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In the time of coronavirus

A collection of stories submitted by the public on their experience of living through the time of the Coronavirus pandemic.
We are now safely through the first phase of response to coronavirus in New Zealand and people are reflecting on what this major and previously unimaginable global catastrophe has meant for us, as individuals, in the 21st century. Globally the losses and the scale of human suffering have been very great. This forum offers a space to reflect upon the experience and to consider questions such as: What are we learning from the pandemic? What might we need to remember and preserve? Through the alert levels our prime minister said repeatedly, ‘Stay safe, be kind.’ What was your experience, what did you observe, what mattered and how might we re-imagine a better direction going forward? If you would like to contribute to the re-collective effort please send me your reflections, observations, journal entries, stories to my contact page... just a page of A4 writing, with a title and a brief bio and they will be added to the repository of important writings flowering in this space.

The search for knowledge is.. an exercise in reminiscence, that is, an effort to recall and recollect that which we once knew.

Ahsivai Margalit quoted in Richard Horton, “The Ethics of Memory,” The Lancet, 6 June 2020

Danger and Safety in the Time of Coronavirus by Liz Wilson

13/5/2020

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Liz was born and educated in Scotland and has lived in Aotearoa for most of the past fifty years. She is gradually edging her way into retirement. 
 
28th April 3 new cases, No deaths

I sometimes think that I have been waiting for a global cataclysmic event all my life. I knew, as a wee girl growing up in Scotland, that life was a risky business. So coronavirus has not come as a great shock to me. 

While we are leading confined lives in COVID-19 Lockdown in our homes here in Aotearoa, I hear the voices of my Scottish forebears saying that a wee bit of isolation never hurt anyone… In comparison to their generation’s experience of two World Wars, the Spanish Flu Pandemic and a Great Depression crammed into a thirty year period, our experience of COVID -19 seems like a walk in the park. My parents, who were at university during most of World War 2, spoke of dancing, overnight fire watching at the Hunterian Museum and outrageous escapades. Of their reality: bombing, evacuation of children, conscription, menfolk away fighting, injury and death, the Clydebank Blitz and rationing: they said little.
 
The spread of coronavirus is currently under control here and we in Aotearoa seem relatively safe for now in Lockdown Level 3 — well sheltered from the danger of contracting the virus compared to most other countries in the world. I feel very safe at home cosseted in my bubble. I feel unconcerned about my lack of ambition to come off Lockdown trusting that safe decisions will be made at the correct time.
  
The way ahead, as we gradually access less restricted lives, seems a careful balance between safety and danger — the safeguarding of the health of the nation while attempting to open up the economy again. 
 
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Copyright © 2017 Deborah Shepard
  • Home
  • Books
    • The Writing Life >
      • Reviews & Interviews
    • Giving Yourself to Life
    • Her Life's Work
    • Translucence
    • Between The Lives
    • Reframing Women
    • Tributes
    • Personal Writings >
      • Lockdown Journal
      • Travel Journal
      • Elegy for a friend
      • Christchurch - Post Quakes
      • On a residency
      • Deborah’s Love Letter to the Women’s Bookshop
      • Deborah's Q & A With Unity Books
  • Writing Memoir
    • Defining Memoir
    • The Participatory Model
    • Tips on Writing and Posting a Story
    • The Value of a Writing Class
    • From writing course to book publication
    • Your Writing Space
    • Writing on a Theme >
      • Window
      • Surviving a Crisis
    • Reviews of Memoir
  • Writers' stories
    • Covid-19 Stories
    • Writing Guidelines
  • Events
  • About
    • Testimonials
    • Media
  • What People Say
  • Contact