Searching for Sanctuary during a Global Pandemic. Reflections on International Mobility, Multisited Presence and Identity-making

Abstract

Abstract I started writing my COVID 19 diary in March 2020 when my family and I were living in Sierra Leone, West Africa. Through the following months, we gradually made our way to my native country – the Czech Republic, where my diary ended (1st July 2020). After living abroad for over 15 years – most of my adult life – spending several months in “my” corner of Europe felt special. In this paper, I reflect on the experience at the time and from hindsight. I first describe our waiting for COVID 19 to arrive in Sierra Leone, touching on anxieties related to expectations of the pandemic development in Africa, and revealing notions of best access to health care amongst the expatriate community in Freetown. I depict our experiences of evacuation, including diplomatic mechanisms interplaying with pandemic control measures across several countries. I discuss the notion of sanctuary as a place of safety. Associating sanctuary with my native country, I experienced an intensive process of interrogating my own identity, a sense of belonging, and realizing conditions necessary for our global mobility to continue. I then reflect on the experience one year later – in hindsight. The situation has changed in surprising ways, making me question my previously held notions of safety and health, whilst comparing epidemiological control measures deployed in an international context. I contemplate my own identity-making process by looking at the individual categories of a stranger, an ethnologist, a migrant, and an expat. I expand on the transnational notion of “imagined community” (hybrid local-distant community), and I suggest that globally mobile people who live permanently transient lifestyles exercise multi-sited presence, by being usually at once present in several diverse countries and bureaucratic systems.