By Volunteer Adhithya Mohan, FHI Kochi
The novel coronavirus is spreading like a wildfire and has impacted almost every country on the earth. The pandemic is going to affect all of us in different ways, but its impact on the underprivileged children will be way more than on anyone else. The virus has so far resulted in less severe cases amongst the children but we all know that it’s going to decimate their lives in a lot of other ways.
Life of the less privileged children has become vulnerable because of this shape-shifting threat. Orphanages might not be receiving donations, volunteers and caregivers won’t be able to turn up because of the lockdown, the supplies that they used to receive would not be reaching them because it’s hard to get a vehicle pass in some cities.
And the problems don’t end here, the impact of this is going to affect the mental health of the children too. It’s hard to make the children understand why all of a sudden there are no visitors, why there is a shortage of everything, and why schools have been shut down all of a sudden. It takes a lot of time for children to process what’s exactly happening. There’s nothing to keep them engaged and that is the sheer difficulty that child care centers and orphanages might be facing right now.
Well, all of this is not going to end so soon. The miseries that they are facing will continue because even the privileged ones will face problems and that would restrain them from giving away donations that they used to give, schools will not open anytime soon and the underprivileged children obviously won’t be able to attend online classes due to limited resources and no volunteer is going to turn up anytime soon to help the children which in turn is indicating that the pandemic is going to cause a lot of trouble in the near future too.
This unprecedented situation has shown them a lot already but the worse is yet to come and all we can do is hope that they will stay positive and pass this arduous time with courage.
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