Sylvia's Journal

Before COVID19 (BC) my ecological footprint was rather large. Decades ago Tessa gave me a quiz and when I had answered all the questions what emerged is that in order to support my ecological footprint I needed 9 planets. I was chided for that by my daughter.  Now I’d like to believe that sustaining my life style has shrunk to less than one planet. I produce less waste and I am not driving or flying. 

It pains me that I have to throw away the colored plastic bags and elastic bands in which our newspapers are wrapped. Now they go into the toxic waste bag sitting by the front door where they join the junk mail (which seems to have diminished). I used to recycle all that.

But when it comes to food, we use more of what we buy and what we already have. We successfully made our first yogurt from powdered milk, like the olden days in Yemen. This was in the 70s when Sanaa’s ring road consisted of two rutted tracks and a stinking ditch in the middle.  The ditch was used as a garbage dump where people poured their household debris (liquids and solids). Food was bought at small stores, not self-service. There was a counter, a till, and a man who gave you what you wanted, which could only be the things on the shelves behind the counter. Yogurt was not something you bought in a store. You made it.

We follow the good example of our daughters and freeze every part of the vegetables that we don’t use in cooking. We boil the unappealing mess for hours. What’s left is called ‘garbage’ soup, a kind of fragrant compost concoction that turns out to produce the most wonderful broth. I have developed a new appreciation of our daughters who are showing us the way, in anything related to COVID19 and simple living. I suppose this means we did a good job. They now are the generation that (should) lead us – Baby boomers, step aside!

We are appreciative of all the free art forms that are now offered to anyone with a computer, electricity and good bandwidth: the museum tours, the concerts, the audiobooks from businesses that used to sell these same wares. We watched a wonderful play from the London Theatre with James Corden.  Our Quaker community organized a poetry reading via Zoom that moved us deeply. It’s funny how the always underfunded art community is coming to our rescue, to keep us, grounded and sane. If people didn’t already know this (and supported the arts), I believe this is now abundantly clear. It will be interesting to see if the debt will be repaid PC (post-COVID19).

Now we have two storms going on – a Nor’eastern, luckily without snow but not the kind of weather for a walk. And then there is the COVID-19 storm that is raging everywhere and in particular inside our government. The reports from Washington are dismal. I can only hope that now many more people regret who they voted for in 2016 and that they vote for someone else in November. I also hope that all the states organize themselves well for mail-in-voting.

In our small Cape Ann community some residents are calling for closing the bridges so no more viruses can get in. Maybe we are in for some stricter rules about movement, like in Spain, Italy and France, where you have to ask permission to get out or in and get a sturdy fine if you do not play by the rules.

My friends S+P who are in France, where they have a small resort, are not allowed to drive through Belgium to get home to the Netherlands – the roads are physically blocked for all traffic except those with the right ‘attestation,’ or trucks. If it comes to that here in our country of rugged individualists there will be trouble. In that case I can only hope that the folks who bristle at the constraints on their freedom see someone suffer nearby, and finally get it.

And so, in the midst of those two storms I try to stick to my routine. If I am successful I have a Routini when the cocktail hour arrives – it’s a nice break from the stresses and screen time of the day. For cocktails there is now a choice of three types of Martinis (in addition to the real ones). In the beginning, when we were still making fun of quarantining, the joke went around of the Quarantini, made with a dash of Purell. No longer a joke my favorite is now the Routini. It is made with Flexibility, an ingredient we are stockpiling now, has some Comfort (not the Southern kind), a dash of Gratefulness & Appreciation, and something to absorb whatever negative thoughts passed my mind. And then there is the weekly Zoomtini where we hang out with friends, it’s a BYOB event at our virtual house.

When one of our sons-in-law first came to our house and saw the inside of our refrigerator he commented on what he saw: ‘it’s all condiments!’ This particular son-in-law did not like condiments – never had mustard or catchup on his hotdog or hamburger, hated the idea of relish and such. He has changed over the years, partially because I make lots of mustard at Christmas time for family and friends. He has received those for decades and I have seen him put the mustard on something.

I thought about this when I opened our refrigerator this morning: he would sure have exclaimed that it contained nothing but condiments. And he would have been right, it’s now mostly populated mostly by condiments, pickles, relishes, simmering sauces, chutneys, glazes, mayonnaise and a few poorly looking vegetables.

We are trying not to go to the store as we have successfully kept the outside world out and are infection free. We plan to stay so. Not knowing where the virus is hanging out, we prefer to stay put where we are.

As a result we are slowly depleting our supplies of fresh food. At first, we planned our meals using an app in which we store our favorite recipes. It has a meal planning calendar and generates a shopping list.  But some of our favorite meals (like Sag Paneer) have ingredients that are no longer in the house. At first, we did go to a store (over a week ago), then we sent out an order for pickup (6 days ago) and now we have abandoned the meal planner altogether because it forces us to go get the needed stuff from outside and with it comes a complicated disinfecting routine.  We will just look at what is in the pantry and what’s in the refrigerator/freezer. Then it will be mix and match. We should be good for awhile longer.

