Living in Paris France, one of the greatest personal impacts of the COVID-19 situation is from confinement measures in an effort to curb the spread of the infection within the country.

While working remotely has been part of my schedule in the past five years, the confinement imposed in France made it the longest yet in my career. Although the confinement period started on 17th March, the organization I work for started about a week earlier in anticipation. As I write this, it’s going to the fourth month of having to work from home. Although my office premises will be opening next week, I am likely only to go back in early July.

Traveling is a major part of my job. Even though based in France, in my role, I cover countries in Europe, Africa, Middle East, and Asia. I had a number of trips lined by for the year, all planned since Q4 2019. As the situation started to evolve in late January/early February, my organization took a proactive approach to implement international and later domestic travel restrictions to reduce the rate of infection and protect the workforce. Of course, this was later followed by border lockdown imposed by many governments globally. This resulted in the cancellation of all previously planned trips.

Speaking on the home front, my spouse had traveled to Africa in February intending to spend about one month and then return home. While there, borders were closed and her previous itinerary cancelled. After several attempts and God’s intervention, she was able to return home with a repatriation flight, otherwise, she would still have been stranded in Africa.

Being a Christian, having a lockdown meant not being able to go to church to fellowship with other believers, which is an important part of my life; our services had to be done online. While this an alternative for which I remain thankful, remote worship could never replace physical services as some things cannot be done online.

I am indeed grateful for the improvement in the situation in many places all over the world and look forward to even further improvement in the coming weeks and months.