Living In A Pandemic Is A Little Like Living Abroad

When you live in a different country you have to adjust to different ways of doing things.  I don't mean a two week vacation and staying in hotels, I mean spending a much longer period, say a year or more in a different culture.  Learning the local language and living and working with people of that country.  Of course, some of these issues arise on a shorter visit, like how do you get food?  How does the money relate to your home currency?  

Since March, we had to start to figure out what restaurants and stores were open and how to get food safely.  It didn't take too long to find restaurants that delivered or how to order groceries online for delivery or pickup.  But shopping on the grocery apps is a lot different from pushing a cart through the store.    

How are the rules different from where you came from?  We're still working on this.  Masks?  Well, sure of course.  But where are masks enforced?  Biking, I tend to be the only one who has a mask ready to pull up when someone is approaching.  And some people forget to keep their distance.   For those still flying, there are all sorts of changes.  What about money?  Do you want to exchange cash?  And I've never washed my hands this much.  

Finding compatible friends is another tricky thing.  How strict are your family and friends about masks and distancing and attending events?  Which friends might expose you to the virus?  There's the awkward discussions as you start discovering which of your friends practice the same level of safety that you do.  And your friends can surprise you by taking more risks or being much more careful than you expected.  

After the first month or so the initial shock wears off a bit, but what you thought you knew may change and you have to adjust.  What good are masks?  Well it appears the early advice was intended to keep people from buying masks that medical workers needed, and no one really knew enough to know if they also protected the wearer or just those around the wearer.  The way health experts are learning about the virus - how it travels, who it impacts, how to treat it - that's what happens to expats living abroad.  Some things you learn are helpful, some things you learn turn out to be wrong.  

Language hasn't been an issue.  More like going to another (in my case) English speaking country.  Some words have different meanings, others are new ones you need to learn, but most of the basics are the same.  

One of the most important benefits of living abroad is the perspective you get as you compare what you're experiencing to what things were like back home.  At first there's a tendency to find the differences annoying, but after a while, you start to see that back home doesn't always do things as well as you thought.  The forced changes make you appreciate what the new country has that you don't have back home, or you learn that some things are actually easier, or people friendlier, or have more leisure than people back home.  

In the US, the worst president ever happened to be in office when the pandemic arrived and that made things far worse than they had to be.  The lies and misinformation, as time passed, made the pandemic worse and I believe the pandemic should get credit for the crowds who have been out protesting for Black Lives.  Many people had been stuck at home for a month when George Floyd was killed, and many were out of work or out of school, so they had the time to demonstrate and the need to get out and voice their frustration.  

So people are also discovering that government services like public health, need to be based on scientists and the politicians have to defer to the experts.  We're seeing in the US what happens when the federal government fails miserably.  For hundreds of thousands of people, that lesson will come too late, because they have been extremely ill or have buried loved ones. Or were buried.  How many will learn that there is a big difference between the politicians and the career civil servants?  

In the field of public administration we often say that no one notices government until things go wrong.  Those things that government provides, that people take for granted, tend to be invisible until the system is broken - public health, for instance.  Experts tend to agree that public health projects like clean water systems and sanitary sewage systems have saved far more lives than all the miracle drugs and glitzy modern surgeries.   

The failure of the Trump administration to see the danger and take appropriate action has proven that point.  People have begun to appreciate the expertise of public health officials and the importance of basing decisions on science rather than perceived political impacts.  

But bad government has also been exposed by George Floyd's death - on top of all the other blacks killed by police and shared on social media.  In this case the pandemic has also helped white US see the problems with police that people of color have known all along. 

One thing that's different between the pandemic and travel abroad, is that when you are living in other cultures you generally have a good idea of how long the adventure will be.  Not so with this pandemic.  At first people were saying the pandemic would be a couple of months, but now it's clearly going to continue well into next year.  So we'll have plenty of time to ponder what parts of normal we want to return to and what new normals we want to create.

Another big difference is that when you live abroad, you experience all the newness and the mental adjustments as an individual.   When you get back your family and friends have no clue that your head has changed dramatically.  For vets this is often a very traumatic experience.  People don't get it and often they can't or won't try to explain it.   

This pandemic is something people are experiencing simultaneously around the world.  We're all going through this.  I'm hoping that that will make it easier to start making 'normal' more equitable, more sustainable,  kinder, and livable.