The College Hill Independent Volume 40 Issue 8

the VOLUME 40 ISSUE 8 17 APRIL 2020

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CITIES IN NONEXISTENT SPACE Performing Pauline Oliveros over Zoom

AMAZON STRIKES

HUMAN HEART

Warehouse workers inspire walkouts across the country

On Christa McAuliffe, Teacher In Space

Indy

the

From The Editors

Cover

I’d like to tell you how sure I am as though things possess certainty, as though I have learned to surrender. The walls between my sadness and the world’s sadness are thinner than before. I’ve taken to watching the wedge of sky and grass outside my window. How between the sun breaking day and the moon closing night, I have forgotten about all kinds of light. How it looks in and suggests, it is time for a walk.

Computer Love Ambika Miglani

News 02

Week in Shared Enemies Alan Dean

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On Moria Island Emily Rust

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Foreign Correspondents Victoria Caruso & Gemma Sack

And soon, tendrils and blooms will find their way across this wall, the empty sidewalks, even the dandelions that will refuse to pull back from the? composed lawn. I want to tell you of the wings we’re growing now, just as deeply as the roots that must have chosen by now, just waiting. I want to remember how some things have less to do with weight, than lightness, just as I’m starting to catch this murmuring of birdsong. That this day exact has little to do with what I make use of, but what I am elated by.

That I will never forget what it is like to ache for a sprawl of ocean or the hot metallic scent of wandering a city.

Arts 03

Cities in Nonexistent Space Seamus Hubbard Flynn

And the way that I will hobble when I get to greet everything that has drawn inwards. For now, I have the frost holding up the brittle grass and branches, just beginning to soften. For now, I can make use of the light emptying in my room. It can only begin to describe everything I want to hold, once my windows are open.

Ephemera 06, 08, 18

, , It s Not About Where I m From, , It s About Where I Am Ethan Murakami

Features 07

Sitting Places Maddie Mahoney

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The Challenger Bowen Chen

Literary 13

The Breakers Olivia Kan-Sperling

Science+Tech 5

Amazon Strikes Bilal Memon

X 17

Afterlife Bank Note Helen Yu

MISSION STATEMENT

STAFF

The College Hill Independent is a Providence-based publication written, illustrated, designed, and edited by students from Brown and RISD. We are committed to publishing politically engaged and accessible work. While the Indy is financed by Brown University, we hold ourselves accountable to our readers across the Providence community. The Indy rejects content that explicitly or implicitly perpetuates racism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia, xenophobia, ableism and/or classism.

WEEK IN REVIEW Emily Rust | NEWS Anchita Dasgupta Peder Schaefer Tristan Harris | METRO Ricardo Gomez Miles Guggenheim Deb Marini | ARTS Zachary Barnes Eve O’Shea Isabelle Rea | FEATURES Audrey Buhain Mia Pattillo Nick Roblee-Strauss | SCIENCE + TECH Bilal Memon Izzi Olive Andy Rickert | LITERARY Catherine Habgood Star Su | EPHEMERA Liana Chaplainm Sindura Sriram | X Jacob Alabab-Moser Ethan Murakami | LIST Ella Comberg XingXing Shou Cate Turner | STAFF WRITERS Alana BaeR Leela Berman Mara Cavallaro Uwa Ede-Osifo Eduardo Gutiérrez Peña Evie Hidysmith Kaela Hines Muram Ibrahim Anabelle Johnston Jennifer Katz Emma Kofman Evan Lincoln Zach Ngin Jorge Palacios Nell Salzman Issra Said Kion You | COPY EDITORS Josephine Bleakley Muskaan Garg Sarah Goldman Marina Though this list is not exhaustive, the Indy strives to address Hunt Christine Huynh Seth Israel Thomas Patti Ella Spungen | DESIGN EDITORS Daniel these systems of oppression by centering the voices, opinions, Navratil Ella Rosenblatt | DESIGNERS Anna Brinkhuis Amos Jackson Kathryn Li Katherine Sang and efforts of marginalized people in Providence and beyond. | ILLUSTRATIONS EDITOR Eliza Macneal ILLUSTRATORS Sylvia Atwood Leslie Benavides Natasha Brennan Bella Carlos Ryn Kang Sophia Meng Sandra Moore Pia Mileaf-Patel Claire The Indy is constantly evolving: we are always working to Schlaikjer Floria Tsui Veronica Tucker Katrina Wardhanna | BUSINESS Caín Yepez Abby Yuan make our staff and content more inclusive. Though our editing | WEB Ashley Kim | SOCIAL MEDIA Muskaan Garg | SENIOR EDITORS Ben Bienstock Ella process provides an internal structure for accountability, we Comberg Olivia Kan-Sperling Chris Packs Tara Sharma Tiara Sharma Cate Turner Wen Zhuang always welcome letters to the editor. | MANAGING EDITORS Matt Ishimaru Sara Van Horn Alex Westfall | MVP Matt Ishimaru

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VOL 40 ISSUE 08

@THEINDY_TWEETS

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S h n a i r k e e d e En w em ies

