Kindness in the Time of COVID
From making facemasks for hospitals to making music to entertain neighbours, the COVID-19 crisis is sparking countless acts of generosity. Here are stories from around the world
‘We’re all in this together’: the pandemic has sparked an outpouring of heartwarming acts.
Jaime Coronel is not a doctor or a nurse. He hasn’t saved any lives or invented a vaccine. He’s an ordinary member of the public. But in his own way, like many others around the world, he helped to improve the lives of others during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Altruism takes many forms, as this year has shown, but it largely stems from a simple desire to help make things better. Indirectly, good deeds can also bring meaning to our lives in times of crisis and can make us feel a greater sense of connection with others, especially when we are starved of company.
Jaime’s story is one of many examples. It began with a chance discovery and ended with a desire to make a positive impact on children’s lives.
Jaime, who runs his family removal company in the Spanish city of Puertollano, came across a fancy-dress costume of Olaf – the goofy snowman from the Walt Disney fantasy film Frozen – while cleaning out the storage room in the early days of lockdown.
“I thought to myself, Let’s do some
thing silly,” he says, laughing as he recalls the day. “So I put it on. And when my four-year- old daughter Mara saw me, she asked to put on her costume of Elsa, the princess in the film. We spent all day hanging out dressed as characters from Frozen.”
At that time in Spain, every evening at 8pm people would go to their windows and balconies to clap and cheer the health workers who were putting their lives at risk on the front line of the pandemic.
“I decided that this would be a good time to take out my garbage while still dressed as Olaf,” says Jaime. When he did, he received a rousing ovation from his neighbours. And so a tradition was born.
Every day, just before 8pm, Jaime would take out the garbage wearing a different costume. One day he would be an Egyptian mummy, the next a dinosaur, or Freddy Krueger from A
THANKS TO HIS INSTAGRAM POSTS, JAIME HELPED TO BRING A SMILE TO A GLOBAL AUDIENCE
Nightmare on Elm Street, or a robot, or an Arab sheikh. He already had a store of costumes from carnival and Halloween parties, and when they were exhausted, he ordered more online; costumes were also donated to him by a company in Aragon, north-eastern Spain. He even made some himself, helped by Mara and Mara’s grandmother, a former seamstress.
Each time, he would receive rapturous applause from his neighbours
and then post a video on social media. Jaime did this for 29 days, and when lockdown rules were relaxed, allowing children to go outside, Mara joined him on his daily excursion. The two dressed up together and made a further nine trips. On the last day of their joint outings, local ambulance crews surprised Jaime by arriving to thank him for cheering people up, and they gave Mara some sweets.
By this time, thanks to his Instagram posts, Jaime was known around the world and had helped to bring a smile to a global audience.
“People on social media thanked me for doing it and making people feel good, at least for a while,” says Jaime proudly.
“Part of my motivation was my daughter and children in general,”
he says. “They are fragile and don’t understand what is happening. My daughter didn’t want to go out for walks, but she was happy to go out with her dad in costume.” Jaime hopes his actions helped other children to feel a little less scared about venturing into the outside world.
In France, two comedians took inspirat ion from the town criers of olden times to bring some human warmth to the locked- down inhabitants of their apartment block in Lyon.
Every evening the residents would gather on their balconies to hear Valéria Cardullo and Alex Repain announce requests for help or birthday wishes, or offer some puzzles to do.
“When we started, we didn’t think it would have such a big impact, but after a while there was a real spirit of solidarity,” recalls Alex.
Elsewhere, music proved a popular means of raising the spirits. In Budapest, members of the MAV Symphony Orchestra drove two cars mounted with loudspeakers around the city and surrounding area blasting out past performances for the benefit of those confined to home.
In Vienna, American musician Olivia Haynes decided to strum her ukulele in her apartment window to bring some light and fun into her neighbours’ lives. To her surprise, not only did she entertain them, but she also helped to build a sense of community.
“I love helping people come together, especially people who wouldn’t normally meet,” she says. As the days went on, some of her neighbours would come down to the courtyard just to listen to her play and afterwards they would chat together.
But it wasn’t just human beings who suffered the effects of isolation brought by lockdown. In Ireland, fisherman Jimmy Flannery realised that Fungie, the famous dolphin that has been living off the coast of Kerry since 1983, was suddenly deprived of the attention from his normal array of sightseers.
He noted how Fungie would speed over to fishing boats leaving the local port in hope of company or a treat.
