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2020-04-28
Students’ Belongings
This is a photo taken in the multipurpose room of an elementary school. Following the closure of the schools, teachers were asked to return to school to pack up the students’ belongings. Teachers were allowed in to the building on a very tight schedule, only a few at a time. They labeled each student’s bag and placed in line, according to the student’s last name. At some future date the parents will be able to pick up the bag at a curbside location. -
2020-04-10
Notes From an Essential Worker Series #3
The COVID-19 virus disrupts life, particularly our relationships with those we love. But, relationships are flexible and adapt to circumstance. Any other year, my mom would stay home from work on Good Friday and bring us to church, so we can see the stations of the cross. This year, the churches closed, and my mom could not afford a day off due to COVID-19. Instead, she used her morning note to remind us to celebrate in our own way: remembering her parents, "grandma and pap," and doing something kind for each other. In keeping with traditional however, we celebrated the end of another week in quarantine with a "Pizza Payday." My mom gets paid on Fridays, so we always have pizza to celebrate. COVID-19 has caused many changes, but I am glad that has stayed the same. #FordhamUniversity #VART3030 -
2020-03-27
Ice cream from 6 feet away
We went out for ice cream one night because it was the only thing left to do. I guess somebody sick was there too because they closed a week later. -
2020-05-01
A rare occurance of an empty Disney park
Disney Parks rarely close down for long periods in time. The pandemic has created a new first for the parks, as this is an odd sight to see. -
2020-05-01
What Spring has Sprung: Uber, Closed.
Uber's gate is down and the parking lot is filled. Could Uber really be closed? -
2020-05-01
What Spring has Sprung: The Cleaners
The gate is down, the sign tells us that the cleaners is closed. I should have picked up my clothes sooner.... -
2020-05-01
What Spring has Sprung 4: The Door is Closed
The corner store gives directors where to go- the door is closed, go to the window. A plastic covering is placed between the merchant and the buyer -
2020-05-01
What Spring has Sprung 3: Playground Closed
A sign and lock on the gate: The playground is closed -
2020-04-03
New Market Square, Wichita, Kansas
Looking across the usually busy New Market Square during the first week of Kansas's "shelter-in-place" order issued on March 30, 2020, which closed all non-essential businesses in the state. *Aaron Peterka, Northeastern University -
2020-04-30
My COVID-19 Experience
A personal account -
2020-04-27
The affects of Covid-19 on children: Homeschooling and special needs services
A young boy works on a speech therapy assignment from home. Families are struggling to navigate how to continue their children’s special needs services in a time when social distancing is mandatory and all non essential services are closed down. #REL101 -
2020-04-29
One College Student's Experience During the COVID-19 Pandemic
As I imagine it is for many other people in the United States, particularly in the northeast, the emergence of the Coronavirus, and the subsequent panic and declaration of a global pandemic, was surprisingly quick. The first that I heard about the virus was from a news article during Holiday Break. At this point, my thinking was that because it is in China, it was not that big of a deal. However, the picture of doctors in full protection gear carrying a body bag was disturbing. Being a person with contamination fears that accompany my obsessive-compulsive disorder, I immediately Googled the symptoms of the disease. I was slightly comforted that one of the symptoms was not nausea and vomiting because my main phobia is vomit. A few weeks after this initial introduction, I was back at Bates College for my Winter Term. Coincidently, I was enrolled in a course called “China in the World.” Part of this course was to analyze media relating to China and connecting it to our core concepts. The first week that we got into small groups to share our individual pieces of media that we chose, most of my classmates choose news articles about the novel Coronavirus. In the weeks following our initial discussion about COVID-19, the virus was present on everyone’s mind, but it did not seem as an eminent threat. People would bring it up in conversation, but we were told not to worry. We had our winter break during the week of February 16th, and many people traveled with friends or went home. I went back to my home in Connecticut. Being that we live an hour away from New York City, my dad commutes into the city every day, and we visit the city often. My mom planned for us to go into the city and watch the Broadway show, Hadestown, before I left to go back to school. At this point, I saw some people taking precautionary measures, but the majority of people did not seem to be worried. My sister brought hand sanitizer, and we all used it before eating and after touching handles or anything else. After break, I headed back to school. During the next two to three weeks, the nation saw the confirmed cases of the virus rapidly increase. Once it became prevalent in the Boston area and colleges started to shut down, it was only a matter of time before Bates closed. The last week