Should I Stay or Should I Go?–An Expat’s Pandemic Dilemma

A lot of expats I know share the same love of elsewhere. We made the trade–chose to be far from family, home, and familiarity in order to see the world. And then the world got sick.

The beginning…

News spread quickly among my ESL teacher friends. The group chat swiftly filled with updates of border closures fluctuating, flights being cancelled left and right, and an increasingly frantic weighing of the pros and cons. Staying or leaving became a precarious game, a sort of gamble.

We were hit with the sorts of questions that come when you’ve put an ocean between yourself and your home: Are we willing to risk layovers in crowded airports to make the journey home? Will we lose our chance to return home if wait too long to leave? Will our foreign jobs still be willing and able to pay us if we choose to stay?

And so there we were, staring across a chasm. The life we’ve built for ourselves on one side, and the life built for us on the other.

Stay or go? Neither choice was without heartache. Budapest is our adopted city, bursting with plans and potential. We still have hopes that once this blows over, we can resurrect some semblance of the expat life we loved. But on the other hand, family is far away, and there seem to be fewer and fewer guarantees that our loved ones will stay with us.

Many of my friends chose to fly home–risky airports and all. Goodbye hugs were replaced by hasty messages as flight plans changed. A few promised to come back once things had settled down. But things were left unsettlingly open, like a frayed thread or a breath cut short.

Stay or go? My choice to stay abroad was relatively easy. Having lived here for three years, I have some stability, a support system, and health insurance (how I could be better insured in a foreign country than in my own still baffles me, but there ya go).

Looking to the future…

So I chose to stay. And now, amidst simultaneous stories of hope and horror circulating the globe, it’s time to choose the next step. Stay or go? Not only do expats need to stay healthy, but we need to stay legal. There are visas to consider after all, and the clock is ticking. Certainly there are more employment options in my own country, but I’m nervous to leave–even if only to regroup with my family for a month or two. Who knows what the border situation will be like months or a year from now? If I leave Budapest now, is it foolish to assume that I’ll ever make it back?

Of course, visa troubles and distance from family can be common for expats, but this stress is part of something greater. I may not know where another job or visa may come from, but in this post-pandemic world I don’t know where anything will come from. Before the pandemic, there was a semblance of stability, of predictability. There was a chance to make plans for the future. And now it seems impossible.

This is not a plight exclusive to expats. We’ve all been faced with the unpredictable nature of life: only now it’s laid bare, unavoidable and undeniable. That’s enough to send anyone into a tailspin, let alone needing to find a visa on top of it.

Home. Familiarity. Family. In a way, we have all been forced to leave those things behind, in one way or another.

It almost seems bizarre to make long-term plans, to assume that things will go back to “normal”. But as spring pushes forward, restrictions ease, and the world seems to be–if only ever-so-slightly–pulling out of this nosedive, there are stirrings of hope. It seems that we’ve been reaching some sort of new normal. But is it truly peace? Or only the eye of the storm?
The hard choices aren’t over. The guessing isn’t over. And in this new time, we expats are left asking the same old question: Where do we go from here?