Tucson COVID Tales 18: Creating in Crisis, by Rudy Flores

In the last few years, my art has been series-based illustrations like the “A Little Tucson Book” covers or custom 3D modeled toys that I cast and hand-paint. The community has been very supportive and has allowed me to share my work at local events like Tucson Comic Con and Made in Tucson. My last scheduled event of 2020 was the cancelled Tucson Festival of Books, and this was definitely a sign that events were going to be put on hold for a while. Without events and gallery shows, I had the sense that it would be a challenge getting my work out in front of people. Although most of my projects are made just for the sake of creating, it is nice to connect with an audience when the opportunity arises.

In April, I decided to take the month off of work to be home with family. Typically, time off would seem like a perfect opportunity to create. I felt the opposite. I felt a strong sense of guilt for not being able to find the need to make art. For the first week off, I stared at my studio, and there was a complete absence I hadn’t felt in years. My creativity was definitely affected, and inspiration was hard to come by.

I decided to pack up the studio space, which contained the new stop-motion workspace that was to be used for my next project, Mosca Roja. I wanted to repurpose the space as an extension of my living space for my family and me. It was wonderful being able to see my two-year-old stretch out into another part of our home. Seeing him there lightened the weight of not being able to create, and as a result, many great memories were created in this newly available space.

By June I had fixed everything I could possibly fix in the house, and the need to create started to come back. The stop-motion studio I was building was for a project that I started 18 years ago. I did several tests and some prop building at the beginning of the year. As much as I wanted to adapt my story into a stop-motion film, I had to consider the time and space needed to produce it.

Over 18 years I have approached the story with several styles. Originally it was going to be a comic book, but it has also been adapted for linocut illustrations, voxel art, 3D printed models, and 2D animation. The images and words never seemed to compliment each other. By mid-June, I decided to take the project on again. Because of the COVID virus, some software developers were being very generous and discounting programs to get them into the hands of people who want to create. The batch of programs became a pipeline that allow digital sculpting, graphic design, character design, and rigging, which is bone placement for animating the characters, allowing me to do both body and facial motion capture and speeding up the process while giving the motion a more human quality. This pipeline of software would allow me to work entirely digitally and require no extra space. After several weeks of learning software and trying to adapt these characters, the look of Mosca Roja finally started to come together. It was amazing seeing 18 years of character and story development take shape in a 3D environment.

I would be lying if I said I didn’t weep the first time I saw one of the main characters moving before me. Being the one handling the animation, it has been fun getting into the heads and motions of the multiple characters. The motion capture for each character requires me to portray each a different way. At only two years old, my youngest son, who does not take orders well, will be doing the motion capture for some chickens that are in the film. At one point I considered having voice actors, but because of the virus I felt it might be best to limit the amount of interaction that is needed to make a film.

I’m incredibly fortunate to be collaborating with my friend Andrew Rivas of local band Sinphonics. He will be providing the score, which serves as the voices for the characters in the film. Any dialogue will be done with subtitles, but for the most part it is a silent film with an original score. It has been an amazing experience working with him. He has an incredible musical sense, and his playing comes from a very special place. Since June I have sent him character sketches and the script. He immediately got a sense of the characters and started to shape their sound. Although it has been remote, it’s been an amazing process.

I strive to make my illustrations look like a part of a bigger story, something to let the audience fill in the blanks. The art also consists of something that feels like a memory. Filmmaking is a new realm for me. I would not consider myself a filmmaker or a storyteller, but this is the one story I needed to tell. I have held onto it until the images and words aligned. The last few months have contributed to a new found focus and energy to make this film. Mosca Roja is being told when it is ready to be told. I’m excited to share the trailer for the film. I’m currently buttoning up production and hope to have a DVD and digital release including the original soundtrack soon.

Rudy Flores, a graphic and fine artist in many media, is a native of Tucson. Visit his film project at http://www.moscaroja.com. Visit composer Andrew Rivas at https://therivasproject.bandcamp.com.

