Locked Down In China

A Limpopo student in China tells DRUM what it’s like being in the Covid-19 epicentre and not returning home due to a fever

- Jana Van Der Merwe

She had her bags packed, her passport ready and she was all set to fly home. After almost two months stuck in China in coronavirus lockdown, Unarine Jessica Rakole couldn’t wait to get back to South Africa.

All the 22-year-old medical student wanted was to see her family again – even if it meant spending another 21 days in quarantine in a Polokwane hotel.

But sadly, just an hour before she was due to be repatriated along with over 100 South Africans last month aboard an SAA rescue aircraft, she got some bad news: she wouldn’t be allowed to fly.

Medical tests had shown she and three other South Africans were running fevers – one of the classic symptoms of Covid-19. They had to stay behind to avoid the risk of infecting the other healthy passengers aboard the aircraft, including the 114 citizens being repatriated.

Jessica, as everyone calls her, was heartbroken – and what made it even worse was that shortly after the flight departed, tests revealed that she didn’t have the virus. “I was very disappointed,” she admits as she chats to us via Skype. “I was excited to be back on home soil. I was craving some braaied meat and pap – anything besides chicken and rice [what she’d been surviving on for weeks during the lockdown].”

But there was nothing she could do. Jessica simply had to accept the situation with the wisdom and patience that only a pandemic like this can teach us.

Before leaving to study in China, she lived with her mom, Portia Tshilidzi, a teacher, her stepdad, Johannes, and younger brother, Justin (13), in the little Limpopo village of Mulima.

It was the American movie Gifted Hands, a biopic about American neurosurgeon Dr Ben Carson, that inspired her to want to study medicine so she could follow in his footsteps.