Home Country

Dear international students, how are you? Home Country

BY NAISARGI MEHTA

A month ago, on a nice Friday of spring break, I was living in my University housing, and I was unaffected. Two months before that, I had just stepped onto the University of Minnesota campus for the first time and was cursing the weather, unaware that I’d be signing all the emails off with “stay safe and healthy!” by mid-March.

You know when something becomes trendy, every single person seems to be talking about it? Everyone talks about it so much that it becomes annoying and then it ceases to be a trend. However, a pandemic that shakes the globe, affecting every single individual can hardly be reduced to the label of a “trend.”It has been roughly three months since people started talking about COVID-19, and it is scary that it has not been exhausted by the media yet. It’s not just some dumb trend someone came up with. It’s real, and it’s frightening, and all of us are affected.

Personally, it was the turbulence of being on campus one day and being in my home country the next day. To provide a little backstory, I am an Indian. For the spring term of my junior year, I decided to study a semester abroad to probably the only place colder than my heart—Minnesota.

The first day I stepped onto the campus, I knew I would love it there. When I entered the Coffman Memorial Student Union and saw the public piano, I fell in love. When I saw Goldy, I fell in love a little more. Interestingly, I even loved standing in long lines outside the social security office! Not to forget, during one of the hundred times that I was trying to catch the campus connector 121, the bus driver waited for me to get on. How could that not make my day a little better? How could that not make me love campus a little more? Then comes spring break, and the weather got so much better during the first few days that even a couch potato like me decided to go out exploring. One of the places that I will always remember is this place called Black Coffee and Waffle Bar, which—you guessed right—served extremely delicious black coffee and waffles.

By the middle of the spring break, our dear president’s emails had started to appear in the inbox. I was a little worried about my classes and my job but never worried enough to actually consider leaving the campus. There were a lot of things I hadn’t done yet. I was waiting for the weather to get a little better. Everyone told me how lovely it gets in May, and I was excited that I would be able to see that before leaving for India in mid-May.

And then it was March 17, a day I spent with almost zero sleep, a lot of phone calls with my family in India and a lot of decisions. Should I move? Even the University president had strongly recommended moving to a safer place. Should I move somewhere else in the U.S.? Isn’t coming back to India a little too big of a step? Finally what convinced me was Trump. There was no way we could foretell either Trump or even Modi’s (the Prime Minister of India) moves. It was highly likely that one fine day, without any prior warning, we get the news that international travel is banned. If that happened and I had to overstay my visa or miss the beginning of my senior year in my home university—those would be problems greater than my affection and respect for the University of Minnesota. Fun fact: A day after I came back to India, our prime minister banned all international travel. Within a few more days, my country was locked down.

Of all the good, bad, and tedious things that came along with that decision, emptying my room out was brutal. It was more than throwing out an unimaginable amount of food; packing up half a semester’s worth of memories in a couple of bags sent chills down my spine. And before I could say goodbye to my room, to the city, to my friends on campus, I was off. In a matter of 24 hours, my phone number changed from “+1” to “+91.” I remember feeling numb, functioning solely because of my spinal cord. I knew that if I thought about it, I would cry. As soon as I entered the airport, I realized I was not alone. I spotted a lot of Indian international students on my flight—all looking a little lost, a little frightened, but sticking together. Never have I felt the spirit of Indian community so strongly before.

During the time I was in the U.S., I had the pleasure of meeting many other international students as well—some from Pakistan, from China, from South Korea—and I am worried about all of you. I want to ask you, are you okay? Are you in a place where you like to be? Are you safe? All the fellow desis, I hope you get through the live lectures without at least one of your family members popping up in front of the camera.

We’re all in the middle of the next generation’s textbook pages, and the one thing that I hope comes out of this is a collective increase in affinity for each other. After all, we will have beat a global pandemic together with extensive research, unending hospital shifts, difficult decisions, discord streams, and, as always, memes.