This summer, I had the opportunity to spend time between Lagos, Nigeria, and London, UK, working on research for a play I hope to present during my senior year. Despite the excitement that accompanied my travels, they also came with quite a bit of homesickness. My time away was the longest I’d been abroad and the longest I’d been away from home during a single period. Fortunately, my travels also came with opportunities to see some familiar faces from campus.
A few of my best friends were also spending portions of their summers in Europe. One was doing a summer course in Spain, another was interning for the United Nations in Geneva, and the other was visiting family in Northern Italy. Each month of the summer, I had a chance to see a friend, debrief on my journeys, and witness warm reminders that the connections I’d built on campus were not limited to the boundaries of Princeton’s grounds.
In June, the week before my birthday, one of my close friends, Mariah, stopped in London on her way back from a trip to Spain. I got to take her to one of my favorite Nigerian restaurants in the city and give her tours of the neighborhoods that had shaped my research.
In July, after returning to Europe from Nigeria, I stopped in Geneva to visit my friend Fikir for her birthday. It was wonderful getting to explore a new city with no academic or work obligations. But it was also super cool to witness her day-to-day life and spend a small portion of our summers together. Before I departed from Geneva, Fikir and I decided to visit another one of our friends, Sophia, before she left Italy. We took an early evening bus to Milan in hopes of spending one weekend with her.
By the time we reached Milan, we were so excited to be reunited that we couldn’t even sleep. We decided to spend the late evening exploring the city — eating pizza, hunting for gelato, and taking lots and lots of pictures. When we finally returned to her family’s apartment, to our surprise, Sophia had bought us an ice cream cake and gifts to celebrate our belated birthdays: an especially heartwarming gesture, since both of us had spent our birthdays away from home. It was reassuring to know that the family I had built at Princeton had followed me to Europe, and that I could still celebrate my birthday with loved ones, despite being away from my home in the U.S.
One of my proudest accomplishments at Princeton is the friends that I’ve made. They have genuinely made campus a home-away-from-home for me, and this summer has proved to me that even as we scatter all over the world in our respective journeys, this home-away-from-home is portable. Home can be wherever we are.