever they were. They were at home doing God’s work and receiving the blessing of those they served. Perhaps "served" is the wrong word; after all, service-learning projects are meant to be reciprocal, and I hope that ours was no exception.
We, my students, friends, and I, did our best. We moved in and out of a land that is not really ours. For some of my students, it will never be theirs in any real sense, but even for those of us with Greek ancestry on the trip, and even for me, with my family a few villages away from the nursing home, it will never be completely mine. Some of us are caught between two homes: a Native American student shared how her friends on the reservation say she’s turning white because she’s chosen to go to college; another student will move across the country to start her first job out of college in a few months at a nursing home in Seattle; another will be student teaching on a reservation in the fall. Soon, I hope, I will welcome a child into my home, and while I will be in the same physical space, the rooms' functions and decor will undoubtedly shift, and the home, in the spiritual sense of the word, will be forever altered.
We are, all of us, always in transition, always rethinking and redefining what we call home. And yet home is where we are; home is where the work of our lives is done; home is where we are both welcomed and challenged, usually simultaneously. Home is where we learn to love and nurture, to love and to be nurtured, where we live, no matter how briefly, with the people who share the work of our lives, even if they cannot always be physically present in our lives.
Psalm 146
Galatians 1:11-24 Luke 7:11-17
In today’s old testament reading, God tells Elijah, during his travels, that he will find shelter and food with a widow at Zarephath. When he meets the widow and asks her for some food, she says, “As surely as the Lord your God lives, I don’t have any bread—only a handful of flour in a jar and a little oil in a jug.” Yet when she opens her home to him, she is able to feed him, her son, and herself. But then her son grows ill and dies. What has God done, she wonders, to take my son at this time, after this miracle? Elijah prays to God, pointing out the injustice of the son’s death, and he comes back to life. In a parallel story, Jesus brings a widow’s son back to life, and the people say, “God has come to help his people.” And in Psalm 46, the psalmist sings, “The Lord watches over the alien and sustains the fatherless and the widow…”. All of these stories are about new life, about God’s love and generosity, but they are also, in a way, about what it means to be at home.
This is my first full day back at my home in Morris after three weeks in Greece. We spent a week in Athens and Kalavrita, learning about modern Greek history and reading articles about aging in Greece. Then we spent two weeks at a nursing home in Ikaria, my family’s island. Ikaria is a large, mountainous island with some 7,000 residents, not counting people, like my cousins, who come only for the summer and holidays. The island has an interesting history. Throughout modern history, her people have felt forgotten or ignored by the national government; in fact, for a brief time the island declared itself its own nation, even issuing stamps and designing a flag. The island has at two different times in its history been used as a site of exile for political prisoners--even though it is a part of the country from which the prisoners were supposed to be exiled. As a result of this history, Ikarians tend to think of themselves as Ikarians rather than Greeks. Parts of the island got electricity and roads for the first time in 1995. Tourism, the main source of money in Greece, is a fairly new concept in Ikaria, though more and more Greeks and non-Greeks are discovering the island.
This is the second time we have taught a course on Aging in Greece—the first time was two years ago. This time, Andy, the professor who co-teaches the course with me, and I knew what to expect to some extent, and we were greeted warmly by residents who, surprisingly, remembered us, as well as by staff who two years earlier had been a bit wary about what we would be doing.
The staff are loving and caring, but there are only three on each shift, and they have to do the equivalent of all the work that nurses, CNAs, office staff, kitchen staff, and janitors/laundry attendants do in American nursing homes. This leaves little time for personalized attention. Still, the staff know the residents well. They know, for instance, how old they are, what village they are from, what led to their coming to the home. Sometimes, they know more details—the teacher’s beating that led to one resident’s difficulty speaking, the troubles in another’s marriage, another’s heroic escape from the fire that devastated the island in 1993.
Most residents are there because there simply is no family left on the island to care for them; they either never had children, or their children, like so many young and middle aged people in rural communities throughout the world, have left for better opportunities in cities in which the elders could never imagine living. In a country that, in general, has moved rather rapidly from a collectivistic to an individualistic way of life in a relatively short span of time, elder care outside the family is a new concept, one not readily accepted by most. Families whose loved ones are in the nursing home are sometimes ashamed, and sadly, this shame may keep them away. And the Ikarians are wary of the home--it is too much a reminder of their people's, and the island's failure to care for the aged.
