Condemned to the confines of our homes/living arrangements until “further notice,” we have been experiencing this coronavirus outbreak through a multitude of ways. As New York City teens, not only has our academic life, but our social life has been affected dramatically by the measures we are being mandated to take.
Despite this being the case, through our current situation we have also been able to further educate ourselves on one moment in history that resonates with us; both for the bearing similarities and differences.
In 2009, Malala Yousafazi told her story of life as a seventh grade schoolgirl under the harsh rule of the Taliban, which had banned girls’ education and blown up multiple private schools in Northern Pakistan. Her circumstance was documented in diary entries, which one of our youth producers, Mia, describes as “deeply personal and consistent enough to give the reader a sense of what she was experiencing at the time”.
Together, we were able to compare and contrast her experience with ours; we were able to see how in crisis, there is still the mundane, that which bores us and makes us restless for something else. “Even though her situation is different than ours, (education rights for women vs. a worldwide virus outbreak) I noticed that she was and millions of kids across the world right now are bored with their schools being shut down” Olesya comments. The differences are indeed stark, but we were able to gain some insight for the situation currently at hand. “Malala’s diary helped me understand the conflict from the perspective of a young mind such as mine, that sometimes could not be the most reliable but surely the most true or real in terms of feelings during these special situations” Mateo writes. By learning about what Malala went through, as a student who was not able to go to school, and by familiarizing ourselves with our own current situation as we continue to get updates day by day, we will be using each of our own individual experiences to document what is happening.
And it is because of her story, which she courageously decided to share, that we will share ours too. “It is like having a documentary that you can read.” as Mateo puts it. Why are we doing this; why record our day-to-day experience as we endure the outbreak? Because we, the youth, are living through a historical time. “I think it's important to document our lives in the moment… if we currently jotted down our daily lives with this coronavirus and wrote about how we can’t leave our house unless it's for groceries and showed it to our future kids or the next generation, they will be in awe of how we've gone through this,” explains Khalil. There is also an unmatched quality of what is recorded when done so in the moment. As Mia states; “relying on memory leaves room for holes and the mental rewriting of events, not to mention that the events can be completely blocked out from our memory if the events are traumatic. It’s also important if you take into consideration that a unified documentation of several people’s lives is built on individual stories -- the broader themes, events, emotions, and thoughts we all experience may not be as easily fleshed out with a single account, a single source. When in-depth documentation is collective, we are able to effectively present a larger-than-life shared experience.” Nevertheless, our goal is not to revolve what we record solely around COVID 19. Ashlee said it best when she described our documentation project as “Not entirely about the virus itself but also our everyday lives; the good and the bad.”
By Hailey (Youth Doc Workshop Teaching Assistant)