BY Alan Dean ILLUSTRATION Alex Westfall DESIGN Daniel Navratil

Of the many common turns of phrase flipped upside down by the current global pandemic, few have become as utterly meaningless as “what’s the deal with airplane food?” As we now find ourselves several weeks into a worldwide (if piecemeal) lockdown, global travel has come to a screeching halt. This is in no small part due to the wave of restrictions and bans put in place by governments around the world, from China to Ecuador. What distinguishes the responses to the coronavirus along borders and at points of transit from past crises, however, besides their massive scale, is the unprecedented and inverted direction of these measures. In clamping down largely on travelers moving between and coming from wealthy Western countries, these limitations have shattered the Global Passport Power Rank in a matter of days. Unlike the usual external threats of terrorism, crime, and migration, the virus and its social effects show even less regard for the geopolitical order than they do for society on the micro-level, refusing to conform to the familiar patterns of control that police the movement of goods and people.

As Homeland Security Today reported on March 13, the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria, a source of global panic several years past its prime, has through its al-Naba newsletter issued a travel advisory of its own.

The Caliphate, claiming territory across the Middle East, Southeast Asia, and North and West Africa, will likely see enforcement of these rules limited to the increasingly small amount of land in Syria it actually controls, and has instead targeted these advisories towards would-be martyrs headed overseas. Militants are strongly cautioned not only to practice good hygiene like covering sneezes and coughs, but also to refrain from any ‘business travel’ in the near future to “the Land of the Epidemic,” Western Europe. This development thus adds acts of terrorism to the long list of happenings crushed under the boot of social distancing.

The Islamic State has in fact kept a close eye on the coronavirus pandemic for some time now—al-Naba and analogous propaganda outlet Quraysh Media have been disseminating regular reports since January, interspersed with their typical coverage. Through this journalistic practice emerges yet another peculiar parallel with the Western state and media complex’s response to the virus, insofar as it draws an inextricable link between China, its government, and the appearance and spread of the novel coronavirus, adding new dimensions to the Caliphate’s public stance towards one of its many enemies.

As the pandemic has evolved, so too has the Islamic State’s tone towards China. This attitude bizarrely parallels, for better and worse, the coverage of ‘reputable’ mainstream media. Quraysh’s prophetic declarations of “China: coronavirus” and “A promise is a debt we must not forget,” despite the bombastic

prose, mirror President Trump and his followers’ punishment from God Almighty.” Curiously enough, insistence on using the phrase ‘China virus’ in their however, this is quickly countered by a reminder that hostility towards China. Likewise, al-Naba has echoed the “interconnected” structure of the modern world the assertion that in China “The real numbers for the “would facilitate the transfer of disease and epidemics,” dead and the ill are many times what they announced,” and militants should thus be most concerned with a claim that has found itself squarely in the middle of “seek(ing) help from God Almighty to avoid illness and the xenophobic narrative developing around the virus’ keep it away from their countries.” spread. From al-Naba to The New York Times, pundits The coronavirus pandemic has created all manner have conveniently nestled the coronavirus pandemic of strange bedfellows (or lack thereof, with the majority into a preexisting and deeply rooted discourse of of the world’s population confined to no bed but their Sinophobia. By blaming the virus’ spread primarily on own) Both in politics and ideology, the Islamic State’s the Chinese political system, this discourse keeps the response is no exception—in fact, it seems that the problem ‘over there’ and absolves our own leaders of Islamic State and the United States have taken the responsibility. idiom of “sleeping with the enemy” unprecedentedly Both media complexes have centered in this far. While it is almost certain that this union will not argument the Chinese government’s policies in the lead to any form of reconciliation, critical observers Xinjiang region, which have been widely described as should be taking note of the unexpected alignment of violating the cultural and religious rights of the Muslim Western establishment and religious extremist media Uyghur population. As al-Naba wrote in February, discourse surrounding China. Ultimately, it is an it may seem plainly evident that “this epidemic is a amusing coincidence that the overlap of equally biased but distinctly warped historical perspectives on China has left both camps so enamored with this simple yet dishonest narrative. Such coincidences, however, emerging in a time of crisis that has already revealed a great number of our society’s basic ‘truths’ to be hollow and arbitrary, have significant value despite their absurdity. What they offer, beyond much needed excuses to laugh, is yet another chance to drag into the light the latent extremism that sits firmly at the core of our own political norm.

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THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

WEEK IN REVIEW

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BY Seamus Flynn ILLUSTRATION Jessy Minker DESIGN Ella Rosenblatt

