COVID nearly trapped us

• Zambians safely repatriated home 

Photo by Martha VanLieshout used for illustration

By VICTOR KALALANDA, Illinois, USA, October 29, 2021

You must have heard that lockdowns have resumed in China due to a COVID outbreak caused by the more virulent Delta variant.

To give you an idea of what’s happening there, four million people in the country’s Lanzhou city can’t move around anymore but stay indoors in accordance with government orders aimed at preventing the spread of the dreaded and notorious virus.

If you’re a foreigner, this could mean you’re trapped and won’t be able to leave that country and see your loved ones for some time.

I was triggered when I heard about this possible crisis because of what happened to a group of young Zambians In Zurich, Switzerland at the height of the COVID pandemic in March, 2020.

I was a member of that team.

Despite the story’s nearly traumatic ending, it had begun on a clearly upbeat note earlier in 2019.

We were scheduled to attend one of the world’s most prestigious internship programmes called the B360 Education Partnerships, which facilitates African development every year by organising training opportunities in Switzerland for a selected group of talented and deserving young African students.

In Zambia, B360 partners with the University of Zambia (UNZA) in the departments of media studies, engineering and also economics, where the best students are subjected to an exacting screening process before selection.

This has been ongoing for many years, with other students being picked from countries like Namibia and Zimbabwe.

In the 2020 cohort, I was culled from UNZA’s media studies department and I joined my university’s two other economics postgraduate students, Milambo and Mataa, on the programme.

The three of us would be travelling outside Africa for the first time, so there was that adrenaline rush, you can imagine.

The other interns included five Namibian nationals and one Zimbabwean guy, a brilliant set handpicked to yield the best potential for the development of Africa.

While I would be working in Switzerland’s robust digital marketing industry, my two Zambian colleagues would be working in the banking and insurance sectors.

Milambo was in insurance and Mataa, whom I shared the same house with while abroad in Hunzenschwil, was the banking sector guy.

The Swiss consider Hunzenschwil to be a village but I will tell you that the place comes across like the rich suburbs of contemporary society. Maybe it’s because its small and quiet, but what I’m trying to say is that it’s not like the villages in Mporokoso, Kasama or Nkeyema.

So after we were selected in 2019, the following year all of us (interns) were flown to Switzerland to begin our orientations by the first day of February.  

The whole experience was like the make-believe world of Hollywood movies.

For every need, food or otherwise, there was someone to attend to us.

The airports in Europe were magnificent as if built to make a lasting impression on us, and roads felt so safe and looked impressively beautiful.

We were literally living in some sort of happiness bubble, where all of man’s dreams come true at once.

We were here, all the way from Zambia, Namibia and Zimbabwe, briefly engaged in highly paid careers, with the freedom to become the best version of ourselves. It was daunting but wildly exciting!

So two weeks into February all of us had adapted pretty well and, though living in different parts of Switzerland and spread across the different media, banking and insurance industries, we corresponded regularly on WhatsApp and Email, and went out on occasion with all expenses paid for by the B360 team itself.

What we didn’t know was the twist our plot of happiness would take.

It would happen soon and, as they say, the punch that knocks out a man is the one that he does not see.

We were reporting for work while the COVID pandemic raged in neighbouring countries like Italy and Spain, and this increasingly became scary in that a similar trend started developing in Switzerland, and travelling protocols on public transport begun to change.

Back in Zambia the situation was different because nobody had yet contracted the COVID virus, not until March 18, 2020,

But in Switzerland’s neighbouring country, Italy, for example, infections had flared up. So it wasn’t a matter of ‘if’ but ‘when’ we would also share a similarly distressing reality.

It would not be long.

On my way to work, I began noticing that there were fewer people every time I got on a train or tram.  

This was strange because, unlike many other countries, public transport is highly popular and reliable among Swiss people, so much so that people would rather travel with buses than own a car.

Such a sudden shift in normal life portended disaster.

By the end of February, Switzerland had recorded its first COVID case and fault lines started developing in public life: when you sneezed on the bus, the person next door changed seats; when you extended your hand, the gesture wasn’t reciprocated; instead, you got a verbal answer; hugs became few and far between; and we were soon wearing masks and surgical gloves.

Suddenly in the second week of March, 2020, about half our group was ordered to work from home, a policy that deprived one of the professional stimulation afforded by the office setup.

As international employees, we didn’t know what would happen the next day, especially in such an advanced capitalist economy where you don’t often hear of state intervention.

But like water slurping into a tank, the crisis steadily rose, until it was almost time to shut down Switzerland while we were still in the country.

My colleagues and I could not imagine leaving Switzerland while halfway into our internship, but again this was clearly not a good time to be abroad.

So while our host companies were introducing rotating schedules, the B360 team made one of its most difficult decisions, but for an even greater altruistic outcome—to save the lives of African interns.

B360 treated the situation like the emergency it was by terminating the internships in the interest of life and safety on March 16, 2020, and generously released funds for immediate repatriation of all interns back to Africa on March 17, 2020.

Such a moment also served to demonstrate B360’s unquestionable competence in managing complex operations such as repatriation just before borders were closed.

And so with flight tickets secured, in a trice, all interns received their dues and were safely repatriated home.

We were back in our respective countries by March 18, 2020 and by March 19, 2020, the Swiss Government had made historic economic decisions and the country went into lockdown.

Today I can relate this story only because I survived. But there is no doubt COVID nearly trapped us.

*Original copy was first published in the Zambia Daily Mail on stated date