COVID STORIES

Did you know that New Zealand has beaten coronavirus, not once, but twice?

Since everyone knows about the traditional quarantine experiences of online learning, interviews through zoom, etc. I won’t focus on these. Instead, I’ll cover some of the more interesting aspects of the New Zealand lockdown experience.

I distinctly remember the day that community transmissions had been confirmed: it was a bright, sunny afternoon and the sound of tense chatter was ubiquitous throughout the air of our physics class. Everyone was crowding around  laptop screens, waiting for our Prime Minister, Jacinda Ardern (or Aunty Cindy as we like to call her informally) to make the call as to whether New Zealand would enter lockdown.

Suddenly, it was announced.

Community transmission? Confirmed. Lockdown? Starting midnight. School? Cancelled. Thus began the odyssey of our social hiatus.

As we unfortunately witnessed the number of cases slowly climbing higher and higher every day, we also watched one of our health ministers, David Clark, break the rules of quarantine repeatedly, not only by  driving his family twenty-kilometres to a beach, but also embarking on a dangerous mountain-biking expedition and moving his family from one house to another. As expected, he resigned shortly after —to the delight of many New Zealanders.

However, on a healthier and more personal note, even under the strict conditions of quarantine, we were allowed daily jogs or walks in order not to completely devoid us from the crisp autumn air. To make the dull life of lockdown more interesting for children, a new social trend emerged which saw my mum (yes it’s spelled with a ‘u’ instead of an ‘o’ here in New Zealand) digging all my stuffed childhood animal friends and setting them carefully on the windowsill facing the streets and muttering a spell to make them sit upright. The idea was that children walking with their parents would notice and experience a bit more colour in their day as they could wave hello to all the plushies who were waiting all day and all night for them to walk past.

After 1504 cases, a very unfortunate twenty-two deaths, and seventy-five days in isolation, New Zealand became coronavirus-free.

We had shown the world that this horrific virus was beatable when strict measures throughout the country were followed. Although we were aided by the fact that we lived in a bubble away from neighbouring countries and both our population and population density are relatively low, the sense of national pride was in every New Zealander when on June 8th, it was announced that the last person had fully recovered from the virus.

For the next two months, life was as we knew it pre-COVID. The sense of normality after such a long period of being in isolation almost felt alien to us, and this was aided by the fact that almost every other country in the world was still dealing with this horrible virus.

Then, this deadly disease struck us once again in August and I found myself once again waking up five minutes before my online classes and lazily attending all of them in my pyjamas.

Thankfully, around a month and a bit later, we found ourselves hugging our friends at school again. New Zealand had beaten the coronavirus, not once, but twice, making headlines once again. Up until today, four months after the last outbreak, there have been no community transmissions and everyone is now hoping for a sunny COVID-free Christmas (the southern hemisphere experiences a sunny Christmas as opposed to a snowy one).

I sincerely hope the best for everyone and everyone’s families out there still currently in quarantine. Please keep yourself safe by socially distancing, wearing a mask, and following the advice of medical experts. New Zealand has shown it is possible to beat coronavirus if everyone plays their part in keeping each other safe, and I believe this is possible in other countries too.

In May, I sat on my elementary school field, masked and distanced from three friends. I’d slowly grown to know these people over four years of high school, in classrooms, hallways, blue library chairs, cross country courses. On that day, I saw them for four hours. I spent much longer than four hours on calls with them, but those calls were small in my mental quarantine timeline. Those calls were separated by boxes on our screens: screens many roads and a river apart. Sitting there, sharing words through masks and transferring glances through real, moving eyes, made more sense than any Zoom lesson I’d attended.

It was a month before my “drive-thru graduation,” but that small moment on the field was a culmination of every year of school I’d experienced. These friends I’d known for four years blurred with the pasts I’d lived on that elementary school field—seven-year-old me building a kingdom out of stray bamboo shoots, nine-year-old me running after a soccer ball and pretending to be Abby Wambach in a sea of boys, ten-year-old me helping my best friend memorize definitions of big, big words for a vocabulary test.

