We didn’t know that pandemic will change our everyday lives. We didn’t hope that it will last and it still lasts and confronts us with more obstacles and challenges in our life. 

For me, the biggest and the first realization of pandemic was while I was intern in foreign country. It didn’t have covid19 cases until the last week of my internship. Then the first case emerged. The situation changed. The first thoughts were: “How do I cope with this?”.. “How did my family react?” “Will I be able to come back home?” “What comes next?”  and the best part was that my country hadn’t got any cases of the virus infection at that point.  When the time for leaving came everything was normal. Nobody cared about virus, everybody walked the streets as usually, because it was “just one case”.  

When I entered the country, just on the border crossing, I felt relief, huge relief  - “I am in a country that has no cases of Covid19, my country!”. Soon after, our government even before the emergence of  the virus, imposed the necessary measures  for suppressing the epidemic.

At the beginning, it was unrealistic and impossible to be happening. But the epidemic was inevitable. 

Still this situation not allowing us to leave our homes means a lot to me in a different way that it should. It allows me to be more with my family, to learn new crafts and skills and to read more additional literature for the university. Online lectures are totally new experience for me. Professors are adapted well and we are more relaxed. We communicate through different platforms, like Zoom, Skype, Viber groups and e-mail in order to be efficient in our daily tasks. The time-schedule becomes more flexible for us as the time passes. Most of us will slowly overcome this situation adapting to the new ways of life after this is over. 

We realized that we can perform tasks and learn gradually without rush and dissatisfaction. This situation brought to us new perspectives on the significance of the education and responsibility and emphasized the choices we have in regard to treatment of ourselves and other human beings. 

Jovana Bigović, 

LDA Prijedor, intern