As I was somewhat marooned in the middle of the Ocean Indienne, the wildfire that plagued the news, Covid-19, seemed a problem for everyone else, but not really for us: the residents of La Réunion.
I remember watching the headlines flash up on my phone and having concern for everyone else, but literally none for myself. At the time the virus was mostly contained in China, and though the world was panicking, I felt pretty calm. Most of the people I love live rurally, or are young and healthy. I’ll be honest, I thought that it was mostly hype.
I also remember the day an Australian cruise ship arrived at Réunion’s shores. Locals took it upon themselves to be border control, and they protested by throwing rocks and bottles at the border forces who had granted access to the passengers of the liner. This scuffle turned more violent, with teargas being used to get the protesters to leave, so that the passengers could continue with their excursions. This was stage one of Covid feeling real. You can read this article from The Guardian to see an article about this crazy day.
As a general rule, the Réunionnaise welcome tourists, as they need them for their economic development, but on that day they were angry because the Australian tourists had not been tested prior to disembarking, and had excursions planned that spanned the entire island.
At the time I was teaching around ninety people (mostly young children) a week across two sites. Life was busy, the days were hot and long, and it was pitch black by 18:30.
La Réunion is a tropical island, it’s volcanic, and spectacular, and the mountains shoot out from the sea covered in dense flora, much of which looks prehistoric. There are lagoons, and whales, and dolphins, and sharks, and beach-clubs, and food-trucks selling curries like you will never have anywhere else, and a rich indo-chinese-african-arab-hybrid-French culture that is beautiful, and the people who the have reggaeton bass pulsing through their veins.
However the island is still in need of a PHAT injection of feminism. You do not walk around at night, as a woman, on your own. Rum is made on the island and it is cheap. I’m talking less than ten euros for a litre, and so there is a huge alcohol problem, not helped by the also a massive unemployment problem. I had a conversation with a local who said, “you either work for the hospital, the council, the supermarket, a farm, or you don’t work, there are no other jobs.” That summises it well I think. For the one million person population, unemployment sits around twenty percent on La Reunion, whereas for comparison it’a around four percent in the UK.
All of this to say that my days had a structure, my week had a schedule, and to be spontaneous meant being brave enough to run for the last bus after work (19:45), and plan to stay in town with friends, because I had no way of safely getting back to my studio in the hills.
I was working at an immersive English language school, and periodically there were workshops, usually loosely based around the seasons, and set over the half-term holidays. It was a lucky dip as to which teachers would teach which children, and I had juniors (7-10), for week 1, and little ones (3-6), for week 2. It was fair to say that I was dreading week 2. I genuinely had a lot of love for all of my students. On the whole they were funny, polite, curious, and just nice people, but that second week class of little ones happened to be the exact same class that I had first taught when I arrived at the island. And they made me cry. Yes, 21 year old Rhianna had to have a sit down and a sob after my first four hour session, because it was carnage. If any of you are thinking about being a teacher, fair enough, it is very rewarding, but my gosh do not enter their lives being overly kind. They will ruin you. Set boundaries, be firm, make them earn your kindness a little bit, and trust me life will, from then on, be much easier. I went in all, “coo-coo how cute are you,” and they were completely wild and uncontrollable, and for the following year they were a nightmare, and I really disliked teaching them. It was constant chaos.
Every other class? Lovely, loved them. That little ones class? Yikes, hell.
So, I had just finished week one of half-term, and had had a lovely time with my juniors during the spring workshops, and the following week I was supposed to have The Little Devils (harsh, they were so cute really, they just worked out that I was a pushover in five minutes flat).
Covid however, had different plans.
I had a wonderful group of friends on the island, composed mostly of teachers from the school, and also some British Council teachers. We were having a get-together at Freya’s house in the centre of Saint Denis, enjoying some wines, and we were watching the news on her TV, because there was going to be some big announcement.
At this point it was around March, and the world was really losing its mind over Covid. Two weeks prior the Australian cruise ship had made chaos, and now President Macron was on the news stating, “We are at war. And it is here, invisible, elusive…” I think all of us teachers felt pretty safe where we were, but we had worries for our families and friends overseas.
