Good friends or pocket money?

“From Yaad to Yard” is a bi-weekly column in which Breanna Burke, a Jamaican international student at Stanford, shares her unique experiences navigating life on the farm. Through reflections on culture, identity and science, she offers a thoughtful perspective on bridging the distance between her Caribbean roots and her new life on the farm.

“Good friend better than pocket money.”
– Jamaican proverb meaning “A good friend is better than money.”

The drive to Kingston was an exhaustingly long four hours, with a few out-of-tune screams as my mother and I sang 90s dancehall. Then it happened. I counted the cars whizzing past us on the highway and wondered if life in them was as strange as mine. The question hung in the cold air of the car and slowly faded away the closer we got to our destination.

“Don’t you want to see any of your old friends again?”

My mother’s question triggered a deep place of deep blue sadness within me that would explode sooner or later. Growing up, I never felt like I had a best friend. Sure, I’ve had friends whose giggles often filled tiny pink bedrooms as we pondered crushes, but I’ve never felt the inexplicable pull of the best friend sold on TV – the one who knows everything about you, the one with you sleep the time.

When I left Jamaica, I left with two great friends from high school who I talk to every day. The three of us met after a school trip to Barbados. From then on, our group chat “BIM” contained thousands of messages with our deepest secrets, fears, and sometimes funny Instagram reels (to their dismay, I’m not on TikTok). I loved them, but I didn’t share a life with them and I thought that was what having a best friend was all about. The other friendships I had in high school slowly disintegrated over the summer, especially when we all went off to college (partly due to moving to a completely different country). People I’ve spoken to every day for the past seven years have had to say a simple “Happy Birthday” once a year.

The truth was that I didn’t really want to see her. We had become completely different people. We were strangers.

The night before I flew to Stanford, I made a new note on my phone titled “Stanford Experience Goals to Achieve by Graduation”:

1. To make at least two real friends

If I’m honest, everything else was just a filler. If you had asked another pre-frog what he was most afraid of, he would probably have said that he was away from everything he ever knew and didn’t know if he would find his people. For me, I didn’t even know what it meant to find “my people,” especially in a new country. All I knew was that for the first time in my life, I didn’t want to be okay with feeling alone.

Over the past year, I’ve found friends in the most unlikely places and have had to work to redefine my idea of ​​what friendship really means. When the lining of the beautiful red dress I had bought for CROM (Crothers’ prom) burned under the heat of my iron – thanks to my very youthful inexperience in ironing my own clothes – rather than sitting alone in my misery (or my mother to bother with it). At 10 p.m.) I called my friend in the dorm who offered to let me borrow her steamer so I could shine all night long (even if I was a little burned inside). When it felt like my entire world was crumbling under the weight of CS-P sets and self-doubt, I also had people to remind me that I belonged here and that everything would be okay – my people.

If you had asked me two years ago whether I would have chosen a good friend or $1,000 (okay, maybe $10,000), I would have chosen money. Now I would think a little more carefully. I learned that a good friend is more than just that: they are proof that our world is more than just the bubbles in which we isolate ourselves. They are proof that there is more. In the words of the best Batman, Christian Bale, they are proof of this: “I am more.” A good friend expands your reality beyond your fears and flaws and gives you a larger world where there is beauty.

And I think this infinite world costs a few dollars.