Tucson COVID Tales No. 17: Of Cocktails and Frying Pans, by Hilary Stunda

Things were already a bit cozy well before Covid broke loose.

My husband, having occupied the kitchen table that served as my office for well over a year, was really starting to get on my nerves. During the first few weeks of isolation we were mild mannered, distanced, giving one another a lot of space. Then the kids came home from school—for good—and we felt like animals trapped in a cage.

Not that it was a bad cage. To console ourselves, we said, “This would be a million dollar apartment if it was in New York City!” But we were far from the hustle of Broadway and 104th Street, where I lived many moons ago. No, the vibrancy and texture of my old ’hood had been replaced by a middle-class suburban neighborhood with houses that all looked the same.

Weekend excitement meant bringing out the folding chairs to the end of the cul du sac with bottle in hand to share stories with the neighbors I seldom saw most of the year.

Thank God they’re Democrats.

My husband and I swore we wouldn’t get on each other’s nerves. Simple, really: just stay away from the urge to question, opine, suggest an air-conditioned road trip to Patagonia, repress the urge to hit him over the head with a frying pan, which looked funny on I Love Lucy.

Pandemics have a way of letting one’s true nature out of the box. With nowhere to run, nowhere to hide, the spotlight turned on us. 

One positive: I finally got around to reading Hemingway’s classic tale For Whom the Bell Tolls. By the end, I felt like Roberto, on my stomach, watching the enemy approach, awaiting the end. The other thing about Covid was realizing I could polish off a bottle of wine by myself and still rise at 6:00 a.m for a hike—that is, until Sabino Canyon shut down because of the fires. It would have done me in, if it wasn’t for juvenile fantasies of returning to masters swim at dawn to see a man I called “Hercules” in all his ripped, 6′3″ glory. But alas, the pool shut down.

I decided to have a Zoom cocktail party. As soon as I flipped the video on and saw the visage that championed my potato-farmer Eastern European stock, the graying hair, a furrowed brow that even Kim Kardashian’s aesthetician couldn’t cure, there was only one solution.

It was time to reignite that old friendship through Facebook. It had been years since I reached out to Blue Sage, but with Covid running rampant, nothing was too weird. Everything was up for grabs. Blue Sage lives in a commune in Colorado, where she has spent years perfecting the art of the homemade “gummy” edible. She wasn’t at all surprised to hear from me or dismayed by my request.

“Just Cash App me,” she said. Et voilà: I’m feeling better already.

Hilary Stunda is a Tucson transplant from Colorado. An editor and writer who longs for adventure and relishes hyperbole over facts, when she’s not concocting schemes and getaway fantasies, she’s mother to two teen boys, partner to a photographer, and a lusty epicurean.

Tucson COVID Tales No. 16: Twenty Twenty, by Fish Karma and Kay Sather

We wanted to depict people slowly growing mad in their houses as the distractions failed to distract, the Catalina Mountains continued burning, and the walls inched ever closer together…

Fish Karma is a musician and artist, among whose compositions are the immortal tunes “God Is a Groovy Guy” and “Swap Meet Women.” Kay Sather is an artist and urban pioneer whose handmade house should make any homesteader jealous.

Tucson COVID Tales No. 15: Living in History, by Bruce J. Dinges

This isn’t how I envisioned spending my retirement. It’s been six months since I shook the hand of a stranger or hugged a friend, ventured far out of my zip code, pulled up a chair in my favorite restaurant, or worked up a sweat at the gym. My hair is longer than it was in my college days during the late Sixties, travel plans are on indefinite hold, shaving is a whimsical experience, and my wardrobe has shrunk to torn jeans and a handful of thread-bare tee shirts. My proudest accomplishment rests on the dining room table—a 1,000-piece jigsaw puzzle of Salvador Dali’s The Temptation of St. Anthony. It took me nearly a month to assemble.