La Réunion is technically France, and so it mostly has to follow French rules. Macron stated in his speech that people in France were not to do anything other than the essentials, outside of their homes. I remember the feeling of the penny dropping, and the, ‘sh*t perhaps this is real,’ feeling. What started out as a lively get together was suddenly pretty quiet, and everyone’s brains were whirring with logistics about what their next moves might be. Some people left to call their families to ask for advice, and all those that did, the general consensus was, “come home!”
Macron said that there would be a selection of AirFrance flights put on so that people abroad could return home, either to or from the French Territories and France. It was made out that there would be an abundance of flights over the next couple of days, but then there would be none for an unpredictable amount of time: it could have been a minimum of 30 days, or months, no one really knew. This naturally spurred people into action, as they didn’t want to be stuck on Réunion indefinitely.
For me however, I was happy where I was. My options were to travel home, potentially catch Covid on the way, take it to my parents, and spend a wet spring on the farm; or I could stay on Réunion for the rest of my work-abroad year, teach my classes online, get paid, and get a tan. Anyways, time alone is my favourite time.
I was lucky that my studio was up high, out of the city, on the side of a mountain, with incredible views, a plunge pool, amazing tropical fruit trees: lychee, avocado, passionfruit, and a garden with a tortoise. It was also the backend of Réunion summer and the weather was settling down from Tropical-Humid-Human-Roast, to God-I-Love-This.
So whilst the world turned to chaos around me, and lots of my friends left, I stayed, and signed myself up for indefinite garden rest. The teaching season had been hectic, and I felt like staying was the right choice. I may have been returning to work after the first two-week lockdown anyway, and I wasn’t ready to abandon my classes, or my work abroad year – despite the fact my university practically begged me to return home.
This may sound selfish, but personally I found that the beginning of lockdown was a hoot. I felt like the God I didn’t believe in had given me this beautiful gift of getting away from the little ones who destroyed my sanity every wednesday. I could not believe that this new, baffling, world-stopping, Covid lockdown had arrived a day before I had an entire week with them. I swanned around my studio, reading, cooking, drinking wine, having a solo-main character-moment, and it was great. The only negative for me during this time was that I deleted all of my News apps. My goodness they were depressing. And I have never gotten them back, and so can’t chat politics quite like I used to. The world is much kinder if you’re ignorant to the absolute shambles that are going on outside of your garden fence.
After a few days, an environmental scientist called Lea moved into the next studio over from me, and we were shy to begin with, because the rules were so strict. You felt nervous to peer over the garden fence for fear an old person might drop dead.
We had to take attestations (an identity form, with reason for movement on it), everywhere with us, and couldn’t go on non-essential errands, and had to try and stay within one kilometre of our house.
In Saint-Denis, the capital city, armed soldiers patrolled the streets making sure people were behaving. In typical Rhianna-fashion, I was up high on a mountain, oblivious, in my own little bubble, and completely hyper-focused on making soy-green beans with chilli and peanuts, and doing my GraceFit workouts; on a mission to become slender and tanned for my UK return, whenever it may be.
On the 9th of April I went to get some much needed supplies from the local supermarket. It was about a 30 minute walk down, and an hour walk up. It was fairly vertical, and hot, and the sweat was very much real. The supermarket in question was directly opposite the biggest hospital on the island, and I remember seeing a person in full hazmat, spraying off the barrier arms to the carpark. It was like living in a dystopian novel. The shine of my nonsense little life sort of wore off a bit at that moment. I’m a big thinker, and I remember thinking, “how the hell infectious is this disease if we have to spray things outside?!” The answer as it transpired: very.
After a week or so, Lea and I became friends, and we crafted a Friday ritual. After work we would drink wine. For hours. Bottles and bottles of wine. And we would laugh about this ridiculous life. My French was fairly basic, and though Lea had decent English, there were some topics that we just couldn’t communicate, and so we would draw these silly little diagrams, and be in fits of hysteria until the early hours. It was honestly like the song, “you and me on this rock.” Just us, our nothing-horizon, tortoise, and litres of good, cheap, French wine. Sometimes I’d get creative and have a bake earlier on the Friday with whatever I had lying around, and would take them round as a bit of a stomach liner.
