I’m back home after two months alone recovering from the pandemic of feelings caused by your demise. I remember last year mom said she was going to throw you a big surprise 60th birthday party, and maybe it was a sign that you were about to go. It’s an analogy that states that people who are abundantly celebrated are ready to go. I remember calling you to wish you happy birthday and sharing with you about my first diplomatic mission to Hong Kong and you were thrilled about it, more than I was, as your candour usually is.
However, they kept delaying it, and they finally postponed it to March 2020. Now that I look back I realised this covid-19 thing was already making its mark, since 19 stands for 2019. It also makes me assume that they thought March was the expiration date, just like right now we think it’s December 2020. The funny thing is that it turned out that you were the one with an expiry date, dad.
Fast forward to February 2020, I kept hearing about corona virus, before it was nicknamed as covid-19. It seemed as something that couldn’t affect me, like it was something too far away to hurt me. You know when you hear about conflicts in some random country and you are confident that it cannot cause any damage to your perfect life.
I remember talking to a friend and she was telling me about all things she was doing to prevent covid-19 and I laughed. She kept preaching about how serious it was and I dismissed her. I thought that staying in Addis Ababa, the capital of a paralleled universe with its own calendar was protecting me from the world.
March 2020, my supervisor hands me an agenda slot with specific days for us to come in. A week later, they finally announced that there was no need to come to work because we were going to work remotely. At home, I found myself narrating my life “Today I’m going to watch a movie and then cook”, and I finally started giving covid-19 the respect it deserves.
On the other side of the world, mom kept calling and asking if I bought certain things like she had a ‘surviving list’ or a covid-19 prevention kit. Little did she know she had bigger things coming to worry about. At the supermarket, I was confronted with suspicious temperatures checks, long queues even longer with social distancing, sanitisers everywhere and all kinds of face masks. I couldn’t breathe with those annoying masks and the increase of the prices was hard to swallow.
I missed waking up early and going to work but I was told to avoid the African Union Commission since it was considered an ‘endemic zone’ because of our travel history. At home, I was far from safe since I stayed in a guesthouse and it was part of the embassies list of places to people quarantine.
At least, I could finally sleep since church and mosques were closed, and there no loud prayers disturbing me. Oddly enough, I was about to be in an urgent need of prayers. From my window, I could see that Ethiopians were still in denial amid all the prevention rules issued. Addis never stopped…people, animals and cars everywhere. I spent most of my days watching the news, impatiently waiting for this to be over. While scrolling between channels, I heard something about covid-19 taking a milder form in Africa, possibly based on Africa having a young population.
In April, I had company, depression came to stay with me for a few weeks. Depression feels like intervention, you are tortured by every thought and haunted by all your mistakes. Then it turned into empathy, like I could feel others’ pain. I was constantly bombarded with the usual ‘200 cases, 50 recovered, 7 deaths’ and the atrocious news such as ‘No lockdown, few ventilators’, ‘lockdown is exposing Ethiopian women to sexual abuses’ and ‘young girl impregnated by brother during quarantine’ .
By June, I sanitised my whole body and my thoughts. I was free from depression but I knew something was off. Suddenly, the government kills an activist and the people didn’t take it well, starting riots and all kinds of public demonstration. I remember thinking to myself “Isn’t covid-19 enough?”. Then soon, the deadly protests erupted, the cases increased.
When the protests started, I assumed that’s what my spirit was warning me about. The social tension was followed by electricity, water and internet cuts. And before they could cut the network, mom called me and revealed that my dad had a stroke. He travelled from Lisbon to Luanda, and while quarantining at some hotel, he suffered a ‘brain attack’.
On July 3rd, internet was back but only for international organisations offices. I was flooded by news and tweets about how covid-19 was destroying the world. I soon realised the universe wanted me to watch another upcoming tragedy unfold, so they finally provided me with a medium to be contacted.
At home, I still didn’t have internet but it didn’t prevent me from running away from my fate. I got a call from a friend giving me condolences for the passing of my dad. I didn’t know my dad was dead and I didn’t believe it. I was shocked! And all I wanted was to call him and convince him to not die.
Grief manifestation were very similar to covid-19 symptoms – fever, body ache and shortness of breath. It was so strong that it made my thoughts derailed, it felt like quarantine all over again. Day 1 of mourning, day 2 of mourning…On day 3, I got ready and went to work. On my way, I saw a covid-19 billboard saying “Protect yourself, protect your loved ones…” It broke me! I then realise I had forgotten my mask, hence the security guards didn’t let me in. I thought that the fact that my father died meant that covid-19 was over but it wasn’t.
Everyone called and said that they were going to arrange for me to go home. I was thankful but I didn’t believe they could accomplish that since covid-19 proven to be unbearable. I don’t think people understood the power of covid-19, just like me in the beginning and I learned the hard way. My family was praying to God to save my dad when they should had been praying to Covid-19.
My dad didn’t die from covid-19 but it played a major role in his death, it put him in a hotel alone and when he called for help they ignored him, thinking he contracted it. When the hotel staff finally believed it was a stroke and called the emergency, they took fifteen hours to arrive there. At the clinic, due to the pandemic, they didn’t have certain resources that would make a big difference on my dad’s recovery.
Have you heard of a wife not going to his husband’s funeral? My mom was in Portugal and decided not to fly to Angola. There were available flights but she was going to do a fourteen days’ quarantine and by the time she finished, the funeral and everything else was over. I supported her decision since she was never going to see my dad ever again. And I supported her anger, after finding out the government allowed my aunt, an ambassador, to travel all the way from Switzerland to Luanda, attend the funeral and avoid quarantine.
I was also affected by the brutality of bureaucracies and coarse laws. Ethiopian airlines weren’t travelling to Luanda and my embassy couldn’t find me any commercial flight. By good or bad fortune, the Angolan government sent a special plane to pick up an Angolan official to take him to Luanda. I asked if I could join him, to make it to my dad’s funeral, since I benefited from the abominable diplomatic immunity. Thus, they claimed that there was a memo with specific names of the people that should be on the plane. This whole thing was slowly flaring up inside of me. However, my dad always told me to look on the bright side, so I wouldn’t hold on to bitterness.
In Luanda, things were also not easy for the rest of my family. Though, me, my mother and my sisters weren’t there, still, only ten people were allowed at the burial. While in Addis, I concentrated on beating the infections grief, through inhaling the steam of hope, hydrating my strength, and washing the pain away.
On my last calls with my dad, he told me that covid-19 is a detox from the world. He added that it was going to be amongst us for a long time and it will disrupt the mortality rate in the world. It will be the ‘elephant in the room’, just like poverty, poor health care and injustice…and we will survive! Like we survived his death.
02.10.2020
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