It’s five am, and I am up sleepless. Woke up restless with heavy stomachache, gasping for air, unwell, body aching. No, it’s not Covid. After spending two beautiful months ´exiled ´into wilderness, I came back to the city, to Rio de Janeiro.

Within a few hours, my husband started having his regular allergic reactions (something he had completely forgotten about in the last two months), my daughter fell prey to itchy skin and UTI symptoms. My digestion immediately deteriorated, making me feel pain, foggy-headed, lethargic. Immediately, our sleep became restless, our energy levels dropped, we became anxious & unwell. …

As we enter the sixths month of our fight against the strange enemy, I can’t help but pull my notes from healthy policy and public health classes out, in an attempt to process and put our current situation in context. Immediately, I come across the definition of health, coined in 1948 as ‘a state of complete physical, mental, and social well-being and not merely the absence of disease or infirmity’ by the World Health Organization.

Asides from the definition, I am reminded of the great world of difference that exists between the concept of health in conventional versus traditional medicine, the one we had finally started welcoming into our health systems, one slow step at a time. Why? We had realized that conventional medicine was leading us in the wrong direction. Yes, it had accomplished great advanced in life-saving drugs and technologies, but it had started taking away our autonomy, our body’s innate ability for self-healing. …

I was a young idealist, aspiring to contribute to a better world when I moved to Washington D.C. from the West Coast to pursue a career in International Development. I had just finished my BA in Health Psychology, when I received my acceptance letter into the Johns Hopkins School of International Studies Master’s Program to be part of the first cohort of health policy studies, funded by the Gates Foundation.

As our class grappled to figure out how countries and international organizations could best coordinate policies to work on and resolve increasingly global health issues, one important theme kept coming up time and again. Given the strong focus of our school on economics, the idea that markets could create the best resource allocation mechanism for just about every commodity, was prevailing. But even the most libertarian professors placed health in a very unique category. Healthcare has many positive externalities that cannot be quantified by market forces alone; and the assumptions inherent to a perfect functioning of a market fail in healthcare: mainly due to the asymmetry of information between those that supply and demand that makes healthcare allocation highly inefficient. Why? In a perfect market situation, the consumer would need to have sufficient knowledge to make his/her decisions as a consumer for efficiency and fair price stabilization. But in healthcare, the customer cannot make an educated decision, because those that supply, i.e. doctors and pharmacists, possess information we the consumer cannot fully understand or check. …

For the last couple of weeks, I’ve gotten myself into many uncomfortable arguments about the lockdown, data analysis, use of masks with the intention of making sense of this new life we are supposed to make work. As I found myself deeper into the arguments but further from any consensus, I looked deeper inside to figure out the reasons for being unable to agree on any of my friend’s and colleague’s convincing arguments. I finally realized that my opposition was not about the measures per se; it went beyond them.

Before all of this happened, we as a humanity were very close to breaking free from all of the lies that were told to us, on the road to regaining control of our true essence, step by step coming together to construct a new reality we had envisioned. We saw straight through the lies of religion and the centuries of dark ages that finally started burning down under our scrutiny. We questioned the veracity of our media, that fed us fake news and had been manipulated by large corporations. We cried out in unison as we saw our forest and jungles burning down and our ocean life choking up with trash of our inhumane greed. We condemned the agricultural and pharmaceutical conglomerates for feeding us toxic foods, poisoning our water supply; we started looking for holistic medicine to replace drugs were created with the intention of keeping us unhealthy and hooked. Our latest presidential elections made it clear to us that democratic institutions were highly flawed, that corruption had penetrated into every aspect of our governance structures. We were waking up to our consciousness. We were uniting in our outcry for a new world that would be different, where we would have a chance at freedom, a life that would be ours to choose.

