HALIFAX, N.S. — Even for someone who enjoys her own company, as Amanda Katsande does, it can be lonely inside Saint Mary’s University’s Loyola residence complex.
Normally, this time of year, 1,100 students make their home on the SMU campus. Since the pandemic hit the place has emptied out.
Katsande, 22, could have headed back to her family in Harare, Zimbabwe, but decided, instead, to hang in and “see how things were playing out with classes.”
Now she is one of the 340 students, many of them from outside of Canada, still in SMU residences.
She’s luckier than most she told me Friday: a part-time job at the residence information desk ensures a bit of direct human contact—at least as direct as it can be in these social-distancing times.
She’s also a devout Christian who “wants quiet time to be with God before time with other people.”
Even so, there are entire days when she sees no one in the elevators in the senior student wing, and the hallways are empty.
When it gets too much — when phone calls and emails won’t do it — she messages a friend, also an international student, on another floor in the Loyola residence, to meet her in the common lounge.
From the prescribed two metre distance they shoot the breeze.
“Of course we check in to see how we are doing,” Katsande explained. “We talk about our day, our conversations with family, and we also just goof around because that is just how we interact.”
Sometimes, because the moment seems to demand it, they just put on some afro-beat or a little afro-house music.
Then, across the room from each other in this all-but-empty building, they dance.
“It definitely is strange,” she said of the post-COVID-19 experience.
In the time of the plague every story is strange in its own way.
After high school Katsande was looking for a small intimate university at which to study. She also wanted an institution that shared the Roman Catholic faith that is so essential to her life.
So, in January 2016, she moved into the Loyola building and started her studies in finance and global business management.
It’s gone well. She played varsity women’s rugby, and is good enough in the classroom to twice be an Academic All-Canadian.
Katsande also sings in a choir at St. Mary’s Basilica, and attends events at the Alliance Francaise Halifax, as a way to buff up her language skills.
All of that, of course, is in the past now.
This weekend she might go outside to get some air on the campus, which is off-limits to anyone who isn’t a student or staff.
Perhaps she will walk down to the Barrington Street Superstore, for groceries. (While other students take food away from the residence cafeteria, she cooks for herself.)
Usually she’s in her eighth-floor room — the usual dorm style with a bed, desk, shelves, cupboard and a drawer for clothes — which faces the Saint Mary’s football field.
Like all of us, she tries to keep busy. Unable to indulge in her normal pastimes Katsande works out, watches YouTube videos to sharpen her French, and plays the keyboard she keeps in her room.
Her parents call every day. Since they’re also devout Roman Catholics they frequently pray together on Skype.
She’s developed a daily routine: work at the information desk is mostly in the morning; classes take place in the afternoon.
“Online courses are not ideal for my learning style,” she conceded, “and it has definitely been an adjustment for me and for the professors too I imagine.”
The COVID-19 pandemic made it hard to focus on schoolwork at first, but she kept pushing and, with the end of term just weeks off, is on track to graduate in May.
In September she’s scheduled to start working for Catholic Christian Outreach, a missionary organization based in Ottawa.
That seems a long way off right now. But Katsande is confident that these dark days shall pass.
It’s a matter of faith. Her's seems unshakable.
She says that she has a personal relationship with God “just like you would with a friend…you talk with them and feel their presence.”
The pandemic is a reminder that the world is always changing, and that things are always uncertain, Katsande said, “but I know that God is everlasting” and will take us through this.
He has shown that he is with her in these grim times. That keeps her hopeful, she told me. That keeps her feeling that she’s never truly alone.