CITIES IN NONEXISTENT SPACES

I was late for the soundcheck. Fifteen minutes after would never happen again. Soon, the hour-long soundthe hour, I was still seeking the perfect position for check ended, the designated hour passed to begin my computer at eye-level in a low-ceilinged nook off performing the opera, and the hosts of the call momenof my parents’ bedroom, assembling my flute, and tarily screen-shared a typed label indicating such. But attaching a printed image of a fish to my sweater using the scattered soundscape did not change drastically, clothespins. Once I had properly assembled my perfor- with countless performers opening their microphones mance space, I entered the Zoom call, worried that I briefly to yell lines in character or insert a lick on the had missed the start of programming. What I found saxophone or synthesizer. Twenty minutes into the instead was an unmoderated space of 200 people performance, someone asked in the chat window, making noise. I asked in the chat window if we were “When do we start?” The rest of us were excited to reply testing our sounds in any designated order, and others that it was already happening. had the same question (it went unanswered). Every few seconds, someone would unmute their microphone +++ and say the likes of “Hi, I’m in San Francisco, can you hear the looped sample of bells that I’m playing right I won’t dwell upon COVID-19 here, but, as you may now?” or “Can you hear the rain outside my window?” have guessed, this experience sprang up in part or “Where are you calling from?” from the current context of physical isolation. This One person yelled, “Everyone be sure to practice!” pandemic is particularly rough for performing artists This provoked audible laughter from those unmuted, such as musicians, with theaters and music venues because how exactly does one practice for an opera indefinitely closed. Not only do gigging musicians with no plot, constructed with characters created inde- suddenly have no stable source of income, but some pendently by performers? Part of the concept of this music schools have even closed permanently. For the opera was that it couldn’t be replicated the same way music educators who still have their jobs, facilitating twice—it was going to be a new event, created live, that lessons or classes over video platforms like Zoom is

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a strange new world. Needless to say, Zoom was not designed for music, and its unreliable delay times make synchronized ensemble performance pretty much impossible.

But while many have lamented COVID-19’s decimation of musical communities, some have seen this as an opportunity to explore lesser-known styles of music that are more adaptable to platforms like Zoom.

“Open scores” is a catch-all term for compositions that do not require a strict instrumentation. They are often based in improvisation, taking the form of musical gestures to be expanded upon, visual art to be freely interpreted as music, or text instructions. Rarely do they require exact synchronicity. Some practitioners of classical music, accustomed to more information-heavy notations, look down upon open scores, erroneously believing them to require less labor on the part of composers and performers. Perhaps now is a good time to demonstrate their pedagogical and artistic value.

So, in mid-March, LA-based composer and music director Sean Griffin posted on Facebook that perhaps there were some text-based open scores by Pauline Oliveros, a beloved experimental musician who wrote

17 APR 2020

many of them, that would work well to perform over Zoom. The post got so much traction that, within a few weeks, the idea grew into a six-hour virtual production of Oliveros’s Lunar Opera: Deep Listening For_Tunes. It was produced by LA’s experimental opera company Opera Povera, scheduled to coincide with the full “pink” moon at perigee on April 7, featured hundreds of participants from around the world, and raised donations for artists whose livelihoods have been interrupted by COVID-19. As a longtime fan of Oliveros’s work—and as a creator of open scores that draw a great deal of influence from her—I heard about it and quickly signed up to perform. +++ Pauline Oliveros, who died in 2016, left an extraordinary legacy in so-called experimental music. She was at least as influential as John Cage, for instance, but has been comparatively marginalized in history books.

This is for a variety of reasons: she was a woman, she was gay, and her musical output was largely participatory and designed to be realizable by amateurs, subverting the value systems of classical “art music,” which tends to privilege virtuosity and exact reproduction of existing musical texts. In addition to her compositions, Oliveros was also an active improviser on accordion, electronics, and whatever other sound-making implements were available. She coined the term “Deep Listening®,” which she described as “a way of listening in every possible way to everything possible to hear no matter what you are doing.”

Oliveros was a professor of composition and electronic music at several different colleges throughout her life, and also founded a nonprofit dedicated to promoting the practice of Deep Listening.

Oliveros stands out from other experimental composers because of the level of trust she places in the performers who realize her work. Some creators of open scores, on the other hand, only allow for performer flexibility within an obvious aesthetic framework, often based on implicit rules about what is sufficiently “modern”—rules that mark consistent rhythms, recognizable melodies, and socio-political commentary all as somewhat taboo. Sometimes composers will specify these aesthetics through the aspects of the piece that are fixed, whether that be pitches, rhythms, or choreography. Or sometimes they’ll just get angry when performers interpret the open score in a way they don’t like (John Cage and Alvin Lucier both did this on certain occasions). With scores like Oliveros’s Lunar Opera, this rigidity isn’t present. Rather than a limited array of performance choices within a grand, composerly vision, this score is an invitation for performer creativity, for the free invention of new sounds and characters. This ideal is present throughout much of Oliveros’s work.

That said, I don’t want to put Oliveros on a pedestal.

The idea of trademarking an artistic practice (Deep Listening®), for instance, seems to institute a new flavor of power dynamic, running contrary to Deep Listening’s democratizing aims. As does Oliveros’s tendency to glorify an imagined primitivity: I appreciate the spiritual component of her musical practice, but her language is “new-agey,” for better or for worse.

Take, for instance, the preface to her well-known (and very effective) set of text-instruction scores, Sonic Meditations, which claims to be “returning to ancient forms which preclude spectators” and “an attempt to return the control of sound to the individual alone.”

This risks implying that all musical traditions without a clear performer-audience boundary have died out— which isn’t the case—and that sound not fully in the individual’s control is necessarily bad. The latter line of reasoning has historically been common in Western music academia, deeming “commercial” musical expression to be insufficiently individual, and, in the process, conveniently writing off such genres as soul, funk and hip hop. Oliveros’s embrace of the practice of improvisation was radical in the academic spaces in which she operated, where written notes are held as superior. But her definition of improvisation isn’t as inclusionary as I would like it to be: she sometimes deemed jazz as less authentic improvisation due to its reliance on pre-defined forms and motives.

