Day 54

It’s day 54 and I have been immune to the virus but I haven’t been able to run away from the infectious news. I thought that staying in Addis Ababa, the capital of a landlocked and paralleled universe of uncommon realities with their own calendar called Ethiopia was protecting me from the world…but it wasn’t.

The first news that shattered my hopes that we would get out of this as better human beings, was about a teenage boy who raped two of his sisters and impregnated them. People have been following the COVID-19 prevention rules, but they are failing to follow simple and moral rules established inside their homes.

I guess he was infected by a virus called greed. I wonder how they felt when it was happening. Imagine you are about to cross a safe and familiar road, and suddenly a car comes and you freeze. I visualise their confusion and how they were mentally paralysed. I can tell you that after this incident, they will be in quarantine their whole lives. Not being able to go to certain places, feeling ashamed, and living with endless guilt and self-hate. They will be enslaved in their own mind. I hope one day they understand that being ‘deflowered’ wasn’t their fate or retribution for something they did.

Every day the media updates us on the consequences of the catastrophe by informing us of what each country is doing to fight or minimize the virus. They constantly display the number of cases ‘X number of people infected, Y number of people recovered, and Z number of deaths’. But, who is taking notes of the number of abuse cases? What kind of procedures have been taken to fight this virus called ‘man’?

Whenever I go to the supermarket and I see people in a queue waiting for their turn, it takes me back years ago when at parties’ guys would emulate that act. I would see several men lining outside a room, patiently waiting for their turn. At first, you might think they want to go to the bathroom but they were looking to release something else. They would pick the drunkest girl, enter a room, where one by one, they would destroy her dreams of having peace of mind. I couldn’t stop thinking of how obedient and disciplined they looked while waiting, I wonder if they touched her with the same respect.

Being in a house for days, you are confronted with merciful thoughts. I wonder what those girls are going through during this time. I wonder if they wish evil upon them and I pray they don’t. Because even if they do, it would never give them back the joy of enjoying intimacy and having a free mind. I hope their pained hearts have been healed by forgiveness and wherever they are in lockdown, I hope their rooms are engulfed by forgiveness.

The current situation has prepared us all to constantly be aware of unpleasant news but I don’t know how I feel about the next episode. In a village in Angola, a lady in isolation was violated by a stranger. Her husband was interviewed by the media and stated ‘I don’t want her anymore. The government should give me another wife.” I was made speechless by his ignorance and lack of empathy. I think men are still under the impression that women are disposable just like the gloves that nurses use to perform clinical tests.

Another collateral damage of the COVID-19, is a young woman traumatized by the default abuse prescribed by her boyfriend and killed him. I don’t have much information about the matter but I can’t help to think that she was going through hell. I figure that her demons decided to ignore the social distance and paid her a visit. I picture that during this time all her senses became more powerful and she decided to be an avenger for herself.

It is extremely difficult to keep calm during this situation, especially being bombarded by news like the following ‘Street vendor beaten with a belt’. A street vendor in Luanda decided to sneak out on police and tried to sell fish so she could provide for her kids. Two police men approach her, when she refused to go home, they took the fish and started beating her up with a belt. I envisaged those same men going home, taking that same belts to physically and sexually abuse their wives and daughters.

A common sense and empathetic approach to handle this would be for them to buy the fish from her right away, so she could home. We as women, are tired of telling men how to treat us and waiting for our sacred ‘poetic justices’. We grow up by tradition that brainwashes us to believe that whatever treatment we receive from men is our punishment. However, only the unknown can determine that. 

It’s easy to assess the lockdown as the catalyst for all these. While, we all know these things have been happening before and they have been immune to any retribution. I hope this isolated circumstances forces men to confront themselves with all the pandemic of fatal things they have done to women and grasp what is the symbol and true essence of a woman. And I appeal that those disturbing stories trigger those in power to fully take the measures to value women.

After all this, replace the ‘wash your hands’ or ‘put a mask on’ to ‘Protect, respect and care for her’. And for women out there replace the Pain with Forgiveness. We can’t give up now, use this time to fully recognize true forgiveness. Forgiveness is a process, the same way it takes a series of traumas to destroy us, it takes a healing trilogy or even more to resuscitate us.