By Super Mom
Hello again, I’m Super Mom, and today I’ll tell you how Covid-19 has affected life around me.
Nine months ago when the coronavirus pandemic began, I was pregnant with my first child.
The whole experience was so exciting and so unfamiliar. After all, I am just a 19-year-old girl who a year ago did not know anything about raising a child. Over time, I’ve slowly started feeling more confident in my new role.
While I was worrying about how I would raise my child, the coronavirus pandemic spread around the world and changed the lives of everyone. At first in March, I was not very familiar with the virus. It seemed like a thing happening far away from me. But in a few months, it reached people all over the world, and we already see that millions have been infected and many have died.
In Bulgaria as well, we began to hear about more and more people who were infected in towns and villages across the whole country. Then we started to hear about increasing numbers of people who died from the virus. This crisis has affected an awful lot of people. Its impact on the lives of poor people has been very harsh. I’m sure that very rich people are affected and infected by the virus, but among the poor the pandemic has been merciless. Many were left without work, without money and food at home, and others – without access to any health or social services.
In some of the poorest neighborhoods across the country, where people are vulnerable to living in extreme poverty, the state set up checkpoints to prevent people from leaving the area. This was back in March and April, during the first wave of the pandemic in Bulgaria. Many people ran out of money and literally had nothing to eat. They relied on the mercy of other people around them.
As more and more became infected with the coronavirus, people started to feel more afraid. There were times, however, when it was nearly impossible or extremely expensive to find a face mask or hand sanitizer in my neighborhood. For the poorest people around us, it was absolutely impossible. And they were left completely defenseless against the virus and the pandemic. If not for the support of wealthier families in the neighborhood, they would have had no other chance to survive.