In other words, while Oliveros in some ways subverted the standards of the elite academic spaces in which she worked for much of her life, there were other

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

ways in which she was a product of them, so her legacy is not clear-cut. But the nice thing about the open nature of her scores is that these notions aren’t baked into the music to the extent that they are for some artists. When following her instructions, most of the artistic control is yours, so these thoughts shouldn’t stop you from playing and enjoying her pieces. There’s a PDF of Sonic Meditations online. They’re great, and you can go perform some of them right now, even (especially) if you might not think you’re a musician. +++ Like many Oliveros scores, Lunar Opera specifies a framework to be creatively inhabited by professionals and amateurs alike. The score in its entirety is five sentences long. Performers are instructed to design their own characters with costumes and props, designate a sonic cue they know they will hear, then freeze or unfreeze when the cue occurs. The premiere, held during the Out-of-Doors Festival at New York’s Lincoln Center in 2000, consisted of a sea of 200 characters freezing and unfreezing at different times, going about their daily lives as creatures from a land called Lunarus. During our preparatory Q&A session with the organizers of this online iteration 20 years later, director Sean Griffin described what we were

Notes on a virtual performance of Pauline Oliveros’ Lunar Opera

predatory to me, a salmon.

I spent more time frozen in silent awareness than I did making sounds, so I was able to look at my laptop screen and see the many different ways in which people were choosing to interpret the score. Some performers interpreted it mostly musically, working with one instrument the whole time while perhaps wearing a silly hat. Others did so theatrically, constructing sets and improvising monologues in character, dancing, or performing pre-written scenes with family and friends in quarantine. And some split the difference between the two—for instance, alternating between drinking out of wine glasses and performatively striking them as percussion instruments. One performance artist spent the entire six hours washing their hands. There was an X-rated breakout room, and nude content would sometimes percolate into the main Zoom room by accident.

It was, simply put, a wild time.

You’re probably wondering who all of these people were. Conveniently, there was an “Artists” page on the production’s website, where we could upload information about ourselves. It was a strange page. A lot of performers copy-pasted professional bios, and it seemed that at least half had graduate degrees in the arts. Certainly, the principal reason for this is that people who are more “plugged in” to the art and music worlds are more likely to have heard of Oliveros and to receive news that a free and open event like this is happening. But, given the way that much of Oliveros’s work, including Lunar Opera, is styled to be executable by untrained artists, a tension arises when the majority of performers on a piece of hers possess professional artistic qualifications. It can be hard to conceptualize how a five-sentence score can be interpreted as a six-hour opera, which can make the space inadvertently exclusionary, as amateur artists might look on and assume that they can’t do this. Heck, impostor syndrome entered my mind more than once during the performance, since I was one of the youngest people there.

These concerns diminished once I got more “into the zone,” so to speak, during the second two-hour act of performance. It helped that there were fewer than 100 people on the Zoom call now, so we were able to listen to each other more carefully, even as we took actions that were sometimes deliberately disjunct.

The fireworks of sound that had filled the first hours of performance smoothed out into long, ambient drones.

As a salmon, I had my eyes closed, either humming long tones and imagining being submerged in deep water, or playing distorted high trills on the flute and imagining that these were the earth’s magnetic field.

I had a few of those great moments in improvisation when you aren’t thinking about anything else, just riding the sound. Oliveros’s philosophies involve sound as a connecting agent between all life forms, breaking down the illusion of separation. I think I felt a little bit of that oneness that night, and it’s an experience I want to have again. Her work is very spiritually nourishing, which is why I keep coming back to it.

Three hours into the performance, I had to stop so that my parents and cats could go to sleep. But I stayed up for a couple hours longer, watching the opera’s livestream on YouTube. With closer to 60 people on the call now, the atmosphere was much more relaxed and intimate. Two friends of mine, who kept playing until the 2 AM finish, agreed that this remote ensemble felt more and more mentally in sync as the evening went on. The livestream showed 20 people at once, resembling windows of a skyscraper in some imaginary city late at night. It wasn’t a substitute for live performance, but it didn’t try to be. I ended the night with the feeling that performing artists will find ways to be collectively creative despite these circumstances, and we’ll hopefully emerge from this crisis with a greater appreciation for open-ended, improvisational pieces like this one.

doing as “a ghost ship” or “a city floating in nonexistent space.” The second of the score’s five sentences reads, “A performance area is designated,” but unlike any performance area in past iterations of the piece, ours was at least somewhat imaginary. It was either 200 separate rooms scattered across the world, the complex system of tubes known as the internet, or both.

