When this evil virus was announced a few weeks ago I went to the store along with everyone else and bought lots of canned food in case there was a famine. Things like canned meats and vegetables, dried fruit and enough rice and peanut butter to feed an army.  Now after being in the house for two weeks I am beginning to wonder whatever possessed me to buy canned peas! or canned turnip greens?  I can tell you canned pot roast does not taste like real pot roast no matter what the label says. And dried beets, what’s with that! And who eats spam except on a camping trip? Actually, if you fry the spam until it is crispy it’s quite editable.

And I was driving to my sisters to take her lunch today and turned my blinker on to signal the turn. The windshield wipers came on!  The blinker was on the other side of the steering wheel and I turned into the wrong lane! I haven’t been outside driving and had digressed back to how we drive in Africa. Fortunately, no one else was out driving. They were all in their houses where the President has told us to stay!

Yes, I am a bit discombobulated!

And then I talked to our daughter, Kim White, who is in Africa with the abandoned and orphaned babies at Neema Village until we return in May.

She had read something she wanted to share.

“Social Distancing is a privilege. It means you live in a place large enough to spread out.

Hand washing is a privilege too. It means you have access to running water.

Hand Sanitizers are a privilege. It means you have money to buy them.

Lockdowns are a privilege. It means you can afford to stay home.”

And your school closed means you were privileged enough to go to school.

Most of the world’s people are not privileged enough to do any of these, including many of the people working at our baby home in Africa.

As I thought about our nannies coming to work each day in crowded face-to-face dala dalas (public vans) and how they bring the day’s water for their family into their house in a bucket from the public spigot down the road or the polluted stream in front of their home and how most of them live in a one room home and sleep in a crowded bed with the whole family, I know we are privileged.

This pandemic crises, which is truly awful, will be over someday and we will go back to our privileged lives, most of us unaware that the everyday crises of half a million moms dying in childbirth every year and handicap babies hidden in dark rooms and 3 million little girls cut every year in FGM and millions of children dying from drinking dirty water, and 200 million little girls waking up every morning wishing they could go to school and knowing they never will, etc.. etc… and that these crises will continue on because they happen to the poor and not the privileged.

And we will be left wondering what we are going to do with ten cans of peas and turnip greens.

Stay Safe Everyone,

Love you,

Dorris and Michael.