before we were sent home—the week of March 8—things started to change each day. Each day brought cancelations, new dining protocols, and a lot of uncertainty for both students and professors. I found it hard to concentrate on getting the work I needed to accomplish completed. By the time it got to Thursday, the high school in my town—where my sister is a senior—had moved to remote learning, the preschool that my mom works at had closed down, and many other colleges and universities have sent their students home or asked that they stay home after spring break. Thursday, I tried to spend a good amount of time with my friends, assuming that we were going to be sent home and not going to be able to see each other for an unknown period of time. Friday morning, around 10am, Bates College President Clayton Spencer announced that we would need to pack up all of our belongings and leave school by the following Tuesday. Subsequently, we would begin remote learning. My 11am class was canceled and very few people showed up to our last in-person China in the World class. During this time, our professor put up the live stream of President Trump’s address to the American public declaring a national emergency. We all sat there pretty quietly. The whole situation still felt so surreal. One invisible entity was causing mass destruction around the globe. My sister and my dad drove up to Maine and picked me up Saturday the 14th of March. It was quite difficult to say goodbye to all of my friends, especially since I wanted to give them all hugs. I said goodbye to the vast majority of people I wanted to see and we headed to Portland for the night. It occurred to me as we were driving by the historic quad a Bates that this would be the last time I would be there for a while; I was planning on going abroad in the fall before the chaos of the virus. Arriving at the hotel, I was feeling pretty down. I am such a homebody, so I never thought that leaving school and spending the rest of the semester at home would be upsetting. It truly was. The week after being sent home, I got an email saying that I was exposed to the one individual who had a confirmed case of the disease on Bates campus. It was a little alarming feeling like I might have exposed my family to the virus. However, my sister happened to be talking to her best friend that night and her friend confessed that her whole family had the virus. Therefore, we had been exposed to the disease twice. We all quarantined for fourteen days, and luckily no one developed symptoms. Over the last month, I have been trying to stay busy and focus on my schoolwork. As more and more people perish from disease, it has been difficult to get up each day not dreading the worst. I have tried to limit the amount of news that I have watched in order to decrease my anxiety. I have tried to ignore some of the “news” presented on social media sites that provide misinformation about the disease. I wish I could help with the crisis more than I have already because, honestly, it feels like staying home is not enough. It has helped to talk to my friends and family over Skype, Zoom, or FaceTime. Now that school is over, I am going to focus on doing things for my mental and physical health. As I mentioned before, having contamination fears during this pandemic has been challenging. Through therapy, I have been taught to limit my hand washing and other compulsions having to do with my phobias. During the pandemic, though, it is necessary for everyone to be extremely cautious and wash their hands pretty constantly. All of the precautionary measures have been triggering, but I am proud to say that I am handling the pandemic a lot better than I would have imagined I would have a few years ago. I am extremely grateful to be able to be living at my family home safely, and having access to food and other resources. I feel extremely privileged being in the situation I am in, and sincerely feel for others who may not find themselves in a similar circumstance. -
2020-04-30
9 Roses Cafe in the French Quarter is Closed Until Further Notice, Take-Out Available at Gretna Location, New Orleans, LA
9 Roses Cafe in the French Quarter closes due to the pandemic, but the restaurant's Gretna location remains open for take-out. -
2020-04-29
Ma Momma's House Restaurant Can't-Wait to Get Back in the Kitchen, New Orleans, LA
Ma Momma's House Restaurant offers words of encouragement, wishing to be back in the kitchen to serve customers as they are closed during the pandemic. -
2020-04-24
Ma Momma's House Restaurant Promotes Popular Meal During #feastinplace for Jazz Fest, New Orleans, LA
Ma Momma's Cornbread, Chicken, and Waffles Restaurant posts a photo reminiscent of Jazz Fests past with one of the restaurant's best sellers. The restaurant is #ClosedDueToCoVID19. -
2020-04-13
Dooky Chase Restaurant Suspends Takeout to Begin Community Give Back Days, New Orleans, LA
Dooky Chase Restaurant announces the restaurant will shut down temporarily until May to conduct the Community Give Back Days. -
2020-04-29
Sudden change
A Personal Account of the pandemic -
2020-04-29
A College Student's Story
Short text -
2020-04-29
Chelsea Langerud
Short text -
2020-04-28
California beaches closed and empty