While all the performers for the 2000 premiere acted as residents of Lunarus, in this online performance, we were given liberty to be whatever or whoever we wanted. I decided to be a salmon. During the first two-hour act of the opera, I would be born in a river, imagine myself exploring my salmon-body and my environment, and begin to float downstream. During the next act, I would explore the ocean, feeling its vastness and navigating through it by sensing the earth’s magnetic field. All this would be conveyed with vocal noises, flute playing, and occasional exclamations of the word “salmon!” in various tones of voice. For my cue, I chose to freeze or unfreeze in response to any sound perceived as predatory to salmon. This could be one of my cats meowing, or it could be anything on the Zoom call that I perceived as a squawk or a growl.

Entering the evening-length performance, the idea was fresh in my mind that Oliveros trusts anyone approaching her scores, which we’d discussed during SEAMUS FLYNN B’21 is still a fish. the Q&A session a few days earlier. As it turns out, trust is chaotic. What greeted my eyes and ears was a psychedelic collage of costumes and sounds. Rather than stepping into a vast courtyard of performers on Manhattan’s Upper West Side, I was slipping on a pair of headphones and receiving the same amount of information squeezed into a massive video call. I would already have been slightly overstimulated if I hadn’t also been listening for anything potentially

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bracing for crisis

THE EU TURNS A BLIND EYE TO REFUGEE CAMPS IN GREECE “My name is Omar. I am from Syria. I am in Greece, on Leros island. This is the minor section, next to the sewage. Of course we will catch coronavirus in this situation.”

In a vertical video shot on a phone, the asylumseeker from Syria reveals large puddles, presumably overflowing from the sewage, right outside barracks where he and other teenagers live. The clip is part of a YouTube video published by the #SOSMoria initiative. The petition campaign was launched by two doctors from the Netherlands who have worked at Moria, a refugee camp on Lesvos island. On its website, #SOSMoria calls on European leaders to evacuate asylum-seekers from the Aegean islands in order to prevent the “medical disaster” expected to occur once the pandemic reaches them. So far, more than 6,800 registered physicians have signed the petition, as well as 50,000 European citizens, citing the “norms and values of European healthcare” on the verge of being violated.

Other European countries have seen similar campaigns. In Norway last fall, two healthcare workers who have also worked at the camp directed a petition toward the Norwegian government called “Evacuate the children from Moria now.” On April 1, instead of demonstrating as usual in front of Oslo's Parliament, these activists organized Norway’s first online demonstration on Facebook Live. #SOSMoria, “Evacuate the children,” and similar campaigns bring up promises that European leaders have made in recent years to take in refugees—promises that have gone unfulfilled.

Though a number of islands are home to what the Greek government calls Reception and Identification Centers, the activist campaigns narrow in on Moria.

Other camps aren’t forgotten; despite living on another island, people like Omar remain central to #SOSMoria.

However, Moria is Europe’s largest refugee camp. The overcrowding in the facility shed light on why it has become emblematic in the evacuation campaigns: despite intending to house 3,000 people, Moria is now home to over 20,000 asylum-seekers. More than a third of the refugees living in Moria are children, and over a thousand of them are unaccompanied. The situation is similar in other facilities. Of the 7,000 crammed into a camp built for less than a tenth of that number, 400 of the children and teenagers living in Vathy refugee camp on Samos Island are unaccompanied.

The #SOSMoria video shows viewers the living areas for minors on other islands. We meet Ahmed Zakara, 17, who tells us that his father is dead and that his mother is still in Syria. He has not seen a doctor in the three and a half months since he arrived at Samos.

Since the Syrian civil war broke out in 2011, Syrians have become the largest forcibly displaced population in the world. Associated with the wave of uprisings known as the Arab Spring, the conflict in Syria escalated into a violent civil war when major protests were met with a violent crackdown by the Bashar al-Assad regime. More than five million people—nearly a fourth of the country’s pre-war population—have fled Syria in the last decade.

Asylum-seekers in the various facilities on the Greek islands live in dangerously close quarters—in some places, 17 people share one tent. This overcrowding makes Moria and the other facilities hubs for mental and physical illness, with infectious diseases more likely to spread rapidly in the tightly packed tents.

With COVID-19 bringing governments across Europe to their knees, the NGO Doctors Without Borders fears that it is but a matter of time before catastrophe strikes Moria. Before then, doctors, humanitarian campaigns, and UN agencies hope that the European Union (EU) will take charge by giving asylum to refugees on the Greek islands. +++ By mid-March, Lesvos already had a confirmed case of COVID-19. Though only local residents have tested positive so far, doctors warn that outbreaks among the asylum-seekers are likely to happen soon. According to Guardian journalist Harriet Grant who visited Moria in January, more than 13,000 of the facility’s inhabitants reside in an olive grove surrounding the main site, “in a filthy unofficial camp of tarpaulin tents and makeshift huts made of pallets.” According to Doctors

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BY Emily Rust ILLUSTRATION Eliza Macneal DESIGN Daniel Navratil

Without Borders, some six-person families live on 32 square feet.

Outside of their cramped living areas, those living in Moria must rely on routine close contact with others to take care of their basic needs. To access bathrooms and showers, receive meals, and see health personnel, for example, they must violate international standards of social distancing. In some areas of the camp, 1,300 people share access to one water station.

Fifteen-year-old Moria resident Masoud Alizada from Afghanistan explained in an interview with Slate that he goes “very late...to the food line” to minimize contact with others. However, this strategy has its own drawbacks: going later means less food.

