voices

Far from home during a global pandemic

Arseli Kurt and Laura Haslinger are both exchange students who are spending their sophomore year of high school at Seacrest Country Day School in Naples. Seacrest, like other Florida schools, has transitioned to an online learning curriculum. Both Arseli, from Turkey, and Laura, from Austria, live with a local host family, SW FL Parent & Child contributor Tricia O’Connor and her two children. We’ve asked Arseli and Laura to share their experience living far from home during the COVID-19 global pandemic.

Laura:

It is extremely emotionally confusing. I would have never thought in the beginning, when this whole virus thing was just some headline in a newspaper “Dangerous Virus Outbreak in Wuhan Province, China” that it would affect my exchange year to this extent.

It started when my school trip to France was canceled at the end of February. “Well, my French teacher is just paranoid, completely overreacting,” I told myself and laughed about it with my best friend, Luisa, who was also on an exchange year in Arizona.

One week later President Trump suspended all travel from Europe. Then the cases in my home country Austria started to dramatically rise, the Austrian foreign ministry announced they urgently wanted all Austrians traveling or living abroad home.

Every day, for about 10 days I spent an hour on the phone with my parents weighing our options about me staying in the U.S. or just to leave everything, pack my stuff, and take the next possible flight to Vienna. Over these days almost all the other exchange students who I knew from home or orientation decided to leave as fast as possible while airplanes were still landing in Europe, including Luisa.

Regardless, my parents and I continually decided the smartest decision was for me to stay, even though it was definitely the harder one to make. So yes, it has been very hard for me to be away from home during all this mostly because so many of my friends made a different decision and my parents got more and more worried about me, not because I might get the virus, but if something would happen and they couldn’t be here.

Arseli:

This was completely unexpected and at first, like Laura, I didn’t think the virus was going to be this dangerous. But after hearing more about it, we talked as a family and decided to act carefully like instructed. I thought if everyone did that we could get over this fast. It didn’t go that way.

As this got more serious, my country, Turkey, like all the others, also started to take some action and started to close their borders to noncitizens. I started talking to my parents, my host mom, and my teachers, and we all agreed it was best for me to stay here in my safe home where we were all cautious and careful instead of flying home with a 14-hour flight and touring airports which was the worst place to be anyway. I was happy with this decision and I was also relieved in a way; to make a decision to go home that fast and try to adjust to a new way of life at home would’ve messed me up. I also wanted to finish my year and not leave early. Even if that sounds really self-ish and unimportant with all of this going on, it is true.

Now that we’re practicing social distancing and staying home, I see that staying here was the better decision and it was best I didn’t travel and take a risk.

Being away from home in this scenario is worrying, but the good part is that I get to talk to my parents more since I’m home and not at school. They’re also quarantining. They’re spending time in their garden, watching shows, baking, cooking and all that kind of stuff. Since I know they’re safe and I can even FaceTime them for five minutes every day, this is not such a bad situation. It is just an experience.

WE WILL TRIUMPH

Nicholas Ackerman, 7, of Fort Myers, “dabs” while Nikki Mallous and Keven Ackerman look on. “We are pretty much homebodies, so the stay at home order hasn’t been too bad, all things considered. We’re happy to do our part and stay home to prevent others from getting sick and to protect our family. I do miss seeing my parents regularly and being able to give them hugs! They are in their 80s, so we are taking the stay at home order and social distancing seriously so that we don’t pass anything along to them. We are also very thankful for the family time we are getting with our son,” Nikki says.

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