Pandemic in the face of parental obstinacy
By Farzana Manzoor
Less than two months had passed of my employment at BRAC James P Grant School of Public Health at BRAC University before COVID-19 immobilized the entire nation and forced upon us a total lockdown, termed as “public holidays”. To avoid a complete breakdown in our office communication and work we implemented an efficient work-from-home system. Already struggling to grasp the nature of the new project I had joined, the concept of working from home felt as foreign to me as the pandemic itself. However, the challenge of adapting to this new working environment paled against getting across the severity of the situation to my aging parents.
Additionally, I had to self-quarantine myself as one of my colleague’s friend tested positive for the virus, indicating a “possible” exposure to COVID- 19. Though I might be the forth in the relay of transmission cycle, I had to strictly maintain self-quarantine. The mindset of confining in my small room for the next 14 days was really hard but making my parents understand the situation was even harder. Knocking on my door every now and then to eat breakfast/lunch/dinner together and such acts quite were upsetting during the initial days. Yet, the toughest and most challenging aspect was to restrict my parents’ mobility within the boundaries. Despite my self-quarantine state, my father had still continued to physically go to his office, banks and mosque, places where the virus can be easily spread. My mother allowed part-time helping hands to work, let our neighbors, guards and driver to enter the house. Furthermore, most helping hands reside in congested slums. This has the potential to rapidly spread the virus between communities. It felt as if all the effort I put into maintaining self-quarantine to keep my ageing parents away from COVID exposure was in vain, just because of their stubbornness. For these reasons above and of course to minimize the spread of this deadly infection, I was actually quite eagerly waiting for the Government to announce the lockdown.
Having ageing parents (more than 60 years of age, each) and their non-cooperativeness of following home quarantine for the first few days were really distressing. Throughout my life, I have known of the efforts of parents made to control and manage their children’s wellbeing, but this pandemic has reversed the roles. Almost on a daily basis I had fights and discussions with them, reading out loud the posts of Chinese and Italian doctors, patients and WHO precautionary measures, all while talking behind the off boundaries of my room. Regardless of first world countries like the USA and Italy becoming crippled by the virus, facts that are well aware of, they kept giving incomprehensible excuses to carry on with their daily lives. The most common excuses were their practice of wearing masks, washing hands, keeping a physical distance with others and not allowing people that are symptomatic or have had close contact with people that have recently travelled to come to work. According to them, in Bangladesh the potentially fatal virus has not spread like in other countries. I can’t put too much blame on them as they were only trying to ensure the work does not stop in home and office.
Fortunately, the continued watching of various news channels, going through social media posts, tons of instructions and discussions coming from elder sisters from abroad, WhatsApp them all necessary information, videos shared in social media and of course the declaration of “public holidays” have put an end to my struggle. Maintaining two weeks of home quarantine and practice of social distancing is a real test of patience for all of us and for my parents as well. Though my parents have now restricted themselves within the house, they sometimes go out for small walks to get groceries, medicines or other necessities. Here lies another dilemma, that of sending guards or caretakers to get essentials rather than going ourselves. Furthermore, short visits by neighbors of the same building also made little sense to me. This begs the question, for a population that is heavily influenced by policy and political decisions, should the media coverage and lockdowns have happened a lot sooner? Only time will tell.
The initial days and nights that I have passed through were of real agony and heartaches. Getting accustomed to the new way of living in self-quarantine like eating all alone in my room, cleaning my dishes separately, doing laundry and cleaning the room on my own. It made me miss those blessings that I took for granted like having food together, watching TV series with my mother, post dinner family chats in my parent’s room etc. The thought of losing my parents to the virus, getting the infection, adapting to self-isolation, adjusting to work from home and reading the mournful cases from across the globe gave me severe mental distress in the initial days. Almost every day, even a couple of times a day, I found myself thinking of the probable dreadful future of us given the current weakness of our health system, limited health facility for COVID-19 treatment and insensitive behavior of people. Many nights, I had trouble falling asleep and so I stayed awake in anguish. It all started taking a tremendous toll on my mental health and reflected on my personal and work life. I was still concerned that the people, including my father, might again start going for work after the public holidays.
However, I have now come to terms with the situation at hand. A random quote from the social media put the situation into perspective, “United we fall. Divided we conquer.” We, especially our parents, need to be cooperative and strictly maintain policies set by local and international research institutions and our government. This too shall pass.
Farzana Manzoor is a Research Associate at BRAC James P Grant School of Public Health, BRAC University
