I watched the wind sweep a pile of dry leaves. They flew around almost one and a half meters above the ground. It was a windy day, indeed. There was a tree that stood tall a few steps before me. On its shaft, there were words carved, I guessed it was some teenagers doing. As I turned my head, a pack of birds also flew west to east, and some others flew the other way around. Alike the packs of birds, I watched a few people walking — only they were not in a pack — by themselves or with one or two companions. It was quite beautiful and peaceful scenery in the golden hour.
This was nearly the fourth year of my staying here as a student studying abroad, in a land of two continents. A lot of things had happened during these past few years. Especially the last two years, when everything started. This scene, right in front of me, reminded me of how things can change as quickly as a blink.
I remembered it was like a year of sadness and mourning all across the world. It was called a Pandemic, an infectious disease that is spread across a large region. Never had I ever imagined this could happen in my time of life. But I guess, one could never predict what will happen in the future. When it was only an endemic, I remembered thinking I was safe and also my family back in my country. Only then, a couple of months later the endemic had turned into a pandemic.
Indeed, the change was like a blink of an eye — no one was ready to face this kind of loss. Moreover, nearly most of the time, death — both collectively and severally — has been bad news for humankind. Ironically, no one can escape death.
Slowly and carefully, I observed the carved tree in front of me. Then, I found out that my guess was right, it was definitely some teenagers doing — the carved words were initial names and heart shapes. As I looked at this graffiti, I thought about how people coped with their loss, and how they filled the holes inside their hearts. I was thinking it was maybe similar to this carved tree. As if the tree was holding their memories by just embracing the carved initial names. I didn't even know if my thought made sense.
People have their own way to cope with things that happen in life. Some were in a way logical and some others were drowning in their emotions a little bit longer. But eventually, time can heal almost everything, they said.
My mind recalled the speeches of Bill Gates in Ted Talks. I considered him to be an instance in the logical section — although I thought this was too magnified as an example. At the beginning of his speech, he mentioned how the Roman Empire back in the year 27 BC was facing a devastating fire. The emperor Caesar Augustus knew that when one person’s house was on fire, another person’s houses were also at risk. Then, Augustus came up with a breakthrough. He gathered a few people and made a permanent team of firefighters who used buckets as a tool and prevented the fire from spreading.
By looking back at history and taking the significance, Bill Gates claimed that we could put an end to the pandemic forever. Gates proposed a plan of making a similar team consisting of 3000 people to prevent the pandemic. He called this team ‘GERM’, short for Global Epidemic Response and Mobilization. The mission was to stop outbreaks before they become pandemics. In this proposal, Gates mentioned the GERM Team would be made up of a diverse set of specialists, such as Data Scientists, Epidemiologists, Disease Modelers, Product Development Experts, and Policy Experts. Their work would be coordinated by WHO and they would be spread and present in many locations around the world, stationed in public health agencies. Furthermore, while the Roman firefighters used buckets as their tool for fighting the fire, Gates also proposed a few tools, some of them were a diagnostic machine called Lumira and drugs that can be inhaled to prevent infection.
That was only as much as I remembered, I wasn’t sure how was the current status of the proposal was. Despite the disagreements, I thought if this project was successfully run, might as well save many lives in the future. Least of all, that was our hope, right?
I felt the wind waft on my face. The autumn breeze knocked me to my sense, I realized I had been staring at the carved tree for almost five minutes. I imagined how many trees we need to carve every initial name of the fallen victims. The world once again had been grieving but slowly rising up. I had heard someone say, “There is no new feeling in this world. Everything you feel has been felt by people from hundreds and thousands of years before.” I took it as a reminder that as a human, we were never alone.
The autumn breeze was getting colder. I fixed my coat as I rose from the park bench and walked down the reddish paving stones. The golden hour had faded and turned into a darker blue. Once more, I swept my gaze and witnessed the packs of birds, then traced a way home.
Published on Instagram @/lale_page0.
