The chronicle I didn't want to write

Will we go back to what “before”?

On March 17, my first child was 18 years old. What a way to celebrate coming of age…closed at home.

We were together and united, with a homemade cake and we sang happy birthday in the company of our maternal grandmother, but without the usual gathering of the whole family that has always characterized us. It was also a month ago that my father, Jorge Roque, died suddenly. A few days ago I experienced the feeling of going through Father's Day for the first time without his physical presence.

There was already talk of this virus at the time of his funeral ceremonies that brought together hundreds of people, family and friends. So I thank all the enormous tributes and tributes that were paid to him as a man of Faro, Tourism and Sporting Clube Farense. Even that would not be possible today. I'd rather him here than go through this with us, but I know it would be torment for him to subject himself to this isolation. It matters that it remains alive among us.

I have been in isolation for a few days now, even though I have been withdrawn and limited mobility for some time now.

We live in organized chaos. We try to maintain some serenity and we are telecommuting, with no deadline. What was true hours ago is no longer true now.

The planning and organization to which we have become accustomed and to which society as a whole leads us is totally conditioned. We learn the meaning of new words: contingency, alert, calamity and emergency. We realized that, on the one hand, we are far from developed support systems in some areas, but also that, on the other hand, we have access to and availability of powerful tools that help us in this necessary collection.

Many services will disappear because they have become unnecessary, but creativity and human ingenuity are giving birth to opportunities for some.

In the direction of a public Higher Education School, the aim is to maintain distance and computer-based learning, quickly adapting to this new situation.

The response was very positive from colleagues from the most varied areas. Some, on the day immediately following the limitation of face-to-face classes, were able to respond from home, with classes based on the Zoom platform, others are still testing and adapting content. They bought cameras, microphones and are trying to stay active and available.

Many questions come to us from colleagues, students, non-teaching staff all the time… how will the assessment be? Some are more apprehensive, others are very open to these practices, which a few days ago we called “pedagogical innovation” and “new teaching-learning methodologies”.

Today, I have many more emails to answer. We receive new information all the time. We constantly make decisions that we communicate by email.

The children are at home and also receiving tasks to develop. There is no cafeteria at the School for them to eat and therefore, we are all eating at home.

In addition, the household chores are all being done without recourse to third parties, neither laundry, ironing, nor cleaning... The husband continues to work and the company's doors are open. He leaves at 8:30 am and returns after 19:30 pm, he doesn't work in health or food… This makes me think a lot about the conditions of the homes of each one and their families and makes me feel anguished.

Offers proliferate on how to spend time at home and do activities with the children. I myself have been sharing a lot about virtual visits to museums and monuments, free books to do download and so many other tools that we are now discovering by force of circumstances.

I would like to have the opportunity to explore them, but I have deadlines to meet and documents to prepare. One of which is the 2020 Activity Plan with all the unknowns that this year is asking us and we are sure that much will remain unfulfilled.

I heard the international commentator Nuno Rogeiro suggest, on television, that we record our daily life in this period in writing, so that we can reread it in the future. Certainly, many are already doing this and the testimonies worldwide will have similarities, but also differences. This chronicle is thus a testimony. Today I do not share an analysis of a scientific nature, nor do I seek to contribute to the sharing of knowledge.

We have seen, these days, some films where fiction presented scenarios of this kind. Nuclear and chemical wars, but also the development of laboratory viruses to decimate nations, which, for decades, have been part of the cinematographic fantasy.

At the moment, none of this matters. Global well-being and our survival is what it is all about, and this affects each and every one of us. This is the greatest test of humanity we have ever experienced in our lives, and we all have to contribute to exterminating an invisible enemy.

We hope that all this will pass, to throw a party and go back to celebrating life as “it was before”. Let's look for the possible serenity, the fulfillment of the determined prevention behaviors and the development of techniques that allow us to develop the professional activity at a distance, so that it complies with what was established.

Be inspired by examples of resilience and share them. We will survive this test.

Will we go back to what “before”?

Author: Alexandra Rodrigues Gonçalves is director of the Superior School of Management, Hospitality and Tourism at the University of Algarve

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