What have you been working on?
Sometimes the work begins when the world is asleep.
Last night the phone rang well after midnight — a mother, frightened and far away, worried for her son who hadn’t been in touch since early evening. Her son is an international student staying in our residential college. She couldn’t contact him and knew something was wrong. Her voice carried that fear.
For the next few hours we tried to work out what might have happened. Had he gone out for the night and run out of battery? Had he been caught up in a scam and responded to a threatening demand? We checked CCTV footage for any leads, then rang the police for advice.
We were still working on it two hours later when word came: her son was safe but shaken. He had been assaulted by a group of teenagers at the local shopping centre. They stole his phone, left him with cuts and bruises, and he had spent five hours at the police station reporting the crime before returning to college, where we cleaned and dressed his wounds.
At that point, relief set in — and the weight of it all. This is the part of leadership that no timetable captures. You don’t plan for it; you just wake to it. The work that begins in the quiet hours is the kind that works on you. It shapes your understanding of care, of proximity, of the fragile network that holds people when they’re far from home.
It reminded me why places like this matter — why living in community is more than a line in a brochure. In a rented apartment, no one might have known. Here, someone noticed. Someone called. Someone responded.
Today I’m tired, but grateful. The student is recovering, his mother reassured, and I’m left with the quiet knowledge that sometimes the truest work isn’t what happens during normal hours — it’s what happens when the need arises.
The Afterword 
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