On Wednesday, Rochester was hit with some of the strongest winds it had seen in more than a decade. Thousands of people in the area were without power by the end of it, and among them were the students of Roberts Wesleyan College.
The power struggled before it finally went out in my last class of the day. It was then that the college decided to cancel classes for the day. My classmates and I, being confused about what to do if class got cancelled in the middle of class, decided that we would rather stay, as we really didn’t want to go outside. However, that all changed when we received a text alert banning pedestrian travel on campus. We all worked to make our way back to our dorms, which resulted in a few of us being hit by branches, and myself nearly blowing away.
At this point, we were at a loss of what to do. We couldn’t do homework, because we needed power. We couldn’t watch Netflix or play video games for the same reason. We couldn’t even check library books out! After a night without power, it was decided that all resident students should leave campus by dusk. #RobertsHasFallen soon became something I was seeing all over my social media. However, I’d argue that Roberts did not fall in the chaos of the windstorm, rather, I think Roberts rose.
Wednesday night, my roommate and I sat in our living room and played board games by fake candlelight, glow stick, and even a lightsaber as we gorged ourselves on junk food before eventually making a blanket fort and falling asleep under it. Others burrowed under blankets and talked with people they might not have ever known before, all while talking about potential solutions to the world’s problems. During that night, I never felt unsafe, nor did I feel scared. I felt as though for a brief, quiet moment, we were all one. We were all working to survive. We were all working to make the most out of a terrible situation.
The next day, classes were cancelled, which worked out for me, as I had received concert tickets as a Christmas present, and I would have had to miss class anyways. It was while I was waiting for my train to show up that another text alert was issued, this time asking all resident students to leave campus by dusk. In order to help spread the word, I went to social media to share the latest update. It was there that I found professors, commuters, alumni, and local resident students offering up their homes for students to go to.
Our campus, our home, may have no longer been a safe place for us to stay, but Roberts did not fall in this moment. It was in these people, sharing information, offering up their own homes that I saw Roberts rise to the challenge. As a Christian college, we have an obligation to love our neighbor, and that’s exactly what I saw happen. We might not have had a place to call home this weekend, but we had each other, and for me, that’s really all that Roberts has been about.
It is my hope that in the time it takes for us to fully recover from the terrible winds, that we continue to rise. We have an opportunity to not only help those in our college community, but also in the Rochester community as a whole.
