Today’s text comes from Noemi, a teenager sharing a home with her mother and grandmother.
Finally, Saturday was the day I answered the challenge – a lot of people around me asked me to write a “journal in time of pandemic”, and I accepted.
I’ve been in “home arrest” for about 6 weeks now. I never considered staying home as a burden. I actually thought of it as an opportunity to find and reinvent myself. There are an infinite number of things one could do while at home.
The celebration of Easter is around the corner. Some of us don’t have our parents, or grandparents, or other relatives of ours close to us, and it could be easy to start feeling alone. But we are not alone! A whole world has this same problem. But I believe it will go away and we will be together again, as a big happy family.
How is this quarantine for me?
Of course it is not easy, I never said that. I also miss hiking or going out with friends, to the mountains, but now I am patient. I find all kinds of fun activities to do around the house – I read, I watch movies or series that are appropriate for my age, I have even started to cook.
With whom do I share my quarantine?
I am mostly with my grandmother, because my mother is working around the clock, it feels like. My mom works as a pharmacist, so there is a great exposure risk for her. It seems very complicated to me that one would disinfect themselves throughly every time one returns home from work, like my mom does.
Even more, this social distancing, even from your family members, is very difficult. Not even a hug or a kiss feels the same anymore. We have genuinely started to feel afraid to give a hug to someone, we live in constant fear of getting infected, or that we could infect someone.
We look out the window and we ask ourselves “how long is this gonna last?”. I believe we must be strong in this battle with this disease. We must take every measure to protect ourselves and each other, indeed, and we must do this while being very patient, because this shall past. While we celebrate the Resurrection again this year, let us all pray to God, because He is almighty in Heaven and here on earth, and He can help us go through and over this difficult time in our lives.
So I encourage all of you to stay at home this Easter and everything will be just fine.