The beginning of the end started with a goodbye. My study abroad program was cut short by COVID-19, and I suppose meditating on it for more than two days in travel creates a frontline perspective on the world’s response to the pandemic.
One of my friends in my study abroad program was being called home early, as an abundantly careful measure by her university. She walked out of dinner stone-faced, caught between grief for an ending and the panic that comes with booking and packing for a transcontinental flight with six hours notice. We stayed up late helping her pack, forcing inside jokes for the last times and searching for the proper ways to say goodbye.
I got an hour and a half of sleep. I woke up to my hallmates pounding on my door and my phone ringing. President Trump’s address to the nation obviously left us scrambling. Our program was in a little-affected area and had given no indication of canceled or even online classes. I stayed up the rest of the night slowly watching flight prices skyrocket as I begged my advisor for an update as he pestered the U.S. consulate office all night with little avail.
In 12 hours, we had gone from casually discussing upcoming finals to frantically stuffing suitcases and turning in keys. I had little time to grieve, which is something I’ve never been good at anyway.
I’m fuming, some higher power tore me away from new friends and threatens my graduation and employment plans. Much more importantly, something terrible is threatening thousands of lives, livelihoods and futures around the world. Studying abroad is supposed to give perspective, and I and everyone else who went abroad this term can claim a special kind of perspective.
I was supposed to be in Ireland this weekend. My friends and I had booked an Airbnb 30 minutes outside Dublin that doubled as an alpaca farm, and we were looking forward to a mixture of countryside sightseeing and St. Patrick’s Day debauchery. As panic over COVID-19 grew, some of us opted to take the original flight to Ireland and hope to fashion some sort of connection back home to Michigan, Texas, Colorado or wherever we could get back into the U.S.
My study abroad program, which I worked hard for and planned more than anything else previously in my life, was cut short by circumstance. I was, however, one of the lucky ones: my original flight home was booked for March 31 and didn’t miss out on a full month or three of memories. That being said, I still think it is fair to be a little bitter that I will spend the last two weeks of March in self-quarantine and not on the Mediterranean beach that I called home for two months.
I didn’t ever feel scared or truly homesick until this final part of my study abroad experience. I missed comforts and routines, but I was usually stimulated by my surroundings and companions. I navigated Rome by myself, stood among the craziest fanatics at an FC Barcelona match and survived a tour through Morocco with a 60-year old guide who ended each conversation with a joke about his gargantuan marijuana stash that was probably also a sales pitch in retrospect.
After clearing immigration and walking the full mile length of Istanbul International to pass just a little time, I felt it all. I feared for my family when I get back. I could realistically infect them unknowingly. I want nothing more than to share their company and love for the first time in months. I feared for the thousands of others just trying to make it home, from one unstable place to a similarly unstable, but a familiar one.
At that moment, all the dire predictions and correlating trends finally became more than code and ink. Watching German chancellor Angela Merkel forecast a majority of her compatriots contracting the disease was scary, but I didn’t fully comprehend its implications until the tiny hours of the morning in Turkey. After a wonderful two months of fearless exploring, the reality now is there is much to fear, or rather carefully prepare for.
Everyone who studied abroad this semester now gets a unique perspective on preparation. We have lived through two very different virus responses and now must live with the exchange of witnessing history for curtailed time abroad.
I miss my new friends already and worry for their futures. Some of them have uncertain paths home, especially as travel restrictions tighten and flights home dry up. We’ve each learned plenty in terms of how to improvise under dire travel circumstances and take calculated risks.
I hope all my old friends are okay. They have had to live through a pandemic response far less robust and wise than the ones I have seen in Spain and Turkey. I certainly was not enamored with the processing approach at LAX, which involved four hours of close-quarters containment with every returning national and no meaningful testing.
For as complicated as all these feelings are and as frustrating this trip has become, one ache stands out above the rest as the greatest lesson of them all. In spite of all this, I have a new appreciation for human connections.
I adventured so much, thanks in large part to my friends. I had the courage to go on this trip because of my family’s support. I have dozens of new perspectives, thanks to students from all over the U.S. and delightfully intuitive conversations with harried travelers along the way. I truly felt we are all in this together, even if our higher powers aren’t.
In spite of all these qualms, we have plenty of reason for hope and even growth. I look around me, and I do not see hysteria. I see many, many tired faces and plenty of prayers, but they all end in quiet resolution. I left for Europe in January hoping to prove my personal belief that there is still so much more that pulls the human race together than drives it apart, and I still believe that. I just never could have expected how conviction would be tested.
Jonah Baker can be reached at [email protected] or on Twitter @jonahpbaker