During the pandemic and the ensuing restrictions, the general picture in Denmark has been that older people have been much more worried about other people getting sick than they have been worried about themselves. Many were also worried about not becoming a burden during a difficult time for their families or anybody else. That was one of the insights from a large interdisciplinary research project at the University of Copenhagen that was launched shortly after the announcement in March 2020 of…
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Seeing the capital from up here, in the hills high above the rooftops, our perspective changes. The distance is small, but mentally, this is another world. A world with no mobile phone coverage. With no internet. A high place where the pandemic doesn’t seem to have reached.
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In the thick trees on the outskirts of Kisumu City in Kenya, a hut is as isolated as the 76-year-old woman who owns and lives in it alone. Without a child of her own, *Mary Atieno had called people "son" or "daughter" from the community she had built in church, a religious camaraderie that COVID-19 halted abruptly.
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The Covid-19 pandemic has put freedom of expression under pressure in many fields. Ole Reitov, a Danish veteran in protecting artists’ free voices, looks at new forms of cooperation with cautious optimism while authoritarianism is growing in the world. Today, Friday December 10th, a paper about ”Critical Voices – UNESCO’s instruments in Defence of Freedom of Expression of Artists, Journalists and Scientific Researchers” has been published in Paris. The paper is prepared by the Permanent…
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The scorching sun is unforgivingly baking the ground in Korogocho slums in Nairobi with the same intensity that pangs of hunger are hitting the bellies of Joyce Khamala and her three children. To this family, lack of food is a rodeo that they are used to riding, but not as brutally as it has been since the COVID-19 pandemic hit the world. The thirty-three-year-old mother of three says that she and her children have faced all the pain that COVID-19 could inflict on anyone: death, stigma and…
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Since the outbreak of the pandemic, poor individuals and families have – even in Denmark - been in desperate need of free food that would otherwise have become food waste
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Due to the advance of COVID-19 - during 2020 - neighbors, friends and families from popular neighborhoods in Chile organized “common pots”, a form of popular organization where, through the delivery of homemade meals, food was assured to thousands of people impoverished and unemployed by the pandemic. In 2021, the “Ollas Comunes” or “Common pots” across the country face new challenges: to continue the project despite the low donations and the return to "normal" life of the members who contribute…
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Twenty-year old chef Amina (not real name) is as beautiful as they come. She speaks with melodic intonations and when she smiles, she bears the look of a happy girl. Behind that, however, is a life of emotional ruptures that, until recently, often resulted in self-inflicted injuries and suicidal thoughts under the cover of dark solitary nights.
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Isolation and loneliness during the lockdown has caused depressions and anxiety, especially among young people – but others with psychiatric diagnoses have experienced less pressure and actually felt relieved
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‘’Our centre was empty then. No orders, no money’’, reflects Mariam, a 17 year -old girl from the Ntereso community in Northern Ghana, on how miserable life had been when the COVID emerged. An early school dropout, Mariam is one among the million rural women in Ghana who makes a living out of shea picking and shea butter processing.
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