Home is Where the Boys Are

It would be simpler, and perhaps more productive, to count the ways the world has changed since we all met than to trace our individual lives through it. The threads of ourselves that we leave behind as our lives unspool show us where we have been and where we have gotten tangled, but not the marks that these disparate paths have left on us. And never can we discern where our scarred bodies may take us to call home next. We carry cities within ourselves – patched potholes that memorialize wounds and healing, and warmly lit entranceways that beckon us back from orbit onto solid ground.

When I was posted for my Peace Corps service, I was sent to live in Ziziba and to teach in Mubanga. At this point, Boy City was not yet conceived, although the other boys, Jack and Brandon, soon introduced themselves and came to visit on bike. What I remember most from those first days were the heat, the pastel-colored paints as I decorated my home, and the nervous excitement of possibility and the unknown.

I had spent my training writing love letters to a crush back home, then my early time at site planning to rendezvous with the Australian nurse I had met the night I was sworn in for service before she left the country. By the new year, that crush rolled into another, and between teaching, dating, and trying to get involved in the community, my time was all but filled.

As life settled, the boys bonded. We ran programs together, coordinated bike rides into town, and had prov-house sleepovers after long nights at Choma Hotel and Lee Love. There is no single commonality that fused our friendship, but we shared veins of similar experiences and heartaches and joys. A mutual sense of humor and fatal attraction to beautiful women sealed the deal.

The journeys of Boy City are too numerous to recount, each otherwise mundane meeting or workshop, canter or bike ride, turned into an occasion and a story and a memory. We lived hard and left a wake as we rolled through, for better or for worse. If Boy City was around, we were the talk of the town, or the gossip behind sideways glances, and always the life of the party. Sometimes it was a party of three, but a party nonetheless. And we took full advantage of each opportunity to work, play, and travel together, until Boy City came to a screeching halt in March of 2020.

Jack was already in the capital when the text was sent out – evacuation, first to Choma, then Lusaka, then through any airport still open until we made it back to our hometowns. After a month of civil unrest and rumors about gassings that felt all too real, we were blindsided by the early morning alert that we had twenty-four hours to pack our bags and say our goodbyes. For Jack and Brandon, so close to ending their service, it was done with finality, and although I still had nearly six months of service left, mine felt like a last goodbye, too.

Back in the states we found ourselves in our respective hometowns, back with our families and surrounded by the uncertainty of a pandemic. The days bled together and faded away as nothing much changed save a growing sense of doom and fear of a scratchy throat. We had video calls and a few movie nights, but there was not yet a horizon for when the boys would be back in town.

Eventually, life moved on and Brandon went to Pennsylvania, Jack to North Dakota, and me to Boston. It took 15 months to reunite in Custer, South Dakota on a sunny August afternoon with motorcycles booming in the distance. 15 months since the tablecloth was pulled from beneath our feet, taking everything we knew crashing to the floor with it. 15 months since tearful goodbyes in Lusaka and the evacuation from Boy City. In that time decades had passed, empires had risen and fallen, universes bubbled and burst, yet it felt like life fast-forwarded. And since then, life has continued to barrel forward the only way it knows how.

It was unapparent at first, but has shone with greater clarity each time we get together, even for a group call just to check in. What sprouted in Kalomo, inspired by a bumper sticker on a pick-up truck, now blossoms. Whether we are visiting in Boston, South Dakota, or California, or merely on the phone, or a picture of us is hanging on the refrigerator door or an apartment wall, we are together. And as we move into new houses in new cities, as our lives change, we hold the homes we have been searching for. We are always at home in Boy City, population 3 (goth girls welcome), no matter where we have been, no matter where we go. Thank you for stopping by.