Seventeen-year-old me sat on a blanket facing three friends, masked, each twelve feet away, cautious. We brought our own watercolors and painted—each other, sea creatures, abstract scenes, colors lacking much thought but equipped with hidden feelings. We listened to music, and sometimes we sang along quietly.

And we talked. We talked in this place where our words could float in the air around us—because our words came from a mouth and not a screen.

Since that May day, I’ve had a few more of those small in-person moments, relearning how to understand a person far from a computer screen. In June, my high school principal handed me a diploma in the front seat of my car, and I officially graduated high school. My parents and sister were in the car with me, and we drove past cheering and waving high school teachers and staff. I hoped my eyes could show my huge smile through my mask.

If I had graduated in 2019, I would have been surrounded by friends and classmates throughout the whole ceremony. Afterwards, I could have cried in my friends’ arms and said goodbye to my teachers in person, taking photos next to them—with our entire faces and smiles showing.

But my informal, lonely graduation isn’t what haunts me. Graduation was only a small event amid months of loss and fear, months of learning how to become an adult in a broken world.

I went 25 weeks without hugging a friend before moving in with two of them in September.

Now it’s been eight weeks since I’ve hugged my family.

Back on March 13—my last day of in-person school—I drove to school like I had every morning for the last few months.

I crossed Chain Bridge, trying to sneak a glance at the beautiful, raging Potomac River as I went by.

I drove down DC’s Nebraska Avenue, the site of so many exhausting track practices, with my friends beside me. There, I tried to learn all of my school’s secrets from a senior. We created a fake reality TV show. I stopped running just to laugh a little harder at a joke. I tried to teach all of my school’s secrets to an underclassman.

I passed all those memories and thought about the future runs that I had assumed I still had time for. My eyes teared up as I kept my foot hovering between the gas and brake pedals. It’s ironic we waited so long for 2020, my senior year. This awful, terrifying, insulting year.

Back then, I was mourning the end of my high school experience and focused on what I’d lost while holding onto gratitude for what I had. I still feel all that loss, all that gratitude, but, now, the uncertainty of my future is what plagues me.

My future. It’s all so confusing now. The future became hard to imagine when I started measuring time in how long it’s been since I’ve hugged a friend.

I am a recent high school graduate grappling with a lack of goodbyes, but I’m also waiting to reenter a world radically changed by months of isolation, fear and death. I’m teetering on the edge of adulthood, and, frankly, I don’t know what that means because I may not receive the adulthood I always expected.

I’m going to college at some point in time—not this year, like I’d always envisioned.

Instead, I went from being student to graduate to staff member at my high school within a matter of months, spending a gap year doing environmental sustainability work.

Fighting climate change is what first taught me to deal with something like coronavirus. Pollution and disease both float in the air around us, largely unseen, and their full effects can only be understood through extensive studying—a studying where high schoolers have never had much control. Both present us with an inevitable, hard-to-understand doom.

My grade was born in the wake of 9/11. We’ve grown up facing constant reminders of a broken world: news notifications that there’s another active shooter somewhere, viral videos of the murder of another Black American, scorching hot summer days and winters without snow days, a stock market rapidly dropping. So, a nationwide lockdown because of a global pandemic doesn’t seem too shocking.

Before coronavirus, prom and graduation were two constants we had amid chaos. Losing those events definitely stung.

But a bigger constant we had was a future of possibility. When you’re locked down at home and the world a few feet away is changing in indeterminable ways, dreaming of possibility makes less sense.

Thinking about the future becomes nearly impossible.

Fear and gratitude bounce back and forth within me. They teach me how to move on in a world frozen in place.

My lockdown experience was pretty clichéd. Every day was the same in my house in the middle of the capital city, Kathmandu, even with my brother back home from college.  I attended online classes, tried some new recipes, cut my own hair…you get the idea. Until one night.

