Before the COVID-19 Pandemic, I was a student living in Turkey, where I taught myself multimedia skills to complement my regular course in IT.
I was in a state of confusion, caught between what I had gone to study in Turkey and the creative skills I taught myself. It was so difficult I had a mental breakdown that shattered my whole life. I wasn’t earning enough as a creative to support myself or my parents back home in Sierra Leone. When COVID-19 hit, I wasn’t that strong mentally or financially. I used my time during the three-month lockdown to empower myself more. I enrolled in more online courses. I learned about animation, adobe after-effect, more photography, video making, and film production in general. For me, that was the only silver lining of the pandemic.
A few months later, I had to return to Sierra Leone. I got a job offer as soon as I arrived, and now I’m doing visual storytelling on local stories that matter. It’s been a month now since I’ve been back after 5 years abroad. The pandemic is one of the hardest things I’ve had to go through. I’m still absorbing and processing things one after the other. A year from now, I’m hoping that COVID-19 will end, though I’m not expecting things to be back to normal. The normal that we used to have before was not working for us. I’m 24 years old, and I work I’m the head of Multimedia Production at Vickie Remoe & Company.
Credit: OSIWA/Essential Stories
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