Esmerelda Lee
Searching for a place to fit in and start a career brought a teenager to the United States.
Although the journey was not what she expected, eventually she found a place to belong.
That teenager was Esmerelda Lee.
Now the campus manager at Garden Plaza, she recently shared her story of coming to the United States to an attentive audience of residents.
“I’m going to tell you a story of a girl who never quite belonged. A girl who really is a nobody and has always been a nobody,” Lee told the group.
Lee grew up in South Africa.
“I was born in South Africa in a town called Pietermaritzburg,” Lee said “The word Pietermaritzburg means separateness. The entire country was racially segregated along strict lines … The only time we saw people of a different race was when we went into town to get our major supplies or groceries.”
Lee said the whites were continually fighting to keep control, while the Africans who had lived there originally were fighting to gain control.
Indians and other non-whites were originally brought in to work for the whites on their sugar cane plantations.
“A group like me, we were regarded as non-white Indians. We were neither white nor black; therefore, we were forgotten in the middle of all this fighting. Even though we were born in South Africa, it was never regarded as ours,” Lee said. “We were disregarded as other, never belonging.”
This was evident to her as a young girl when she was swimming in the ocean and accidentally crossed into the water of the beach for whites.
“I saw a white lifeguard swimming rapidly toward me, but he wasn’t coming to save me,” Lee said.
Instead, he began pushing her trying to get her on the other side of the dividing buoy.
These groups also had separate schools. When her family saved “for months and sometimes years” to go on vacation and stay in a hotel, they always had to enter the hotel from the back entrance and were given a room over the dumpster area, Lee said.
She said her parents “accepted their place.”
Fighting in the area increased when news that Nelson Mandela was to be released from prison spread. It was common for her and her mother to be held at knifepoint after leaving the grocery store. She said they would “just let them have the grocery bags because it was not worth dying over.”
“Growing up in South Africa, we never stopped at a traffic light after dark because there were so many times people even with children were held at gunpoint, and children were even kidnapped because they would just take their car or kill them for it,” Lee said.
Her parents were pastors at a church in the inner city.
By the time Lee was in high school, different groups of black South Africans were fighting each other to gain control.
“Seeing people killed had become something that had happened quite often, and the police actually got to the point that if they came during the struggle they would be killed. So they would wait until the fight and the struggle was over and then they would show up,” Lee said. “However, I grew up with a very strong Christian heritage.”
Her great-grandparents had been a part of founding the first Church of God denomination church in South Africa.
Despite the chaos in the country, Lee was loved by her family and was close to her grandparents.
“I just loved having them around,” Lee said.
Her grandparents lived close by and cooked for her family. They each found ways to show Lee that she was special to them.
“I was always different at school,” Lee said. “In the school I went to all, the Indian girls there wanted to get married and a lot of their parents were arranging their marriages. That was the furthest thing from my mind.”
Lee said she had decided she wanted to go to the United States. She had watched American television shows as a child, getting goose bumps when the “Star-Spangled Banner” played at the end of the programming each day.
“In my senior year of high school, I told my dad so many times, ‘I am not going to college in South Africa … and I am not going to get married.’ I was very headstrong,” Lee said. “He finally relented and he told me about a place called Lee University.”
She was almost 17 when she came to the States. Yet, Lee did not immediately feel like she belonged in the U.S. as she had hoped.
“I didn’t have any connections at Lee (University),” Lee said.
After she came to the United States, her scholarship money fell through. She went to the vice president for business at the university and worked out a plan.
That summer she stayed in Ringgold, Ga., with a white South African friend who had moved to the U.S. with her own family. She got a summer job at Kentucky Fried Chicken. She also cleaned for the family she was staying with.
“That was one of the hardest times of my life,” Lee said. “I worked so any hours trying to get the money to come back to Lee (University).”
At one point, she wanted to give up. She called her parents from a pay phone.
“And my grandfather got on the phone … and he said, ‘You are not coming back and you are not giving up this easy. You wanted this. You are there now, so make it work,’” Lee said.
Soon after she went to a church where the minister said to her, “The Lord has a word for you, ‘Do not turn back.’”
“And I never turned back after that,” Lee said.
She was able to study for a semester at Harvard University and visit the homes of many of her friends.
Lee said when she first came to the United States she was “really odd.”
“But someway at Lee I really found myself and I found who Jesus was to me, not who my parents or my grandparents said he was,” Lee said.
Lee graduated with no debt due to jobs and scholarships. She wanted to continue to study to become a medical a doctor, but did not have the financial backing needed. She would later complete her master’s at the University of Tennessee Knoxville.
“The Lord led me to Life Care Centers of America,” Lee said.
She got a job as an administrator in training. At that time she had no knowledge of what the position meant or much about Life Care Centers of America. But, as she went through the program and came into an administrator position she came to enjoy it. When Garden Plaza opened, Lee transitioned to an administrator position there.
Lee met her husband on a blind date. She said after that first date they both knew they would get married one day. They have three children.
“Many times our culture sends a message to women that they must choose ... a career or fulfilling the role of a wife and mother, but you know with God, He has helped me do both. It takes a lot of juggling and it takes a lot of prayer and it takes a lot of help (from family and friends),” Lee said.
Lee became a U.S. citizen in August 2008.