7 lessons from my Easter holiday 2022

After seven years I finally got the opportunity to visit home again. This was the first time that my son, daughter and wife had been to Zimbabwe. A week before we were due to fly out, my son got covid. My son is the most covid conscious person that I know. He still wears his face mask to this day (3 September 2022). He was the last person we expected to get covid in the family. He had to self isolate for a week and a day before we were due to travel, he tested negative. It was strange travelling through Ethiopia, Zimbabwe and South Africa which still had very strict covid restrictions at a time the UK government had declared that “we should learn to live with covid”. Almost all Covid restrictions had been dropped. In Zimbabwe some of the restrictions got dropped while we were in transit, but that is a story for another day. We had planned this holiday for a while and we learnt a very important lesson. The one person in the family who was most careful about covid is the one person who almost “spoiled” the holiday for everyone by getting infected by covid. Doing the right thing does not always mean that you will be justly rewarded.

Here are the lessons that I learnt while on holiday.

1)?????We can learn so much from children: I will use three events to illustrate what as an adult I learnt from my six years old daughter during our holiday.??

Event 1: my daughter was playing with two of her cousins. At bedtime, we prompted my daughter to say goodnight to her new found friends. We discovered that even though they had been happily playing together for hours, they hadn’t bothered to ask each other their names. They had spent all their time having fun and playing and didn’t have time to learn names and surnames. Not at all minimising the importance of names, but….

Event 2: We went for breakfast at this expensive and exclusive place in South Africa. It is a family friendly setting where you have tables set around a play area for kids. Needless to say, we were the only family of colour (also another story for another day). My daughter was playing with this boy who was probably at least two years younger than her. They were playing hide and seek among other games. Suddenly there was a thud, the young boy had fallen down. We all ran to see what was happening. The young boy was ok and keen to continue playing. To our shock and surprise, this young boy did not speak english. We were left scratching our heads as to how they had been communicating all his time. My daughter only speaks english and a little bit of sign language.?

Event 3: A day before we were due to leave, we found ourselves with a “free” day. We asked the kids what they wanted to do or had enjoyed the most. They unanimously voted to go to the beach. This surprised me, given how cold the Cape Town beach water is. The kids understood that there was a little bit of pain that came with the joy of enjoying the sea front. We went to the sea front early in the morning and everyone had loads of fun. My daughter was shivering all the time, but she kept using words like epic to describe how she was feeling.

2)?????Chicken: It pains me to admit that there is probably something in the stereotype. We ate a lot of chicken during the holiday. I mean like a lot. End of. Don’t @ me.

3)?????One person’s meat: Sadza is a treat for us in the UK. I cook it once or twice a month. In Zimbabwe it is the staple food. We went to a take away and while everyone else was ordering pizza, pies etc. My daughter ordered sadza. This took the gentleman at the till by surprise. He had a young girl who was obviously not Zimbabwean enthusiastically ordering sadza. For my daughter this was a special treat. She sat there and ate the sadza with her hands, much to everyone’s delight. My family was worried about what food to give to this British Zimbabwean South African girl. I guess the answer was Zimbabwean food. She absolutely loved the water melons and everything else Zimbabwean. At no point did she want British food. She just wanted to play with her cousins, have fun and try new things.?

4)?????Family is everything: Spending time with mine and my wife’s family was the best thing about our holiday. We have very extended families and we tried to see as many people as possible. Every minute was worth it. Except the one incident with a cousin’s husband. (another story for another day).

5)?????The world is still divided: so is Zimbabwe and South Africa. We met friends and family who cover the whole ethnic spectrum during our holiday in Zimbabwe and South Africa. However, what really stuck with me is how the world is still divide by wealth, racial and tribal lines. There is still a lot of work to do to undo the division caused by the legacy of colonisation, apartheid and slavery.?

6)?????Do what makes you happy and always remember, even though we might all be experiencing the same storm, we are on different boats: On the way back from our holiday we started reminiscing and talking about the past four weeks. I realised that even though we had all been on the same flights, met the same people and ate the same food. We all had different memories and views of the holiday. Some the things I didn’t like, my family absolutely loved and vice versa.

7)?????Representation matters: My organisation (NHS RHO) and other researchers have highlighted the inaccuracies in some pulse oximeters for people with darker skin tones. The same applies to cameras. I ordered new phones for me and my wife just before we left for our holiday. My wife is the photographer in the family. After some research, I got her the Google Pixel 6. It is one of the best phone for taking pictures. I got myself an iPhone 13. This is the first time in my life I had an iPhone as my personal phone. My last four phones were all Samsungs. When we arrived in Zimbabwe and we started taking photos, I quickly realised that my phone was struggling. Something about a black man wearing a white t-shirt was bamboozling the phone. On all the photos that I took, my white t-shirt appeared grey. During the holiday I exclusively wore white t-shirts and white shirts. I pretty much gave up on taking photos using with my iPhone. My wife’s pixel phone had no such problems. The difference was so stark and frustrating, we decided that we would only use my wife’s phone to take pictures for the rest of the holiday. My iPhone cost almost twice as much as my wife’s Google pixel (don’t tell her). This made me wonder, who tests these company’s cameras. I know google do a lot of work on ensuring that their cameras work well with all skin tones and go to great lengths to test the cameras on their phones on people from across the whole complexion spectrum. Their efforts are worth it and it shows in the quality of photos produced by my wife’s Pixel 6. In some photos, my iPhone even gave me and my wife white and grey hairs we do not have yet. So that I do not get sued or trolled and for the company lawyers sake, this was my personal experience and everyone else’s experience may be different.?Or maybe I am just not good at pressing the take a photo button on my iPhone.

As we all get back to normal life, I am asking myself how I can use the lessons mentioned above to enrich my every day life.?