Wenn man an einem neuen Ort kaum vernetzt ist und dann so etwas geschieht, fühlt man sich doppelt abgekapselt

Anthropologist, postdoctoral researcher, University of Amsterdam. In January 2020, my family and I moved from Switzerland to the Netherlands with a postdoctoral mobility fellowship (for two years) to start a new research project entitled ‘Doing Fatherhood in the 21st Century: Connecting the Global North and the Global South’. The project’s aims are to find out how fatherhood is being done in everyday life by researching two urban settings, namely Amsterdam in the Netherlands and Kankan in Guinea. My partner (here called Numa) quit his job in Switzerland and wanted to find a new one in Amsterdam, once settled down. Our two daughters, here called Mali (6,5 years old) and Alma (4,5 years old), started school in a local Dutch school. After nine weeks of learning a new language and trying to integrate into a new class, the schools closed. In the following weeks and months, we were pretty much on our own. Thus, this diary deals with the daily struggles of trying (and constantly failing) to be a ‘good’ mother and partner, beginning a new research project, and doing fieldwork while feeling lonely and isolated in a foreign country during what is locally referred to as an ‘intelligent’ lock-down.