Virtual meetings for positive lifestyle during Covid19 Pandemic
Apart from its regular activities, members of Nepali American Center (NAC) started year 2020 with renewed fervor after successfully organizing Nepali Mela 2019, a historic event in Chicago. Its board members showed greater zeal for the need of accelerating activities in raising funds for building a long-cherished Nepalese (should we remove Nepalese?) facility in Chicago. This new / rekindled vow dealt a serious impairment shortly after. As early as March 2020, the spread of Covid19 pandemic needed a national lockdown to safeguard the health and welfare of the people in the USA and abroad. Offices, business, educational institutions, transportations, and everything else were shut down. Our new year resolutions and other planned families’ activities encountered abrupt uncertainty. This also hindered all our daily routine life indefinitely.
Many businesses started closing. People’s mobility came to a grinding halt, and they started panicking for daily supply of food and other household essentials goods. Shops selling daily consumer and household products began to have empty shelves as people began grabbing items wherever they could find. Everything became chaotic. Our only way of remaining in touch with community members was limited to phone calls and evolving pandemic news across the country and the world through TV and other media channels. We were constrained avoiding the crowds as much as possible even in walking out in the nature. All of us were perplexed with the fear and potential threats to life without any knowledge on how quickly the contagious virus may spread and infect. None of us feel any good with these restrictions and may never forget.
Fortunately, how to deal with this situation to prevent from infection slowly started to emerge. Social distancing, use of masks, washing hands and minimizing exposers were advised by the scientists and doctors. But the most baffling thing witnessed even in such a terrifying time was to see a lot of people not trusting the potential threats of the pandemic in its face value calling it hoax while witnessing ever increasing number of people admitted in the hospital affected by Covid day by day and growing number of deaths in front of their own eyes.
Apart from interruption of conventional working in office premises, attending educational institutions, operating businesses, it also brought our regular and occasional social, cultural, and religious gatherings to a halt. While all of us were stung and fearful from it with unknown implications and health danger, the economic challenges put all of us also in a precarious condition with constant anxiety.
Life for all of us, like everyone around the world, came to a complete standstill. This has brought us to a standstill with uncertainty in our lives never experienced before. It has threatened families and communities with possible personal and social disorders. By the start of March, it forced us to live our life like in a home arrest. On the one hand we are cut out from everything that was our normal and on the other hand we are struggling to readjust everything for a new normal that nobody knows well. While it was a time of great confusion, it was also very important for all of us to be patient to keep ourselves out of chaos in order to come out of this threat imperviously.
Until then, we must be patiently mindful to adapt for a healthy and balanced daily routine. Among others, inspirations gathered from learning yoga and practicing spirituality will certainly be valuable. Perhaps, God is allowing us this time to pay attention to learn yoga and spirituality and introduce such things in our daily routine permanently. We know from our long ancient spiritual history as well from modern practice that those who practice it as part of their life can face physical and emotional challenges in life with strength and grace.
At such a terrifying time, we have no choice except stopping the monthly puja, children’s classes, yoga activities and other planned activities, which was beyond our thoughts. Therefore, NAC volunteers started discussing ideas how can we engage the community somehow? We decided to use technology such as zoom, Facebook, viber etc. to offer virtual programs until the situation resumes normal. Our virtual activities included the following.
We requested everyone to help us and participate to keep everyone in the community physically and mentally sound as best as possible. We believe these activities attracted many people with different interest to attend these activities at the comfort of their home. We think it helped to fill the vacuum created by the pandemic preventing organizing physical events at normal times.
So far almost the entire Nepali community in Chicago are safe and mindful to safely arrive at the end of the pandemic for reclaiming full normalcy. We certainly believe these activities provided a significant advantage although we cannot exactly quantify it.