This is a photograph of a beach located in my hometown (Carlsbad, CA). Due to COVID-19, beaches in the San Diego area have been temporarily closed. No one is allowed to surf, swim, walk, or sit on the sand. If you look closely, you will see caution tape on the stairs and other entrances to the beach have been blocked off. This is a beach town, the beach is never empty and temperatures have been in the 80s. We are entering the time of year where the beach is the most popular and fun thing to do, but now any beach plans will be cancelled until further notice. #REL101 -
2020-04-24
COVID 19 Journal: 04/21/2020
COVID 19 Journal by Kaitlin Whalen written 04/21/2020 -
2020-04-29
Graduating College in a Pandemic
Landing a full-time job before graduating from college is a daunting task for every student. Now that Covid-19 has spread all over the country and social distancing has gone into full effect, it is much that harder to land a job. Before the pandemic hit, the job market was at its best it has ever been; there were more jobs than people looking. However, from one month to another that all changed. I was active in clubs and everything and anything that would make my resume stand out. I also had 3 internships in my respective major throughout the 4 years of college. During my last internship, which was during the 2019 Fall semester, I got offered a full-time job starting 2 weeks after graduation. However, the offer got rescinded a couple weeks into March. Given the circumstances, I knew that it was going to be hard to find a job. I started tracking all of the jobs I got rejected from and all in all it was 26 jobs. Most of the companies rejection letters started the same way, “Due to Covid-19…”. It would have been easy to give up applying to jobs and wait for the pandemic to die down, whenever that was. I told myself that if the next company I applied for rejected me I would stop applying. Luckily, this time I got an offer. This comes to show how the pandemic has affected every college student around the country, regardless of experience. #REL101 -
2020-04-24
COVID 19 Journal: 03/25/2020
COVID 19 Journal by Kaitlin Whalen written 03/25/2020 -
2020-04-29
Bethel Lutheran Church Closed
It shows a church forced to close by the pandemic. The sign on the front door reads: "CLOSED, Public Health Emergency, ReOpen...God Only Knows, 2020" The sign informs the public, reaffirms faith in God while also making a joke about the uncertainty of the time. It also documents the fact that churches are not considered to be essential. -
2020-04-17
Creative Graffiti Appears on Boarded-Up French Quarter Businesses, New Orleans, LA
Creative graffiti is appearing on many of the boarded-up French Quarter businesses. -
2020-04-17
World-Famous Chris Owens Club Temporarily Shuttered, New Orleans, LA
World-famous clubs like Chris Owens at 500 Bourbon Street are shuttered during Covid-19. -
2020-04-29
Waiting to Return 2
When the school closed, it was unlike any other closing. Teachers left up the bulletin boards and projects were still hanging from the ceilings. Do we take down the maps and put away our figurines on our desk to keep from dust? When will we return? It's only March. The school year isn't over yet. A month later, the classrooms are still wondering. The teachers are still hoping. The students are still asking.The wishers are still wishing. The prayers are still praying. -
2020-03-15
Starbucks Lobby Closure
This video was shot the day the major of Los Angeles, Eric Garcetti, ordered the closure of all bars, nightclubs, dine-in restaurants, entertainment venues, and gyms. As a result, we had to ask customers to leave and stack up the lobby furniture. In the video, my coworkers and I are being silly but really we were all pretty freaked out. -
2020-04-29
Warning to People Trying to Park in Local Neighborhoods to Use Peter's Canyon
OC Parks closed the parking lots of their county parks, and encouraged people to stay at home and visit parks within walking distance. However, warm weather has led people to drive to parks such as Peter's Canyon to hike. Police attempt to keep these people away by forbidding parking in the neighborhoods surrounding the canyon. -
2020-04-28
REL A local Church notice
This local church has signs posted all across their doors to update members on how they shall proceed in the midst of COVID-19, and how they will be able to remain connected through these unsettling times. They are continuing to do live stream masses. I found the wording of the note extremely special as they note "dispensed all of the faithful from the obligation" so that these members do not feel like they are doing a disservice or sin by not attending their normal mass routines. -
2020-04-28
Small Community Library
This is an image of a community library in my neighborhood where people can come and take a book and replace it with their own contribution. Because it is usually touched by many people it has been closed. This tell us that it is necessary to social distance and quarentine for the safety of yourself and others.#REL101 -
2020-04-28
A brief memoir written by a trapped Chineses student at ASU