Even the most basic hygiene precautions are nearly impossible. As mud and garbage streams through the camp, Moria deals with a severe shortage of water. There is no access to soap, and sanitation is a huge problem—up to 160 people use the same toilet.

To top it all, there are not enough medics to handle the day-to-day injuries and chronic illnesses of the thousands of people living in the facility, only having the capacity to attend to the most urgent cases.

The existing public health concerns in facilities like Moria demonstrate that the protective measures implemented elsewhere in Europe would be futile in such overcrowded spaces. In recent weeks, signs recommending social distancing and proper hygiene have been placed around Moria, but asylum-seekers living on the Greek islands do not have the privilege of taking these precautions. In the words of Marco Sandrone from Doctors Without Borders, “the preventive measures sound like a joke to these people;, how can you ask someone living in a tent to go back and isolate in their room, how can you ask [them] to increase their level of hygiene when there aren’t enough toilets, showers, water points in the camp?”

Until Moria becomes less densely populated, the health personnel working at the facility can do little more than measure people’s temperatures and wait for an outbreak. +++

crisis the EU had prematurely decided was over. NPR states the Aegean islands became “squalid dumping grounds” for asylum-seekers. Both unable to return to their home countries and unable to reach the countries they had hoped to find asylum in, thousands of refugees were abandoned in facilities like Moria, which began to resemble detention centers. In 2017, the mayor of Lesvos called the island “Europe’s Guantanamo Bay.” European leaders blamed Greece for not using EU funds to improve conditions in the camps while Greek politicians blamed the rest of Europe for placing a disproportionate refugee burden on Greece—a country already facing economic instability.

Until the recent pandemic, humanitarian efforts targeting Moria generally worked toward alleviating the pressure put on the Greek government by sending new arrivals to other countries. Last month, however, the focus shifted to bringing the people in the camps— especially those considered vulnerable to COVID-19— to places where social isolation is feasible. +++ As the pandemic began to devastate countries around the Mediterranean, humanitarian organizations and doctors called on European governments to comply with the 2016 EU-Turkey agreement and take in more refugees. Seven EU states came together in mid-March to announce that they would accept 1,600 vulnerable people, mostly children, from the Greek camps.

Left unanswered is how these states would determine vulnerability; according to UNICEF, there are at least 3,900 unaccompanied asylum-seeking minors in Greece. More than half of these children and teenagers live without appropriate accommodations. The joint decision between the seven countries was reached before the pandemic made such action particularly urgent. Ironically, the pandemic has delayed the relocation plans.

Meanwhile, some countries have gone ahead with receiving vulnerable individuals from the refugee camps. On April 8, Germany and Luxembourg announced that they are preparing to receive over 60 unaccompanied children from camps on Lesvos and Chios: 12 will be relocated to Luxembourg and 50 to Germany. The relocation of the children is being organized by the UN migration agency, the International Organization of Migration.

Some figures—mostly European politicians opposed to taking action—have asked what difference it will make to distribute vulnerable asylum-seekers across various European cities. Although solutions based on European cooperation are necessary for the long-term safety of asylum-seekers coming from Syria, Afghanistan, Iraq, and elsewhere, medical professionals and public health experts stress that immediate action is needed now. As the densely populated and inadequately resourced facilities make clear, evacuation is the best public health measure that can be taken for the asylum-seekers on these islands.

Conditions in the Greek camps have been dire for years. COVID-19 is only the most recent in a host of challenges faced by stuck refugees. In the words of child psychologist and Doctors Without Borders field worker Katrin Glatz Brubakk, who helped launch Norway’s “Evacuate the children” campaign, “it has always been inexcusable to let these people live in the crowded camps...Forcing them to continue living under such conditions without the ability to protect themselves is on the verge of criminal behavior.”

Conditions in the facilities were considered inadequate long before news of a strange SARS-like virus came out of China in late December. In the last few years, photos and videos from Moria and neighboring Greek islands have flashed across European news channels intermittently. These pictures—depicting the barbed wire surrounding the camps and the makeshift barracks refugees are forced to live in—are images that the leaders of Europe would prefer to forget.

When the refugee crisis peaked in 2015, Europebased organizations and activists increased their demands that the EU take action by receiving more asylum-seekers fleeing war and conflict in Syria, Iraq, and Afghanistan.

In 2016, European leaders signed a deal with Turkey that for each Syrian refugee in Greece returned to Turkey, the EU would take in a Syrian refugee from Turkey. As many pointed out then, and have continued to point out since, this deal was based on the shaky premise that Turkey is a safe place for refugees. The main goal of the deal was to cut off the route across the Aegean Sea for Europe-bound asylum-seekers. In the words of the leader of Amnesty International Europe, the deal was “celebrated by people who are dancing on the grave of refugee protection.” Since then, the EU has relocated only 25,000 Syrians out of Turkey—a number far below what humanitarian organizations EMILY RUST B‘22 is fed up with Erna Solberg and Ine had called for.

As European leaders patted themselves on the Eriksen Søreide’s nonchalant disregard for human back in 2016, the deal made Greece overwhelmed by a rights.

