There are more than 200 results, only the first 200 are displayed here.
In Christian churches the celebration of Easter this year will look more like Lent or Passion week. All Australians, too, will be without football, concerts, interstate and international travel and family gatherings. The atmosphere, too, will be one of constraint, not freedom. Instead of celebrating the present, we may be weighed down by fear and anxiety about the future. We are all captive to COVID-19.
We know that prisons are pressure cooker environments at the best of times. We can’t let them also become sites of mass infection, with potentially grave consequences, during the current COVID-19 health crisis.
The COVID-19 pandemic came swiftly and without any warning to turn our lives upside down. But while many of us are living the routine of our lives very differently now, people who are homeless or those at risk of homelessness are experiencing this pandemic in an acutely difficult way.
The ability to work from home or social distance is a class issue. How do you practice social distancing in the slums of Lagos, the favelas of Rio or the shanty towns of Bogota, the city where I was born? Here in Australia, it’s not much different for refugees, people seeking asylum and migrants in vulnerable situations.
While I stay by my mother, I glean only the edges of the news; already the horror of the fires has been at full stretch. In the quiet room where my mother lies, I think of people trying to sleep in unfamiliar environments, refugees from the fires.
While there have been endless social media posts, political campaigns and the like about staying safe by staying at home, I have been concerned about the many people who are not safe at home and what this may mean to them. What will this mean for the woman who’s been living with a domestic violence perpetrator for years?
It’s a stressful and anxious time for many people. Yet, the expression to ‘look for the helpers’ whenever a crisis occurs is an apt one in this situation. People are looking for social connectivity and ways to express kindness to others in practising social distancing under direction of medical experts.
For the last two years I have been an advocate for the refugee community in Jakarta. I have seen how women’s education is the first and most important need for women to secure their rights. Each week, I meet many refugee women who can’t speak up for their rights.
This morning there is fresh graffiti in the tunnel on the bike path: ‘No Income Still Pay Rent’. And it hits me like a punch in the gut: I still have a job, an income. I’m lucky.
Nicaraguan Ernesto Cardenal, Catholic priest, poet and revolutionary, was an essential figure of Latin American liberation theology. He died on March 1. He was 95. Cardenal’s spiritual life was the unyielding foundations of his country’s social and political struggle.
Although this is a necessary step to stop the spread of COVID-19 — and especially in order to protect those most vulnerable in our communities such as the elderly and immunocompromised — being confined at home is going to take its toll on the mental wellbeing of many of us.
How to make sense of what is going on? I think that there are ostensibly competing discourses at play. Apart from widespread community concern, or even fear, I see three different spheres of risk that are melding together in the collective (non-expert) consciousness: public health, personal health, and workplace health and safety.
157-168 out of 200 results.
x
Subscribe for more stories like this.
Free sign-up