I had a disheartening conversation with two elders who lived on their own in Therma. The conversation was unsolicited, but they both took me aside at the bakery, where my students and I often gathered for a piece of tiropita or spanakopita after returning from the nursing home. They told me that the Greek ways were changing. An old man told me that he has been mocked by teenagers when he walks through the village--he has heard them shout, "Hey, old man, what are you doing here?" "We are a people who get very old, we Ikarians," he said. "We live past 100. What will we do now?" The woman wept as she told me that the Greek-Americans are more steadfast in their adherence to the old ways, the respect young people used to have for their elders--she said the nursing home, and the fact that Greek-Americans are the first to volunteer there--is proof of it. Both told me they feared getting older; they didn't want to bother their children, who lived in Athens, but what would they do when the time came?
We spent a great deal of time talking about the implications of this cultural shift, as well as how we, as outsiders, could complete projects that were culturally appropriate in this context. We asked hard questions, questions we could not always answer. But most importantly, we took the project moment by moment, day by day, and did the best we could to be present. We tried, like Elijah, to have faith that we could create change in the lives of the elders, and the elders reciprocated, inviting us warmly into their homes and offering us whatever they had, as did the widow in the Old Testament story.
I will never forget walking down the sloping, narrow road toward the nursing home on the first day. Right away, the residents from two years earlier knew us; they held out their arms, kissed the students on both cheeks, thanked us for coming back. Andy and I went into the kitchen to greet Rodopi, a resident I’d loved deeply two years ago, who had wept on our last day at the nursing home and said, “I won’t be alive when you come back.” She is 100 now, and she was overjoyed to see us, smiling her one-tooth smile and raising her arms in praise to God. I began to weep; there was no way to hold it back. She asked then about Clara, a student from two years ago with whom she’d had an especially close connection. I had to explain that Clara had graduated and was no longer a student, but that she sent her best wishes.
Argiro, a resident with Parkinson’s, was also in the kitchen, slumped over, her head resting on her clenched hands. I knelt beside her and asked if she remembered me. Slowly, she turned her head and smiled widely and said, simply, “Argiro.” That’s right, I said to her, we share the same name. She unclenched her fingers, slowly and painfully, and I took her hand.
Panagiotis, a man who had not been very engaged in the group projects two years earlier until he got to know Nikki, one of our students, clapped when he saw us, hitting his palm against the stump of his other arm (Panagiotis has only one hand). He, too, asked about Nikki—I had to give him the same bad news. But, like Rodopi, he did not dwell on her absence, but instead threw himself into getting to know the new students.
We gathered on two couches in one corner of the home, and Elenora, the nursing home director, only nurse on staff, and jane-of-all-trades, addressed us, thanking us for coming back. She brought Niki out then—a woman who was a regular visitor at my aunt’s house and knew my family well. She’d warned me at the door that six residents from two years before had died and that Niki was non-verbal because of a recent stroke, but when Niki saw me, she said, “It’s Argie, from Magganiti!” (the village my father is from). I went to her and held her hand, and she smiled crookedly. The stroke had clearly taken much of her strength, but her mind was still there.
Each day, the residents met us at the door, ready for their walks. We rolled their wheelchairs or guided their canes or walkers down the path. Deb (a Greek friend from Morris who was helping to translate) and I helped the students hold some semblance of a conversation during these walks when we could, but often the residents were content to point to a flower they wanted a student to pick for them, or to motion that they wished to be turned so they could see the sea in the distance, glistening in the morning sun.
Next, we would massage the women’s hands. (There are only two male residents currently living at the home). This, too, was an activity that required few words, though again, we would try to engage the residents in some conversation, translating back and forth.
Then the fun would begin—a large group or some small group activities that the students had planned. We made watercolor paintings, talking to the residents about their lives and then painting something that they requested. We made a German chocolate cake, a family recipe of a mother-daughter duo who took the class together. We played backgammon and checkers (Panagiotis always let the student win and always rooted for the underdog). We danced a lot—everything from the Hokey Pokey to the Kariotiko (the island’s traditional dance), sometimes singing the music, sometimes playing a CD. The residents always clapped loudly, tried to sing along. Some tried to dance with us. Panagiotis, for instance, managed to do all the motions to the hokey pokey, smiling widely the entire time. One resident, Katina, new to the home, went to the kitchen and got some plates to throw at our feet as we danced, a Greek expression of extreme joy. "Opa!" she shouted. Then she stood up and shook her hips, holding tightly to her walker.
