I’m sure these times will divide people. There will be those who find that the only thing they liked about their job was their colleagues and the social interaction it gave them, others will realise they hate their job so much they’d rather clean the oven and some will discover that they like the work but would rather not ever have to sit in a room with the other members of staff ever again. For lots of people, working at home is getting hard now. It’s hard for the children who haven’t gone back to school. They have now been told that they won’t be going back until September. Their parents have been told to go back to work but six year olds are meant to stay at home, or go to a theme park.
I miss being in school and making music with children. I’m already missing playing Over the Rainbow with my neighbour every week on a Thursday, now that we’ve stopped giving carers the clap. However, I am still able to be creative and work on the planning ideas, which is a bonus.
I am currently planning for a week’s work on Madagascar. It’s not somewhere I know much about, except that the flag is white, red and green. I didn’t even know it was in Africa or that it’s a huge island. I suspected that it had probably been colonised and was part of building someone’s empire but didn’t know that the French won it.
The thing about planning and the internet is that you never know where it might take you. If I didn’t have this job to do then I would never have found out about the lollipop situation in Madagascar.
It is really interesting, in a world pandemic, to observe how different countries deal with the same crisis. If the virus had burnt itself out within a couple of weeks then our ‘watch and wait’ approach would have been hailed as genius. We’ve heard a lot about the countries who fought this mathematically, by locking down and halting exponential growth and we’ve heard Trump’s suggestions of injecting bleach into your eyeballs but Madagascar’s preferred option has slipped under our news radar.
The scandal in Madagascar is that a government minister has been sacked for using $2m of the country’s budget to buy lollipops . It turns out that they are hitting the virus by suggesting everyone take a herbal remedy (preventively). The herbal drink is made from Artemisia, or sweet wormwood and it tastes disgusting. This herbal remedy is widely used and has been demonstrated to have some effect against SARS and is now being tested by the Max Planck Institute. The government minister bought lollipops so that school children could stomach their daily dose of COVID-Organics, as they are calling it. You might laugh at this but with over 1000 cases and only seven deaths, you can see why the scientists are keen to test it.
I love my job. How else would I have found out about this?
In a spectacular case of life imitating art I also found this wonderful song. It’s like a love song to a lollipop.
I have often woken up wondering where I can get a guard penguin from (still no cases in Antarctica) I tell you, this virus is all about the penguins.
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