Items
topic_interest is exactly
generosity
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2022-04-03
The can-do vaccine spirit must be applied to refugees
This is a news story written by The Sunday Times (cannot find author). The Sunday Times is a British paper and this is detailing the contrast between the generosity of the British citizens towards Ukrainian refugees, but the lack of care from the British federal government. It says that over 200,000 people and organizations have registered to sponsor refugees in the Homes for Ukraine scheme. The overall story is not about the vaccines themselves, but the author is wishing for the can-do attitude of distributing vaccines in the UK to be applied to the refugees. Of the visas applied by refugees, for families, 32,300 applied for a scholarship, but only 4,700 were issued. I think that during the pandemic, the author that wrote this got more used to the government being lenient in helping, but now when faced with a refugee crisis, lacks that same helpful spirit. -
2020-11-30
Creating New Traditions in a Pandemic
One of the traditions in my family is to make lefse, a type of Norwegian flatbread, at Christmas time. This tradition was started by my grandmother, because it was one of the foods that she associated with her childhood Christmases as the child of Norwegian and Swedish immigrants. Every year, no matter what was going on, we gathered together as a family at the start of the Christmas season to make lefse. If you’ve made lefse before, you can attest to it being a labor-intensive process, which involves ricing pounds of potatoes, rolling out dozens of balls of dough until they are paper thin, and frying them one by one on a hot griddle. It’s one of those recipes that works better if you have several people to help. In my family, everyone had a job to do. The youngest children of the family were put in charge of popping air bubbles that rose from the dough while it cooked. The older kids took turns flouring the rolling boards and rolling out the dough. The adults were responsible for cooking the lefse, a process that involved transferring huge rounds of dough to the hot griddle using long turning sticks. Even family members who were not culinarily inclined were put to work, folding the finished lefse and packaging it up so that it could be frozen, so that it was available for Christmas morning. It was a family affair, that filled the kitchen up with laughter and stories and more than one flour fight. Family lefse day is one of the most enduring memories of my childhood. When the pandemic made it unsafe to travel or even to visit my family, I found myself facing a Christmas without being able to participate in my family’s lefse making tradition. There were many teary video calls to family members as we all came to terms with the fact that we would be missing this tradition for the first time in nearly 40 years. At this point, after enduring months of isolation because of COVID-19, I was devastated. It didn’t feel like the holidays without this tradition and making lefse by myself felt overwhelming. I was telling my friend Mike about how sad I was over missing out on this tradition, when he offered a solution. We would both quarantine for 14 days, purchase all the ingredients we needed and have them delivered, and then he and I would make as much lefse as we could. I was stunned by his generosity. After all, this was not his tradition. In fact, he’d never even eaten lefse before. But he saw a way that he could help a friend feel better after such a trying year. So, we did just that. With only two of us, it took us about six hours, but we ended up with nearly thirteen pounds of lefse that eventually got sent to family members in four different states. The best moment came when we all video chatted from our homes on Christmas morning, just to eat the lefse together. It was different than normal, but it was a joyous moment. Mike joined us on the call and shared some of the challenges we had making thirteen pounds of lefse in a tiny apartment in the middle of a pandemic. This year, he’s been invited to my parents’ house to join in on the family lefse making day. After all, it’s tradition. -
2020-09-20
Jewish Melbourne Rosh Hashanah in the time of covid
Our Neighbours offered to blow the shofar for the street. A few Jewish families live on our street in Balaclava. We all gathered in the street, All still and all connected by the mitzvah of hearing the shofar. It was a very special feeling. I felt the need to document this extraordinary event, this moment in history. In this time when so many of us are disconnected this moment of togetherness felt precious. Shofar, Rosh Hashanah, community, connected, isolation, mask, generosity, neighbor, listening, Mitzvah, covid moment, improvising, Balaclava, outside, togetherness -
2020-09-20
Rosha Hashanah in the time of covid
Our Neighbours offered to blow the shofar for the street. A few Jewish families live on our street in Balaclava. We all gathered in the street, All still and all connected by the mitzvah of hearing the shofar. It was a very special feeling. I felt the need to document this extraordinary event, this moment in history. In this time when so many of us are disconnected this moment of togetherness felt precious.