The students completed three group projects. One group painted a personalized flower pot for each resident. They spoke to each resident about their lives and chose images that reflected those lives—a coffee cup for Rodopi, who ran a coffee shop for much of her life (unusual for a single woman), a church and flowers for Stamatoula, who often crossed herself whenever she would see something beautiful in the natural world. Each resident got his or her own flower to care for at the end of our visit as well. "When these flowers die," Rodopi noted, "I'll plant some basil."
Another group interviewed each resident about their villages and wrote short pieces, which I then translated into Greek, about what they loved best about the village. They pasted a map of the island to the poster, marking the village on the map. These little posters were taped to the walls in their rooms. Despina, the nursing home busy body, laughed at the description of her garden, which was, as she had told us, "rich in onions."
The last group made a collage of photographs of activities the residents did with us; the collage was in the shape of a Greek flag. The elders loved looking at this collage and finding their own images. Needless to say, there were multiple photos of our students kissing Panagiotis on the cheek, and vice-versa.
After working on the projects, we would settle in for lunch, assisting with serving, feeding residents, and cleaning dishes. A student was always assigned to Argiro, but she asserted each time that she preferred to be fed by her friend John, one of the youngest residents. He rarely came out of his room, and when he did, it was only to help Argiro--then he would carry his tray back to his room and eat alone, as he told me, "because the view is better from my window." Each day, Despina, in her 90s, made sure that Maria's apron was tied tightly around her; Maria would smile and nod as Despina not-very-gently pulled it over her head. The nursing home always served a large Greek meal, and the elders said they liked the food. They were bothered, however, by the fact that we did not eat with them; they tried over and over to give us their food. Eventually, we began to accept a little food from their plates, because to refuse to do so is to refuse the hospitality that is so central to Greek culture--and the one gift that they were still able to provide. Like the widow's oil and flour, it seemed that no matter how much they offered and how much we ate, there was still food to go around.
They tried, in fact, to give us many gifts. When I complimented Katina on the green scarf on her head, she tried to give it to me. When I told her I couldn’t take it, she said, "Don’t worry, I have another one that’s black." I said, "I don’t think you should wear black (the color of mourning in Greece). You are a happy person." She smiled widely and said I was right. This was the only way I could think of to get out of the request.
Rodopi tried again, as she had two years earlier, to give us a photograph of herself at 17, beautiful and all dressed up next to her sister, who died years before her. Eventually, I took a photograph of her photo with my digital camera and promised to make copies for all the students; again, this was the only way I could get out of taking the one photograph she has. (I had to promise to also give a copy to her friend Clara from two years before).
They gave us other gifts, too. Katina, for instance, insisted that it was a good thing I wasn’t married, and that if I wanted, she would call my father and tell him so! She told me marriage was slavery, and that I would never be able to travel or do what I wanted if I married. This is, needless to say, an unusual opinion for a 90-something year old living on a small, rural island in Greece.
Maria, another resident new to the home, asked me about Native Americans. I called the Native American students who were on the trip over to talk with her. She admonished them to remember their native language and customs, and not to let the white oppressors take these things away from them. She praised them for going to college. She asked them many questions and studied the family photos they had with them. Again, her open mindedness surprised even me, proving every stereotype of old Greek women wrong again.
On our last full day at the nursing home, we had a party for Stamatoula, who was 102, and Rodopi, 100. The staff made a huge meal for us, and we ate and drank homemade Ikarian wine. The day before, we’d made a pound cake for the event (another mother-daughter creation), and we sang an American happy birthday for the elders. The local paper covered the event, and then I had a live interview with the radio station in Samos—embarrassing because, although my Greek improved immensely while I was there as it always does, my lack of confidence and lack of practice caused me to make all kinds of mistakes. I have to let go of the image of listeners laughing at my Greek and be grateful that we got coverage; I hope the stories will encourage more volunteers to come to the home. As we posed with the two women, I looked around and realized everyone was glowing.