I have always assumed that not even an earthquake could wake me up when I was asleep. Turns out, I was very wrong.

You must have a pretty good idea about a teenager’s reaction to waking up at 5 am. Especially when the said teenager was up past midnight, engrossed in Dan Brown’s mysteries. I scrunched my eyes and turned to my side, bringing the blanket over my eyes. I swear, if my brother is trying to prank me again, I’ll –

My inner monologue stopped when I realized that it wasn’t a hand on my shoulder that had shaken me awake.

I opened my eyes, and they immediately fixated on the swinging ceiling-fan. I quickly glanced across the room and saw the silhouette of a rattling chair. In the distance, I could hear the street dogs barking.

The earthquake was of 5.4 magnitude. Not big enough to cause death and destruction, but enough to take us all back to that dreadful Saturday of April 2015. The day when 9000 Nepalis got crushed to death.

I still remember that day like it was yesterday. I was in that very room, seated on the bed, but with a six-month-old and a three-year-old girl. Just five minutes prior to the quake, I had asked them if they wanted to play in my room, taking them from their mother, who was still having lunch at our little family reunion. I remembered staring at the same fan and trying to shield the girls’ heads with an arm while scooting away on the bed, just in case the fan dropped on us. I remembered their eyes wide and scared, their hands clutching my t-shirt in tight grasps. I remembered a soft voice asking me what was happening.

I also remember what happened afterwards. Terrified shouts of a mother, my cousin, as she burst into the room. The relief in her eyes on seeing her little girls unharmed. The way she carried both of them out alone like a supermom. I remembered all that and more. The countless aftershocks that continued for months. The distraught faces on TV. The debris of the most monumental buildings in the city.

Sitting up on my bed five years later, I placed my sweaty palm flat on the cool wall next to my bed. I waited for the shakes to stop but it was hard to tell since my hands were trembling even more than the earth.

According to a quick Google search, earthquakes generally last less than half a minute. In those seconds, if you had told me this fact, I would have refused to believe you. Crises always seem worse than they are.

I knew the excruciating seconds were over when my parents rushed into my room.

As the lockdown continued, many forgot how the walls that surrounded them 24/7 were trembling with uncertainty only a few days earlier. Maybe it was a good thing that they did; we couldn’t go on living in fear of the unknown, whether the unknown was a nation-wide disaster or an infectious virus.

 

 

 

 

The news about the coronavirus pandemic – and the subsequent lockdown – were what altered the lifestyle of many Romanian twelfth graders, myself included. When schools closed in our country – March 13^th, I remember, a Wednesday – everyone thought it would be temporary, for a week or two at most. At that point none of us had really taken into account the way other countries had been affected by the virus, because if we had, we would have realized that the pandemic could not just end in a fortnight simply because we wanted it to, because we had more important things to do – we being mostly people involved in education, students and teachers alike. And the reason why we needed the outbreak to end? The Baccalaureate was coming.

The Romanian school curriculum is heavily anchored by the Baccalaureate, “bacalaureat”, or “bac”, for short, as we call it. This exam – or rather, set of exams, is viewed as being the most important exam students will ever take, the one that will open the gate to adulthood. All my life, whenever I thought of the bac, even as a middle schooler years before I had to take it, when I envisioned the exam only in a faraway future that, in my thirteen year old mind, seemed like it would happen in another lifetime, one thing was always certain: it was a monolith. Adults always talked about it like a threshold that you have to pass in order to begin your life, and from a young age, its importance is drilled into your mind, — you know you’re going to have to go through school and that it’s going to end with the culminating occasion of this exam.