It is the third week after transition of classes started in ASU. My life started to become monotone after the spring break which was 3.17. Dining hall did not allow dine-in anymore. The chairs inside the nearest dining hall—Hassayampa, were all put away and sanitized towels were placed in bowls on tables. The dining hall staffs began to provide us with disposable plastic boxes to fill the meals and they even wore glosses to prevent spreading epidemic. The transitioning of classes announced by ASU was said to maintain for two weeks, but it was extended through the semester at the end of the first week after spring break. My first roommate decided to go back home right after the new policy, and my second and third roommate moved out during the second week, which left me alone in the dorm. My daily routine is: wake up--breakfast--online classes--dining hall--dorm--online classes--dining hall-- dorm--homework or video games. It was not as monotone as weekdays during the weekends, since I could spend more time on leisure instead of studying. In the light of the epidemic, I was discouraged by myself as well as my parents and the local government to do any social contacts. But thanks to the virtual technologies, I use zoom to make video contacts with my friends and Wechat to contact with my parents. They worry about my safety in U.S. because they are mostly back in China where the epidemic is approximately purged; in the contrast, the cases in U.S. are increasing. They fear the public order here are disrupted and urge me to hoard food in case that the dining hall might close or something worse happen. Most importantly, they all ask me to wear mask if I am outdoor. In U.S., I barely see people wearing masks outdoor, which is greatly opposite in China. Here is a fun fact that can explain why CDC does not recommend people wearing masks: Half of the production of masks among the world are in China, which explains why CDC does not recommend wearing masks while purchasing masks from other countries to meet the need of medical staffs. CDC may explain that no empirical results prove wearing masks can prevent the spreading of virus, but if it really can’t, then the epidemic in China will not get better than it used to be with the help of masks. Few people wearing masks in U.S. is my greatest concern, because it cannot efficiently slow down the spreading rate of Covid-19. Based on the status quo of epidemic in U.S., cases will keep growing and need time of months to see the turning point. And even now, the travel level for China is still “4”, which means Chinese are not allowed to enter U.S. Because I bought the flight ticket to China at the end of this semester, I am afraid that I will be declined to reenter U.S. even during August. I truly wish the epidemic around the world will stop in the coming months and the vaccine for Covid-19 can be successfully produced. Stay healthy, wash hands frequently, keep social distances and wear masks if you can. -
2020-04-28
REL Arizona State University Ghost Town
I work at the Sun Devil Card Office a the Memorial Union on the ASU campus. These are the signs that are on every door of the MU that has been closed. Usually, the Memorial Union is filled with people at the food court, dining hall, or just studying, but now there is nobody but the 10 employees that still clean/ roam the building. The virus has made this lively campus a ghost town. Students and faculty haven't been on the campus since spring break. This shows you just how serious this pandemic is. Usually, around this time, students would be studying for finals in the MU or the library, but now there is no one studying here. -
2020-03-17
The City that Never Sleeps, Asleep?
Las Vegas, known as the "City that never sleeps", which is the home to many famous performers/acts, hotels, restaurants, night life and more is seen to be completely empty due to many of the attractions being closed because of COVID-19. This just goes to show that, even the city that never sleeps cannot go on as it should with the pandemic occurring. -
2020-04-28
What Spring has Sprung 1: School Crossing Guard in Bronx
School Crossing Guards are essential workers. Children who have not- continue to frequent the school during the lunch hour. -
2020-04-25
Toilet Paper Street Art, New Orleans, LA
Rolls of toilet paper spray-painted on boarded-up doors of Dat Dog on Frenchmen Street in New Orleans. Businesses along Frenchmen and throughout the French Quarter boarded up their doors and windows at the beginning of the COVID-19 stay-at-home-order. Toilet paper was one of the first items to go out of stock due to panic buying in the United States. -
2020-04-20
Palms
With the church closed on Palm Sunday, palms are left outside for people to pick up. -
2020-04-20
No services today
Church building is closed; services are streamed on Facebook. -
2020-03-21
La Jolla Band of Luiseno Tribal Chairman Addresses Tribe
Tribal chairman addresses community, giving a brief history of the tribal response to date and offering the results of a recent survey among tribal members where 55% said that they had underlying health conditions that put them at greater risk. As a result, the Council has decided to close the tribal offices temporarily and close tribal enterprises to the public. #IndigenousStories -
2020-02-26
Brothers lounge, Omaha Nebraska
Handwritten closed sign in bar window, Omaha, NE -
2020-03-27
California's Agua Caliente Tribe Closes Casino, One of the Largest Employers in Coachella Valley
"""Stay healthy and safe during this challenging time,"" Tribal Chairman Jeff L. Grubbe said. ""We remain hopeful and are eager for the day we can reopen. Since time immemorial, the Agua Caliente Band of Cahuilla Indians has been resilient in overcoming major challenges and obstacles. We will get through this together, Coachella Valley."" #IndigenousStories" -
