May lock-downs, Pita's Undoing and many more...
Before I start writing this, I feel like I must admit that in addition to my actual work, I also have assignments (past) due and an application for a scholarship that I still have yet to complete pending. I thought that maybe it was important to first paint a backdrop of where I am at right now, before I start my rambling. For context.
As I write this, the Suva and Nausori corridor is readying itself for the second (maybe third? I've lost count) total lock-down for 2021. Contrary to the most recent one, where Suva had all but thirty minutes to prepare for a 56 hour lock-down, the government's allowed us a good 2 whole days to prepare. This time though, it's going to be a 96 hour stay at home order, where only the contact tracing, government endorsed food delivery and police forces are allowed to be moving around. For most of us who have had the pleasure of spending the last 3 weeks working from home, it doesn't make much difference as the only time we left home anyway was to pay homage to some long forgotten role of hunter and gatherer, and bring back food from the supermarkets to sustain our families.
While I know, logically, somewhere in the deep recesses of my mind, that the 96 hour lock-down is really just a repeat of something my family and I have been practicing for the past 3 weeks, it still feels like the closer we get to Friday, the closer the steel bars are getting to cage us in. Naturally, it's setting off some serious panicked mental screaming in the parts of my brain where logic is almost always firmly pushed aside. I'm hoping, that as I write this, there are other people that this happens to and that it is not, as my older sister likes to call it, a symptom of weirdness on my part.
In the last lock-down, a Facebook page called Fijian Fiction published The Undoing; a nice little snippet about a family that comes undone during the COVID-19 outbreak. This is largely due to the fact that the family's father and sole breadwinner, who we all instantly dislike in the opening chapter, Pita, is confirmed as a primary contact of a woman who has tested positive for the virus. Pita is a primary contact because he has been sticking little pita into crevices which he really ought not to be, as a married man. There are not that many twists and turns, they spend most of the ordeal stuck in a quarantine facility and the story is hilarious in it's delivery. It also brings home a very sobering truth.
There are people in our country, right now, who will have to spend this 96 hours under the same roof as their abuser. There are wives (and husbands) who will have be walking on eggshells, tip toeing on glass shards, and constantly trying to maintain a delicate balance of normalcy subject to their abusive partner's moods. There are children who will probably go to sleep counting the hours until their abusive parent can leave home and let them breathe again.
It's sobering because for a society like ours, where domestic abuse is often swept under the mat or often dismissed as "normal," the 96 hour lock-down gives a perpetrator way too much time and access to their victims. It's sobering because, despite doing their best to advertise their toll free lines, only a small fraction of the victims might end up calling and asking for help. Many others, isolated by societal expectations or cellphones with no credit to call, might not be able to dial the number at all.
I think it drives home the fact that, as women, as people, we also have a responsibility to others in our community. We all need to start paying a little more attention to our neighbours and the people around us (people who might not be inside our bubble). Most probably because, in that instance where a victim is not able to reach for the phone to dial for help, maybe just maybe, you can do it for them.
If you, or anyone you know, is experiencing domestic violence or feel unsafe at home, please reach out to the Fiji Women's Crises Center on the following numbers:
(You may notice that I started this blog on a whole different tone from which I ended with. This is because I was not totally aware of why I was writing a blog in the first place anyway, but I hope that if someone, anyone reads this, it ends up being more helpful then just a collection of thoughts that I needed to get out of my head).