But I’m okay. Because my mother taught me to look for silver linings, and perhaps because I was raised in the rural Midwest where social distancing was a fact of life, I believe that I’ve discovered a few worthwhile things in the midst of this pandemic. Without places to go and deadlines to meet, my life seems to have settled into a comfortable rhythm free of urgency and distractions. Traffic noise and air pollution miraculously evaporated during the early days of sheltering in place, exposing—if only for a moment—a world I thought was gone forever. Suddenly, I have time to sip a leisurely cup of home-brewed (no Starbucks) coffee and watch nature come alive in the wash behind the house. Ground squirrels, rabbits, quail, lizards, snakes, and coyotes prowl for food, while finches, hummingbirds, woodpeckers, owls, cardinals, vermilion flycatchers, and hawks alight on the branches of a dead tree or cluster around our backyard feeders. I take my cues from our dog Monty, a lovably manipulative Swedish Vallhund, who sets out on his morning walks convinced that every day offers unlimited opportunities for a grand adventure. Friendly greetings from pedestrians and cyclists I pass during my rides along The Loop are a welcome antidote for the barrage of craziness coming from cable news. Even the Catalinas in flames seem to speak of resilience and recovery.

And, surprisingly, the pandemic has brought me closer to family members dealing with their own isolation and boredom. What had been occasional emails and phone calls have become almost daily updates on what is going on (or not) in our lives, book recommendations, and occasional rants about the sorry state of our country and world. Photos and videos of grandnieces and a grandnephew lift my spirits and make me optimistic for a better future. Recently, my siblings and I recalled that our parents and grandparents survived the 1918 flu epidemic, and yet none of us can remember any of them talking about it. One of my sisters certainly got it right when she reminded us that they were “a generation of few words who never really talked about the past much or about personal hardships.” She also pointed out that “history never stops giving us wake-up calls.” I’m a historian, so I have to wonder if we’ll pay attention this time and how we will remember these somber days. But for now I’m hunkered down, making the best of a time I hope we’ll never see again.

Bruce Dinges is former editor of the Journal of Arizona History and coeditor, with Bill Broyles, of America’s Most Alarming Writer: Essays on the Life and Work of Charles Bowden.

Tucson COVID Tales No. 14: My COVID Experience, by Richard A. Dooley

I began writing this in a hotel room in Kalispell, Montana, while my wife, Vonnie, and I were on a two-week road trip through Utah, Washington, Montana, and Colorado. I needed this trip, and we needed this vacation. We realize that traveling from Arizona through these states might be ill advised, given Arizona’s surging coronavirus status. But after much consideration, we felt that traveling in the sealed capsule of a car on the open road was an effective method of physical distancing. In the 14 days we were gone, we’d eaten indoors in only two restaurants. We had breakfast at Stella’s in Billings, Montana, and were pleased to see that Stella and her crew had distanced the tables and that all staff were wearing masks. We did not expect this, but to be honest, we didn’t know what to expect. Customers even wore masks until they were seated. I was proud of Billings. In Bonners Ferry, Idaho, we stopped for gas and not a soul was wearing a mask.

I have a personal stake in masking, social distancing, and all the rest of the measures responsible people are taking to combat the coronavirus. On March 25 and 26 of this year I was exposed to COVID-19 via a patient I cared for as an RN on the telemetry unit at a Tucson hospital. In the last few hours of my shift on the 26, I started sneezing and experiencing a runny nose. I thought little of it since Tucson had recently had some rain and the wildflowers were showing up in force. Every year, I seem to have an initial allergic reaction to the pollen in the air and this seemed no different. On March 27, I felt a little worse, so that evening I called in sick for the next day. Over the next few days, both Vonnie and I experienced some symptoms of Covid-19, but I didn’t immediately think that we had it until I was notified by my hospital that the patient had tested positive. Before I got this news, when Vonnie had brought up the possibility that we may have “it,” I promptly shot down the idea, because as a clinical nurse, I felt that a temperature of less than 101 was unremarkable. Body temperature fluctuates throughout the day. We were taking our temperature every two or three hours, and only twice did I have a temperature greater than 100. Vonnie never had a high temperature.

