Written By Arushi S Goyal (Grade 8)
In December of 2019, a little someone known as COVID-19 was introduced to me. At the time it just seemed like just a small viral that would eventually die down, but who knew what it would become.
Over the entire year, COVID seems to have slowly sucked all the small pleasures from life. From going to watch movies to eating out with friends, or even something as simple as having access to toilet paper. COVID has slowly and not-so-slyly stolen our lives from us but more importantly, it has stolen our sanity.
Throughout this entire process, COVID has had no regard for any of our status or income; it has just blindly attacked the world. All of us have been forced to lock ourselves in houses and completely distance ourselves from the world. Everyone works or studies from home silently praying that this would just go away.
However, throughout this journey, some people have got it a lot worse than others. In only April almost 10 million people lost their jobs, countless people are not able to afford necessities like food, and over seven hundred thousand people have lost their lives. This has been a battle for everyone but the one big truth coronavirus has revealed to me is how selfish all of us are.
Since the beginning all of us have just been concerned about ourselves; “do I have enough supplies?” “am I safe at home?” “and is there anything I can do to help my situation?”. people have been so concerned with themselves that they have forgotten that there are people out there who have got it bad.
Right outside my community, there was an old woman who used to sit outside and sell roasted peanuts. She sat there every day just selling peanuts and that was all the money she made. A couple of months after the pandemic I realized that the woman was not there anymore and that got me thinking about what had happened to her and her entire family. She didn’t have a stable income or proper place to live; how was she and other people like her supposed to survive?
I felt so ashamed. Ashamed that there were people out there who didn’t have anything to protect themselves against coronavirus or enough money to pay for treatments and here people were fighting over something as stupid and unnecessary as toilet paper.
I think that this entire experience has brought out people’s true colours. People who genuinely care have done their level best to help whoever they can and others have only thought about the impact this has had on them. A prime example being the girls at the Aarti Girls Foundation in Kadapa.
Sandhya Puchalapalli, the founder of the Aarti for Girls Foundation, helped the girl’s partner with the government to distribute all kinds of aid around the small town of Kadapa. They printed pamphlets and handed them out to raise awareness for Corona, they created sanitation packets to help keep people’s homes clean and also made mask and distributed them to people who did not have access to them.
In conclusion, I want to share a small thing that I have learnt; Be kind and compassionate. Everyone is going to through a tough time right now and least we can do is have each other’s back. I know that on some of the bad even just a smile could have helped me. So, going forward just remember to be kind and compassionate to anyone you meet because everyone is going through a rough time.
These are trying times for everyone and all of us are scared but we just have to remember that this going to be last forever; there will be an end to this.
Stay safe and stay healthy.
Originally publish on Medium
Featured Image Courtesy – The Star