I was in my second year at TU Dublin when I first walked into the community room near Stoneybatter with a backpack full of chargers, a cracked phone screen, and the confidence of someone who had grown up pressing “accept cookies” without reading a word. I had signed up to volunteer because my lecturer said it would be “good experience,” and because, if I’m honest, I wanted something decent to put on my CV. I didn’t expect it to rearrange the way I thought about loneliness.
The notice on the door said “Tea and Technology,” which sounded harmless enough. Inside, there were eight older people sitting around fold-out tables, their phones placed in front of them like difficult exam papers. There was a plate of Kimberley biscuits in the middle and the heating was on too high. A woman called Maura waved me over immediately and said, “You’re the young fella. Can you make my daughter appear?”
Her daughter lived in Perth. Maura had not seen her properly in three years, except for a few blurry photographs sent through WhatsApp by Maura’s grandson. The problem was that Maura thought WhatsApp was “the green thing” and FaceTime was “the other thing,” and she was convinced that pressing the wrong button would somehow delete Australia. I laughed, gently, and told her Australia was safe enough for the moment.
We started with the basics. How to unlock the phone. How to find the app. How to turn the volume up. Around us, others were learning too. Paddy from Cabra kept holding his phone to his ear during video calls because, as he said, “it’s still a phone, isn’t it?” Eileen had written her Apple ID password on the back of an electricity bill but had added two extra capital letters “for security” and now couldn’t remember where. Another man, Joe, came every week but never brought a device. He said he was “only observing,” though he watched every screen with the focus of a surgeon.
At first, I treated it like a task. I was patient, but in the way you are patient when you know more than someone else. I explained swiping, tapping, microphone permissions, camera access. I used words like “interface” until Maura looked at me over her glasses and said, “Would you ever speak English, love?” That brought me down a peg.
After that, I stopped teaching like a student and started listening like a person. Maura told me her husband had died during the winter, and her daughter had tried to call from Australia, but Maura had missed it because the phone was on silent. “I thought silent meant it would be polite,” she said. Then she looked away and added, “I keep thinking if I’d answered, she wouldn’t have cried alone.”
That sentence stayed with me. I had missed calls from my own mam all the time. I’d see her name pop up while I was on the Luas or walking past Dublin city centre, and I’d text, “Can’t talk now.” I thought connection was something you could pause and resume whenever suited you. For Maura, one missed call had become a small room she kept returning to.
The breakthrough came on a wet Tuesday in November. Rain was battering the windows, and the buses outside were hissing along the road towards Smithfield. Maura had brought in a notebook where she had written, in careful handwriting, “1. Green app. 2. Daughter’s name. 3. Video camera.” She had practised at home on an old phone box, pretending it was a screen.
We sat side by side. Her hands were trembling a little, so I told her there was no rush. She tapped the green app. She found her daughter’s name. She pressed the small video camera icon. The phone rang, making that strange pulsing sound that feels like waiting in public.
Then her daughter answered.
For a second, nobody spoke. The screen filled with a woman’s face, sunlit and startled, with a kitchen behind her that looked impossibly bright compared with the grey Dublin afternoon. “Mam?” she said.
Maura made a sound I can’t properly describe. It was half laugh, half sob, and completely unguarded. “I can see you,” she said. “Oh God, I can see you properly.”
The room changed after that. Paddy stopped joking. Eileen put her hand over her mouth. Even Joe, the observer, leaned closer. Maura’s daughter called to someone off-screen, and suddenly a little boy appeared, all missing teeth and school uniform, shouting, “Hi Granny!” Maura touched the screen with one finger, as if she could smooth his hair through the glass.
I stepped away to give them privacy, but Maura grabbed my sleeve. “Stay,” she said. So I stayed, looking at the floor while three generations tried to fit years of missing each other into one call. They talked about Perth, about school, about the price of flights, about Maura’s bad knee, about whether the boy remembered the toy bus she’d posted him. Ordinary things. Sacred things, really.
When the call ended, Maura sat back and wiped her eyes with a tissue from her cardigan sleeve. “That’ll do me for a month,” she said, then laughed at herself.
Note: Please be aware that these are written in confidentiality and there is not reference or mention of any real people and their sentiments here. Every incident and Story tends to be emotional so please read at your own emotional risk. Website is not responsible for anything related. HumansofDublin.io is not related to the photography project HumansofDublin by Peter Varga
