Hi everyone, I am Abdullah Wahidi, a Year 13 student. I am from Afghanistan, my family and I came to New Zealand two and a half years ago as refugees. I joined Linwood College almost two years ago. I am a house prefect at Linwood College and I do have a part-time job at KFC as well. New Zealand has been a great country for me and I think I was lucky to get out of all those wars back in my own country and come to New Zealand and start a new journey full of hopes and wishes.

Though New Zealand is going through a tough time right now, I believe that we will get out of this soon. Our government has done their job against COVID-19 far better than many countries around the world and for sure this could not happen without all New Zealander's help to stay home and save lives. This lockdown has been pretty decent for me, because I have been able to do the things that I wanted to do for a long but couldn’t find the time. I have been learning Spanish, helping my mum to cook and bake some new Afghani cakes. 

The lockdown didn’t affect my sleeping schedule, I go to bed by 11pm and wake up by 7am as usual. I believe most of the people are happy as well with this lockdown because they get heaps of time to spend with their loved ones now, which wasn’t possible in our normal lives. Our teachers at Linwood are doing their best for online learning while we are in lockdown, they make sure to email us and respond to our emails as soon as they can. I think online learning makes me learn more than many classes that I used to attend because I get to do more research and work hard to learn from a topic.

I am enjoying the lockdown and hope you do as well. Spend time with your loved ones, do a lot of fun stuff and try to learn something new while you are in your bubble, and the most important thing is to make a schedule of what you will be doing throughout the day. We will soon get out of this pandemic and start our normal lives again, but for now, stay home and save lives.