Editor’s note: We would like to thank Denis Kayima, Language and Writing Consultant at the Teaching and Learning Centre at the University of Fort Hare, South Africa for providing this collection of responses. To contact the author, please email TLC. If you would like to share your writing center’s experience during COVID-19, please submit via WLN.

Denis Kayima

I am a student of Ugandan origin who came to South Africa on a masters’ scholarship in 2018. I am both a student and a peer facilitator working as junior Language and Writing Consultant (LWC) in the Teaching and learning Centre (TLC) department of the University of Fort Hare Alice Campus. Numerous challenges ranging from internal normal academic struggles to external uncontrollable occurrences like Covid-19 pandemic have hit me during this phase of my academic journey. The pandemic threw the country into a national lockdown, which involved closing of Universities to reduce the spread of the disease. This significantly affected my academic progress and the academic writing process that formed part of my responsibilities in the university as a peer facilitator in academic writing.

The South African Government invoked a national total lockdown on March 26, 2020. This happened at a time when I had just finished preparing my biological samples ready to be taken to Stellenbosch University (about 1400 km away) for laboratory analysis. The lockdown meant that I could not proceed with transporting my samples to Stellenbosch for analysis. This meant that I could not get results to proceed with data analysis and finish my thesis to graduate in expected time. However, I have used this time to contribute a lot to my research in the area of writing and developed two review papers.

On the other hand, my University engagement involved reviewing of students’ assignments, proposals and mini seminars, conducting student consultations, trainings/facilitations for academic writing. All this mainly required physical participation, engaging students and to some extent, online reviewing which never required physical engagement. When total lockdown was declared, students went home; we were deprived of physical engagements and left to only online reviewing and consultations.

Through working online, assignments from students were received and distributed via email by the senior consultant. Access to internet to download assignments was a challenge away from campus and costs of data were inevitable in the home settings. The home environment was also not appealing at times for reviewing assignments. This was partly emanating from the fact that I do not have any home or relatives in South Africa and depend on good Samaritans around for accommodation. The challenges of accommodation did not only affect my writing and study abilities but also my emotional health. However, despite all these challenges, reviewing became more elaborate as it became hard and uncommon for students to book online consultation for further clarification about comments in their assignments. This meant that all the corrections and comments had to be articulate and detailed in the assignment.

The Covid-19 pandemic and Lockdown has created memories that will leave indelible footprints in my life. I have learnt a lot ranging from social, spiritual, mental to physical aspects of life. I have grown from challenge to challenge with great thinking to obtain working solutions in a foreign land where accommodation became the greatest challenge after closure of the University. From my experience, I would strongly recommend that the University puts more effort to the E-learning systems and capacitate all peer facilitators in the E-learning systems plus equipping / empowering them with all materials, abilities and logistics to virtually interact with students academically. The university also needs to have a special safe accommodation on campus designated for only international students. Overall, my lockdown lesson learnt is that a problem becomes less of a problem when bigger problems arises and some basic needs become less basic.