Is Social Distancing a privilege?

Everyday I wake up hoping this to be just a bad dream. I fear for myself. I fear for my families who still have to go to work. I fear for people in poverty. I fear for my country. I read articles that tells me how I can use this time to my advantage and be productive. But how can I? I can’t tell if it’s grief or fear but it is paralyzing and I’ve a feeling it hasn’t even started yet for my country.

How do you stock up when you live from hand to mouth? How do you wash your hands when there’s no water? How do you stay informed when you have no electricity? How do you keep isolated when you share a single room with five more people? Yes, this corona virus is ugly but what’s more ugly is that plus poverty. People kept saying we’re in this together. I’d really like to believe that. It’s certainly a difficult time and a difficult problem to solve especially if you live in a country like Ethiopia.

Kissing as a way of greeting, eating with your fingers and holding hands have long been part of our beautiful culture. Congested public transports, inadequate housings, shortage of electricity, shortage of water and a very weak health care system are some of the major challenges we have in the fight against the coronavirus.

I’m sitting here thinking how isolating yourself is a privilege ; social distancing is a privilege and washing your hands is a privilege. If we manage to pull that off somehow, how are we going to cope with the financial crisis that some people are predicting now? As it is now, we have little export, high rate of unemployment and countless number of small businesses just on the stage of flourishing. And how will the country be visually reported through all of this? Will we have the same level of respect and consideration we witnessed being given for the rest of the world?

Let’s do our very best in protecting ourselves and those around us.