Room and bored: A family’s close-quarters quarantine in Jordan
“TRY not to breathe in too deeply, kids. We don’t want to risk ge ing sick in quarantine.”
Lobbing this ridiculous warning at my children was a low point in the middle of our 14-day government-mandated quarantine in a 245-square-foot hotel room upon our return to Amman, Jordan.
A er taking our required coronavirus tests, we had filled the first seven days of confinement with a mix of dance parties and board games, yoga videos, history and geography lessons, Duolingo language sessions, bingeing ‘ The Great British Bake Off’ and ‘The Handmaid’s Tale,’ napping and eating (and more eating). But my creativity and inspiration were waning, and the lack of fresh air and movement had dulled my brain. The only lessons I had le in my bag of tricks were virusavoidance measures so that there would be no prolonging our confinement.
“Actually,” I said, “now that I think about it, maybe we should just keep our masks on all day.”
Americans are banned from travelling to most countries these days thanks to Covid-19, but there are exceptions for people who must report to new jobs and a end schools or for those with dual nationalities. These travellers inevitably face some form of quarantine to ensure they are virus-free before reaching their final destinations.
Each country has its own quarantine, testing and oversight requirements to ensure that travellers do not bring the novel coronavirus into the country. Jordan’s quarantine is quite strict. Upon our arrival on a specially arranged repatriation flight, we were transferred from the airport to our hotel in government buses with a police escort (just in case someone tried to escape!) and then taken immediately to our rooms, where we would stay confined for 14 days.
That we had made it this far was in itself a small miracle. In May, a er enduring months of one of the strictest lockdowns in the world, along with some brief flirtation with food shortages, my children and I opted to take a repatriation flight home to the United States for the summer, while my husband stayed behind for his job. We hoped to recharge in nature and visit with family with the expectation that Amman’s airport, which had been closed since March, would reopen in time for us to return at the end of the summer and for the kids to start school. We did not suspect that the Covid19 situation in the United States would devolve into one of the worst globally and that we would face the possibility of not being able to return to our temporary home in Jordan.
As Labour Day approached, with the airport still closed and panic se ling in, we learned of a charter flight from Dubai to Amman arranged by a Jordanian boarding school. A er a few urgent phone calls and emails, we were offered the last three spaces on the flight that was leaving Dubai for Amman that Friday at 5pm But there was one caveat - we had exactly 48 hours to cut short our vacation in Martha’s Vineyard, secure three negative PCR coronavirus tests and provide confirmed reservations on a one-way flight to Dubai.
A tropical storm coming up the East Coast prevented us from leaving immediately, so we lost precious hours and began our journey before dawn the next day. — The Washington Post