Under the Covid-19 Storms , livre ebook

Partridge Publishing Singapore - Lindiwe Bhebhe

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37 pages

English

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The year 2020 was a year like no other. Right from the beginning up to the end it was full of fear and a lot of unknowns. It will be years before people forget the challenges they went through during this year. Under the COVID-19 Storms is a record of the challenges that were brought about by the 2019 Novel Corona Virus told from the point of view of a child, and it is written in a way that is meant to entertain the reader and serve as a record of what transpired during this year. The book explores the negative outcomes of isolation for children and how online schooling had both positive as well as negative results for children. It is the writer’s hope that children will have this book as a go to read at a time when they wish to look back on this year of horrors. This may be in a few years to come or at the time they get to tell their own children or grandchildren about the year 2020.

It is a must have COVID-19 record read for children and adults alike!

Sujets

Fiction Jeunesse

Interpersonal relationship

Juvenilee Fiction

Informations

Publié par	Partridge Publishing Singapore
Date de parution	26 juin 2022
Nombre de lectures	0
EAN13	9781543770483
Langue	English

Informations légales : prix de location à la page 0,0200€. Cette information est donnée uniquement à titre indicatif conformément à la législation en vigueur.

Extrait

UNDER the COVID-19 STORMS
Polly and Paddy’s Lockdown Tales
Lindiwe Bhebhe

Copyright © 2022 by Lindiwe Bhebhe.

ISBN:
Hardcover
978-1-5437-7049-0

Softcover
978-1-5437-7047-6

eBook
978-1-5437-7048-3

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced by any means, graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, taping or by any information storage retrieval system without the written permission of the author except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

Because of the dynamic nature of the Internet, any web addresses or links contained in this book may have changed since publication and may no longer be valid. The views expressed in this work are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the publisher, and the publisher hereby disclaims any responsibility for them.

www.partridgepublishing.com/singapore
CONTENTS
Part 1My dear friend Timothy Townsend (Timmy)
Part 2The New Normal
Part 3When Paddy and I had a meltdown.
Part 4My Surprise Virtual Birthday Party.
Part 5The return to school
Part 6The last day of School
ABOUT THE BOOK
In this book, Polly, a young girl from Kent in the UK, describes her struggles during the COVID-19 lockdown period and she explains how she developed a fear of the unknown and had drama featuring in her life every other day. She frequently wrote letters to her friend Timmy who was attending school in person while she was in the online school, she asked him questions about the things she did not understand during this time. Her mother asked her to keep a diary for this traumatic year, some of her letters to Timmy form part of this work. Polly hand posted her letters to Timmy through Khaya, a boy from next-door, and she made sure that her mother did not know about this as it violated the COVID-19 restrictions.
Whilst some of the work in this book closely reflects the experiences of most people during the COVID-19 lockdown period, none of it is taken from real-life situations, it is purely a work of friction. The names of places and people in the book are not real but some have links to the writer’s own life experiences. Scenarios described here are imagined in a way that mirrors what reality was like for most people, especially children with no siblings.
For Polly, her mother and her dog were a great source of support and she also got some help from her school and from a very unlikely source; Plop the Owl who was afraid of the dark featured in the book by Jill Tomlinson.
I believe many children went through similar struggles and because this was a very first experience for everyone, there were no documented experiences from other people to help them through the challenges they faced during this time.
DEDICATION
To my dearest son Vuyo, this is for you, I hope you will find this book interesting enough to inspire you to drop Netflix and start reading books and maybe one day write them too. To my beloved parents who did not get to see me write books, I wish I had done this earlier and had a day to read my book to them.
To all those who lost their lives to COVID-19, especially those closest to me, humanity owes you mountains of debt and gratitude as your loss of life left us with tons of knowledge about the 2019 Novel Corona Virus and the kind of vaccines that had to be developed to fight it.
To everyone who will buy and read this book, I send you my thanks and love.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
My thanks go to the people and organizations whose work I read whilst writing this book.
1. NHS Charities, (2022) Every Mind Matters; Dealing with unhelpful thoughts.
https://www.nhs.uk/every-mind-matters/mental-wellbeing-tips/top-tips-to-improve-your-mental-wellbeing/
2. The owl who was afraid of the dark, Stories n Stuff. (Aug 29, 2020) https://www.google.com/search?q= the+owl+who+was+afraid+of+the+dark&rlz=1C1GCEU_enKW947KW947&source=lnms&tbm=vid&sa=X&ved= 2ahUKEwjcx9ft0_P3AhWE8rsIHcNOATcQ_AUoAnoECAIQBA&biw=855&bih=403&dpr=1.5
3. UK National Newspapers – All the reports I read about COVID-19 at the peak of the pandemic (Various).
4. Worldometer, (17 May 2022). https://www.worldometers. info/coronavirus/coronavirus-death-toll/
Over 6 million people had died of COVID-19 worldwide.
5. Unicef-Child Mortality and COVID-19, (March 2022). https://data.unicef.org/topic/child-survival/covid-19/
“Among the 3.7 million COVID-19 deaths reported in the MPIDR COVerAGE database, 0.4 per cent (over 13,400) occurred in children and adolescents under 20 years of age”.
6. KATHY, KATELLA . Yale Medicine. (MAY 18, 2022) https://www.yalemedicine.org/news/covid-19-variants- of-concern-omicron
7. Rupak De Chowdhury/Reuters, Aljazeera. (4 Apr 2020) India newborn twins named Corona and Covid after virus. https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2020/4/4/india-newborn-twins-named-corona-and-covid-after-virus .
8. My thanks also go to the Duchess of Cambridge- Catherine whose work on children’s mental health inspired me to finish this book after I had shelved it for almost a year.
I believe that while the death rate from COVID-19 for children was low the mental traumas were much bigger.
PART 1
My dear friend Timothy Townsend (Timmy)

