When Elena Schwolsky’s husband was diagnosed with AIDS, the work she had been doing as a nurse for kids with AIDS suddenly came home. After he died, she wondered what would come next for her. The desire to find a way forward pushed her to take a chance on 6 months in Cuba, a place she’d felt a deep connection to ever since a visit in her twenties. She would go and work with Cuban people living with AIDS- in a new and unfamiliar environment with very different ways of addressing AIDS. In the sanitarium Cuba had created to curb the spread of AIDS, she found people she would come to love and care about, and a place to approach the healing that had eluded her at home.