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BY Maddie Mahoney ILLUSTRATION Maddie Mahoney DESIGN Maddie Mahoney

An incomplete list of seats DINING CHAIR Do you ever sit in someone else’s kitchen while they cook for you?

You drink half a glass of wine you don’t like (you don’t like wine). You think about how dinner parties aren’t as fun when you’re not up to participating in the main activities (the drinking of wine and eating of dinner). You’re not hungry (you ate too soon before). Or maybe you’re too hungry, and that’s why you’re getting anxious, impatient. This should be your body’s job, not your brain’s, so why are there so many decisions? Why do people act like this is easy?

“Come over, I’ll cook dinner!” they say. You think: Please just say, “Come over! You can get high and sit on the couch and listen to me talk and you don’t have to say anything, just listen. I’ll pour you a glass of sparkling water and play a show we don’t particularly enjoy on the TV in the background. You can help me water my plants and collect all the mugs from my bedroom.”

What do people talk about at dinner?

You can talk about anything at dinner. You can talk about pets: pet food, new pets, and pets who have died. You can talk about your cousin, the one who is a chef, “But their roasted brussels sprouts don’t even compare to these, Jeff!” or your cousin, the one who had a baby, “Make sure they’re getting that contact! Skin to skin! It’s got to be skin to skin.” You burned your skin getting this pan out of the oven. People shed skin all the time. How much dead skin is on this table? The question bothers some but not others.

PARK BENCH (ALTERNATIVELY: PICNIC BLANKET, SWINGS) Do you ever share weed or snacks or sweet drinks with your body on grass or your feet on grass, smelling grass?

You haven’t, not yet. Only in parked cars or bedrooms or backyards in the summertime.

You think about how if you don’t kiss people on park benches, it’s either because you don’t go to enough parks or sit on enough benches or kiss enough.

What’s the right number of visits to the park, minutes spent on benches, seconds spent kissing outside?

Maybe if it was summer and you had just pulled two joints out of the little breast pocket that’s sometimes on T-shirts and started one for her, in the almost-dark.

WINDOW LEDGE Do you like sitting on the ledges of windows on second floors, maybe thirds, but not fourths (too high)? Not to sit but to observe the not-sitting. Not to be silent but not to talk.

When asked, you say that you’re afraid of heights, but you’re not sure what the people who aren’t scared feel when they’re so many stories above ground and looking straight down, down. They must feel more than nothing.

They probably feel exhilarated, and that’s barely any different from fear. If someone were to tell you, “No, I’m not afraid of heights,” you would probably tell them, “Well, of course you are.”

COUCH (SMALL) When you’re 20, you don’t kiss people on couches as much as you did before you were 20. Remember kissing on a velvet loveseat in a house that wasn’t yours and not even the person you are kissing’s? And then when your lips get chapped, you go home and listen to the kind of

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music that makes you wish you were sitting on a small Listen to it when you want the “happy it happened” orange couch in the almost-dark. Perhaps kissing. feeling. Listen to it when you want the “sad it’s over” feeling. Listen to it when you feel one but want to feel the When you’re 20, you kiss people on beds. Sometimes you other. think about when you hadn’t kissed on a bed. Beds are far too luxurious and yet—what’s the opposite of luxu- Listen to it when your heart swells in the way that makes rious? Functional? you lighter, or when it swells in the way that presses hard against your chest.

DRUM THRONE SHOWER FLOOR What makes the drums different from other instruments is that the hardest part is the keeping going. You can be Tear ducts in the shower are like showerheads in a thuna great drummer if you do just that: you keep going. No derstorm. Suddenly everything is water, everything is pauses, no interruptions, nothing surprising or jarring cleansing. It’s like sad music while you write or grandexcept one or two fast improvisations right before the mothers squinting their bad eyes to read on comfortable chorus. It seems like you’re living for a ratta-tatta ratta- wicker furniture in their meticulously-tended gardens. tatta rat-a-tat-tat right before the chorus.

Or balloons deflating just enough that they don’t fly away.

Red doors on purple houses with marigolds in the yard.

But you also just want to keep going. You’ll forego the improv if it keeps your hands from getting so sweaty that Suddenly everything’s a song, everything is lively, you drop your drumsticks. everything is floating, everything is bright. And maybe, despite all that, you’re still sad.

DESK, CAFETERIA TABLE WITH STOOLS ATTACHED, ETC. ARMCHAIR Sometimes, public tables have chewed gum stuck to their undersides, and sometimes, the gum is scraped off. You recently learned from the internet that there are many different kinds of armchairs: barrel chairs, wingWhat’s the word for when you touch underneath a table backs, club chairs, tub chairs, even occasional chairs— and feel something that squishes like gum, sticks like which are more for decoration than anything. Like gum, must be gum? What’s the word for the feeling when uncomfortable shoes and Hallmark cards. you have a piece of gum in your mouth and you become positively revolted by the idea of having a piece of gum Weeks ago, you stopped in an antique store in the in your mouth? What’s the word for the sensation when evening and sat in two bergères (big seat, exposed your gum is really minty and you take a sip of ice-cold wood) with torn upholstery—one currant (dark red), one water? What’s the word for chewing gum when you’d sangria (darker red). She took in her arms a forty-dollar actually rather be eating? nylon-string travel guitar. She would have bought it if you hadn’t promised to bring your full-size steel string You think about being taught to blow bubbles and almost for her next time. getting it, but not quite. You think about the kids blowing big pink bubbles that would pop loudly and collapse on You think about your purpose. How small. How their faces. They laugh, the bubbles laugh. important! To sit in a bergère, hold her hand, and talk about cracked porcelain figurines and old clocks and LOCKER ROOM BENCH dusty croquet sets and guitars. Now, you send texts (ALTERNATIVELY: FOLDING CHAIR IN CLOSET) sweet enough to fill in for gifted string instruments and make phone calls when you want to hold her hand.