I met Timmy at the Vines Nursery School, it was during our very first play time that we had a big playground fall out over a toy duck. We later made up and put that bad spat behind us, little did we know then, that we would become friends for life.

The toy duck was made of a beautiful fluffy white material, it had a yellow beak and feet and brown eyes .
I first met Timmy at The Vines Nursery School on my very first day at school. The Vines overlooks the Medway River; it is housed in a big Victorian building with a modern-day extension, which is just a few blocks away from my house. Our first meeting did not turn out well, as our parents told us: we had a big playground disagreement. My mother told me that, on this day, Timmy and I had a big fall out after he took a toy that I had already picked up during our very first playtime. The toy in question was a snow white duck made from fluffy material with a bright yellow beak and feet and brown eyes.
Neither of us agreed to give it up or let the other have it for playtime, so our teacher took away the toy and kept it in the toy box on her table and asked us to pick other toys from another toy box. I was not interested in picking a different toy, but Timmy went on to pick another toy, a police car. I followed him to his table and told him I wanted to play with it too. We pulled the toy from each other’s hands until the teacher came over and took this toy away from us as well. After this, she told us that we were not going to have any toys to play with and gave us white paper to draw any of the toys other children were playing with. I drew that white duck the teacher had taken away from me, although some parts were missing in my diagram, from what my mother told me. Timmy drew his police car toy but then decided he did not like it, so he drew the duck as well. His drawing was so beautiful; it looked exactly like the toy taken away from us by our teacher.
When our teacher came over to look at what we were doing, she was very impressed by our drawings, though more so by Timmy’s.
‘You two have done very well,’ she told us. ‘Those drawings are beautiful.’
‘I will give mine to Polly,’ Timmy said.
I was very surprised that he had chosen to give me his beautiful work, especially after I had been so stubborn about sharing the toy earlier on; I took it and thanked him many times over. I went over to him and hugged him, and I told him that at home I was called Polly so he could call me by this moniker. From that day on Timmy called me by this name, and he asked me to call him Timmy. At the end of the day, our teacher told our parents about what had happened at playtime and I showed my mother the drawing of the duck that Timmy had given me. My mother was extremely pleased with this kind gesture shown by Timmy, and she suggested that we take a picture of us holding this drawing. When we got home, I asked my mother to pin the drawing up on my bedroom wall; it stayed there for a very long time.
Timmy was very good in all subjects, and he was also good in sports; for every grade level he was the class monitor or assistant to the teacher. If anyone did not understand something in class, he was the go to person for an explanation if the teacher was not around. He did everything with such ease: it seemed like he had already done it before. It was at his birthday party at the end of our year three that I got to understand why this was the case. At the end of a very lavish party, the guests were invited to watch some of his films in his study room. In this room there was a very long, fancy bookshelf with all kinds of books and encyclopaedias of different types, a telescope, two microscopes, a photocopier, printer and scanner, a state of the art computer, video camera equipment, and many more things, some of which I did not even know what they were or what they were used for. This room looked like one of the offices I had seen on TV. We went around looking at all of the things in this room and trying our hands at using the gadgets, looking like students on a school trip.