What did ESN Hradec Králové do during the state of emergency?

When the #coronacrisis started and the university cancelled all face-to-face activities in university grounds, we, ESN Hradec Králové, had to cancel all of our events. However, this did not mean our volunteers had any less work. For starters, we had to inform the students about what was going on and what were the steps required to do a proper check-out from the dorms in case they needed to go back to their home countries.

Overall, we just tried our best to maintain a communication flow between the students’ concerns and the university. We also encouraged our volunteers (the buddies)  to keep in contact with the international students (their students), check up on them, and invite them to our online events.  During the pandemic, we sent several emails and updates to the international students to help them make some sense of the ever changing rules and regulations.

We took part in the Stay at Home initiative, together with other ESN sections, and we had weekly events for our international students. Most notably, we created a movie club and a book club. We also created a Discord channel where the students were able to “virtually” hang out with us, play board games, and MORPGs.

In other words, despite the fact that we could no longer meet in person, we continued to be there for our international students.