LONDON: The outbreak of coronavirus disease (COVID-19) in the UK is forcing Saudi and other Gulf students to make tough decisions about their health, education and family.
London faces the most serious outbreak of coronavirus in the UK, and the city is in lockdown as of Tuesday.
Amid this unparalleled disruption to daily life, many students from Saudi Arabia and other Gulf countries have found themselves navigating a once-in-a-generation crisis as best they can, from a foreign and often unfamiliar country.
Jana Mughrabi, 18, a first-year Saudi student at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), told Arab News that she had been in the city for just six months before the outbreak.
With her flights home canceled and London in lockdown, she now faces a long period of isolation in her “tiny” student dorm — a situation she is already finding hard.
“It’s making me sad, very sad,” she said, adding that the distance between her and her family is even worse.
With both parents working in hospitals in Riyadh, Mughrabi said she “worries about them constantly; they’re at high risk — if anything were to happen to them, I couldn’t be with them.”
She added: “The uncertainty of the situation has had a major impact on my mental health. Everything is uncertain, I can’t plan anything, and right now there’s nothing to look forward to.”
The weight of uncertainty is a common theme for many of those still in the UK. Saudi student Lulu Al-Sugair, 21, a second-year student at SOAS, told Arab News that for her too, the unpredictability of the situation has been the most difficult part.
Al-Sugair and her parents, she said, had initially thought that staying in London would be her safest option.
But as they watched the situation in the UK deteriorate, she said she lost faith in the country’s National Health Service, forcing her to make a last-minute decision to return to Bahrain, where her family is based. She left the UK just days before the nationwide lockdown was announced.
“I’ve dodged a bullet, for sure,” she said. “I think I’ve been very lucky that I managed to get out early.”
Now back in Bahrain, Al-Sugair said she is facing a whole new set of anxieties. Studying for exams online and completing coursework under the weight of a pandemic, she says, “has been an incredibly stressful experience.”
Some who remain in the UK have left London to protect themselves. Kuwaiti Yousef Abu Ghazaleh, a 22-year-old final-year student at Royal Holloway University, told Arab News that he left his shared student accommodation in central London due to fears of catching the virus, calling it the “safer choice.”
Abu Ghazaleh, who is now staying with friends in Manchester, said having this support system has made a “huge difference.”
Many of his friends have already returned to Kuwait, choosing to put their faith in that country’s health care system over that of the UK, he said. But with his sister still in London, Abu Ghazaleh said he “couldn’t go with them and leave her alone.”
With the lockdown now in place, he and his sister are confronted with a much longer period of isolation in the UK, with very little indication of when it will end. “Despite the uncertainty, I’m trying to make the best of the situation,” he said.
With his fears for his health and that of his family, he added that it is a “very emotional time” for him.
With his time at university over so abruptly, he is left with very little sense of closure at the end of such a formative phase in his life.