My symptoms seemed to be more severe than Vonnie’s, and while during my illness I never felt that I was going to die or that I couldn’t breathe, I was unable to talk without immediately coughing. Those coughing fits seemed to have no end. One was so severe that it caused me to throw up. Other symptoms included night sweats and a pounding headache in the morning, for about a week. Vonnie’s symptoms were noticeably less severe, but they were still significant. My primary doctor, through a teleconference, abruptly shot down my suggestion that we might be positive when I told him what our temperatures were. But I was in contact with my supervisor and my hospital’s occupational health department, and on April 1, after describing my symptoms to occupational health, and requesting to be tested, they swabbed me in the tent. Upon returning from being swabbed, I received a call from my supervisor notifying me that I had been exposed, and two days later I received the positive result.

After three weeks I was on the mend and was eager to get back to work. I had heard that several of my coworkers had been exposed and were out of commission. Despite my desire to return to work, my primary doctor would not release me to work until I had two negative swabs that were collected greater than 24 hours apart, per CDC guidelines. It took a few days before I was able to get authorization for two COVID tests due to the statewide shortage. After a few more days and two negative tests, I returned to work and was happy to be back.

Since the day that I was first exposed, visitors have not been allowed in the hospital. Over the last 12-plus years that I’ve been a nurse, I have grown to understand the importance of having a family member at the patient’s bedside. I often tell them that it is the single most important factor in ensuring effective care. The nurse often has three to four other patients to care for and the family member at the bedside is only focused on their loved one. They also know the patient’s baseline behavior and demeanor and are more likely to pick up on subtle behavioral cues or changes. They are an extra set of eyes and ears for the nurses and I greatly appreciate their presence, and I let them know it.

Family members can sometimes be a hindrance to delivering care, true. But the comfort for the patient far outweighs any minor annoyance. This pandemic has made this strikingly clear, and I feel for my patients. Being in the hospital is isolating enough without having your friends and family barred. Wearing a mask for 12–13 hours at a time with only a few breaks here and there has not been easy, and I can tell that it impacts how I deliver care. When I perform my initial physical assessment on my patients, I often slip in a joke to lighten things up, but with the mask on they are unable to see me smile. The mask restricts the visual warmth I wish to convey with a smile, and it casts a thin layer of sterility throughout the room—and not the good kind of sterility.

At the beginning of our trip, leaving Flagstaff early in the morning, we went through a fast food drive-through. In front of us was a man standing in front of the drive through window trying to order. He kept tapping on the window until someone finally opened it. We could see that he was trying to negotiate an order, but they would not let him, because, and I’m guessing here, he was a pedestrian standing in the drive through lane. After watching this scene and seeing the man walk back to his commercial transport truck, we realized that the size of his truck had prevented him from using the drive through lane. We felt for this guy and as we approached the window, we asked if they could add to our order what the gentleman had wanted. We would then surprise him with it. They couldn’t recall what he had wanted so we drove around to the driver, sitting in his truck, and told him we would buy it for him. We returned to the drive through lane and doubled his order. When we brought it to him, he expressed sincere gratitude. As we pulled onto AZ 89 heading north, we felt grateful to be in a position to carry out this small act of kindness. It was a sweet beginning to our trip.

These are strange times for all of us, and what I have learned in the last few months is that now, more than ever, small gestures, acts of kindness, and thoughtful consideration should be on everyone’s mind. I try to remind myself of this every day.

Richard Dooley is a nurse, designer, bartender, and entrepreneur. If you’re a margarita fan, visit him at https://market.tucsontamale.com/products/dicks-mix.

Tucson COVID Tales No. 13: Art and Diversity, by Amy Acuña

I have chosen to spend my time in isolation to become an antiracist activist. Since I am a teacher, I feel I can help most by reimagining traditional early-childhood, whitewashed social-studies themes to incorporate a global perspective and engage children in that activism. I am doing this through play-based weekly themes that help children learn about our world and appreciate its diversity and beauty, but also to recognize inequity and make a plan for change. For example, traditionally children learn about the “Great Masters” of the art world as a group of white men from Europe. Instead, I did an art week where we learned about great art contributions from men and women from around the world, from Frida Kahlo to the Kenyan Masai people to Yayoi Kusama of Japan. We looked at a bunch of coffee-table art books and discussed the overrepresentation of white male artists. We also had a ton of fun making art, and we culminated the week with a gallery opening where we sold our art and are donating the money to a BLM charity. We can all make a difference if we choose.