“But they didn’t have time for him, they were too busy heading for the fishing grounds,” says Jimmy, who decided to pay a couple of visits a day to Fungie, just to keep him company. “I hope he appreciated it,” Jimmy says, laughing. “And I hope he hasn’t forgotten me now his admirers have returned.”
Apart from dealing with the spiritual effects of isolation, lockdown brought with it other challenges. For some, making sure they had enough food was a serious issue – and no more so than for those living in Australia’s remote outback.
Gary Frost, who owns a roadhouse in the Northern Territory, hit on perhaps the most extreme solution to the challenge of delivering food to those who needed it: as he has a pilot’s licence, he decided to fly meals out to people locked down in cattle stations at no extra charge.
“Nobody could go anywhere, so they were limited to how they got their food and refreshments. We thought we might do something to help them out a bit,” recalls Gary.
“We make pizzas anyway, so we thought we would fly them out, so people didn’t have to leave their properties. It’s something unique, I suppose. I don’t know of anyone else who has done it in the world.” Gary is keen to stress he didn’t do it as a commercial venture, but as “a friendly gesture to try and help people out”.
Young Parisian entrepreneur Maud Arditti was inspired by the experiences of her nearest and dearest to provide food for health workers. “A good number of my family and friends are doctors and work in hospitals,” she says. “I was talking to my aunt and discovered that hospital restaurants were often closed and five people could end up sharing a single plate of pasta.”
Maud began by making cakes and pizzas and small quiches for her local hospital, but soon realised she
A CALL FOR HELP ON SOCIAL MEDIA GARNERED A REMARKABLE RESPONSE
wouldn’t get far on her own. A call for help on social media garnered a remarkable response: in the end, around 1600 helpers were making cakes all over Paris to be sent to hospitals. Soon Maud’s Vos Gâteaux
(Your Cakes) initiative spread to other French cities.
“We were in a moment of standstill and I think there are three types of personalities in these moments,” ref lects Maud. “Those who are a
little paralysed, those who criticise everything that’s done… and those who are not afraid and tell themselves they’ll give all their energy with the means they have, to be able to help. With our cakes, we could feed and bring some sweetness to all our hospitals.”
Elsewhere, food for the needy arrived from unexpected sources. That included a group of female gondoliers in Venice, who delivered organic produce to the elderly, and a temporarily unemployed violinist from the Helsinki Philharmonic Orchestra who delivered food to pensioners by electric bike.
“It was a big thing for the people who received it, and so it became a big thing for me as well,” says Teppo
Ali-Mattila, one of many culture and sports workers in the city who offered their help to the elderly.
In Lisbon, a young Syrian couple, Ramia Abdalghani and Alan Ghumim, offered free food from their restaurant to local hospital workers. Having arrived in Portugal as refugees four years before, they were more than happy to help their new community.
“When you flee a war you feel the disaster, but you also realise who is there for you,” says Alan. “So in all things we do here in Portugal, we try to give back to the people who welcomed us with open arms.” One of those grateful hospital staff was nurse Nuno Delicado. “It was a big life lesson for all of us,” he says. “It
showed us that as a society we must be there for each other.”
A similar spirit inspired five Syrian women in Aberystwyth, Wales, who donated 100 meals to their local hospital to thank the health service for its work. “The people are very lovely here, it is very important to help them,” says Latifa, one of the women. “In these worrying times, we should all work together. I really care about our new community and I wanted to say thank you.”
One man in the UK gave the gift of food anonymously. A mystery donor in the Oxfordshire village of Denchworth bought fish and chips for every resident once a week through three months of lockdown.
“He doesn’t want to be the focus of attention for this, he thinks people like him who are fortunate to be in their situation should do something for their communities if at all possible,” says local publican Stephen Davidson, who was recruited to provide the meals.
The pandemic also demonstrated how ingenious we can all be given the chance. In particular, many people used their skills and imagination to create personal protective equipment for healthcare workers.
In the small city of Elda, south-east ern Spain, a group of women who stitch shoes in their own homes for a living switched to making thousands of masks for the nearby hospital. They used fabric provided by the hospital and rubber bands donated by a local business. Their efforts brought
THEIR EFFORTS BROUGHT A FLOOD OF REQUESTS FROM GROUPS WANTING TO DO THE SAME THING
a f lood of requests for information from groups all over Spain wanting to do the same thing.
