The Times Herald (Norristown, PA)
LILITHA JIPHETHU, 11, SOUTH AFRICA
CHICAGO »These are children of the pandemic.
In the far-north Canadian town of Iqaluit, one boy has been glued to the news to learn everything he can about the coronavirus. A girl in Australia sees a vibrant future, tinged with sadness for the lives lost. A Rwandan boy is afraid the military will violently crack down on its citizens when his country lifts the lockdown.
There is melancholy and boredom, and a lot of worrying, especially about parents working amid the disease, grandparents suddenly cut off from weekend visits, friends seen only on a video screen.
Associated Press reporters around the world asked kids about living with the virus and to use art to show us what they believe the future might hold. Some sketched or painted, while others sang, danced ballet, built with LEGOs. A few just wanted to talk.
Their worries are matched in many places by resilience and hope, for a life beyond the virus.
This is life under lockdown, through the eyes of children.
Lilitha Jiphethu has made a ball out of discarded plastic grocery bags to keep her amused during the lockdown. She and her four siblings play with that makeshift ball almost every day in a small scrub of ground that they’ve fenced off outside their home.
The 11-year-old screams as her brothers throw the ball at her. Then she laughs, picks up the ball and throws it back at them. This happens again and again.
Lilitha’s house is like hundreds of others in this informal settlement of families just outside Johannesburg, South Africa’s biggest city. It’s made of sheets of scrap metal nailed to wooden beams.
Like many children under lockdown, she misses her friends and her teachers and especially misses playing her favorite game, netball. But she understands why school is closed and why they are being kept at home.
“I feel bad because I don’t know if my family (can catch) this coronavirus,” Lilitha says. “I don’t like it, this corona.”
She prefers singing to drawing and chooses to sing a church song in her first language, Xhosa, as her way of describing the future after the pandemic. She misses her choir but takes comfort in the song’s lyrics.
She smiles as she begins. Her sweet voice drifts through the one-room home.
“I have a friend in Jesus,” she sings. “He is loving and he’s not like any other friend.
“He is not deceitful. He is not ashamed of us.
“He is truthful, and he is love.” —Bram Janssen and Gerald Imray
HUDSON DRUTCHAS, 12, UNITED STATES
Hudson Drutchas waited and worried as his mom and sister recovered from coronavirus, quarantined in their rooms. Just a few weeks earlier, he was a busy sixth-grader at Lasalle II, a public elementary school in Chicago. Then the governor issued a stay-at-home order.
Now, the soft-spoken 12-year-old receives school assignments by computer and looks to dog Ty and cat Teddy for comfort.
“Since I don’t get to see my friends a lot, they’re kind of my closest friends,” he says. He giggles when Teddy, now 9, snarls. “He sometimes gets really grumpy because he’s an old man. But we still love him a lot.”
He knows he’s fortunate, with a good home and family to keep him safe, but it’s difficult to be patient. “It makes me feel sad that I am missing out on a part of my childhood,” he says.
When he draws his version of the future, Hudson makes a detailed pencil sketch showing life before the coronavirus and after.
The world before looks stark and full of pollution in the drawing. In the future, the city is lush with clear skies and more wildlife and trees.
“I think the environment might kind of, like, replenish itself or maybe grow back,” Hudson says.
Still, he feels uncertain: “I’m worried about just how life will be after this. Like, will life change that much?”
ALEXANDRA KUSTOVA, 12, RUSSIA
Hard times can have a silver lining. Alexandra Kustova has come to understand this during this pandemic.
Now that all her studies are conducted online, she has more time for her two favorite hobbies — ballet and jigsaw puzzles. The 12-year-old also able to spend more time with her family and help her grandmother, who lives in the same building, two floors down at their apartment in Yekaterinburg, a city in the Urals, a mountain range that partly divides Europe and Asia.
Together, they take time to water tomato plants and enjoy one another’s company. Time has slowed down.
“Before that I would have breakfast with them, rush out to school, come back, have dinner, go to ballet classes, come back — and it would already be time to go to bed,” Alexandra says.
Ballet has been her passion since she was 8. Now she does classes at home and sends videos of her drills to the trainer, who gives her feedback.
The dance she shows for an AP reporter begins slowly and finishes with leaps in the air.
Just like the pandemic, Alexandra says, it is “sad in the beginning and then it becomes joyful.”
“I believe the end is joyful because we must keep on living, keep on growing,” she says.