Amy Acuña is an elementary school-teaching, volleyball-playing, Chihuahua-loving, wine-drinking, Spanish-speaking, happily married mama of two.

Tucson COVID Tales No. 12: Coping with COVID—A Playlist, by David La Russa

These are all songs that have touched me since the outbreak. I’ll admit there have been many days when no music has been played in my home. Then there have been days devoted to nature sounds/Eno ambient works/Satie YouTube channel marathons/Ravi Shankar/Miles Davis/J.S. Bach, etc.

David La Russa is host of “Random Axis,” aired Friday mornings on KXCI-FM. Find more of his playlists at dlarussa on Spotify.

Tucson COVID Tales No. 11: Trusting the Process, by Dan Stuart

I’ve spent most of the pandemic pedaling up and down the Santa Cruz River bike path, shuttling between a 1972 Winnebago in El Hoyo and an ancient casita I’m renovating just south of Ajo Way. Outside of a few years working for a paint contractor, I have no experience in construction. The idea was to raise one wall with new courses of block, turning it into a big ass lean-to with a shiny metal roof. Given my limited knowledge, the only thing that compares is making a record, also a collaborative effort that utilizes folks with different skill sets. While thrilling at times, I can’t say it’s been fun, but it has been a great diversion from the awful reality of this novel virus that wears one down day by day. As with the pandemic, I’ve had to learn some new lingo, and I can now give dubious opinions on the Infection Fatality Rate or Oriented Strand Board with equal ignorance. But the main thing I’ve learned (for the umpteenth time) is to trust the process, something a very wise Memphis producer tried to teach me a lifetime ago. Still, and just like this new house of mine, it would’ve been better to approach the pandemic with a more cohesive plan. Unfortunately at this point, we must simply learn from our mistakes, and try not to repeat them in the future. Vote!

Dan Stuart is a musician and writer who calls Tucson home every few decades. You can find him at https://marlowebillings.com/

Tucson COVID Tales No. 10: Path to the River, by John Convertino and Naïm Amor

At the beginning of these exceptional and uncharted times, I felt immediately forced into some existential questions. What could be my answer as a musician to this new situation in which a global pandemic shook the world ? How to turn the isolation and the potential anxiety into something nurturing, something validating my existence as a musician? Correspondents is an album that John, who lives in El Paso, and I soon realized was going to defy the distance between us. It generated a daily correspondence of audio files and annotations during the course of about two months. Just like any good correspondence, we responded to all the content we were sending to each other. No picking, no ruling out or ignoring any propositions here, but instead, making a point in considering and answering all of each other’s ideas. Openness from both of us more than anything and listening to where the project was leading us, provided me with joy and a great feeling of freedom during this COVID year of 2020.

—Gabriel Naïm Amor

As the reality of the pandemic settled in and the lockdown was secured, I knew that everything was going to change. Clearing and creating new spaces for work, school, and music had to happen, and not without some serious urgency. It was about that time the text from Naïm came wanting to know if I would like to exchange files for some new music created in this troubled time. I said yes, and within a few days I sent him a drum track. I had changed my setup, added an extra rack tom, several other cymbals. I set up the vibes and marimba and had everything ready to go. This first track is a sort of familiar bolero beat that I’ve been known to play often with brushes. I played with a kind of form in my head, not a melody, but a feeling within a form. I listened once back and sent it off to Naïm. The next day he had composed a melody to the form I had established with the drum line, and that was the beginning of our correspondence. As we became correspondents to the music, channeling the immediate moments of our predicaments to become the producers of what has become a storyline of song, to be able to create something when everything else had come to a stop. I could see it as another discovered layer of what love can do, even in the midst of the most troubling times.

