ALISA'S STORY
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Hello! My name is Alisa, I am 14 years old and I live in Auckland, the biggest city in New Zealand, the land of the long white cloud. We are a tiny tiny country located in the Pacific Ocean and we are known for our Kiwi (the bird), volcanoes and breathtaking views, sheep, and agricultural products such as kiwifruit and Manukau honey. I came to this beautiful pure country when I was 7 years old from Beijing, China. Although I wasn’t born here, for the past 7 years this has been my home and I really have a deep relationship with this place.
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I feel like we New Zealanders united really well during the Covid-19 pandemic. For example, at the beginning of quarantine around 48 hours before the whole of New Zealand went into lockdown, people were swarming the supermarkets and shopping malls like angry bees trying to get enough resources for themselves and their families. Now, in the 48 hours before lockdown happened in other countries, people started to get very nasty and mean towards each other because of small things like toilet paper. There was only ‘I’ in the fight and not ‘we’. However, in New Zealand, I feel like those types of events would not occur as frequently because neighbours were looking after each other and getting different food and water for each other to make sure that they’re okay. Even though we are now back to school and things are normal again, we are still making sure that the visitors from overseas coming into New Zealand are checked regularly and quarantined. I think we are doing a great job even though there are sometimes a few slip-ups.
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About my contribution to the Covid-19 fight. Unfortunately, I did not invent a vaccine, I didn’t cure the patients in the hospitals, I didn’t ‘do’ anything really at all. But I did follow the rules of what the government told us to do. When lockdown level 4 occurred, I had to leave from a lovely and entertaining school camp. My whole class and I were devastated. but we knew we had to come back from our camp destination Opotiki Bay (the south of Auckland). We were allowed to go outside for walks during alert Level 4 lockdown but for the whole entire month, my area of activity was my house and my backyard. I did not step foot into the outside world at all as we did not want to introduce the risk of getting infected by COVID-19 to others and ourselves.
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In lockdown level 3 we still did not step outside our property as the cases were still pretty high for such a small country like New Zealand. We remained at home and only went outside once a week in our car. Here comes alert level 2! Children were allowed to go back to schools and their education and things just started to seem normal again... I still did not go to school like the rest of the children in New Zealand. You can call my family and me ‘paranoid’ but we did it because we were still not exactly sure and we wanted to observe the situation for a while in case the second wave of confirmed cases hit. You never know, it’s better to be safe than sorry. I had to make a lot of sacrifices and there were many days and nights where I questioned if it was really safe in New Zealand and I could go outside again. I thought I was being stupid as many of my friends who were going to parties, enjoying themselves and turning their life back to normal. However, I stayed inside for an extra 3 weeks in level 2 and after a while, I was finally able to go back to school! I was overjoyed at this. Even though my friends still question me about not going to school, I am actually really grateful for not going, as I figured out that I was more productive at home than at school since there was nothing to distract me!
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I feel like that there are a lot of heroes I want to thank for helping us New Zealanders get through this pandemic. So I would like to thank the doctors and nurses working in the hospitals that were constantly on shifts trying to help victims of Covid-19 in the hospitals to feel better. Early in lockdown level 4, there was an outburst of Covid-19 cases in Queenstown and many nurses and doctors were having to fight to keep up with the number of patients in the hospitals due to Covid-19. Many people have perished during this time period, but without consistent efforts of the doctors and nurses in New Zealand, I think more people would have died.
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And this is my Covid-19 story!
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