As Allan and I headed back from our road trip to Elon, the Foreign and Commonwealth Office of the UK government announced that all Brits who are not resident abroad should come home. When the FCO says you should come home it’s usually time to consider that maybe you should – they can sometimes be overly cautious, but even the Fulbright Commission who had been saying Fulbrighters from the UK based in the US could choose whether to come home or to stay, started warning that commercial flights might become more difficult to get hold of and airports might close. Initially in the early days of coronavirus I had decided I would stay to complete my Fulbright in the US, but as more and more businesses closed and universities moved to teaching online, I began to realise that the work I was doing would have to be done from home and I wouldn’t be allowed to continue exploring the USA. For my health and that of others, we were moving to a point of lock down.

We decided to try to move Allan’s flights home with KLM to an earlier date and to see if I could get a flight home on the same day. We managed after some long phone calls and some frustrating cancellations of one leg of Allan’s flights to get us both flights out on Thursday 26th March, arriving in Glasgow on Fri 27th March. Allan would go from Raleigh Durham to JFK to Schipol to Glasgow and I would go with British Airways from Raleigh Durham to JFK to London Heathrow to Glasgow. Allan would be home 2 hours before me, rather than the 2 months he was expecting to have at home before I was back! It’s worth reflecting on what that would be like to cope with your wife coming back 2 months early 🙂

So it was time for me to say some hasty goodbyes and thank yous. Not how I really would have wanted to leave, and I didn’t get a chance to say goodbye to some people. On our journeys home we were really fortunate with all flights running on time (amazingly despite the earlier cancellations, and plenty of cancellations showing on the departure boards). There were passengers wearing biosuits (!) and others who seemed not to even realise coronovirus was happening – I saw two pilots shaking hands!! Heathrow was not a pleasant experience. It was as if they had not received the memo about social distancing with overcrowding at passport control, security and flight transfer points. There was one transit train to go to flight transfers that was as congested as a rush hour tube train – I chose to walk rather than put myself at such risk of infection.

My flight from London to Glasgow was about 3/4 full while Allan was one of 5 passengers on his KLM flight back to Glasgow. Allan kindly had a cup of tea at home, turned around, and came to collect me in the car from the airport in Glasgow. We were both home minus Allan’s hold luggage which was still at JFK. His bag arrived safely the next day and we have both so far shown no signs of illness. The irony in being told to come home by the FCO is going from relative safety of being at home in NC locked down at home with lots of groceries I’d bought, to risk flights and airports to get home to the UK and relatively empty shelves at home.

In the end, the FCO advice (which usually impacts on things like travel and medical insurance), and my underlying health condition (which was always a grey area for my medical insurance ie. if I picked up coronavirus and was ill, would they blame my pre-existing health condition and then refuse to cover me), posed the risk of me having to pay thousands and thousands of dollars in health care bills, suggesting that it was safer to come home. However, I was also weighing this against accounts of the NHS from doctors and nurses I know, which to be honest suggests that should I get ill in the UK, it might not cost me any money, but I might not get any treatment, as hospitals are already at capacity – if you get ill now, there may not be an ambulance, oxygen, a ventilator, or a health care worker to treat you.

So who knew I’d be doing a Fulbright Scholarship from home. But that’s what will be happening for the next 2 months. I’m still receiving my Scholarship from the Fulbright Commission, and I still have work to do, grading of student work, data analysis for my research, online meetings etc. and I will do these things from home in Scotland. It won’t be the same, and I wasn’t really ready to come home, but I have so much to be grateful for. I had a brilliant time in the states, and I still get to do some of the work I was enjoying, and I can still meet some of the wonderful colleagues and friends I’ve made online. Some Fulbright Scholars had not even started their Scholarships. Others have rented their houses out until the end of the summer – there are others in more difficult situations. I may be tired after the anxiety of the last 2 weeks of deciding whether to come home or not and then due to the journey itself, but we are both home safely and we are well so far. I’ll try to keep you updated on what it’s like to be a Fulbrighter working from home!

And then the world turned upside down… / Star spangled banter by blogadmin is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution CC BY 3.0