Social distancing: Through the lens of an International Academic

Years have gone by since my life first intertwined with the Galwegian lifestyle. The never-ending use of an umbrella, admiring all four seasons in a day, the lovely beaches and the green pastures have all become part of my life. However, the day still feels fresh in my mind when my entire family, from my parents to my niece and nephew, took an eight-hour-long road trip to give me a farewell to head to Ireland to become an academic at NUI Galway. I remember that my dad was trying to console my mum and sisters, who were visibly trying to hide their teary eyes. I reminded myself of the literal meaning (and not its actual philosophical meaning) of some words of wisdom from one of our famous female Tamil poets from the 3^rd century BCE, Avvaiyar, to keep my tears at bay. “Thiraikadal odiyum thiraviyum thedu” _ Avvaiyar (roughly translated to “venture and sail across the oceans to seek your fortunes”). I promised my family then that I would be with them every year for the entire duration of my holidays.

Little did I know then that there would come a day when I would not be able to keep this promise. Even after starting my own family, I never failed to keep my promise, but thanks to the COVID-19 pandemic, I failed in this for the first time in almost 15 years and have not seen them for nearly two years now. No wonder I felt the two-metre social distancing rule to be a breeze compared to the storm of being miles away from my loved ones for this long. When I hear people often talking about their difficulty in staying at home and not being allowed to travel outside of their counties for months together, I empathise with them. I understand the importance of a hug or a handshake better now and how these two-metre distancing rules denied us simple joys like these in life. It is, however, hard for me not to think about being unable to hug my family back home and even harder to think about when in reality it might ever happen again. It is beyond my imagination to think how my wife will tell her one-year-old niece that her uncle and aunty are people in flesh and blood, similar to her parents. They are not just another cartoon character or someone living inside a phone, whom she unsuccessfully finds in her never-ending searches on the rear side of her mum’s phone during our every single phone conversation. For the first time in my life, I truly felt about the saying, “it is a small world,” that nothing is farther from the truth. I believe this is what social distancing feels like for every international staff member of NUI Galway and beyond. It is no longer simply metres apart, but miles apart of social distancing experienced by us, the international faculty, and the guilt and fear that accompany this, which adds to the spectrum of mental health challenges caused by this pandemic-induced lockdown.

In the past year, I appreciated the role of telecommunication technologies in our everyday lives more so than ever before. I am so thankful for Skype and the likes that kept me close to my loved ones back home as best as it can be done during these difficult times. But even this happiness was short-lived. The limited availability of internet data and bandwidth, which need to be used for day-to-day shopping and work, forced my family back home to reconsider their data usage. Our calls became shorter and shorter as a result. As the time progressed with the pandemic’s grip tightening, even these conversations became an occasion to enquire about everyone’s welfare and wellbeing rather than being a conversation of joy and the happiness of casual chitchats. The impact of COVID-19 became the central theme of our conversations. In hindsight, I should have enjoyed these conversations about welfare more, because things took a turn for the worse. In the recent past, with India facing the worst second wave, the conversations have started to focus more and more on who is and who is no more with us. Being a healthcare professional, exposure to loss of life is nothing new. The rate at which these losses had happened over the last year and particularly to one’s own family is tremendous.

To put it into context, I have lost four of my uncles or aunts in the last four months. Although I am fortunate enough not to have witnessed war, the frequency at which these losses were happening is nothing short of a war-like situation, where there is no time to grieve between losses. Not seeing the loved ones for one last time made these losses even harder to handle and did not help with the natural grieving process. Such an experience is not unique to me for sure, although I wish it was not. At some stage with varying intensity, all the international faculty of NUI Galway might have experienced something similar in the past year. Unfortunately, these events and experiences tend to strain the already strained mental health and wellbeing of our international faculty community.

I sympathise with the family and friends who cannot attend funerals in Ireland due to government restrictions. I dare say I even understand the few families who occasionally broke the rules about the numbers allowed in a funeral, just to have the opportunity to see their loved ones for one last time. While I agree that a loss is a loss, where I think the experience of such a loss by an international faculty differs from an Irish colleague is in the absence of their extended families and their support. For an international academic such as myself in NUI Galway, I would like to think of NUI Galway as my extended family. Thankfully, unofficially, this extended family was as supportive as they could be over the years and more so in the last year, with many colleagues and friends calling and having virtual coffees as frequently as possible. Officially, initiatives such as the newly inaugurated NUI Galway International Staff Network last year gave us opportunities to network better and support each other better during these difficult times. I am glad that I was part of the initial meeting among ten or so international academics a couple of years ago to discuss the need to establish this network. We met at Moffetts restaurant in the Orbsen building (when sitting next to each other rubbing shoulders was considered a norm) over a coffee, which almost sounds like something impossible in the current climate. Initiatives similar to this are more crucial now than ever before, to ensure the feeling of community and oneness.

Of course, not everything is doom and gloom due to this pandemic. Working from home removed a minimum of two hours from my commute every day in the famous Galway traffic, thus adding more quality time to life. More often, it gave me the precious extra time I needed to call my family and friends around the globe. Like everyone else, I enjoyed staying up late in my bed, knowing that on days when there are no official meetings, I can still be in my jammies and work! Honestly, I had more international collaborations and academic publications than ever before due to the flexible availability of researchers worldwide, courtesy of COVID-19 and global lockdown. Undoubtedly our social experience has been reshaped considerably by this COVID-19 pandemic and is likely to remain the same for the foreseeable future. This pandemic experience taught me a valuable life lesson: that I must appreciate every little positive thing both locally and internationally.  After all, an international academic is also an academic striving to learn every day. I am confident that the new connections I have established both within NUI Galway and beyond, despite being metres or miles apart, will continue to be a part of this beautiful new social journey promised by COVID-19 in my future. Like everything else in life, even this pandemic experience is a mixture of all emotions, which I can proudly say I lived through, giving me a once-in-a-lifetime experience. However, I am looking forward to having this behind me and never wanting to see it again in my life.