—John Convertino

John Convertino : Drums, vibraphone, marimba

Gabriel Naïm Amor: Guitar, strings

Thøger Lund : Electric bass, acoustic bass

Mastering : Jim Blackwood at AZPM

Tucson COVID Tales No. 9: The Tucson Frontline Workers Portrait Project, by Kathleen Dreier

I am a portrait and event photographer in my 15th year of business in Tucson. When the Covid-19 pandemic began to impact Tucson in March 2020, in the span of one week, all of my scheduled photography assignments were canceled for the rest of the year.

After processing the shock of the pandemic and financial implications, I considered how to utilize my photography skills, social work background, and social media platforms to support and educate the Tucson community. Tucson Frontline Workers portrait services was born from the desire to provide a forum for our frontline workers to share with us in their own words their Covid-19 experiences.

All portraits were completed outside, strictly following social-distance guidelines. Each portrait and statement is posted on multiple social media pages to amplify the professionals’ experiences. To date, 85 frontline essential workers and first responders have been featured in this no-cost portrait series.

My intention to serve our frontline is based on my intrinsic understanding of the challenges all services-related workers face even during “normal” times, now greatly compounded by the pandemic. My hope is that all Tucsonans become aware of and compassionate to the plight of all of our heroic frontline workers and their families and exercise safe behavior such as wearing a mask and following social distancing guidelines.

The full project can be viewed on Facebook (https://www.facebook.com/Covid19TucsonFrontLineWorkers) and Instagram (@TucsonFrontlineWorkers)

The mask that protects me from this virus is as suffocating as my fear of the virus. I feel isolated even as I am out in the world and doing my normal routine. Those of us who are “essential workers” are weary and afraid. Our emotional labor has increased greatly because people are so tense and scared. We have to act like everything is normal, offering calmness and confidence even as we monitor every single cough and ache for signs of COVID-19. Most of my family and friends are self-quarantining, which makes me feel separated from the collective experience. While I am happy I live alone, so I don’t risk infecting others, the isolation adds to my stress. Part of me is so grateful for my job, my co-workers, and my health, and another part of me wants to hide at home from everything that is happening. But like many others, I find the strength to keep up and do my job so others can get the help they need.

When the panic first started and people began stocking up, I was excited about the major increase in sales our store was having. Sales easily doubled and almost tripled in a very short time. Within a few days, as I watched my shelves get completely emptied of paper, rice, beans, and water, my excitement turned to anxiety. I have to get those shelves refilled so that people can eat. Supply and transportation issues that are completely out of my control made that very difficult. I felt like I was letting my customers down. I feared that I could be fired. I know the importance of my job in the food supply chain and how much comfort just having food in our pantry can bring during a crisis. I was not doing the job as I strive to do all the time.

As the initial surge of shopping calmed down, our company was already doing lots to protect the health of the employees and of our customers. Now the impact of the health side of this crisis on me, my co-workers, and my customers has come more into my focus. Before social distancing, how many people could have infected me and how many people could I have then infected? Will or when will the other shoe drop? When will grocery workers, frontline essential employees, start getting sick—me, my co-workers, my friends?

I love doing my job. I enjoy my co-workers, their humor and good spirits. Customers are generally understanding, kind, and appreciative. I’m so very thankful that my job is still here and that my company is doing so much to take care of us. Right now though, I am unsure of everything. My world is unbalanced.

I am a nurse-midwife in Tucson Arizona. This is me coming home from work in the morning. 

Life during the pandemic is different, both good and bad. Tolerance of uncertainty is an essential skill, and something midwives are used to.

What worries me most are my clients who are socially vulnerable, living in unsafe situations, or in homes full of violence and addiction. I worry about the children. Families have suffered from social isolation, quarantine, and separation. I worry about the life-course health consequences of worsening poverty.

The same social injustices that existed before COVID are only magnified by this disease. Egregious health disparities plaguing our women and children are only getting worse during the pandemic. 

