I woke up to find water coming out of the taps after almost a week of a dry spell. With these 30 days of lockdown, you wonder if we can totally stay at home 🤔🤦🏾♀️, because its either you are by the shops queing for grocery supplements or by the borehole topping up your water reserves. Mantaining the Covid regulations still seem like a fallacy to an average Zimbabwean.
So, as I was fetching water, a childhood memory struck me 😊. It was year end in 1999 and I was seven by then. My older siblings, Tari and Tina were having a conversation on the year to come. I listened attentively as they narrated about something called the millenium bug which was meant to come and destroy the world at the beginning of the year 2000. Tina expressed it in as much scary manner as possible for a 7-year old imagination. Being the cry baby I was, I started crying because I was super scared of dying at such a tender age. I remember vividly both of them laughing hillariously at me but it was such a devastating moment on my end.
Following the news on Coronavirus on various social media platforms, I sense the millenium bug moments in most people’s lives. The only difference now is Covid is real and people are dying daily from it. Its so heart-rending 😔. In a country like this we only hope and pray that it spares us because staying indoors seem pretty difficult. We are trying to balance between not dying from poverty and not dying from the virus. Most families survive from hand to mouth so the math seem a lot more difficult to balance. Lord have mercy on us. Amen.
Yesterday I had a conversation with a good friend of mine, Kue, she was telling me she needs to stay at home as much as possible because she has 2 or 3 relatives who have succumbed to this new strain of Covid. May their souls rest in eternal peace. This was amidst some business conversation were I needed her availability. I calmly told her, “its okay, lemme take the risk.” She lovingly tried to convince me to stay put but I responded, “what if I dont die?” Get me right, I am not reckless about my life, I wanna live and see my Penda age, God willingly. Each time I decide to go out, it has to be for a genuine cause and I make sure I mask up, sanitise all the way through and mantain social distance as much as possible though this is pretty hard in my motherland.
I am trying to strike a balance between poverty and this pandemic. I have a daughter to raise so I made Kue understand how much that call from Gran ma depresses me when she gets to notify that Penda’s supplies are running out. The feeling somehow equals the Covid pain 🤦🏾♀️, it suffocates me. To ease the pain, I am holding on to my faith and keep on praying for the best. I might already have the virus in my system thus still holding on to the statistics that of the 100% infected, 80% will show mild symptoms and heal without much serious attention, 15% will get hospitalized and 5% will die. I still stand to be corrected if am wrong, dear readers. The statistics might have changed without me knowing 😉.
One thing for certain, these coronavirus strains are not going to end now but will surely come to pass some day. We gotta brace up for this new normal and work on our adaptability mechanisms. I choose not to live in fear, I just wanna make the most of my life in the safest manner possible. Around social media there is a lot of conspiracy theories on this pandemic so I have chosen not to take in eveything that comes my way. Usually I question credibility because I do not want to live in fear of what I dont understand. I keep on raising my faith so high and pray that this comes to pass earlier than we can ever imagine.
Lets keep on staying safe, we have survived the Covid 19 and am hearing we now have the Covid 21, may it spare us too.
Tales Of Tabitha 