Aquarium
My friends Jenn and Haley were essential workers during the Covid19 Pandemic. During that time we bought a goldfish.
(That fish is dead now)
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Jenn
Former Starbucks Employee
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Haley
Former Starbucks Employee
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Kohaku
Goldfish
“I’m–my chest is getting tighter and tighter. I feel weak. I feel really sick to my stomach. My head is feeling fuzzy... and I was like, oh this is happening to me too. I could barely get out of bed. I developed pneumonia from COVID. I’d be alone at night and wonder if I was going to die. I wanted my mom. It was lonely. It was a really really rough time. My job gave me catastrophe pay for ten days rather than the whole month I was sick. Because apparently you’re only supposed to have COVID for ten days and then you’re better. But even to this day my lungs hurt a lot, especially if I talk for long periods of time.”
— Jenn
“I remember at the beginning of the pandemic how everyone was talking about essential workers being the ones who prop up the economy. And yet to this day the same essential workers have been berated by the anti-mask block. They’ve been consistently cut hours and cut benefits due to claims of the pandemic harming the economy. And I think it’s made a lot of people realize that the system doesn’t work at all. It doesn’t. It works for the top like 0.01 percent of billionaires who, throughout the pandemic, actually made billions of dollars rather than lose any while people died. So the pandemic made a lot of people realize that the system that we work in not just as a country, but on a global scale, is not meant for us. The Mississippi government has continuously put forward this idea that we’re fine when we are not. We’ve had some of the highest rates of COVID deaths and transmissions throughout the pandemic consistently.
— Haley
Oral History
haley’s words