I have solved the milk problem by ordering a large can of Nido, Nestle’s milk powder that is ubiquitous in developing countries. Axel was surprised (why didn’t you get something that is local, cheaper and doesn’t need shipping?). I must admit it was an entirely irrational buy, driven by emotions and associations. As soon as I saw the image of the product, my mind was flooded with images of that can on my kitchen counter in  Yemen, Lebanon, Senegal. And with those images came all these memories of those adventures. Good old times!

Replenishing our dwindling egg supply is more of a problem because our local hatchery owners are infected. They have a refrigerator outside the chicken barn where you can help yourself and leave the money. But the refrigerator is closed now, no more fresh eggs. And so, we hope that we can drive to Tessa and Steve who live in New Hampshire. They have chickens and thus eggs. It may be a nice outing for this weekend – that is, if such is still allowed. Watching Spain and Italy and France, that freedom may soon be gone too. We wonder how such limitations will go over in New Hampshire, a state that has as its motto ‘Live Free or Die!’ This now means something entirely different than it did before.

A month ago, the fault lines between the have and have-nots were already beginning to show and this produced a highly infectious cocktail: people who do not have a doctor because they don’t have health insurance or who have a job without benefits, gig workers, they all kept working – we will never know how many infections were passed on like that. 

Now a new fault line is emerging, separating the caring from the scammers. I know that there are more caring people than scammers, but the scammers are flooding the stage as there are more opportunities than ever before to separate people from their money. They are pretending to be Medicare and asking for personal information (I had such a call and reported it immediately, though it took me a bit to realize it). They have a range of possibilities to talk anxious, weary and fearful people into doing things that will cost them. 

Scammers also now have a large pool of unemployed people to recruit from and to do their bidding, make the scam calls. I am sure there are now many people who cannot be picky about paid work however unethical.  I don’t think the friendly lady who makes the scam call will partake in the financial windfall if the call is successful.

Scammers are also finding ways to get in the way of the people who care, or worse, right into their faces. Zoom has a series of actions in their COVID-19 resource center to avoid getting ‘zoom-bombed.’  It’s a new term I just learned from my daughter. I witnessed such a Zoom bomb yesterday during a DEVEX webinar with African leaders speaking about matters of importance to funders and members of the American NGO community. Within minutes of the start of the webinar the chat and Q+A boxes were flooded with hateful racist vitriol of an intensity that harkened back to the slavery days. It was so distracting that it kept me from writing questions and comments or reading those from other listeners. Eventually the organizers pushed the infiltrators out, but the text of their writing stayed and each time you opened the chat or Q+A box the words were there, right in front of you.

There were already a lot of angry people in the US who felt left out, I imagine that the ranks of those have swelled, especially when people find out who gets the government checks and who does not. Exceptions to the government handouts are emerging and the process of getting the check are confusing and complicated, especially to people who don’t usually file a tax return because their income is so low. Apparently now, in order to get the check, they need to do so. Imagine how that is going to work.  What a contradiction: government promising swift action!

For those of us who are in place of privilege, at first there was some elation about the new normal: finally, you can bring your dog to work, kids happy to see more of mom, no need to commute, no need to dress up, etc. 

But now, the grimness of what we are in the middle of, is coming into full view, especially with what is happening in Africa and Asia. If the US is predicting about 200,000 more death, that is 198,000 more than we already have, then what about Africa, where the number of infected people is only now becoming visible?

I am coaching someone who lives in an African country that is now in total lockdown. No doubt, more of such drastic measures will be taken across the continent. Public and private transportation has come to a halt. If you are delivering critical services (which my coachee’s project does – serving people with HIV) you need forms that allow you to be on the road. That process may have been fairly easy to implement in France (just download a form, print it and fill it in).

Those who have a computer, a printer and an internet connection at home, may be able to handle this.  As I follow the thread of consequences of the lockdowns in Africa I fear people whose lives depend on consistent delivery of drugs, for whatever condition, will either not be able to come to the place where they get their drugs, or the drugs won’t make it to those places as the entire supply chain is compromised. 

Here in the US we are given numbers and graphs that count only COVID19 deaths, which are still relatively minor compared to other causes of death. I fear that these other causes of death, especially in the underserved countries of the world, will start to rise astronomically as basic services become less and less accessible due to missing drugs, equipment, sick service providers and a lack of transport options.

The coronavirus has changed my perspective on the other scary viruses that have surfaced in recent years, infections that now seem so much easier to prevent: you won’t get infected with HIV if you don’t have unprotected sex; you won’t get Ebola if you don’t touch a sick person’s body fluids. These behavior changes now seems so much easier to manage, even though we didn’t think so at the time.