Our New Normal
by Shawn Evans V. Quiming
Malolos City, Bulacan
This pandemic has truly affected our daily lives. Even a thirteen-year-old grade seven like me felt its “curse”, the classes have been canceled in all levels with no advice when it will resume again.
This causes a student like me, to change my daily routine. The first few days of the Enhanced Community Quarantine (ECQ) felt carefree as I can play games nonstop; even sleep in the morning and wake up in the afternoon, this lockdown really destroyed our body clock.
However, that doesn’t stay for too long, my cousin Ate Anne, a Registered Nurse at Jose Reyes Memorial Medical Center assigned me a task.
Every day when I wake up, I need to do some house chores like wiping with disinfectant on all the doorknobs and furniture to prevent the virus from sticking and spreading inside our house.
I also have an online Kumon ( a Department of Education online class ) every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday. And most of all I am not allowed to go outside the house.
If my family needs to go out to buy some food or go on duty (my Tita Gina and Ate Anne are both medical frontliners) they need to wear a face mask, face shield and always check if they have alcohol with them.
And when they are back before they can enter our house, they first need to clean their selves by taking a bath (we have a bathroom outside the house), their clothes must be soaked in water with bleach. Then everything that they bought and brought with them must be sprayed or wiped with anti-bacterial wipes and Lysol, only then they can enter our house.
As much as possible we do not accept any visitors to our house. We don’t know what we are dealing with and who is carrying it. So for us to be safe, visitors or people who are coming to our house must stay outside. As prevention is always better than cure.
And now that the ECQ will be lifted and we are going to be placed under General Community Quarantine GCQ meaning we can go back to our daily routine, our family rules will still remain as we now living in what we call, “The New Normal.” And this is our new normal.
