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There’s a knock at my door and before I even have the chance to open my mouth, the door flies open and my room is filled with an excited cry of “Neighbour!” and a cacophony of sound from the many bracelets adorning the arms of my visitor. Meet Courtenay-Jade Gillespie, a.k.a. ‘Neighbs’. Courtenay as can be deducted is my neighbour – well, technically we live opposite one another, but she’s never been one for technicalities. This is the girl who always has a smile on her face, she dresses how she wants to dress and she exudes confidence, but behind everything you can see, is someone who has dealt with many trials over the past six months and has bounced back. “You know, I worked my ass off to get here” she says as she brushes her short blonde hair from her face “but it wasn’t what I expected at all.” In fact, she (like many other first years) expected Rhodes University and Grahamstown itself to retain the National Arts Festival vibe. Being a self-proclaimed Peace Child, my neighbour thought the student life here would be very different from that of students in Johannesburg and Cape Town “I don’t drink too much, I don’t do drugs and I thought everyone else here would be the same... But they’re not”. Rhodes students binge drinking is one of the main problems that pushed her to her decision to leave Rhodes. One of the others being that, like many other first years, Courtenay found living away from home extremely difficult. She had never been away from home for longer than two weeks. One of the issues some students deal with while being here is the loss of a strong family base and Courtenay was one of many who found it incredibly hard to be away from her family “I didn’t have that support base any more, I didn’t know who to talk to, where to go, I just knew that I wanted to leave”.
Finding out her dad had cancer was all she needed to make her want to leave Rhodes even more than before “I thought the fastest way to get out of here was to fail first semester exams”. After not studying for an exam and failing on purpose, she was fully prepared to handle the consequences but all that preparation would prove unnecessary. She shakes her head and laughs at the irony of her next statement “ I wanted to leave to be with my dad, but he was what made me stay”. For the first time since I’ve known her, her voice drops to almost a whisper “when the floor beneath you crumbles, you realise life is fragile”. For my neighbour, the floor fell in the minute she heard the words “I have six months” come out of her father’s mouth. It was these words that made her realise what she was throwing away by leaving “I was taking the easy way out, all he wanted from me was to be successful and I realised that failing won’t get me anywhere and he would just be disappointed”.
Courtenay flashes me one of her bright smiles “So here I am, working my ass off again”. She came back after the long July vac ready to fix the mistakes she made back in first semester and with a whole new approach to life. “The way I see it, you can either stand above life, or you can get swallowed by it. I choose to stand.”