The next day, before boarding the plane that would take us back to Athens, we went back to the nursing home for just an hour to say our goodbyes. It was a rainy day, and all the residents were inside; most of our activities had taken place on the patio in front of the home. We sat in a circle. The students presented their final projects. The elders blessed us and wished us a good trip. And then we sang—the Minnesota fight song, "I've Got Friends in Low Places" (who knows why!), some old Greek folk songs from the island. Panagiotis, the only resident from Samos, sang "Samiotisa," looking into the eyes of the student seated beside him. By the end, all of us were weeping. It was heartwrenching to say goodbye. Again, Rodopi told me she’d be dead the next time I came, and I reminded her that she’d said the same thing two years ago and here she was, still alive at 100. She smiled. Panagiotis held my hand and didn’t want to let go. Maria, a woman with Parkinson’s who was a quiet, calming presence in the home who endured Despina's rather gruff care at mealtimes, whispered to me, “You’re not really going, are you?” Despina said, “Of course she’s not. Of course they’re not going.”
In the end, as the students walked, sobbing, toward the bus, Katina followed us, saying she wanted to be the last to say goodbye. She hugged and kissed the students as they boarded. I was last. She held me and whispered, “Remember, come see me again next year. And don’t you dare get married. Stay single. You’ll be able to go wherever you want, whenever you want. Just put on your hat and go out.”
There is so much more to write. There were the visits with my family—the sadness of returning to my father’s village only to know I could not stay long. A wonderful swim at the beach in Magganiti with three of my students, who then ate a big meal at my aunt and uncle's house and witnessed my aunt getting me in a headlock and saying she wasn't going to let me go back to America. Nights we spent drinking too much and dancing until morning. (Including a night when I had just enough to drink to announce to my students that I only smoke non-alcoholic cigarettes--whatever that means). The owner of the zaharoplasteio, Steve, who generously closed down his bakery to take us to the beach...out on his boat...and who, at least once, saved us from returning to the hotel a little too loud/drunk.
How, on the boat between Ikaria and Samos during our weekend getaway, I felt my mother’s presence, heard her telling me that things were going to be OK, that I would be a good mother. I won't forget the feeling I had in that liminal space between a shore that represents who I am, all of my ancestry, and a shore I do not know--so much like this place in my life, a place in between, with so much uncertain. My time in Ikaria was all metaphor, all beauty and color and light.
On the plane trip home, I remembered, again, that my aunt and uncle’s balcony—the place where my father was born—is where I feel most at home, even though I will always be, in a way, a stranger there, a visitor.
What does it mean to be home? Elijah relied on the kindness of strangers as he wandered the countryside, doing whatever God asked of him. He found places, like the widow's house, where he could do his work and also receive the blessings of another. Jesus did the same, though he had 12 close friends who went with him, and who carried on his work after his death. Throughout the scriptures, we realize that God’s people did not have homes, not really. They were at home wherever they were. They were at home doing God’s work and receiving the blessing of those they served. Perhaps "served" is the wrong word; after all, service-learning projects are meant to be reciprocal, and I hope that ours was no exception.
We, my students, friends, and I, did our best. We moved in and out of a land that is not really ours. For some of my students, it will never be theirs in any real sense, but even for those of us with Greek ancestry on the trip, and even for me, with my family a few villages away from the nursing home, it will never be completely mine. Some of us are caught between two homes: a Native American student shared how her friends on the reservation say she’s turning white because she’s chosen to go to college; another student will move across the country to start her first job out of college in a few months at a nursing home in Seattle; another will be student teaching on a reservation in the fall. Soon, I hope, I will welcome a child into my home, and while I will be in the same physical space, the rooms' functions and decor will undoubtedly shift, and the home, in the spiritual sense of the word, will be forever altered.
We are, all of us, always in transition, always rethinking and redefining what we call home. And yet home is where we are; home is where the work of our lives is done; home is where we are both welcomed and challenged, usually simultaneously. Home is where we learn to love and nurture, to love and to be nurtured, where we live, no matter how briefly, with the people who share the work of our lives, even if they cannot always be physically present in our lives.
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