Sometimes even when things go terribly wrong, the universe still seems to have your back.

That was the experience of Toy Okotete in 2011, who had just embarked on a six-week volunteer teaching experience in Cape Town, South Africa with her then-boyfriend DeAngelo.

“We really wanted to do something, we wanted to travel and see the world, but we didn’t just want to travel without purpose,” Toy recalls. “We wanted to give back in some way.”

The trip started out wonderfully, with the couple teaching for Cross-Cultural Solutions in the township of Khayelitsha. But three weeks into their trip, halfway around the world from their home in Ohio, DeAngelo had some troubling symptoms. He was eventually diagnosed with leukemia.

“The first thing he says after the doctor has confirmed he’s got cancer in his blood is, ‘I wonder how I can bring awareness to help other people with this,’” Toy recalled. “DeAngelo was the most incredible person I’ve ever known. I’m just lucky to have been a part of his story, and he a part of mine.”

DeAngelo experienced a series of recoveries and relapses from leukemia, and eventually he passed away in 2019.

“It’s heartbreaking—but I’m also just filled with so much gratitude for our entire experience together,” Toy said. “DeAngelo and I had a very beautiful love story—we were just so happy together. As most cancer patients know, one of the positives to come out of cancer is you don’t really sweat the small stuff as much. So in our relationship, we didn’t argue very much. We just enjoyed life and we didn’t let cancer stop us from living.”

DeAngelo started chemotherapy in Cape Town, eventually taking an emergency flight home. Interestingly, when Toy had to end her role as a volunteer, her replacement was AFC founder Terri Wingham. Terri, having recently completed treatment for cancer herself (an experience that would lead her to create A Fresh Chapter), proved a powerful connection. 

“The story gives me chills sometimes to see how things aligned,” Toy said. “She provided a lot of comfort in the scariest time ever in helping me understand some things that were helpful as he was going through treatment—and to see someone that had survived cancer.”

Keeping that connection proved to be valuable to Toy and DeAngelo. The couple married in 2013, two and a half years after their South Africa experience, a time when DeAngelo was in remission.

“People would say, ‘Well, you could have left,’ knowing that this was the road ahead. Even though we had only dated for a year and a half, I’m like no, I couldn’t have. That doesn’t change how amazing he is.”

When DeAngelo was first diagnosed, the doctors in Cape Town had encouraged the couple to save a sperm sample before starting chemotherapy, because of the impact treatment can have on fertility. Toy and DeAngelo came back to the city in 2015, starting in-vitro fertilization treatment to hopefully conceive a child. (Coincidentally, Terri had returned, too, leading a group of A Fresh Chapter participants to Cape Town in 2015.)

“The whole story is just like, my goodness—was this really my life?” said Toy, who said it was an easy decision to return to Cape Town, where they had had such a great experience with medical care.

DeAngelo wrote a book about his cancer experience called Falling into Faith, about being diagnosed with leukemia there in South Africa, how positive and reassuring everyone was, Toy said. 

“It almost felt like it was meant for this to happen in South Africa, not here in Ohio. He basically summed up in his book that he discovered that his faith was the source of his power and that helped him with the entire journey.” 

While Toy did get pregnant as a result of the IVF, she had a miscarriage shortly afterward. She and DeAngelo decided to try again, this time at home, successfully having their baby girl, Aidyn, in 2017. “She’s like a spitting image of her dad.” 

Toy and DeAngelo kept in touch with Terri, and DeAngelo went on to participate in the Costa Rica Odyssey in 2017. 

“It helped him with navigating being a survivor, and then also it was important to just be in such a beautiful place,” Toy said. “It was his birthday while he was there. I remember him being like, ‘I’m celebrating my birthday in the rainforest, and it’s so cool.’”

Toy encourages people to give to AFC if they can, and is grateful she and DeAngelo had a chance to help another participant experience an Odyssey program with AFC. “We’re really proud to have called ourselves philanthropists because we were able to at least, in part, send someone else on a trip. It was something that we talked about.”

She also encourages those who might be looking into an AFC experience to take the leap. “This is something that DeAngelo would tell me all the time: He’d say, ‘Stay open, my love.’ He always just had this mindset of staying open to experiences in life.” For DeAngelo, the Costa Rica Odyssey experience “brought a lot of comfort and a break from thinking about all of the nuances of cancer, and really to think about healing and positivity, and gratitude. It was incredibly impactful for him.”

From Toy’s perspective, volunteer experiences like the one she had with DeAngelo in South Africa will stay with you for your whole life. “The people you meet—Terri’s a perfect example—the connections that you build. You never know where it takes you and how it changes your perspective, and just how life changing these things could be— in some ways you can’t even begin to imagine.”

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Nikki Kallio is a writer and cancer survivor. She has worked for newspapers in Wisconsin, Maine and California, and is now a freelance writer and editor. Nikki is a graduate of the Goddard College MFA creative writing program, and her fiction has appeared in literary journals including Minerva Rising and Midwestern Gothic. Her essay “Cold Front,” about the anxiety of cancer recovery amid the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, appears in the 2021 anthology “(Her)oics: Women’s Lived Experiences During the Coronavirus Pandemic” from Pact Press.

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