To whom it may concern,
As I sat at my desk in Creighton Hall, having just finished watching the college-mandated Community Care video prescribed to me by the Office of Residential Life here at Mount Holyoke, I could not help but think to myself how those had been eight minutes and 34 seconds of my valuable Black life that I would never get back. I had just listened to a British man somberly explaining the biomechanics of how a COVID-19 virus particle goes about colonizing the human body. As I watched the Crash Course-esque animated video, I began to find my predicament increasingly unsavory.
I had been community compacted. As we all know at this point, there are several negative sanctions which may be enacted upon a student who fails to uphold the terms to which they are bound by the compact — the terms to which they were required to agree to gain housing on campus during a global pandemic. While I understand and respect the necessity of our community compact, I would be remiss to overlook an opportunity to point out its many flaws, one of which happens to be this very “Community Care” procedure.
I fail to understand how being asked to watch this video and complete the conjoined “Community Care essay” will stop me from missing further COVID-19 tests. You may be wondering what I had done in order to warrant the disciplinary sanction of housing probation. I hadn’t been caught trekking outside of the 25-mile radius outlined in the summer housing contract without permission, nor had I gotten bored and decided to throw a wild party in my campus residence. Instead, I had missed some COVID-19 tests (three, to be exact). Which brings me here, to you, reader.
I didn't just wake up one day (or three of them, rather) in a small room in which I opted to live to circumvent my housing insecurity and go, “You know what? I think I’ll risk my residential status today. COVID test be damned!” This video has taught me nothing that I did not already know.
I have, like billions of people around the world, spent more than a year of my life submerged in the depths of a global health crisis. It was because of this global health crisis that I opted to stay home during the fall semester. I had just watched the United States government and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention grossly mishandle their response to COVID-19, first downplaying the severity of the disease, then urging non-medical professionals against using surgical masks to protect ourselves and our loved ones. I watched first my elderly great-uncle, then his wife, contract severe cases. I held back tears as I watched my great-aunt struggle to communicate with me via FaceTime, her only connection with the outside world as she laid intubated in the hospital bed where she spent 14 days connected to a ventilator believing that death was on its way. From this, I learned that if I were to leave the responsibility of keeping myself and those whom I care about safe to the various institutions to which we are beholden, we would not be making it out alive.
I decided against trusting Mount Holyoke, an institution, with my life this past fall. Instead, I opted to split my time bouncing between different family members’ homes. Finally, after seven consecutive, isolating months seeing almost no one outside of my family, I decided to move on campus in the spring. There, I found that the COVID-19 protocols to which I had agreed were upheld by a system of community policing. I watched as my lower-income, disabled and otherwise marginalized peers suffered at the hands of hastily made and poorly implemented policies that penalized them, often unfairly. I made note of the lack of access to basic cleaning supplies and PPE. Thank god my mentor had had the foresight to ship Clorox spray and KN95 masks to my campus address before I arrived, or I would have been ill-prepared to protect myself. I noted the irony in my being assigned to a single bathroom stall, shower and sink to use for the entirety of the semester for contract tracing purposes, when there was only one soap dispenser for an entire floor of people.
I spent the first five weeks or so of my time on campus holed up in my room, rarely leaving, except when it was necessary for me to acquire a COVID-19 test or to collect food from the dining hall. I waited anxiously for the whispers that I was hearing about a small outbreak in Rockefeller Hall to reach Buckland, where I lived. The early COVID-19-related anxieties that I had developed after watching my loved ones get sick were exacerbated by being around more people than I had seen in the months since the pandemic began. My heart rate would increase whenever I heard the sound of laughter outside my door, because I knew it meant others were congregating, that the virus thrived in places where community was built. As things slowly began to open back up, as restrictions began to ease, as the number of cases began to dwindle, I slowly, very slowly, began to trust this institution with my life. I started going outside more. I made friends. I got vaccinated. I applied for summer housing. I was hired for an on-campus job. Hundreds of students moved off-campus and returned to their homes. I began to feel safe again.
Then, within just a few days of this newfound security, our campus became flooded with strangers. Despite the fact that I was not (and am still not) allowed to bring a fully-vaccinated guest into my residence hall, I was now surrounded by people who stood too close to me in line at the dining hall, who coughed into the open air, treated mask-wearing and my safety as optional. My temporary summer sanctuary was not as safe as I thought it would be. I found myself, once again, anxious to leave my room, because outside of it would be people whom I did not know. Once again, I started leaving only when necessary. During the school year, the testing center had been open at least 4 days a week for about 7 hours a day. During the summer, despite the harsh repercussions of missing a test, the center is only available on Tuesdays and Thursdays from 12:30-4:30pm. Without the structure of courses to build my day around, the days began to blur together. Furthermore, one of my work shifts overlapped almost directly with the reduced summer testing hours. This, coupled with my hesitancy to go outside, meant that I missed first one test, then another, then another.
After watching this video, I realized that none of us know what we’re doing. I realized that, regardless of my circumstances, Mount Holyoke will not protect me. This ugly epiphany was further cemented by that lack of compassion with which I was met upon attending my second Community Care meeting with a staff member from the Office of Residential Life. A person who told me that I didn’t seem to be “taking this seriously,” immediately after threatening me with eviction should I miss another test. A person who told me that I was being placed on “housing probation” without taking the time to explain what it meant. Never mind the fact that many of the students residing on campus right now are lower-income and international students with few other housing options in the event that this institution chooses to punish us for its own shortcomings. The first chance that Mount Holyoke gets to toss me out for failing to perform this dance of pretending that I am solely responsible for any harm that should befall myself or my peers, it will most definitely do so. The same institution which initially failed to do the basic due diligence of providing students with disposable face masks, or placing hand soap in their communal bathrooms, has now turned around to penalize me for missing COVID-19 tests because I was too anxious to leave my room and too stressed to notice how much time had passed since I had gone outside. The same institution that failed to expand student access to mental health services during a pandemic that has brought unprecedented levels of hardship now punishes them for suffering. Even as I spend my days indoors, battling my anxieties and struggling to balance three different jobs, I will also have to deal with an institution that pretends I am a threat. Perhaps I am one, a threat to the facade. I understand now that no one cares why I miss a COVID-19 test, only if. I must keep up the dance.
Best,
Mariam Keita ’24