The Lockdown

Prologue

2020 was the year I had been most anxious about. I was going to complete high school, apply for university, rewrite my SAT exam, and just get some personal freedom. My family is a below middle-class one financially and 2020 was supposed to be a big year for us to start living better. The plan was simple: I would study hard to win awards for my A level exams and Aike (my younger brother) would study hard to win awards for the IGCSE exam would study hard to excel at her checkpoint exam. All our exams will fall within April through to June. Then, when the results are out, we will use them as a backup in asking for financial support from affluent people. Everything was planned and was going according to plan; we were getting outstanding results in our school work and our family was just coping fine with our financial issue.

The coronavirus outbreak had begun hitting China and a few places in the world by January, but here in Ghana (and almost everywhere else that was unaffected), we saw it to be something that was just too far to be our business. Nobody talked about it. Just a few whispers here and there and that was all.

My school is an expensive international one but all of my siblings and I attend on a full scholarship. Being with classmates from different nationalities, I remember when one of them was talking about how 500 people had been infected in her country in Europe. That still didn't budge a lot of people including me and my family. We were just focused on our plan for the year.

The number of cases kept on increasing in the world and what was once in just a few countries was declared a global pandemic on January 31st by WHO. That was still not strong enough to make us worried though.

As part of our plan to prepare for the exams, we had decided to skip some school days to study at home. The last day we went to school was on the 10th of March. We were going to skip the rest of the week until the 13th, but it was during that short period we received the shocking news that there had been 2 confirmed cases of the disease in the country. My school immediately sent a message saying we were to all stay home for the rest of the term until 14th of April which would be our last term of the year.

To us, it wasn't a big deal to stay home because we were already used to it, to be honest. It was just the pain of not being able to meet a few teachers to ask some questions we had problems with that hurt a bit. Apart from that, everything else was ok especially with the fact that Cambridge had assured all its candidates that the final exam would not be cancelled. That assurance was highly needed because every other thing I knew of had been cancelled or postponed and I just couldn't stand the thought of our exam (which we were banking on) being cancelled too --- all those sleepless nights would be for almost nothing.

The situation became as real as it could be to us when on the 26th of March, the exams were cancelled globally. That's when I started paying close attention to the outbreak. With every infected country taking measures of national lockdown to prevent further spreading, it didn't take long before Ghana was also placed on partial lockdown. That's when I began to think about what we were facing.

Now I have 2 siblings and I'm the eldest at age 19. My dad was a politician but with no positions for more than a decade now, is currently a security man. My mom, on the other hand, sells fast-food in a small shop at the roadside and it's funny but those small jobs have been responsible for taking care of the whole family for a long time. As both of my parents go to work almost every day, I have to take on the parental role in babysitting my siblings until they return because apart from being the first child of my parents, I am also the academic manager of the house. The lockdown, however, meant that nobody would be allowed to move on the streets in groups and people were to regularly remain indoors; a restriction that spelt bad news especially for my mom who banked on people outdoors to purchase her food. Things got worse when my dad's employer had to temporarily relieve him of his duties because he was facing financial hardship and couldn't pay his salary. It was a tough blow for the family. Soon enough, my parents were forced to also stay home with the rest of us and that's where this "thing" I'm writing begins....