*3.3. Ebere*

Ebere is an international development professional from an African country. She worked as a monitoring, evaluation, and learning specialist for approximately five years and was working for a US company at the time of the pandemic. In her country, people started isolating at home in January 2020, and this meant that Ebere could not even go to the hospital for fear of becoming infected. Ebere had recently given birth to her daughter in November 2019, and she was very excited about her baby's birth because she had waited five years after having her firstborn, a son, to have her daughter. She was planning to resume work in April of 2020. Her son was five years old at the time of lockdown. Her husband is a businessman who works late nights.

Since her son was out of school because of the pandemic, Ebere had to take charge of her son's online learning. She had to pay for online tutoring for him and help him learn how to learn online and to listen to his teacher on a computer. She did this while caring for and nursing her new baby daughter. Ebere found it challenging to be glued to the computer and TV all day while also feeding her daughter every other hour.

In April 2020, her first work assignment was to travel to a distant state in order to complete a data quality assessment. This assignment caused her a great deal of chagrin because her baby was still very young, and the thought of leaving her five-month-old-baby, who was still nursing, for several days with someone else was extremely disturbing. She thought of bringing her daughter with her, but her husband thought that was not a good idea given the conditions in their country at the time. She thought about appealing to her supervisor that she could not travel at that time but was afraid to do this because she had been away for four months and could not make a legitimate case for not going. She did not want to step back and look like she could not do the work. She needed to get back to her position and reaffirm her position, especially as a woman and especially in a country where employment was at a premium and many others were ready to leap onto one's job. She finally had to make a decision to leave and do something that she clearly did not want to do and leave her children for four days.

Fortunately, in April, her company decided to institute a work-at-home policy because of the pandemic, so thankfully Ebere was relieved of the agonizing decision to leave her children to go on a business trip. Ebere subsequently worked from home from April until October 2020. During that time, Ebere conducted her assignments online and interviewed people virtually. She said that "this was the best period of my life. I will always remember it. I interviewed people while holding or even nursing my baby". Once she was speaking via the computer to a large group of colleagues while nursing her baby. She did not know that her video was on and that everyone could she her. She had put her phone on silent during the call so only after the meeting did she see all the calls and messages that her colleagues were sending telling her to turn off her video. She was obviously embarrassed and asked her colleagues if "they saw anything!"

During this period, the burden of working and caring for her family fell solely on her shoulders. She completed her work tasks while feeding her baby and helping her son in online learning. She would not allow her nanny to come to her home during lockdown, so housework, cooking, educating, feeding, and working fell on her alone. Her husband, Ebere reported, helped ensure that she had necessary resources, such as a generator that always worked during the common electricity outages and fuel in her car, but he did not participate directly in housework or childcare. He once did place the baby in a wrapper on his back when Ebere left the house for an errand, but she quickly grabbed her baby when she returned because she did not think he had the physique to hold a baby this way!

She said African women are sometimes envious when they hear about husbands in the West who help with care responsibilities, but that practice was not common in her country. She also did not want her mother-in-law saying that she loved her job more than her family and was not a dutiful wife. Ebere emphasized that her family meant everything to her, and she would never "give them up for anything". She said she worked to help support her family and also because she did not receive her education only to stay home.

At times, she felt like a bad mother and wife, especially during the times she had to write reports for her job while holding her baby in one hand and type on the keyboard with the other, which she described as a nightmare. She said she developed severe pain in her right hand from holding her baby and keyboarding at the same time. That pain is now less but has not completely subsided even today. She said she had to smile and look happy when speaking with colleagues and clients via video even when she was not feeling happy because of the stress she was under. "That was my life during this period, she said. My son and I shared the laptop and even my baby played with it".

Ebere's special object is her smartphone, which helped her through the pandemic and provided a hotspot for her computer, communication, and everything necessary to help her ensure that she could complete her responsibilities during lockdown and support her son's online education. Her phone was a symbol of what provided her the means to accomplish all she had to. "It served as a facilitator of everything I had to achieve during COVID".

Ebere reflected on the time she worked from home during lockdown and concluded that despite the stress of blending work and life, she considered the time with her family as precious and valuable. "It was not so bad because I had a year at home with my family which was very special and my family did not have to suffer from lack of care".

In October 2020, Ebere had to physically return to work, and she had to turn over the daily care of her children to her nanny, who was an older, more experienced woman who could handle the household. Since her project was ending, Ebere had to begin to look for new jobs in addition to working. She had to spend a lot of time reworking her CV, attending interviews, and looking for job opportunities in addition to working and caring for her family.

