Julie Community From A Far – March 16th 2020

Because of how fast the coronavirus is spreading, it is ruining a lot of lives and needs to be taken seriously. So far, it has affected 100s of thousands of people and is killing a small, but very real, percentage of the infected people. Not only is the coronavirus infecting and killing more and more people everyday, it is also causing the whole world to come to a stop. Because of this, people are unable to work, unable to earn money and it is hurting the economy and so many lives. Now, because of globalization and the rapidity of how this virus is spreading, it has reached our community.

Now that the coronavirus has reached our community, it is directly impacting all of our lives. First school was cancelled and we all now have to work from our homes, and all other events were also cancelled or at least postponed. For example, I was unable to take my SAT on Saturday which could really impact my ability to get into university if the date is postponed for too long. This virus is also impacting our community since we are unable to leave our houses, restaurants and stores are not getting any business or even shutting down because of the risk that their employees could obtain the virus. This is especially impacting our community as many of us work in the tourism industry and because of this virus, many people are cancelling flights and their trips.

When it comes to my CAS project, my role in my community right now is to make sure the yearbook members are updated and are working to complete their pages, even though we are unable to have our weekly meetings and talk about the project at school. Luckily for us, the yearbook is created digitally, so we are all able to continue working on it from afar. Even though we are still unable to communicate at school, we can use resources like whatsapp or video call to stay in touch with our team and make sure everyone is keeping up with their work. Jimena and I already have a plan to try and finish adding in all the portrait photos by the end of break, making sure we aren’t falling behind with putting it together. We also are planning to title all the pages before the start of break to make it easier for the committee to know what pages they should put their photos on and get rid of any confusion when it comes to the order of the yearbook.

My personality type can help add value to my project during this time, as I am good at being creative and finding ways to solve problems. For example, because of the coronavirus, the yearbook committee is unable to take photos or get photos from their assigned classes at school, so I came up with the idea of swapping out pages we aren’t able to use anymore, for example beach olympics, and put in a quarantine page. This page would consist of students doing school work in their beds or pjs, class video calls, etc. I still have to ask Ms. Kerry and get permission, but I believe this is a good idea, as it will be a funny way to look back at this time when we are all older and remembering the time we were all stuck doing school at our houses.

In conclusion, I think the best thing any of us can do for our community is to just stay in our houses to prevent the risk of someone infecting you and then potentially you infecting other people. This way it is unable to spread to large quantities of people and will hopefully die down at a faster rate. It is important not to hangout with anyone, because even if they are not sick, they could still be carrying the virus, especially since a student at Cria has it and there are many potential cases in the community which could have spread even more now.