All the comforts of home

There is an excellent passage from 'Nicholas Nickleby' that has been running through my mind these sweaty, dusty desert days. Nicholas, the gritty, big-hearted protagonist, has reached a lull in his adventures and so turns to his traveling companion, a young cripple named Smike and says, 'We're going to take you home now.' Smike looks at him and says plainly, 'But you are my home.' It was the first time for me that I became aware of home as not a physical location, but an idea of comfort, safety, warmth, and security.

If you trace the migratory patterns of college kids from bedrooms to dorm rooms to shoe box apartments, with each new location, few are trying to recreate the physical space of home, the flowered wall paper and patterned bathroom tiles, but rather the feeling, the essence, that indescribable x-factor that makes a cluster of rooms a space you want to return to after a trying day.

The majority of our students are born without a complete notion of home. Many of their parents and siblings create relationships of unconditional warmth and provide the utmost level of protection that they can afford, but large, hulking social factors of caste and economic marginalization that lurk in the shadows always pinch and pull and tug at the edges, oftentimes creeping into the heartbeat of these students' lives and robbing them of that feeling of total security, of purpose and belonging and being unconditionally wanted.

So we try to foster the tools necessary for students to be their own architects of home, to build and fortify the idea of place and safety. It happens slowly on an ever zig-zagging path, but we can begin to see little twinkles of foundations being laid. Akram bellowing 'Name 'a' sound 'ahhhhh,' while reading a sign that said 'Apples,' Suriya correcting a vistor that her name was not 'Suriya' but 'DOCTOR Suriya,' Frida yelling across the street to her mother that she'd written her name for the first time in her life.

And gradually, the wheelbarrows are being emptied, the cement is being laid, and the beams are lumbering into place. We're all set with Webster's for now; today, at the Merasi School, as with tomorrow and the day after, the definition of home is being written by Akram, Suriya and Niwab.