Four months have passed since our lives shrank, almost overnight, to the walls of our homes. We went through the state of emergency, the signed forms you needed just to leave the house (in Romania, a self-declaration stating your reason for going out), queues at pharmacies and empty flour shelves. Now it is July, café terraces have reopened, but the numbers are climbing again and everyone is talking nervously about a second wave. We don’t yet know how this story ends. We only know it hasn’t ended.
I watched the first months of the pandemic from two places: from Limassol, where I have lived since 2018, and from Romania, where I have family, friends and a good part of my heart. And however many bad things I saw, today I want to write about the other side. About what people, neighbours, small businesses and communities got right. Not out of naivety, but because if we don’t write down now what worked, we risk forgetting exactly the lessons we will need this autumn.
Neighbours became neighbours again
For me, the most beautiful thing about March and April was a note taped to a lift door. Not one in particular, but the dozens of notes like it that went around social media: “If you are over 65 and can’t go out, I’ll do your shopping. Flat 12.” People who had barely said good morning on the stairs started leaving their phone numbers for each other.
The elderly were the most exposed and, at the same time, the loneliest. For them, a neighbour bringing bread and medicine and asking from the doorway “how are you doing?” probably mattered more than any official press release. You don’t need an organisation to do that. You just need to look around.
Volunteers, chefs and programmers
Beyond neighbours, whole networks of volunteers appeared quickly. Some delivered food, others staffed phone lines for people living alone, others sewed masks when pharmacies had run out. I saw restaurants closed to the public fire up their kitchens again to cook for doctors and nurses in hospitals. A chef who no longer had customers found, overnight, the most grateful customers imaginable.
And I saw the tech community doing what it does best: building. Maps with verified information, platforms that matched volunteers with people in need, apps for hospitals and authorities, many of them built for free, on weekends, by people who still had their day jobs. And most of the time, they did it not for money.
When donors moved faster than the state
In Romania, a lot was written this spring about NGOs and donors, companies and ordinary people, who raised money and bought equipment for hospitals: medical devices, protective gear, things medical staff needed immediately, not after a three-month public tender. I won’t quote figures, because I haven’t verified them. But the message was clear: when people trust that the money goes where it should, they give, and they give fast.
That says something about the state, too. Not that the state doesn’t matter. It matters enormously. But an organised community can be faster and more flexible in an emergency, and a smart state should work with it rather than eye it with suspicion.
Small businesses, saved by their customers
As an entrepreneur, this is the part that moved me most. I saw people buying vouchers from the corner café, the barber or the gym, paying now for services they would use some day. I saw neighbourhoods start ordering from the butcher and the baker down the street instead of driving to the hypermarket. I saw small producers learn in two weeks how to sell online and deliver themselves.
Back in March, in my first lessons from lockdown, I wrote that the businesses that survive are the ones with real relationships with their customers. This spring confirmed it. A customer who knows you by name and wants you to stay in their neighbourhood is the best insurance a small business can have.
The diaspora was home, even from afar
Millions of Romanians live outside the country, and many lived through the pandemic with one eye on the news where they are and the other on the parents they left behind. I saw Romanians abroad donating, sending equipment, ordering groceries online for their parents, and keeping in touch every day over video with grandparents who until then didn’t know how to answer a video call. In my own way, I was part of that story too: far away physically, close in every other sense.
Good news exists. It just needs telling
From 2009 to 2016 I ran Știri de Bine (Romanian for “Good News”), a website dedicated to positive news. A few years ago I wrote about what I learned about positive journalism, and the main lesson fits perfectly now: good things happen all the time, but they only spread if someone tells them. Fear sells itself. Hope needs a storyteller.
In the first weeks of the pandemic, stories about neighbours, volunteers and chefs spread incredibly fast. People needed them. Not to forget the danger, but to remember they weren’t facing it alone.
What didn’t work so well
It would be dishonest to leave the impression that it was all beautiful. It wasn’t.
- Fake news. Theories about where the virus came from, miracle cures, alarmist WhatsApp messages. They did real harm and eroded trust exactly when it was needed most.
- Conflict. Between those who follow the rules and those who don’t, between “it’s just the flu” and “everyone stay home”, between authorities and citizens. Public debate polarised quickly.
- Fatigue. The enthusiasm of March can’t last forever. Volunteers get tired, donors get tired, and rules followed strictly in April are treated more loosely in July. That may be the biggest challenge for the months ahead.
What we should keep for a fairer society
In 2017 I wrote about what a fair society means from an entrepreneur’s point of view. The pandemic added a few lines to that list:
- Trust is infrastructure. People donate, follow rules and help each other only where they trust one another and their institutions. Trust takes years to build and one press conference to lose.
- Local networks matter. The residents’ association, the neighbourhood group, the corner market. We ignored them for years. In the crisis, they were the first to work.
- The state and communities aren’t rivals. The state has the resources and the authority; communities have speed and local knowledge. The best results come when they work together.
- Businesses can be good neighbours all the time. Not just in a crisis. A company that pays its people fairly, treats its customers honestly and gets involved in its community isn’t doing charity. It’s building its own future.
From Cyprus I watched a small society, where people know each other more easily and where the rules were, by and large, respected. From Romania I watched a bigger, more tense society, but with a capacity to mobilise that, honestly, many people had stopped crediting it with. Both showed me the same thing: solidarity isn’t a feeling, it’s a habit. And habits can be kept.
Before autumn
I don’t know what comes next. Nobody does. Maybe a second wave, maybe new restrictions, maybe long months until we have a vaccine or a treatment. But I know that if we go through this again, we won’t be starting from zero. We already have the notes on the lift doors, the neighbourhood groups, the apps, the volunteers and the customers who saved their favourite café. They’re worth keeping alive, not letting fade just because we’re tired.
What good did you see in your community over these months? And what do you think is worth keeping once the pandemic is behind us?