The Small Math of Staying Close

This week, we’re handing The Second Half over to Andrea, our working student at Amara.

One of the things I absolutely love about being part of this team is that all of us come to the question of connection from somewhere different. Different generations, countries, families, backgrounds… We all have our versions of what “being there” for a loved one looks like.

We’re also all someone’s child & grandchild.

Andrea moved from Peru to Germany three years ago. For her, staying close to her grandparents comes with one tiny extra calculation every day: six or seven hours. -D

Andrea: Three weeks ago I started working at Amara. Somewhere in my first week I found myself thinking about something I do every single day without really noticing: the small math of calling my grandparents.

I moved from Peru to Germany three years ago to study. Peru is six or seven hours behind here, depending on the time of year. The gap actually shifts twice a year, which took me an embarrassingly long time to notice. So when it’s 12pm here, it’s early morning there, somewhere around 5 or 6am. By the time I’m done with work or classes and actually free to talk, they’re usually still busy in the middle of their day.

It’s not a big deal, most of the time. I just do the math without thinking, are they awake, are they having lunch, is it too late, too early. It becomes second nature, the same way you learn a new keyboard shortcut and stop noticing you’re using it.

But every so often it doesn’t work out. I message “call you later?” and later never quite lines up for both of us, so the day slides by and we end up talking the next one instead. Nothing dramatic happens, we just miss a day of the small stuff. Not the important news, just the “guess what happened today” kind of thing that only really works at the moment.

What made me smile, thinking about it after that call, is that I’ve never actually complained about this to anyone. It’s such a small thing, subtracting six or seven hours, that it doesn’t even feel like something worth mentioning. And yet I do it every day, and so does everyone I know here who has a family somewhere else. It’s just part of the background of living abroad, one of those tiny, unglamorous routines nobody warns you about before you move.

I still get it wrong sometimes. I still occasionally message them at what I think is a normal hour and get a very sleepy voice note back. But mostly it works, in its own imperfect way, a small daily habit of trying to land in the same twenty minutes as someone you love, even from two time zones and an ocean away.

Andrea’s story is hers, however the feeling is familiar to us all. There are thousand small things that shape how families stay close: work, distance, time zones, routines, energy, life. Being part of this team has made us more curious about those small things. Not just the big question of how do we keep people connected?, but all the tiny moments in between that make connection easie, or make it slip by. So this week, Andrea is taking over The Second Half to tell us what that looks like from her corner of the world. -D

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