During one interview for an international job held at 11 p.m., her baby started crying loudly and would not stop. Ebere texted her husband to come home to quiet the baby, but he could not come, so Ebere had to excuse herself and put her baby in a wrapper on her back so that her baby would stop crying and she could continue the interview. Although the interviewer, who also had a baby, was understanding, Ebere did not receive the job. Realistically, however, she was not in a position to work overseas at that time.

Ebere's project ended at the end of 2020, so from January to March 2021, Ebere stayed home again and looked for a job. She was happy to have more time with her family. She worked on a United Nations assessment in April 2021, and by September she was working for her current project.

Ebere bemoaned the lack of flexibility in work and the inadequate maternity leave that organizations offer women. "Mothers need time to bond time with their kids", Ebere explained. "Maternity leave is grossly insufficient especially if the job requires travel ... . If a women who has just had a baby after three months needs to travel, this is very stressful. A woman is forced to choose between job and her family and should not have to".

"Jobs should offer more flexibility and maternity leave for six months at least. Women are constantly challenged to go beyond their responsibilities because there are many others ready to take our jobs ... Some international organizations factor in maternity leave for one year. This is something I recommend". Ebere is lucky because when she travels, her younger sister or nanny can sometimes stay overnight at her home to care for her children, who are now older.

Ebere explained that COVID "taught us a lot". People worked much longer hours. "Because I was working from home, I needed to take care of my family as well as do my work. I had to complete assignments by deadlines without knowing what my colleagues were doing so ... . If there were more flexibility in the workplace, people would give their best. If you get the right people, they will deliver even from home".

"COVID changed the way we look at things. When we were all stuck in our homes, we had more collaborative relationships with our donor clients who were also working from home. For example, they gave us all the documents for desk review before we went to the field. COVID allowed the review of documents and our donors were also part of those virtual reviews. Now we have to review them after we go to the field. Things were more participatory when everyone was locked up".

#### *3.4. Murphy*

Murphy is a university professor at an American university who has two teenage sons, one in middle school and one in high school, and a longtime partner who is a business owner.

Murphy accepted a position as Associate Dean in the largest academic unit in her university right before the COVID lockdown began. She only isolated at home from March to July 2020, after which she assumed her new position in person at the university. During lockdown, her sons undertook digital document studies because the school district had not yet learned how to host classes online. Students were given independent assignments to submit for grading. This continued until the next school year began in the fall of 2020, when the school system had organized online classes. "There was a lot of lost learning", Murphy reflected. Murphy worked out a lockdown schedule for her sons to include at least 30 min outside for exercise, schoolwork, housework, family time, and free time. Luckily, her boys are very technologically savvy and self-reliant. By December 2021, the time of the interview, her sons were physically back in school.

Murphy was thankful that her family was independent and very supportive of each other and of her. "They are all low maintenance. I am probably the highest maintenance of the four of us", she smiled. They had to be especially careful not to get infected with COVID-19, because Murphy's partner's mother was soon to turn 100 years old, and he took care of her once per week and obviously had to protect her from becoming infected.

She described the challenges of the four family members being on zoom at the same time for school and for teaching. "The Internet is not meant for that", she explained. She and her partner had to place each other strategically apart in order to teach or host meetings simultaneously. This was one of the greatest challenges of lockdown.

Murphy reported to work as the Dean on 1 July 2020, and she and her three colleagues were some of the very few university staff who worked in the office during lockdown. Although Murphy said that she did not have a lot of care responsibilities for her sons, in her new position as Associate Dean, she had enormous care responsibilities for students and parents during the lockdown and the early days of the pandemic. Students were obviously concerned about their health, and parents were worried about their children and how they would be able to continue their education. Murphy reflected on what it must be like for students who now had no idea what their future may bring. Murphy and her colleagues had to answer an enormous number of emails in order to keep everyone apprised. Murphy's university is student-oriented and hence focused on transparent communication. However, there are only 300 staff for 1500 students, and hence, the workload was enormous.