It rapidly became apparent that Covid wasn’t going away anytime soon, and so I just sort of accepted my fate. I saw literally no one except for Lea on a Friday, I was only teaching four classes a week, and so I had to get creative with my time. I had read every book I had taken with me, and had borrowed all of the English books from the school I worked at, and so, for the first time in my life I read Harry Potter. Every. Single. One. Cover to cover (acknowledgements included). I learnt to embroider, and took to embroidering everything. There was no delivery system on Réunion that I was aware of. There was a postal service, but it was easier to just go to the shop. So I dug out a hoop and needles and thread that I had bought before lockdown, and I took to embroiderdoodling on most things I owned. I also started to paint like a maniac. I had taken a small twelve tin watercolour set, and painted animals and fruit and stuck them around my house. I vlogged to my Instagram followers. I did quizzes on Zoom with my best UK pals. I played the flute that I had bought on a weekend in Mauritius, and I got good at it. I tried to really simplify cooking, and approached food a bit like if we were in a war: tins, frozen, flour, home-grown. But perhaps the funniest use of my time was The Taming of the Shrew. No, literally, I took to taming a shrew. To be specific an Asian Money Shrew, or MuskRat. She was cute, and loud, and I think… blind, and she was my housemate: Hood Rat.
She moved in entirely of her own accord, and I welcomed her with open arms. My landlord wanted to trap her, but I protested. She was crepuscular, and would come out of her hidey-hole when the sun was setting. This was her favourite time for scuttling as fast as she could to the garden to hunt her favourite snacks: cockroaches. She was exceptionally busy, and after her time in the garden, she would come back to the studio and hunt there too. Her little star-shaped nose in the air, she would find all sorts of delicacies. At the time I also lived with huntsman spiders, and as someone who had a pretty serious phobia of spiders prior to moving to Réunion, I can testify that exposure therapy really does work. Though even today I don’t think that I could touch a spider of any size. I could however live with them, as long as they are where I can see them, and are slow moving. Maybe I’ll do another blog on Barbra, the huntswoman another day. She was the queen, and in hindsight should have probably been called Artemis.. Anyways I digress – the shrew. I took to feeding her bits of cheese, and sweetcorn, and she became ever bolder. I named her Hoodrat, and she would keep my insect creatures at bay. Barbra ate the mozzies, Hoodrat ate the rest. I had my own little ecosystem.
Hoodrat never trusted me enough to physically get in my hand, but she would eat cheese from my finger if I kept very still.
Fast forward sixty-three days of me progressively losing my marbles, and FranceAir said that they would start flying again. I spent literally two days listening to, “Should I Stay or Should I go,” on repeat – which actually was not that mental compared to the shew story, and after sixty-three days, or nine weeks, or two months and a week, completely on my own (apart from naughty Fridays), and a shrew, it felt the right time to leave. And I booked to head home the following week.
Lea and I hired a car, and did a lap of the island. I remember this completely visceral feeling of freedom. It was euphoric, zooming all around the island in a little white car, hoping the police wouldn’t question us. We went up the volcano, and had it to ourselves. On the way down we saw the best sunset that I have potentially ever seen. Sat above the clouds, a full view of the island’s peaks, and a sky lit on fire, I knew it was the right time to go. In the words of Fleetwood Jack, a good sunset on your last night means it’s okay to move on.
I packed my life into my ginormous suitcase and went to bed on that spicy little island for the final time. But as I was drifting off, I was woken up by something under my pillow. I thought it was a spider and panicked, but what it actually was, was Hoodrat…and her seven new babies. She had become a mumma, and put them in my bed. Not the goodbye gift I was expecting, but definitely the most memorable one she could have chosen.
So there it is: my Covid experience. Sixty-three days, on my own, taming a shrew.
If you hadn’t gathered that I was a bit crazy from my other blogs, I assume that you have now.
Anyway, thank goodness that’s all behind us, I sincerely hope it’s the last global pandemic for a very long time.
As always, stay safe, have fun, and hug everyone you love really hard!
❤ Rhianna x
Rhianna's World 