2020-04-09
Suffolk student will direct virtual performance of ‘The Lover’
The Suffolk Journal, Suffolk University's student run newspaper, reports on student life during the pandemic. -
2020-03-22
What switching to online learning means for the Suffolk Art & Design department
The Suffolk Journal, Suffolk University's student run newspaper, reports on Suffolk's decisions around campus during the pandemic. -
2020-04-25
School Closed Until
COVID-19 has forced widespread closure of one of the most bedrock American institutions: school. Three words on the marquee outside Eastern Senior High School in Washington, DC, capture the uncertainty facing children, teachers, and broader communities. -
2020-04-02
A coffee-shop is using walkie-talkie
Due quarantine restrictions all the cafes have to be closed, only delivery and take away are allowed. This cafe is using a walkie-talkie to avoid unnecessary contact. -
2020-04-01
Tied up play equipment
Children can go to school and child care but can’t play on public play equipment. This makes me think about the all the energy small children are having to contain when confined to their homes. -
2020-04-07
National park closures in Tasmania
This "Reserve Closed" sign is simply one of many which mark the closures of Tasmania's national parks, enacted from 26 March 2020. -
2020-04-21
Finding Each Other in the Dark: On Losing Shared Experience
Being apart shows how much we need to be together. Sarin Moddle reflects on what this temporary period of physical separation costs us, and what it can teach us. “No kapa haka tonight, whānau.” The words jarred me. Nearly every Wednesday for two years I’d been ending my night in a beautiful wharenui at Unitec’s Te Noho Kotahitanga Marae. This simple weekly ritual – a rising tide of voices coming together to sing waiata after our night school language classes – had saved me so many times before, a potent balm when other parts of my world were crumbling. I came to the marae that night in search of that feeling. Exactly one week prior, the first signs of the impending collapse of the live music industry were coming to light. The hairline cracks had widened so quickly that, in the space of seven days, it seemed like everyone I worked with – close friends, most of them – was staring down the barrel of #canceleverything and zero income as far as the eye could see. It was early days and our industry was alone in this, our concerns financial only. But trauma is trauma, and I knew what I needed: voices lifted in unison. Shared space, shared intention, the whole greater than the sum of its parts. It is apparent, now, that our ability to come together in such ways is going to be off the table for a while. Even once we’re released from sheltering-in-place, once we’re allowed outside of our household bubbles, the act of gathering in groups is likely to be under various forms of siege for months or years to come. Some communities, where the imperative to exist collectively is structured into daily life, will feel the impact of this immediately; for others, it will come as an awakening. We’re discovering how much we need to physically be with other people at the exact moment we’re being told we can’t have it. * At 35, the only other reference I have for shared experience on a global scale is 9/11. At the age of 17, my world stopped at the edges of the North American continent, so as far as I was concerned, the “whole world” was feeling the same trauma. I’d never felt shared grief, shock and uncertainty on a scale that large. In my corner of the globe, we responded as a collective: first gathering in prayer, vigil and moments of silence, and later in anti-war protests that filled the streets with – again – a rising chorus of voices. We processed it all together, in the company not only of our friends and family, but in the presence of strangers with whom we suddenly shared common ground. When words fail us, it is our mere physical presence with one another that gives us solace In the days following the early waves of Covid-19 news – when it was still just private-sector responses, minor travel restrictions, event caps – life was a blur of human contact. My community’s reaction to that shock and uncertainty was to process it with each other. We spent hours in friends’ lounges, ruminating through happy hours, taking long walks, and drinking endless amounts of coffee while strategising our survival over café tables. There were entire conversations punctuated only by the shaking of heads, there were so many hugs. Proof that when words fail us, it is our mere physical presence with one another that gives us solace. Fast-forward 48 hours, past the border closure and nationwide mandate to shelter in place, and suddenly all those measures of comfort were off the cards. * When I speak with Mohamed Hassan about what isolation means for him, the first thing he reflects on is the irony of a community so brave that local mosques kept their doors open in the face of terror threats only to have them forced shut by Covid-19. He’d travelled to Christchurch in early March ahead of the one-year anniversary of the terror attacks. “When I spoke to people down there,” Mohamed recounts, “they were saying, ‘It doesn’t matter what happens, we’re not going to stop coming together and we’re not going to stop worshipping and we’re not going to stop building this community together.’ And two weeks later, all these mosques are being closed down, not just here but all across the world.” The ban on public gatherings strikes at the very heart of Islamic life, which – like many religions – “is very deliberately laid out as communal activities,” he says. And daily prayer, the anchor around which Islamic life revolves, is only ever performed alone as a last resort. He explains that there is a very specific imperative to pray in a group and in a mosque, before adding, “That communal sense of worship is very much at the heart of how we understand our religion, and also how we understand the way our societies are structured.” Faced with curtailing the spread of Covid-19, Muslim leaders worldwide are grappling with the question of how to reconcile a moral imperative to be together in the face of a public health imperative to stay apart. “Muslims around the world,” muses Mohamed, “they're having to figure out what happens now that we don't have these mosques, we don’t have these centres where we can connect to one another, where we can see each other regularly. And it isn’t really anything that we’ve had to come across before,” at least not as a global community. The questions that leaders are asking, Mohamed says, are big ones: “Is it right to close a mosque in these times, is it right to tell people not to come in for Friday prayers, which are fundamentally a part of our beliefs?” “I don’t know if people are going to be able to come up with other ways of being able to fill those spaces or make these connections with one another.” * Sense of belonging is a human psychological need right up there with food and shelter. We innately seek community and connection with others, and it has tangible outcomes on our mental and physical health. As neuroscientist James Coan commented recently in The New Yorker, “Our brains have learned from brutal evolutionary lessons that social isolation is a death sentence.” This isn’t really news; neither is the knowledge that sharing a room feels very different from sharing a screen, although we’re not always able to articulate why. The task we’re confronted with now is how to give our brains the sense of connection they need – not simply for this moment, but for when we inevitably return to it in future. Millennia ago, our ancestors were bound together for material survival. These days we bind ourselves to others through work, worship and leisure – and for many, when these physical spaces shut down, the activity within them becomes impossible as we knew it. The closure of art spaces is heartbreakingly explored in another piece pulished on The Pantograph Punch by actors and theatre-makers; the absence of gym spaces, suspensions of sports teams and cancellations of competitions leave a similarly gaping void for many. Like many coaches and trainers, Richie Hardcore had been modifying his Muay Thai kickboxing team’s training over the weeks leading up to the Level 4 alert to accommodate social distancing – no sparring, no sharing equipment, no contact drills. It was a way of eking out as much time as possible for the team to be together. Closing his club for the first time in two decades, while inevitable, still took an emotional toll on everyone. When you operate like family, the breakup of that unit is hard. “I've had young people come in the gym and they’re going through breakups or their boyfriend’s being abusive to them or their girlfriend’s left them or just life is confusing for them, and they want to talk [to someone].” Team relationships are unique in that they breed a particular intimacy between people who don’t necessarily maintain contact outside of the gym. Does he think those kinds of conversations will happen outside of the face-to-face opportunities afforded by training together? “In my case, yes, but I think words on the screen through Instagram still don't carry the weight of touch, talk, connection… to not be able to give them a hug or punch them in the arm or give them a wry smile or laugh or dry the tears, it’s not the same, you know.” * Back at kura pō, on the night of no kapa haka, shared teatime also disappeared. Our programme coordinator sticks his head into our classroom to let us know that from now on we should each bring our own kai to eat ourselves. He apologises, and tells us it’s only temporary until all this Covid-19 stuff is over, “then we can all go back to being Māori again.” For some Māori like Amy Bassett, the rhythms of daily life on her marae reflect the importance of the collective: “Whatever is happening, if it’s a tangi or a wedding or a wānanga, everything’s moving around that thing, so you’re always in service of something greater than yourself. Everyone has something to do and if you don’t have something to do, you’re almost set apart from everyone. Having a role to play gives you your mana in the place.” The inability to carry out tangihanga – the rites for the dead – is a fraught and painful consequence of the Level 4 restrictions. Māori communities are grappling with how to rethink tikanga for one of the most important sets of cultural protocols in te ao Māori. In the Far North, this was a very early consideration at Bethany Edmunds’ marae, where whānau have been asked to modify tangihanga and “to be completely self-sufficient in these times.” The notion of self-sufficiency in the face of the most acute human loss – death – is a pragmatic but