Being away from home gives you a renewed appreciation of our wonderful town

Being away from home during these times gives a renewed appreciation for our wonderful town and the people in it.

As you can imagine, life in Abu Dhabi is worlds apart from the comfort of our close knit community back home. The uncertainty of the pandemic brought plenty of extra worries and concerns – If something happens back home, how will we get there? Is it it time to pack up and move home for good? Are we safe here? Luckily, there are enough Mullingar natives out here to fill a football team, and we have all pulled together to look out for each other during difficult circumstances.

The UAE employed tough measures very early on by closing the airports, cancelling sports events, shutting down the malls, and imposing a nightly curfew. Schools moved to distance learning straight away and it was quite a scramble to organise ourselves for that shift, but you just do what you have to do when you work in fee paying schools and parent expectations are very high. There were no down days, but it was a welcome routine when there was little else to fill up the hours.

Since the beginning of all this, the UAE has felt like a very safe place to be. Masks are mandatory and no one questions their purpose. Covid testing has been rolled out on a huge scale – you need a negative result to go to work (teachers are tested every 14 days), to travel between emirates, and to enter and exit the country. It’s all very efficient and has become second nature to us by now.

Probably one of the most difficult adjustments we have had to make here in Abu Dhabi is quarantine. Quarantine is not an obligation, it is the law, which again, people do not question or attempt to flout. The upside of this is that everyone is safe; the downside is that it’s a lonely time for those living alone, and can make travelling home very difficult when you need 2 weeks off the grid either side of your trip.

Life is cautiously returning to ‘normal’ out here with shops, hotels and bars reopening. We’re back to school under strict guidelines (15 students max in a classroom).

The temperatures are dropping so it’s much easier to get out for a walk or a run, which are the little things that now mean so much after a long, hot summer! Now would normally be the time that family and friends would come visit. It has always been an exciting time of year with GAA kicking off and plenty of events to fill up the weekends. All of that will be sorely missed this winter, but we have plenty to be grateful for too!

When you live away from home there will always be pangs of homesickness and worry throughout the year.

These emotions have definitely been magnified over the past few months, particularly when you see your family and friends struggling back home with their own consequences of this ordeal. But as I’ve said earlier, it has been heartwarming to see how our community has pulled together back home, much the same as how the Mullingar gang have pulled together out here.

At the moment, all eyes are on Christmas and hopefully being reunited with our families, if only for a couple of days.

There’s plenty of negativity in the national media about Christmas being ‘cancelled’ this year, but I refuse to entertain this idea, because for some of us ‘cancelling’ Christmas means 18 months+ without seeing family and friends, and that is just unbearable. Optimism is all we have, so let’s go with that and see what happens.

Until then, I’ll be here in the sandpit hoping for the best for everyone, and dreaming of a coffee slice in Fraynes Bakery with my mother!