Then out of the blue, right as we were about to make some really important choices, and cut through all the vails, the virus attacked. Whether it was real or manmade, is irrelevant. Whether there is a conspiracy theory explaining its orchestration or not, is a futile discussion. The virus is real. And its out there. Uncontrollable, unpredictable, and fatally dangerous. We hid at home, waiting for it to go away, watching our screens as the numbers kept rising. We watch in grotesque detail the elderly grasping for their last breaths, we see them being buried in mass graves, we watch the numbers grow in dismay. We stay at home. We lose our jobs. We give up on our dreams. We put on our masks. And we carefully wait and listen to everything that’s said to make sure we don’t miss any of the lifesaving instructions. …

This time of the year is an emotional rollercoaster for me: April 23rd and April 24th, for completely different reasons, have a powerful significance for me of remembering and reconnecting to my ancestry. My beloved grandmother’s birthday — a day of remembering someone in love with life and unwavering sense of inner power. Followed by a grimness of the Armenian Genocide Remembrance Day. This year, as I was sharing with my 4-year old pictures of Rita, the great grandma she’d never met, and contemplating whether it was time to also show her the documentary I had made about the genocide survivors, I for the first time realized the importance of the proximity of those days. Surrounded with news of the pandemic and the frustrations of the lockdown, I felt such a painful urge to bring her back, to feel her unwavering uplifting energy that made everyone around her feel like nothing could ever go wrong. …

Yesterday, as I posted a ´very´ controversial article on Facebook about Sweden’s less-than-strict response to the virus, I knew I’d get some negative comments. What I didn’t realize is how personal some people would take my opinion, nor how serious of a backlash I’d get. In an effort to explain my dissenting opinion, I decided I owe everyone, myself including, a real explanation of the reasons for my disagreement.

My motivation for questioning the current draconian lockdown policies is not in an aim to belittle the seriousness of the situation. Nor does it suggest a defense of the economy in favor of human life. On the contrary, I started questioning these strict measures after seeing how badly they are ALREADY affecting real people around me: with hunger, domestic violence, job loss, social unrest and similar problems, that are on the rise. While in some countries, a strict lockdown might be warranted, by applying very strict measures for everyone around the world indiscriminately, we are condemning half of the world population to starvation and poverty. The lockdown is rather elitist in its nature, in my opinion. Here, in Brazil (where I currently reside), where millions live in the slums, on the streets, lockdown is not only NOT an option, but shear suicide. For those people, staying at home, literally means starving. While it may seem that we are saving more lives from an immediate threat right now, millions of lives will be lost in the medium to long-term as a result of economic depression, social unrest, and psychological distress. The total number of people we lose to the very measures we are currently implementing may be far greater than the number of people we fear will perish from the virus. They just won’t be so in our face, nor will we hear about them on the news in such excruciating detail as we are following the chronicles of the Coronvirus. …

As the world turns a calendar page to yet another month of this unwavering crisis, some of us have been in a lockdown for two weeks, some for a month, and others even longer. Daunting and endless as this confinement might seem, an even more frustrating question keeps coming up. How was our life different before? Were we free from the dark internal demons that are now haunting us, staring us straight in the face?

Start with confinement. Bound to our house, waking up every morning to the sameness reminiscent of a house arrest, unable to get out, scared to step outside, bored out of our minds, our only hope is that someone/something will end our misery soon. It’s always someone else that’s responsible for our well-being. We never had the audacity to be the protagonists of our own creations. Externally we had a myriad of distractions: our careers, making ends meet, social life, goals. After all we were going somewhere, right? Or were we? How free were we before this virus gave us a pause? …

Women’s Day Paradox

On the surface International women’s days is about expressing appreciation for and celebrating women’s beauty. But just as with our female nature, this day is much more complex than what it seems. Though a celebration, it has a bitter taste to it. Would we need this day if women had their way on all the other days of the year? Why celebrate the superficial appreciation if one cannot accept the not-so-pretty messages that we as women have to share, if our voices continue to be suppressed, and our collective call for change remains unheard.

Today, for a change, I’d like to wish us all the courage to embrace and appreciate the women that are hiding under the beautiful shell, with all the paradoxes they bring forth with them. We can be beautiful AND powerful at the same. Being one does NOT take the other away. A woman can be a housewife with a sex appeal, because being a mother and wife, does not and should NOT take away our desire to be seen. …