These are the tools and rituals in my saddle bag that I rely on during COVID:

My fetoscope. COVID-19 has required many communities to get back to the basics for childbearing families to preserve hospitals for sick people. Avoiding the use of electronic fetal monitors for normal, healthy, childbearing moms is an important way to keep moms and babies safe. It is becoming a lost art. When COVID hit New York City hard, I was involved in helping to promote national guidelines for teams that have not been trained or supported in the art and science of “listening.” This fetoscope was given to me by my mentor and is a symbol of midwifery and family centered care; especially important during the pandemic.

My computer. COVID has required that we organize our care delivery differently for the safety of the community and each other. This means I use my computer more than ever. In my 20 years of being a midwife, our workflow has changed tremendously. The word “midwife” means “with woman.” I sometimes feel like I am “with computer.”

The electronic health record is an important part of quality and safety. It is also a driving force of burnout in our field. I bring my own computer to and from work, because sometimes I need to work on several workstations at once to keep up with the charting. On the bright side, telehealth has taken off during COVID! Be with a provider in the comfort of your own home, when you want it, in your natural habitat. I hope we keep this option going!

My street clothes. When I am not working clinically, I practice strict social distancing. I wear a mask in public at all times. We don’t wear our scrubs to or from the hospital. When we get home, our street clothes go straight to the wash and we go to the shower. My shirt says “Support Matters.” It comes from La Leche League. We know that the support provided by the healthcare team matters. Nurses, medical assistants, doulas, lactation consultants, social workers, behavioral health, physicians, and midwives matter. Our team has united to support families and each other during the pandemic and I am proud.

My sleeping bag. Midwives are no stranger to long nights. We have changed our call schedule to limit the number of midwives who are exposed to COVID. If I nap, I sleep in my own sleeping bag and wash it immediately when I walk through the garage door. We are all vulnerable. No one is immune.

Healthy midwives have died across the world over the past eight weeks. We are scared. 

This whole notion of being a housekeeper and considered a “frontLine worker” is fairly surreal to me. I say that because I served in the Iraq War on the front lines. At that point in time I was a frontline worker. While I understand the terminology, I didn’t really grasp the magnitude of the current title I was given until I was assigned to the COVID-19 ward. I was officially at Ground Zero, back in the war zone. I was right in the thick of what the entire country was grappling with. I have a front-row seat to the devastation, the brutality, and the raw carnage of a disease that many people did not, and some still don’t, believe is a real thing. It only took one shift to change my mind.

As I make my daily rounds of cleaning, trash collecting, sweeping, and mopping, I am required to enter rooms where life and death are engaged in a tug of war, with the balance of power tipped toward death. However, I also get to witness angels in protective gloves and gowns provide some of the most intensive and critical care one can imagine in order to give the patients a fighting chance.

The work that I perform is dangerous, yet critical. It is thankless, yet rewarding. It is repetitive, yet vital. And most important, it is never-ending, yet it is “essential.”

I am a 1st grade teacher who works with a high population of English language learners. 

It felt like a sucker punch when I heard schools were going to close, thinking about how much learning, growth, and community students would be missing out on.

The big questions that came into my mind were: How can I provide access to learning to students who do not have technology in their homes? What are the most fundamental concepts I should be focusing on with such limited student contact time? How will I maintain a sense of community with my class? The answers are that all these have been and continue to be a challenge.

What has been inspiring is to see parents, with all they have to juggle, working so hard to ensure their children move forward with their learning. I feel that many parents and I have become educational partners in a deeper way than I have experienced before in my 20+ years of teaching.

What has been uplifting is seeing my students’ bright faces on my computer screen, watching them continue to interact as a community and grow as learners. Doing reading tutoring over the phone with students who don’t have internet, but are still able to share the joy of a good story together. And celebrating with our whole class, doing a drawing project with our art teacher, that ended with proud faces holding up their finished products.

Students and families have had to make significant sacrifices, as all of us have, in order for our community to move forward safely. It may take considerably more time and sacrifice, but my hope is our community remains diligent, keeping ourselves and each other safe.
Visit Kathleen Dreier at www.kathleendreier.com.