Collected Item: “Family facetime”
Give your story a title.
Family facetime
What sort of object is this: text story, photograph, video, audio interview, screenshot, drawing, meme, etc.?
video call screenshot
Tell us a story; share your experience. Describe what the object or story you've uploaded says about the pandemic, and/or why what you've submitted is important to you.
At the start of lockdown it became clear that my family would not be able to see each other for a while. Most of my family lives in Sydney, some of us live in Melbourne, regional Victoria and Canada. In response, my sister initiated a Coffey Family FaceTime every night at 6:30pm with whoever was available. However, this meant teaching my grandmothers how to use Facebook and how to start a call. More than 8 months later and both my grandmothers still can’t turn their video on without direction and also can’t start Facebook calls. This call kept us together when we felt far away. Celebrating father’s day and birthdays and anniversaries on FaceTime made some moments more memorable and some feel more lonely. Face timing each other was fun until there was a family dinner in Sydney and you couldn’t leave the state. However, there were fun moments, stirring up my parents dogs by yelling “walkies” or “dindins” and then leaving the call, FaceTiming on empty trams and using the weird face effects to confuse my grandmother about who’s camera was whose. The call gave structure to the days spent inside and caused me to talk to my grandmothers and extended family more about the current world events. HIST30060
Use one-word hashtags (separated by commas) to describe your story. For example: Where did it originate? How does this object make you feel? How does this object relate to the pandemic?
#family #facetime #facebook #distance #familytime #stayingconnected
Who originally created this object? (If you created this object, such as photo, then put "self" here.)
Samantha Coffey
Give this story a date.
2020-04