My studies already disrupted by a 1,400 mile trip from Ethiopia, I heard my phone ping to tell me I’d be on the move again. This time, to a different COVID-19 quarantine facility, 20 minutes away.
My school — Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois — is in the American Midwest, but I attend classes in Qatar, at the university’s Doha campus in the Gulf States region. I am working toward a bachelor’s degree in journalism, remotely, like most of the world’s students, because the COVID-19 pandemic has shuttered campuses and pushed classes online.
I had just returned from my home country, and was quarantined at a hotel in Doha for the standard seven days before I could join the general population. When the COVID-19 app on my phone failed to turn from quarantine yellow to go-ahead green by Day 7 after my entry COVID test, I knew I wouldn’t be set free.
My phone app — called EHTERAZ, or “precaution” in Arabic — is a contact-tracing and risk detecting app, operated by the Ministry of Public Health in Qatar and used by all residents and visitors.
While green indicates COVID-19 negative, yellow means quarantine, and red says COVID-19 positive. No one can enter an establishment, restaurant or mall unless the QR code on their EHTERAZ app shows a green health status.
I’d be going next to a special quarantine dormitory in Education City, a section of clustered universities, to wait for my app to turn green.
Education City (EC) hosts well-known, international universities, such as Weill-Cornell, Carnegie Mellon, Virginia Commonwealth, Georgetown, Texas A&M, and my school, Northwestern.
It is home to about 8,000 students. About half are Qataris. The rest come from Latin America, East and South Asia, and North and Sub-Saharan Africa and a few from Europe. Housing is divided by gender.
Started in 1997 with Virginia Commonwealth University, EC has slowly become a hotspot for other international satellite campuses.
Nearby, it hosts the sustainably designed Oxygen Park, known as the “green lung” of the 12-square-kilometer development, according to the Qatar Foundation website.
Other recreational, artistic and research facilities include the Al Shaqb riding club, showcasing Qatar’s long-standing equestrian culture of Arabian horses, and the Arab Museum of Modern Art, featuring modern and contemporary art from the Arab world.
It also hosts the glittering, expansive Qatar National Library, which is open to students. And the Education City Stadium, completed last year and earning a five-star Global Sustainability Assessment System certification, will be one of the venues for the 2022 FIFA World Cup matches.
In March 2020, when COVID-19 was declared a pandemic, some of the international students studying in EC cleared out for home. But many remained in Doha in lockdown.
In March, the Ministry of Public Health imposed lockdowns of almost all public spaces, such as retail stores, places of worship, entertainment, restaurants and cafes.
“Lockdown restrictions got extreme. Everything in the country was shut down, except for grocery stores,” said Azma Mulundika, a journalism sophomore at Northwestern University, from Zambia.
“I never left the dorms once the quarantine got severe because the cases were going up every day. It had reached 1,000-plus cases at some point, and that’s a really high number for such a small country,” explained Mulundika.
Most flights deemed high-risk for COVID were canceled. Students were afraid to travel home, worried that Qatar would close its borders and they wouldn’t be able to return to university. When outbound flights were available, students and residents had to complete extensive procedures.
“Traveling during that time from here to anywhere was such a lengthy process because you had to fill in all these documents and you had to get all these tests. And COVID tests are very uncomfortable,” Mulundika said.
“Coming back, you have to get quarantined. At some point it was two weeks, and then it recently reduced to one week, and you still have to quarantine when you go to the dorms,” she explained. “I just didn’t want to have to go through all of that.”
Sometimes the EHTERAZ notifications are delayed.
“After being in lockdown for seven days … you just want to go outside, see people, and interact,” said Mekdelawit Worku, a junior communications student at Northwestern University, from Ethiopia.
Students have reported a decrease participation and engagement with online classes.