wrenching one. One of my first thoughts when Aotearoa went into Level 4 lockdown was, “What happens when someone dies now?” I have grieved alone, an ocean away from anyone else who knew that extinguished life. Skype did not cut it. I have never wanted anything more than to be in the same physical space as other people who also shared the loss of this specific person. The question lingers: to what degree can we feel the sense of belonging, like part of a greater whole, when we’re prohibited from being in the same room as anyone outside our ‘bubble’? * You’ve gotta admit, though, we’re trying. We’ve got online group workouts and virtual cocktail hours and Facebook Live church services, we’ve got endless Zoom conversations with friends and Twitch houseparties. There have never been more options available to conquer the distance between ourselves. But they’re imperfect tools at best. They presuppose you have people you can call on, and that you’re comfortable doing so. The interactions are inorganic: only one person can speak at a time, there are no sidebar conversations naturally spinning off from the group. There are technical glitches: faces freeze, audio lags, people unintentionally talk over one another. These all seem like minor inconveniences but they add up quickly when the virtual is our sole source of human contact. Our brains, used to processing a wide array of contextual information drawn from surroundings and subtle changes in body language, are being asked to work exponentially harder in environments devoid of that context, and will find it harder to feel comfort. Virtual communication is a lifeline in these times: necessary, but not sufficient. That’s because the reason that all these online tools of communication were designed was to facilitate one thing and one thing only: conversation. The point of praying together, training together, cooking together, grieving together, is not to talk, although that’s often a byproduct; the point is to share experience in the presence of others. If the most intimate connections are the ones that don’t require words, then any tool reliant on words will always fall short. And most achingly, we haven’t figured out how to sit in silence with one another on the other side of a screen yet. Richie likens it to what we eat: “We all need nourishing meals for our physical wellbeing, but often we get junk food because we’re in a hurry. And I think it’s the same with human connection. We feel a bit connected through Instagram and Facebook and Tinder and all these sorts of things, but they’re not really what we need. They can be a nice add-on to human connection, or augment it, but when it’s your sole source of nutrition, it’s not very good.” * The physiological reality to all of this is that when we are stressed or uncomfortable, we seek oxytocin (the ‘cuddle hormone’) release through human touch. And when we feel lonely, it’s a biological warning sign to seek out other people for survival. Under lockdown, self-isolation, shelter-in-place, alert Levels 2 through 4, whatever you want to call them, our go-to options to alleviate our discomfort are off the table. Compounding that feeling is the fact that we can’t really see the end of this thing; we don’t know how long we’re stuck with these feelings for. In some ways it feels like a wake-up call, a glimpse down the extreme end of the path we’re currently on. More people in the world live alone than ever before. In cities, the closer we live to our neighbours, it seems, the less likely we are to actually know them. We’re all in constant communication on our devices but rarely do we actually hear each other’s voices on the Devices Formerly Known As Cell Phones. There’s even a recognised condition – hikikomori – of literal hermitude in favour of exclusively online interaction, originally identified in Japan but now being recognised around the globe. “We’ve finally isolated ourselves to the point that we have to sit in our houses by ourselves, and not be around others, we’ve finally atomised society to the nth degree,” Richie points out. “I think this is a real time for us to really stop and pause and look at the world that we’ve built.” Mohamed sees things differently. “As Muslims, we’re having to take on these challenges together. We're going to be starting the month of Ramadan together, we're going to be ending it together. And all of us, as a globe, are going into this unknown territory together. There's a lot of comfort in that.” Perhaps this is how we survive until we can gather again: ritual. Doing the same thing at the same time – apart, together. Common experience may not be the same as shared experience but it’s as close as we can get. * If we take anything away from this strange time, I hope it is this: that when these restrictions on human contact are eased, we remember how deeply we needed more than a screen. That we needed each other in the flesh. That we sought that flash of recognition in another person’s face: I see you, and we are in something together. That we are part of something bigger. Writ large, this is precisely the notion that is required to carry us through. -
2020-03-13
Public Libraries Close, Jefferson Parish, LA
Libraries to be closed due to COVID-19 pandemic. -
04/21/2020
The Swamp Remains Shuttered Through Coronavirus Pandemic, New Orleans, LA [Private]
The Swamp remains temporarily closed during the COVID-19 pandemic.