A big part of the typical Romanian student’s life goes like this: if you’re going to take an exam, be it the bacalaureat or the “National Evaluation” that eighth graders have to take in order to be accepted into a high school, chances are you’re going to have to be tutored. Tutoring, or “meditaţii”, as we refer to it, is when a student has private lessons with a teacher – typically at the teacher’s house – that the parents pay for. They usually occur once a week, often with groups of two or more children at once, and they are a very common thing in Romania, especially for students who are preparing for exams. In some cases, like it was for me when I was preparing for my Romanian literature bacalaureat, it’s not that you don’t have a good teacher at school, on the contrary, but that you want to get more guidance from a tutor who is more focused on you individually. Even if you don’t do the session one on one (I had two other classmates for my tutoring), the tutor can obviously focus on you way more than they would at school, where you are typically part of a class of thirty or so students.

Tutoring is a pretty important component of the Romanian school system, even though it’s not exactly “legal” in many cases, and the reason it is so commonly practiced is, once again, the exams, particularly the bac. Parents want their children to succeed, and more often than not, at least in the environment I am a part of, parents are willing to pay around 1200 lei (about $300) a month for one child’s tutoring, which is significant taking into consideration that the minimum wage in Romania is currently around 1500 lei (about $370).

So, we’ve already established that the bacalaureat is perceived as being very, very important in Romania. And when the coronavirus pandemic came about? Everything was disrupted. The bac is based on a curriculum that is usually very closely followed, and when it was announced that we would not be going back to school for the rest of the year, except to take the exams at the end, people panicked. The vast majority of teachers had not finished teaching the whole curriculum yet and some were still behind, and then the debates started. Should we include the whole curriculum in the exam? Should students even take the exam anymore? The latter question caused a lot of indignation, both from teachers (and a number of students), and the masses, as well. The bac is nothing short of holy, in the Romanian mindset, and some people basically believe that not taking this exam is the equivalent of having no chance of surviving adulthood. In the end, the exam did take place, although it was only based on the first part of the curriculum, the one that had been taught until December, in the first semester.

Despite the lessening of the exam curriculum, the lockdown was still draining for most twelfth graders in my country. The lack of a routine tipped everything off balance for many of us. Most students still had online classes, both school courses and tutoring, however, for me, at least, it sometimes felt like they were all over the place. Sometimes I had a course in the morning, then a few hours later there was a tutoring session, and in the evening, there might have been another school course. This lack of a very clear timetable, like the one we usually followed, made it more difficult to focus, at least for me, and the majority of my peers seemed to agree.

You don’t really have a routine anymore, like you used to do when you went to school, my history tutor told us, and I think this makes it way harder for you to concentrate on studying like you did before. he added.

A friend of mine also mentioned that she found it hard to concentrate when she had nothing else to do,— you’re at home all day and this is all that you do, over and over. You don’t really leave the house, except maybe to go buy a loaf of bread or something, and this makes you stir crazy, it becomes really hard to focus on anything.This was something I resonated with on a very deep level, as I found that the lack of a certain kind of stimuli made it very hard for me to find the energy to focus on studying, and with the shadow of the impending bacalaureat looming over me, getting closer and closer by the day, I sometimes felt like I was going crazy, like I was going to fail at life.

I did eventually manage to pull myself together, about a month and a half before the exams, and I started to study really hard, almost every day. I managed to catch up fairly quickly, due to the fact that I usually am a very quick learner, and I even managed to score maximum results in two of the three exams, which had seemed like an impossible feat at the time. I think this experience certainly changed me, because it made me realize that there were things that I used to hate, like having a routine that at times seemed very boring, waking up at the same time every day and starting classes at 7:30 every morning, but that grounded me in a way I didn’t even realize was important until it ceased to exist.

One thing that I realized during this pandemic – and I think this is very universal, not only for students but for other people as well – is that we shouldn’t take things for granted. There are things we may not particularly enjoy, like waking up at 5:30 every morning to get ready for work or school, but their absence can definitely make life harder, in a way, and that we should try to be grateful for what we have, when we have it – we never know when we’re going to lose it.