Murphy stressed that "stepping up to something new and challenging proved to be interesting" and helped her cope with the pandemic because "I had so much to learn and do and had such a clear direction". Murphy emphasized the benefit of using work and problem-solving as a refuge. While many of her colleagues and friends "were falling apart", Murphy felt good because her brain was so active, and her university had to be ready to teach by fall of 2020, only a few short months after lockdown began. She said that she was "blessed" because she, unlike most of her colleagues and friends during lockdown, still got dressed and went to work as usual. However, Murphy noted that COVID ramped up her learning curve and made it steeper because of the challenges the university and she, as Dean, faced when confronted with this paradigm-shifting pandemic. Murphy also jumped over being a Department Chair to serve as Dean, and hence, she skirted the normal process of moving from teaching to administration. She was also made Acting Chair of the Conflict Analysis and Dispute Resolution Department, ironically because of conflict between the previous chair and professors.

Murphy's university was ahead of the curve and prepared well for the pandemic because the university president is a chemist who understood what the pandemic would mean for the university. The university sent students home during spring break and began to prepare professors to teach online long before the local school districts had taught their grade and high school teachers to do so. University opened back up for fall 2020, and students were required to be tested for COVID once a week. The university hired 14 nurses and provided 20 home test kits per week for everyone. As a consequence, the university only had a one percent COVID infection rate. Students were very verbal about their mental health challenges and their struggles, and their parents were open about their worry and concern. Murphy spoke about "empathy burnout". Everyone was concerned about helping the students and professors, and Murphy wondered about the caretakers, such as her and her staff, and their mental health.

Murphy brought her office keys to the interview as her special object, which she qualified by saying that they were not really special. The keys were all different because it took different keys to open different doors since the locks were not standardized. She reported that the keys represented an interdisciplinary course the university had recently given. She said her keys were a metaphor for the reality that "one key will not open everything" and she lifted up a book by David Epstein, *Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World.* Epstein argued that being in one discipline may have been appropriate for a stable, less complex world, but in a volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous world, that is, a "VUCA world", being a generalist may prove to be more functional. She said she may have been a generalist but was always told in graduate school that "those who dabble babble".

Murphy began her river of experience in March in a boat excited about the prospect of her new position. Then, the pandemic and lockdown hit, and Murphy drew herself falling down a waterfall into self-isolation, during which she hated the term "social distancing", a term that, according to her, should have been "physical distancing". She said she googled to find out what was at the bottom of a waterfall and found out that it was a pool of calm water. So, she drew the pool in her river.

Murphy was confronted with the challenge of how to teach fellow professors to teach, with a mask on, to a camera. As Murphy said, "sometimes we need a plan in a crisis", and their plan was preparing professors to teach virtually. Murphy discovered her own leadership during the crisis since there was no heroic leader to tell her and her team what to do. She drew a knight on a white horse in her river as she reflected that she and her team kept asking each other whether they were allowed to do things, and they recognized that they needed to get over the fear of "doing it wrong" and, rather, to do it themselves and survive. As she pointed out, "we all needed to save ourselves".

Murphy's boys exclaimed that lockdown and no physical school was the "summer that never ended". For her birthday, her younger son placed 752 candles on her cake, because time was goofy during lockdown and people's brains became confused about time.

Murphy was teaching a course on political communication during these tumultuous times. Ironically, she was teaching about civility in politics when there was no civility in the political United States.

Murphy drew a party boat in her river at the time she said people were starting to become distressed and depressed during lockdown and needed a lot of support. She organized a virtual party of the women and leadership community of the International Leadership Association, of which Murphy was President, at which women wore funny hats and tried to forget the stress of lockdown. Murphy had become terrified by the news. Her partner was a news junkie, and she could no longer bear to hear what the death toll was and "needed to go to the mailbox" when the news was on.

Murphy kept extremely busy as her pandemic coping technique. She participated in a state leadership program in which she and 50 other participants began to meet virtually and eventually met in person to learn about leading in a number of different industries, including in prisons. They traveled all over the state, and that began to wear on Murphy, she said. She led a group of PhD students during the International Leadership Association Women and Leadership Community Research Colloquium in June, and her group published a case study in a Sage publication, the first publication for the students as well as the first group of the colloquium to publish. Murphy was also involved in the organization of a national folk festival that included 90,000 attendees. Meanwhile, her father's health took a turn for the worse, putting more pressure on her mother as caregiver. Her older son received his driver's license but soon after crashed his car going only eight miles per hour. She went to a conference in Geneva and, soon after, another conference in Seattle. Then, her older son was accepted into university, a huge accomplishment for him and Murphy. Soon after, COVID Christmas 2021 arrived.
