The Question About Response

Ever since this pandemic started the question on response has been everywhere. Every industry has done a webinar/call on their response to Covid-19. I have to admit that I went on two or three calls and gave up. Frankly, because I am easily bored and secondly because I was feeling helpless and was wondering where people were getting the energy to have a response especially when the pandemic had just started. I was on a call where someone had released a twenty-page document on a Covid-19 response. I was impressed by people’s ability to respond to this crisis. Unfortunately, I couldn’t read the report because I did not have the energy to read it.

 As a survivor, there were many requests from media for me to send the ‘perspective’ of survivors and to say what survivors are experiencing during this time. I also couldn’t do that. For the longest time. I have wondered whether a lack of response is a response because, in many ways, I feel like I don’t know what I am doing. I am not sure whether what we do will work and that everyone around me is just trying to breathe. We are in a crisis and the priority in a crisis is to survive and that is what I have been trying to do. When I genuinely think of what my response should be when people ask me about what the ‘response” should be, I feel like the right answer is “I don’t know”. The truth is I don’t know if the people I serve will be able to survive this. I don’t know because the needs are so great. I started working with survivors of trafficking in 2014 and the calls are increasing by the day.

“My children are hungry.”

“I am using the last amount of money to call you because I have no one else to rely on, everyone I know doesn’t have money. “

“Our landlord will throw us, out of the house today.”

I have called my former colleagues at HAART so many times to re-open cases and I believe that this will continue until this pandemic ends. The number of people needing basic needs for survival will increase and the question is what will we do with donor funding that is constantly tied with the question of sustainability? How do people argue for sustainability in humanitarian situations?

The truth is no one has a timeline on when this will end. How it will end. What the world will look like. When it is over, because it has to end, right? We can pretend and be confident about the answers we are giving in our webinars for Covid-19 response but the truth is that we were not prepared for this. There were some people that had criticised the system and its inability to cater for the most vulnerable, mainly black feminists that were called names but they were right. How did we end up with a system that could not manage this situation for such a short period of time? How is it that we lived merrily not acknowledging that the system as we knew it was a crisis? As we imagine our responses right now, are we imagining changing the system to one that sees and caters for all our needs not just the lucky few?

 I am also at a point where I know that to imagine a new world, I have to mourn the old one. I have to mourn all the things I loved about it because there is no going back to normal. Knowing what we know, the only response should be that we cannot go back to normal because normal was only great from the perspective of a few people. The vision has to be to create a normal that can cater for all of us for more than 60 days.

What is my Covid-19 response? To share what I have. There are so many organisations with an emergency fund dedicated to providing basic needs to people that cannot afford it. Donate. The future must begin with us ensuring that we all survive this. 

10 days ago, HAART surpassed 100 survivors that were being assisted with the basic needs support. This is just the bare minimum, just enough to survive. I don’t know what the numbers will look like in one week. But it is not sustainable to see people die from hunger, especially not people who have already gone through so much trauma and abuse.