“Imagine how eagerly my children wait me at home after work. They miss me, my huge, my kissing and the like. But it takes me more than 30 minutes to do this unlike the period before the pandemic happened in Ethiopia. I accept it because it helps my family and me to alive.
I strongly agree that social distancing among families helps to safeguard our family from the disease,” said Aster Gebru, Mother and Addis Ababa Resident living at Hayat Tafo Condominium.
According to her, there are strong social ties and attachments with frequent physical interactions among Ethiopians that have been developed for centuries as a beneficial means of integrity, which are now considered to be risk factors for COVID-19 transmission.
Two of my children were ready to celebrate their birth day this May with calling their friends grandparents, neighbors and the like. Unfortunately, they could not do this because of corona and prohibits social gathering. They always told me that they will kill the virus if they found it.
“They seriously felt anger by the disease because of different reasons. Apart from their birthday party, they also asked me about their school, their grandparents, and their friends. But still my husband, Getachew Wolde and I are trying to create awareness about the difficulty of the pandemic and its solutions to protect it,” Aster added.
Despite being difficult to break these social bonds, all parents should apply this strategy for their perfect future life. But we must be careful about our children not to adopt this habit for their future life, Aster suggested.
According to Ethiopian Public Health Institute, social distancing is one of the accepted strategies to delay and reduce the magnitude of outbreaks of pandemic influenza. At the individual level, social distancing involves the use of non-contact greetings, maintaining at least one meter distance between yourself and other people, and staying home when ill.
At the community level, social distancing involves closure of any events or settings in which people gather together, including schools, workplaces, houses of worship, and cultural, social and sports events. For COVID-19, social distancing is necessary at the individual and community levels, because transmission occurs frequently from person-to-person and infection causes severe illness in up to 20 percent of people, EPHI said.
In an exclusive interview with The Ethiopian Herald, Mekonen Abera, Sociologist said that as this global pandemic, COVID-19 is rapidly spreading across the globe social distancing with in a family is expected to be applicable. Social distancing is staying away from crowds or congregations of among peoples with the intent of minimizing transmission of infectious diseases outbreaks like COVID-19.
Thus, social distancing within a family includes meeting in groups for meal. Yet, it is difficult to be practiced at a community like Ethiopia that have strong social, cultural, and religious bond, Mekonen added.
On the contrary, for the time being the pandemic “COVID-19 “Creates opportunity for the family to spend their time at home to gather and to know each other very well. The parents have also got the chance to know their children which will increase their relation as well.
Even though social distancing is promoted so as to keep everyone from the pandemic, the social cultural, economic and religious practices do not allow everyone to act upon these. But people should actively perform this mechanism for the sake of themselves.
The challenge of this crisis is framing social distancing as an act of community, as something that brings us closer because it is practiced out of compassion, even as it physically asks people to keep apart.
But another, smaller challenge will be to keep seeing our homes and families as a source of support rather than fear and believe that our close family, friends, neighbors, siblings, relatives, free from the pandemics which is wrong.
For example, children who are staying at home now can never understand and aware of that their family could be the reason for transmitting the disease since they are working out and go back to home. Even we have to avoid body contact with our family members before changing our cloth and sanitized ourselves well.
Families; meaning households in which two or more people live together have historically been among the most significant hot spots of infectious-disease transmission, and that seems to be true in this current pandemic as well. “If a person you live with contracts COVID-19, you are much more likely to get it from them than from anyone else,” he asserted.
Mekonen further stated that parents should play a great role to create the awareness and their vulnerability. All in all, it will become easy to think of one another as a burden. In a time of social distancing, we should think that we are allowing our relatives and ourselves to be alive.
The Ethiopain Herlad Jun 20, 2020
BY HIZKEL HAILU