On the front page of the New York Times on April 18, 2020, an article described protests in the Midwestern U.S. of state-imposed stay-at-home orders, even as coronavirus “death tolls spike[d].”  Directly beneath was a photo of schoolchildren in Denmark from an article about how Danish elementary schools were re-opening as the threat of the virus diminished throughout the country.

On March 11, almost exactly one month before, I was halfway through my semester abroad in Copenhagen, when the news came out that all schools in the country were closing for two weeks.  Within a matter of hours, my study abroad program was cancelled, my home university announced that it would be closing, and the President tweeted that the U.S. borders would be closed to all travelers from Europe.  At three in the morning, I rushed to pack my suitcase while my parents bought me a plane ticket for mere hours later so that I could get back home before the borders closed (it would later be announced that since I am a U.S .citizen, I would be allowed back regardless, but this crucial piece of information had not yet been tweeted).

In my Danish Language and Culture Class we had studied how Denmark’s welfare state contributes to a high level of trust: Danes trust the government to take care of its people in times of crisis.  In the morning on March 11, I went on a field trip to a local high school, where we played a game with the Danish students in which my teacher would make a statement, and we stood on one end of the classroom or another based on whether we agreed or disagreed.  When my teacher made the statement, “I trust in my government,” the classroom split between Danes and Americans, with my American classmates and I gravitating toward the “disagree” side of the classroom.

That very night, the universe decided to see if I was telling the truth.  And it turns out, I was.  At three AM on March 12, I didn’t trust that my government would allow me back home.

And, even though they and I have vastly different political views, the protestors from the April 18 Times article didn’t trust the government, either.  They didn’t trust their leaders to take any action that infringed upon their personal freedom.

The concept of freedom lives in American culture in the same way that trust resides in the hearts of Danes.  As Americans protested the  attacks on their freedom perpetrated by policymakers trying to keep their constituents safe, Danes showed a willingness to follow some more restrictive rules for the time being because they trusted the experts, and knew that their neighbors trusted them to be responsible.

And, as of April, Danish children were back in school.  There are many differences between Denmark and America that influenced the way the pandemic affected the two countries differently.  Trust, a quality conspicuously lacking in American pandemic culture, is certainly one of them.

 

On the first day of the year, different colours and styles of fireworks were discernible in the sky. One that we lit set a nearby bush ablaze, reminding us that indeed, fire does work. I was two blocks away from home in the midst of the wild plus young at heart, and though I turned a year older on that very day, getting back inside and switching to neverland is what my mind yearned for.

By March, the excitement dwindled and consequently,I got back to my quotidian life of helping my mum at the restaurant.

The sound of the cash register when people pressed their orders, the familiar and strange faces I invariably had to say hello to plus tolerate no matter how rude, and the long hours away from home made me yearn for a life away from the hustle and bustle.

Therefore, when the lockdown was announced and my mum decided to shut the business until further notice,I thought, good riddance!

As March said goodbye, the life I always wanted came by. I stayed home, watched a lot of tv, slept in, caught up with the latest updates on social media and spent time with my whole family to boot.In addition, I went through my old stuff, reminisced, as well as just lived in the moment. This was beautiful and enjoyable, howbeit.

They came as days and went as weeks and I woke up still dreaming, dreaming of the smiles on people’s faces as they enjoyed our food including the precious memories made. Some of the customers that came were not so nice, but my mum and I laughed about it later. I missed them, I missed the aroma and I missed going to bed knowing I had somewhere to go to the next day. Also, necessities were no longer as easy to have as when the business was still running.

Then I had an epiphany, the life I was searching for is the one I had all along, I just didn’t realise and appreciate it. Yes it was tiresome, yes sometimes it was annoying, but this is what made it worthwhile. This is what made it my life.

Taking a walk down the streets and seeing how the once crowded and well kept  places looked dilapidated, made me wish to have everything back. When the virus is gone,I just want what I had, nothing more.The silver lining is that I learned a valuable lesson,

It’s ok to take some time out, it’s ok to go on vacation, but its never okay to take for granted what brings you happiness and makes your story.