FAUZIATUN NABILA SUDARKO – UNIVERSITAS INDONESIA

Topic: Covid Recovery: Strengthening Human Connections to Enhance Collective Efforts

Towards Recovery and Resilience

Hi! Good morning! Have a good day!

How many seconds did it take me to do that greeting? It was probably less than 10 seconds.
But those seconds are of great value to me. And in the next few minutes, allow me to convince
you that it should also be important for you.

It has been a while since I left my hometown for my study. As a person who also greatly values
solitude, I never thought of staying home for the past two years as the worst part of the
pandemic. However, these three months of minimum solitude I find myself looking forward
to a 10 second interaction with a street-sweeping lady on my way to campus in the morning.

You see, I have a hard time talking to people first. It’s got to a point where people would ask
me if I was okay as they knew I never had a hard time speaking in public. Yet strangely, one
day, I just greeted the street-sweeping lady without thinking much. I said three words, “good
morning, Ma’am”, and she replied to me with “good morning neng, are you on your way to
class?” and a pair of smiling eyes which lifted my mood, made me think that the day would be
a good one. Now I look forward to that 10-30 second interaction every morning.

The Covid-19 Pandemic has taken away too many things from us. For some it’s the lives of
loved ones. For others it may be a job that they love or a job that keeps a roof over their head.
It’s devastating. And to make it worse, genuine connectedness as a part of social support that
help us survive has been rather limited.

To me, there are days that a random kindness of a stranger, or a smile from a food stall owner
would help convince myself to hold out. But now with a mask covering the lower half of our
face, those days are unfortunately taken away as I could only make guesses whether people are
smiling under them.

You can think of your day as a dark room with bunch of lightbulbs. When you wake up, there
are few lightbulbs on, according to how you feel. When you see that the weather is nice outside,
another lightbulb turns on. But then you would see a devastating news on Twitter when you’re
having breakfast and now a couple of bulbs switch off. You basically spend your entire life in
that room. There are days that the room is so bright because every time you have a short yet
meaningful interaction with someone, several lights would switch on immediately. But there
are also days that you don’t find it in yourself to greet others first and you can’t even exchange
smile with the security worker of your office. These are the days, a simple “how are you
doing?” from others would switch on a bulb in your dimly lit room.

In conclusion, a simple greeting, “Hi! Good morning! Have a nice day!” or any form of greeting
you prefer can start making up for the sense of connectedness we lost in this pandemic. Does
it seem trivial? Well, it is so trivial that we forget it matters at all during this time of returning
to our normal settings and recovering from the pandemic.

Lastly, I invite you to test this out. Figure out if this small individual action, indeed results in
small uplift for an individual, or if it’s the first butterfly flap in this realm of connection loss
and devastation.