Even children joined in with creating vital protective equipment. In Ireland, 14-year-old Conor Jean and his 11-year-old brother Daire set up a small facemask production line in their home in County Kildare using a 3D printer.
They even incorporated special design features so that the masks could be worn more easily by a doctor or nurse in glasses or goggles. “I couldn’t be prouder of these two boys,” commented their mother, Lorraine Duffy.
Perhaps the most kooky example of ingenuity came from Romanian shoemaker Grigore Lup, who unveiled a pair of shoes in European size 75. The idea was that wearers would be forced to keep 1.5 metres apart from others and thus ensure
social distancing. A pair takes the 55-year-old Transylvanian cobbler two days to make, using one square metre of leather.
A desire to care for the elderly, who are particularly at risk from the coronavirus, also got people thinking outside the box.
Take Tristan Van den Bosch, for example, an operations manager at a cleaning and maintenance company in Brussels. Driving to work one morning, he saw a man shouting at an elderly woman. The man was on the footpath, and the woman – his mother – was three storeys up, in a care home. Like many senior citizens, she was unable to receive visitors because of the
virus. Tristan thought to himself, We can help this man!
Work had all but dried up at Tristan’s company, which meant it had cranes standing idle at the depot. Why not use those cranes to lift people up, so they can get closer to their loved ones? And so Tristan began driving around Belgium in his crane, bringing families to the windows of relatives on the upper floors of care homes.
“OK, it cost us money,” Tristan says. “But in the end we’re happy that we were able to help people.”
In Brazil, staff at the Três Figueiras care home in Gravatai displayed similar ingenuity in creating an entirely
new way to safeguard elderly residents when they received visitors.
“We noticed that our senior residents were feeling sad,” says owner Luciana Brito. “And we thought they would be much happier if we found a way for them to hug their relatives.”
Inspired by a viral video showing a woman in the US using a plastic curtain to hug her mother, Luciana and her colleagues created a Túnel
do Abraço (Hug Tunnel) consisting of a large plastic sheet with arm holes, which was attached to one of the care home’s entrances. The arm holes also had plastic sleeves, allowing visitors to hold their loved ones without actually coming into direct contact with them.
“It was so gratifying to see them hugging each other,” says the home’s administrator, Rubia Santos.
When Valerie Mar t in, head of the Vi lanva care home near Lyon in France, heard how those in homes all over Europe were suffering from the virus, she decided on drastic action. “I said to myself, No. Not mine. My residents still have so much to live for,” she says. Valerie’s answer was to completely close the building and invite staff and nurses to join her in what she expected to be a three-week quarantine period.
Some 29 employees volunteered for what turned into a marathon of 47 days and nights, with 12 employees remaining for the entire time. And it paid off. At the end of the stint, when the national average of new cases had fallen dramatically and the gates of Vilanova were unlocked, coronavirus tests came back negative for all 106 residents.
The caregivers, who had named themselves “the happily confined”, left in a parade of cars, honking their horns on their way back to reunions with partners and children.
Valerie was hailed a hero for her efforts, but says it wasn’t such a huge sacrifice in the end. “It was a bit like
“WE THOUGHT THEY WOULD BE MUCH HAPPIER IF THEY COULD HUG THEIR RELATIVES”
entering a holiday camp,” she says, laughing. “Living in lockdown with 130 people is extremely rewarding.”
In the Netherlands, 150,000 elderly people in care homes or living alone at home were surprised to receive a colourful bouquet of f lowers on Good Friday. The initiative was led by Dutch rapper Ali B and organised by the country’s floriculture industry.
The bouquets were accompanied by a message of love and hope. “Loneliness has never come this
close,” said Ali. “Now it is your mother. Or the neighbour.”
And in France, Belgium, Luxembourg, the UK and Switzerland, elderly people in isolated care homes received notes of hope and happiness from total strangers, thanks to a group of ten cousins in France who launched the 1 Lettre 1 Sourire (One Letter, One Smile) website.
“We had feedback from people receiving the letters, saying how they were rays of sunshine in their daily life,” says co-founder Alienor Duron. “And we had feedback from people taking care of the elderly in these care homes, telling us how amazing this initiative was for them as well, seeing that they were supported like that. We’ve also had great feedback from the people writing the letters, telling us how it was something heartwarming for them.”
