​Dr Cathie Koa Dunsford taught English Literature and Creative Writing at Auckland University for 25 years. She has 26 books in print/translation globally.
 
Covid 2020 continues to be a process of painful letting go. The death of my dear mother. Not being able to grieve or be hugged by whanau. Getting my partner here from Orkney, borders closing everywhere, car stranded. Eighteen airfares dropped. Deadline to get whanau home. Finally, Quatar. 3,600 one way. Strange sights at Heathrow. My partner wakes, surrounded by astronauts and beekeepers, passengers masked. Beginning of covid. We knew so little then. Our meeting masked up and in isolation.
 
I’ve been playing in five bands, riffing, solo concerts and gigs. One by one, our work gets cancelled. Musicians thrive on playing together. We try to meet on zoom. Not the same.
 
Twenty one years of touring Europe, USA, Canada as an author and performing with my translator, culminating in NZ as Guest at Frankfurt Book Fair. Then eight years of joint elder care in different countries. Culminating in Covid.
 
We isolate in my bay. Eat from our forest garden and support local veg stands. No supermarkets for us oldies! A brief time of celebration. Then clearing house. 21 years of book tours, disastrous tenants, leaky home lead to a massive clearing. As best as I can muster on joints waiting knee replacement. 13 months now. Delayed by Covid. Terrible pain, especially at night.
 
Then I am reminded to give thanks for life BC. Before Covid. For all those suffering  job losses, family disintegration, struggling to survive on  meagre or no wages; discrimination everywhere; trying to avoid conspiracy theories flying at us from all sides my mother would say, like the Dalai Lama, Never Give Up. And she did not. Until the very end. She loved the daily broadcasts. Reminded her of the war. And the vital need to work together.
 
When I consider this time, still feeling pain and loss, I am reminded. Never Give Up. No matter what is happening. Never Give Up. Covid is a time of letting go. Hold onto what matters, let go of the rest.
 
He aha te mea nui? What is most important in life?
He tangata, he tangata, he tangata. It is people, people, people.

​David Arrowsmith is a history teacher and writer who lives in Auckland. He is married to Hilary, a librarian, and they have three daughters: Charlotte in Manchester, Penny in Wellington, and Kim in Tamaki Makaurau. David has published one novel, Wesley Jones, a coming-of-age story set in rural South Auckland in the sixties. He is currently working on a memoir based on his father’s Kodachrome slides of life in a farming community in the 1960s.
 
In late February 2020, I accepted a full-time teaching offer at a South Auckland secondary school. I was already two years into semi-retirement when at the age of 67 a new teaching experience began. Little did I know then that my decision to return to teaching would be impacted by Covid-19.   I was in the process of getting to know staff and students and learning the system at my new school when, within a month and with minimal preparation, we were thrown into lockdown.
 
Suddenly I had to learn how to navigate ‘Google Meets’ with my classes — taking the roll and chasing up the other half of the class who'd become disengaged from learning. I was required to makes notes on every online communication on a spreadsheet, be they phone calls, emails, or text messages, with every student in each of my six classes. The Ministry of Education wanted the data to analyse the Covid-19 education experience. Tracking students and data entry began to supersede teaching.
 
On weekly online sessions on ‘Google Classroom’ I quickly learned how to scroll down documents and YouTube clips about Julius Caesar or Adolf Hitler to motivate the kids from a distance. I learnt to close my laptop 5pm Friday and not open it until 8am Monday knowing there would be umpteen emails from students with drafts of assessments to check, or asking for assistance. There’d be a Google Meet code for the principal's briefing with eighty staff at 8.30am. I'd ring disengaged students at two in the afternoon only to be told by their parent they were asleep. I'd email students who weren't producing any work on Google Classroom and learn that after a month of lockdown they were still waiting for the promised laptop from the Ministry. I'd discover students working full-time to help put food on the table for their family.
 
I tried to create a work/life balance at home. This meant daily bike rides or walks, meditation, reading great authors like Hilary Mantel or rereading classics like The Wind in the Willows. Keeping in touch with my daughters by social media became crucial. The 1pm 'Jacinda and Ashley Show' on TV One became a daily ritual with Hilary to learn the latest development in the virus crisis. I learnt to play the Gold Card game at the supermarket to avoid the queues until Countdown banned it and I had to shop at New World who still allowed the privilege. It meant the ongoing quest for engaging TV drama on Netflix and discovering great productions like The Crown.
 
One of the frustrating aspects of the new teaching load in the time of Covid-19 was its impact on a new writing project I’d started in January. With Deborah Shepard as mentor, I had started work on a memoir of my father based around his wonderful Kodachrome slides of 1960s rural South Auckland that he'd taken as a newly arrived English immigrant. As the themes from the photos emerged, and the writing became more focused, and the family research proved surprising and enthralling, the pressure from my teaching job increased. Students' NCEA assessments were pouring in. Marking was time-consuming. I was also required to write very detailed reports on students' progress for parents. By the end of a school term that effectively lasted from February to July, I was exhausted and in need of a break in Taupo. With Deborah's support, the memoir is still on track as we experience a second unexpected and unwanted lockdown for Auckland in August. Whoever would have thought my year would unfold in this way.

​1
 
A Tuesday twilight in the middle of August: we’re on the point of sleeping, the panorama from our languorous home stretching out across dark estuary water to faint lights on opposite shores, when our phones tremble. We stir to discover our screens are ripe with an unexpected offering:
 
 
COVID 19 ALL OF GOVERNMENT RESPONSE: ….
 
 
2
 
What we read stuns us. In the moment of scanning it, of beginning to process it, the news that there are new Covid-19 positive cases in our Auckland community feels as if it belongs elsewhere: to a half-forgotten time perhaps; to an era thought eliminated; a trauma exorcised; an ailment cured. Perhaps this reaction, instinctive and not entirely rationale, is to be expected; perhaps, at some point in the future when I will return to this moment to reflect upon it, my response will seem illogical, naïve. But the mind and heart too often process the unusual and unexpected in ways which aren’t always reasonable or impartial. So often too, their instinctive riposte appeals to the self. So there it is: a late night awakening, a blurry sense of déjà vu, a sudden emotional and psychological unsettlement, a disruption to our everyday already stealing through the darkness outside... 
 
 
3
 
As a displaced person exiled by whanau and ancestry, dislocation is an experience and a feeling I know too well. I’ve long grown used to expecting it, encountering it and adapting my routines to contain it. Still the spectral slumber which besets me becomes an articulation about displacement: fractured recollections of the Lockdown conjoined by distortions of the Level 3 at the edge of its materialisation …
 
4
 
In the morning, when I wake, I turn to transformation; or is it regression? I re-establish my son’s online schooling, recreate the technological delivery of my under- and postgraduate teaching and reorder my writing life into snatches of creative time. The hidden stresses of those who work and have school-age children, who are asked to simultaneously supervise education of their offspring and their workload: these become my familiars once again ….