From my pandemic to yours
When in the future someone asks us “What was 2020 for you?” our answer will be: COVID-19.
None of us would have imagined, at the beginning of the year, that a global pandemic would have turned the world upside-down like this. This experience has taken away from us the opportunity to live fully our first year of high school.
This is a real worldwide emergency: the system is orderless, nobody knows where we are going to end, we are facing an enormous global crisis, the economy is in serious danger, and so are our lives. This moment will be remembered forever, we will read about it in history books. That’s why we wanted to keep a record of this time: to give a first-person representation of this important event, in order to feel really present and aware of the times we are living, to bear witness to this troubled period, to remember what we have felt and learned.
The project
The project’s objective was to talk about how our lives have been affected by the pandemic. Each of us created a personal vlog, a 5-minute talk, that we shared with our classmates during the online lessons and in which we tried to vent our feelings, our thoughts about the virus and our perspectives about the future.
Another requirement was to choose among the incredible load of information on the pandemic, an article, a picture or a video that had struck our imagination. Being forced to have a look at the news to pick our article was a way to stress the role of the media especially in this circumstance.
Here are some excerpts from our vlogs:
Sofia: “When we are old we’ll tell about all this and for sure, we will make it all much bigger than it is in reality, to make our children and grandchildren see us as surviving heroes… and this is exactly the same thing that our grandparents do with us all the time!”
Susanna: The fear had been growing more and more in me, so I decided to talk to my mom. She told me that there was no reason to worry about things, that everything would be solved and that soon we would all be back to normal, some at work, some at school. I knew my mom had always told me the truth, but that time I knew she was trying to play it down to avoid increasing my anxiety level.”
Gaia: “Many people are convinced that this virus is a kind of revenge from nature, because we have really been treating it badly, and I agree in some respects. Since the general lockdown started, the pollution in the environment has been decreasing: in China people can see again the blue sky, and in Venice the water is clear after such a long time. But as the normal life starts again, the pollution rises again.”
Joanne: “A long time ago, maybe a year ago, I went into a café with a friend to have breakfast together. I remember finding a particular sugar packet that I still keep with a saying on it: “may you live in interesting times“. Now when I think of that statement I remember what I thought when I first saw it; I thought that maybe I would never have got to live in times as interesting and as meaningful as the past: times of revolution, scientific discoveries and sophisticated men. In my quarantine experience, I have had time to think about this.”
Lorenzo: “I have decided to contrast the problem finding something to do every day to distract my mind, for example helping my mum do the housework, baking a cake with my mum, one day I even cut off a piece of my eyebrow because I was inspired to do so… it inspired me.”
Riccardo: “At the end of February, I had to leave for the Carnival holidays, and that’s when I realized that the “Chinese virus“, that was so far from me had closed all the museums and parks. That’s when I realized that something that seemed so far away had directly influenced my life, and so perhaps it wasn't so far away.”
Cristiana: “I don’t really like social media, in fact before the pandemic I used the Internet only for texting and to watch movies, but today I am grateful for being born in the third millennium, because it’s only thanks to social media if I can still study and see my friends and my relatives.”
Anna: “When Coronavirus started to spread in Italy, earlier than in the rest of Europe, Italian people tried on their skin the experience of being discriminated. I realize that many people need to find a culprit to explain bad things that happen and it's easier to blame those who are different or far from us.
Margherita: I was feeling really awful, I thought there are other people like this daughter who only wanted to say “goodbye” to the woman or the man who stayed with them every single day of their lives till now. And after a few days their mom or dad died, maybe in a room with nobody to say goodbye to. For these people we must hang in there and after this we will be stronger than before
Mariachiara: As concerns my family, my parents are lucky because my brother and I, are fifteen years old so we can stay alone at home without problems, but think of all the mums with little children. Now how can they go to work and leave their children alone, or even with a baby-sitter, it is harder now.
Cristina: Before this pandemic began, I had never expected that a virus could make so many disasters and scare people, I had said to myself, “Ok, it is only a virus in China, it will never come to us” but the virus showed me, that I was wrong, and that distances don't matter.
Cecilia: I watch the news on sky tg24, or on “La Sette” daily. Before all this, watching the news with my mum had always been a time of day when we relaxed and were she explained to me more complicated news (such as the ones about economics that is like Arabic for me). Now, we hear only numbers: deaths, infections and people that have recovered. Now we remain silent when we listen to the news.
Tommaso: I’ve recently read a very interesting phrase on Twitter: life is 10% what happens to you and 90% how you react to it.
Beatrice: I am giving so much value to the ordinary life I lived every day, to my classmates to the teachers, to the lessons that were never boring, to the experiences that were different every day at school.
Ingrid: However, I believe that this virus has in some way also brought something positive for humanity because it made a lot of people think that only with mutual help we can have positive results and if each one of us does something small then they can help create something.
Conclusion
We want to conclude this article highlighting how helpful this experience has been: it has made us think about what is happening, keep in touch with our friends knowing that they feel in the same way and so feel less alone. This feeling has grown thanks to the human contact we have had: some of us live in the same city, but somebody is far from the others, so they feel the distance more. Even though sometimes the vlogs have been a little repetitive, especially when we were getting to the end, the story is unitary, it shows how all our experiences were all about the same.
This project has taught us many things, such as finding new ways of expressing our emotions and feelings: our vocabulary has improved; we have discovered many new words and these words, indeed, have also defined our ability to express and to communicate our feelings.
As everybody knows, hope is the last to die… so there is nothing left to do but hope, hope that the future will be better than the present, hope that the world, after this terrible experience, will overcome prejudices and accept everyone for the special person he or she is.
Mariachiara Leoncini, Gaia Loi, Susanna Perini, Sofia Pascoletti I^E