Learning to communicate online during COVID

One of my favourite part about travelling is getting to know people by getting into conversations that I may have never thought possible and by stopping to talk to them I have learned so much about myself and them. I was just getting to know people in South Africa when President Ramaphosa enforced the 21 day lock down and later the 28 day lock down which would put my daily face to face conversations to a stop.

Luckily I had my neighbour Marina to speak to, but other than that it was just me. When things like this happen, we learn to adapt our way of doing things. While I spent the first few days upset with the world, wondering why this had to happen on my trip, I soon discovered that feeling sorry for myself would not solve anything.

Fortunately, we still had the telephone and video to communicate with others. I found out that I was drawing on a few intercultural competencies such as adaption, reflection and building relationships.

I actually learned that because of everyone was locked in, many people had more time to really talk to others, do other things beside work and reflect on oneself.

Reflection

Reflection is an important and critical intercultural competency. It is not only about honing our skills to talk to one another, but it is getting to know ourselves. During the 28 days of the pandemic, I learned that it was important to rest and relax the brain. I didn’t need to be busy everyday and did not always need to be at the university to build relationships. With the extra time I had, I learned to think about the conversation I with someone and evaluate what went well and what did not go so well.

eg. Upon talking to someone I had recently met in South Africa, I had learned that perhaps my way of communicating to him was too direct. It was hard to tell without facial expressions and body language (we were on the phone). By taking the time to think about why our conversation did not run as smoothly as I thought, I learned that I needed to be a little bit less direct and more empathetic towards his situation.

“We do not learn from our experience. We learn from reflecting on our experience.”

John Dewey”

Adaptation

I also learned that communicating during a pandemic was not necessarily all bad. I actually learned to connect with people via WhatsApp more. By communicating on video, we could see each other and while it wasn’t quite the same as face to face, I actually found people had more time to talk on the phone. Since we were not allowed out except for essential services, we all had a little more time on our hands.

Hence those people I had barely spoke to before had more time to chat and we had the opportunity to get to know one another and our relationships grew deeper. I still continue to foster my relationships with my new friends in South Africa through WhatsApp. You could say the pandemic brought us closer.

While it was not the best situation and still continues, we all must adapt to the online world of communicating with others. By keeping in touch with others and building online connections we can still foster those relationships, reflect on ourselves and our conversations with others and continue to dialogue with others.