Another group particularly vulnerable to the pandemic were the homeless. In many places, public toilets were closed and homeless shelters temporarily shut down. Fewer people out and about meant fewer opportunities to make a little money selling newspapers or making music. And as Wilhelm Nadolny, head of the soup kitchen for homeless people behind the Berlin Zoo railway station puts it, “How do you ‘stay at home’ when you’re homeless?”’
In Berlin, around 2000 people officially live on the streets, although the figure is thought to be much higher. Nadolny’s kitchen had to close its doors, but it continued to serve sandwiches and hot drinks through a window to the street. “And despite all the problems, new kinds of solidarity emerged,” says Wilhelm.
One example was a special bus brandishing the slogan # Gemeinsam
FürBerlin (Together for Berlin), which toured the city delivering grocery packages to the homeless from 20 of Berlin’s supermarkets. And in many German cities so-called ‘ Gabenzäune’ (donation fences) started popping up – local fences on which people would hang bags containing food, hygiene
“PEOPLE RECEIVING THE LETTERS SAID THEY WERE A RAY OF SUNSHINE IN THEIR DAILY LIVES”
products and clothing for the homeless.
France saw the birth of the # PourEux (For Them) movement. Volunteers cooked meals at home, which were then delivered by other volunteers to those in need. “Everyone could help at their own level,” recalls Maxime Klimaszewski, a 28-year-old volunteer. “It didn’t take a lot of time or a lot of money, but it really helped the daily lives of a lot of people.”
Perhaps the stories that will linger longest in the memory are those that involved great personal sacrifice for the benefit of others. Take 15-yearold Jyoti Kumari, for instance, who cycled 1200 kilometres across India, carrying her disabled father on the back of her bike.
Their ordeal began in New Delhi, where her father, Mohan Paswan, earned a living driving an auto rickshaw before being injured and losing his job. All non-essential travel had been banned, but their landlord was demanding rent, which they couldn’t afford to pay, and he was threatening to evict them, recalls Jyoti with tears in her eyes.
So Jyoti decided the only course of action was for her and her father to spend their remaining money on a cheap bike and return to their home village of Darbhanga in Bihar state.
Jyoti pedalled for ten days in searing temperatures, living on food and water given by strangers. For two days there was only enough for her father and she had to remain hungry.
“It was a difficult journey,” she says now with great understatement. “The weather was too hot, but we had no choice. I had only one aim in mind and that was to reach home.”
By the time the pair finally reached their destination, news of their journey had spread and Jyoti had become famous, but she says fame was the last
thing on her mind when she began the journey. “It was a decision taken in desperation,” she says.
The potential of a simple gesture to capture the public’s imagination in a time of crisis was illustrated when the then aged 99-year- old British army veteran Captain Tom Moore decided to raise some money for health workers and patients.
Inspired by the excellent treatment he had received in hospital for skin cancer and a broken hip in 2018, in early April he pledged to complete 100 laps of his garden, using his walking frame for support, before his 100th birthday at the end of the month. His aim was to raise a modest £1000.
But news of Captain Tom’s efforts soon reached the ears of a nation desperate for some good news amid the lockdown. He was featured in newspapers and on TV, and even teamed up with the singer Michael Ball and a health-workers’ choir to record a charity version of ‘You’ll Never Walk Alone’ (famous as the anthem of Liverpool Football Club), becoming the oldest person ever to top the charts in the UK.
On April 16, Captain Tom completed his 100 laps ahead of schedule, having raised more than £17 million. “I never dreamt I would be involved in an occasion such as this,” he announced.
But this was just the beginning. Captain Tom mania showed no sign of abating as people paid tribute to his efforts in different ways, such as knitting dolls and painting murals. By the time he reached his 100th birthday on April 30, he had raised nearly £ 33 million. He was honoured with a flypast by Britain’s air force, and the public sent more than 150,000 birthday cards.
His response? “To all those people who are finding it difficult at the moment… the sun will shine on you again, and the clouds will go away.”
In honour of his remarkable achievement, Captain Tom was promoted to the rank of Honorary
Colonel, granted the Freedom of the City of London and awarded a knighthood on the recommendation of the Prime Minister. The money he raised was used to provide comfort and care for National Health Service workers.
“I’ve never been someone that’s sat around,” he laughs, adding that he enjoyed the challenge.
“The first lap was the hardest, but after that I just got used to it.”
And he believes the secret for his success – and also his long life – is simple: “It’s all about having the right mindset. You’ve got to be optimistic and to think that things will get better.”