COVID 19: MY LOCKDOWN EXPERIENCE

“This year is the year of perfection. If you don’t believe in perfection, you will not have it”

– Chris Oyakhilome

Did I not believe enough? Did we not believe enough?

M-O-R-B-I-D-I-T-Y – MORBIDITY

M-O-R-T-A-L-I-T-Y – MORTALITY

E-N-D-E-M-I-C – ENDEMIC

E-P-I-D-E-M-I-C – EPIDEMIC

P-A-N-D-E-M-I-C -- PANDEMIC

2009, Obama’s year, the birth year of vision 2020. Its health education class, in a red-walled classroom with colourful conjoined tables and chairs. I’m nine, bubbling with a childhood exuberance, excited about almost everything. We are learning some new words. I learnt the words with a childhood gusto but they would not be part of my vocabulary until 10 years later when Mortality and Pandemic would become everyday words and I would become unexcited about everything. Twenty-twenty here I come.

Vision 2020. Nigeria would have uninterrupted power supply in 2020. Nigeria would stop gas flaring by 2020. Nigeria would have a female president by 2020. Nigeria would eradicate extreme poverty in 2020. Nigeria would have a great health care system by the year 2020. Nigeria would be a one of the 20 largest economies in the world, able to consolidate its leadership role in Africa and establish itself as a significant player in the global economic and political arena by 2020. All jokes. #What we ordered.

Mission 2020. Covid 19. Lockdown. Food scarcity. Economic recession. Giveaways. Lootings and robberies. Banditry and terrorism. ENDSARS 20.10.20. Reality. #What we got.

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In a mess of yellow and wine stunted cabs. Ibadan. That’s where the experience begins and ends. After the lockdown was announced barely two weeks into resumption, I, like many other students thought we would be back soon. So many things were left behind, it was just two weeks there were just a few countable confirmed cases of Covid-19. We dared to be optimistic. We dared to hope.

I school at Obafemi Awolowo University, Ile-Ife and we had just returned after a long holiday for a new academic session. Barely two weeks into resumption, the lockdown was announced and we were all asked to leave. Lectures had not even started in my faculty. Asides the fact that we never started classes on time in the law faculty, there was also the uncertainty caused by the newly commenced strike action by the Academic Staff Union of Universities (ASUU). In my school, there is a divide in which some academic staff members belong to a different Union outside of ASUU and so did not join in the strike action. At least not at first.

I arrived at Ibadan, the city of stunted yellow and wine cabs, slightly irritated at the inconvenience of returning home just about a week after I left. But I had a plan to enjoy the moment, the two weeks. To relax and do my own thing before the hassle of school begins. Pen and journal in hand, I made daily plans. Morning runs, reading and rereading books, writing mediocre poetry and good fiction, cooking meals, hanging with my siblings and cousins, reading the Quran daily. This is it. This was the life. For two weeks and then the listlessness sets in. Being tired from doing nothing. Being exhausted from rest. I would often spend half of the day sleeping and when I wasn’t sleeping, I would be reading or struggling to write. But I was always tired.

1 confirmed case, 3 confirmed cases, 25 confirmed cases, 120, confirmed cases, 369 confirmed cases, 1000 confirmed cases. As the number increased so did hope melt away. It became real. Fear so raw I could almost taste it. Never have I thought of my life as something that could so easily snap. An entry in my journal says:

“New month, very little excitement. The number of infected Nigerians keeps increasing and it’s scary. The world as we know it is falling apart and we are all scrambling. I hope Nigeria survives this. I hope my family, friends, relatives, acquaintances, schoolmates, fellow countrymen survive this”

During the lockdown, my older sister fell ill with malaria a number of times and each time she was ill, I thought to myself, ‘this is it, this is the moment we all get it’. So even while, I joined the productivity bandwagon and set daily tasks, and attended every free webinar I came across, and registered for a zillion online courses which I never completed except the one on intellectual property, the fear, fear of not knowing was just beneath the surface

It is only in retrospection that I realise this, my parents’ way of coping with the entire situation was by listening to a lot of radio. The sound of the radio became an almost permanent melody in our home It was like they took solace in the fact that even though we were financially stretched and the Indomie of our childhood was fast becoming a luxury, there were people on radio who were really starving. Men and women who could no longer afford to feed their families. People who were sick and could no longer afford medications. In a way, their stories were inspiration. To my parents and to me, because through them I was able to remain grateful. Through their stories I was able to gain strength. Because even though, I now realized for the first time, how fickle the security of our family was, I was able to not think too much about it. How we were closer to poverty than to being middleclass. Yet we were so far removed from it because of the security of a roof over our heads and the privilege of education. This is beginning to sound like a sad story.

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Since we are supposed to see the bright side of everything here’s the bright side of my lockdown experience. For the first time in my life, I read so much. I read so many books during this period that at the end of the year I had read eight seven books completely and abandoned about a score halfway because, ‘I like what I like’. The lockdown experience also made me a lot more self-aware, more introspective and more comfortable with myself. And if there’s one thing in particular I would be grateful for forever about this period of my life, is the gift of storytelling it gave to me. I’ve always had it, lockdown just repackaged it for me. I had so much time to think and imagine that If I didn’t start writing seriously, I felt I would have exploded one day and instead of blood and bones all over, it’d be just words flying around.

It’s 8:32 pm less than 72 hours to deadline and because I’m still not sure this experience is over I refuse to conclude. A part of me still feels locked down. That part of me that hopes that things would go back to the way they were before the lockdown, before Covid happened yet I know this is a blind hope. There is a new normal one in which it is cool to take pictures with half of your face covered in a mask; a new normal where my lecturer sends me emails and screams at me across the screen ‘can you hear me?’ No, I cannot hear. I wish we were in the same room doing it the old way.

Perhaps this feels incomplete to you, well it is because it is. I have withheld information from you and for that I am sorry but I will not give you the particulars of my flirting with the Ex online. That is a lockdown experience that will remain locked down until perhaps when I publish that book I haven’t even started writing. Till then, make do with this. I am no longer the person I was before the lockdown but some things remain constant, like my love for shoes and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie. And of course, storytelling.

Amal.