“He knows we’re talking about him,” Hope Campbell, the new assistant resident director for the women’s quads, said as Buster sat in the corner between her couch and the wall. “He’s pouting. He’s also just such a diva…Some people think he’s super ugly, but I think he’s a cute ugly, you know?”
Campbell became assistant resident director at the beginning of the fall 2021 semester. Additionally, she was asked to become Buster’s new caretaker. Shortly after I sat down in her well-decorated dorm in Ayers 1, I asked her how she felt about Buster as he nuzzled up to her wrist. Somehow, this led us to talk about how much we love cats, but she assured me that she was comfortable with this responsibility.
“Ken Litscher was like, ‘Hey, do you want to keep Buster?’ and I was like, ‘You know what? Sure,’” Campbell said. “I like him. A lot of people don’t and I kind of feel bad for him…So far, we’re doing good. He has his quirks, but don’t we all?”
Campbell is no stranger to adjusting to different circumstances. Between her time as a high school senior and college student, she worked several different jobs, including being a camp counselor and an RA. After graduation, she interned for a church in the summer, planning events and coordinating with others, which helped her become more equipped to handle several different tasks at a time.
“My senior year and coming into college I moved a lot,” Campbell said. “I felt the Lord uprooting me in a lot of ways and kind of challenging that sense of ‘Man, home really isn’t a place anymore.’”
Before returning to Union after graduation, Campbell worked with troubled foster care youth as an AmeriCorps member in the Atlanta area, which was an eye-opening experience for her.
“I think it just gave me such a bigger sense of empathy for what people are going through…There were a lot of hard things about it, but it taught me a lot,” Campbell said, patting Buster’s back as he stared at me intensely. “It also helped me balance handling stress and taking care of myself when you’re in an environment that is a stressful situation…I had to be really mindful of praying more, being consistent in reading scripture and having support from friends and family during that time, which I think is really important to teach students in college. That support is so important.”
Suzanne Rhodes, content development specialist for the office of university communications, stated that Campbell is a source of support for other people.
“She has a natural gift of being a counselor,” Rhodes said. “I admire that about her, and I think she does a fantastic job at that. I think this job at Union really applied to her strength which is connecting with other humans…We are sisters in Christ who walk alongside each other and help each other in similarly deep struggles that we have.”
As Campbell continued to talk about how she had to adjust to many different places, I began to think about how hard it was for me to adjust to a tiny dorm room as a freshman away from home. For Campbell, home is what she makes of the space that she has been given.
I gestured to one of Campbell’s three couches and asked if she had bought all of her furniture. She pointed to the couch, with wooden legs that matched the Union dorm aesthetic, and said that she got it from McAfee when they were getting rid of it, but that the rest of the furniture belonged to her. I told her I loved that for her, and she thanked me, laughing and leaning back into her couch.
Though community and material things invite a sense of home into an unfamiliar environment, Campbell emphasized that unfamiliar environments invite us into a stronger relationship with God.
“God takes care of you throughout any and all seasons,” Campbell said. “As great as college is and as important as it is, it’s temporary…Things are temporary, people and places change. And that can feel really overwhelming, especially for a lot of college students who haven’t lived anywhere else except home and Union. And so, moving forward, when they think about what they’re going to do after Union, they have an opportunity to build their life and trust God in the process and grow amidst that.”
Photo by Davis Smith