Maybe you’re with Dad, driving to hockey practice at that rink in Fall River, where they made you get dressed You think about how armchairs are meant for one, but in a closet because the locker rooms were for the boys. that sometimes, two of them angle towards one another The girls take off their shirts and put their hair in pony- on either side of a table that’s good for reading lamps tails. You steal glances and lend hair ties. and cups of tea. And you think about feeling guitarless, purposeless, and breathless.

For her birthday, you draw her that picture of a flamingo and frame it. You give it to her in the closet after skating, BED breathing hard. Hug, sweaty. Feel like a flamingo, bright pink, sticking out, balancing on one leg.

So often the end of a bed is transitory; it’s for waiting-sitting. Waiting-sitting is leg-shaking-sitting and knuckBOOTH (IN A DIMLY-LIT BAR) le-cracking sitting and breath-holding sitting and sitting that includes unimportant reading—reading that will be You’re there for minutes, maybe seconds. You drink forgotten, reading that will stop when you’re called into your drinks and laugh your laughs and your insides are an office or your bus arrives, reading that you care about like a balloon that swells and swells with air or helium. much less than the thing you’re waiting for. Are you It happens often these days, but usually with air, rarely waiting to get into bed or are you waiting to get up? with helium.

You think about sitting next to someone on the end of a You remember the bartender the way you remember bed, absorbing your thoughts and imagining theirs. The most bartenders when you’re high and it’s dark and beer tucked-in covers loom (you could be under them). The travels through bottleneck then lime wedge then more door looms (you could be on the other side). You like to sit bottleneck then lips–perfectly and also not at all. where there is enough to absorb and enough to imagine so the looming doesn’t loom so hard.

The next time you sit on the end of a bed, think about if you’d rather be in it or sitting someplace else or not If you can remember the feeling but you’d rather feel it sitting at all. And that should tell you all you need to with your body, not hear it in your head, sit alone in the know. middle of a big couch. Think about how many other people could be on this couch with you but aren’t. Keep MADDIE MAHONEY B'20 is reclining on a cushy faux your feet on the floor. Listen to the song from the play- leather sectional. list you made after she said, “Yes, pick me up at eight.”

COUCH (LARGE)

17 APR 2020

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

EPHEMERA

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HUMAN HEART Jan 28, 1986, 11:38 AM Hundreds of students have gathered in the Concord High School auditorium, eyes glued to the television placed on a black plastic rolling cart. Conversations are shushed as teenagers and faculty alike strain their ears, trying to catch bits and pieces of the static-filled broadcast. The machine is dialed to a CNN broadcast, and they chant in tune with the flight operator from Kennedy Space Station. Ten, Nine, Eight…

This is no ordinary space mission. The space shuttle that has just launched carries one of their own, whom they call Mrs. McAuliffe, who only a year and a half prior was standing in the classroom, teaching them about the Battle of Gettysburg, grading their essays on the Cold War. To the students, she will always be a teacher of firsts, but now they must share her with the nation as the first teacher to venture into space. As the shuttle launches, the students erupt into cheers, unable to contain their excitement, knowing they stand witness to a pivotal moment in history.

At Cape Canaveral on the Florida coast, what was once a barren strip of sand and scrub has long been used as NASA’s standing base of operations for its space exploration program. Having sent the world's second man into space one month after Russia claimed the golden title, NASA, nearly 25 years later, prepared to launch its 25th space mission: a crew of seven aboard the space shuttle Challenger, embarking on its 10th voyage into the unknown. +++ Barbara Morgan stands atop a viewing platform several miles from the launch site and watches. Hidden somewhere deep in the belly of the beast, behind hundreds of layers of LI-900 silica designed to withstand temperatures of up to 1,260 degrees Celsius, her fellow teacher and astronaut trainee will in moments be propelled into the sky at 18,000 miles per hour. For the past year and a half, they have both undergone the same training, learning to fly T-38s and do barrel rolls and lazy eights, performing underwater stimulations in full gear weighing close to 300 lbs. In some buried corner of her heart she wishes that she was the one aboard Challenger, the nation’s eyes watching her, but tells herself regardless of whether or not she makes it to space, the journey has already brought her so many experiences that she can’t wait to share back in McCall

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with her students and family.

It seemed only yesterday that she was interviewing for NASA’s Teacher in Space Program (TISP). When president Ronald Reagan had broadcasted plans for TISP on national television, Barbara, along with many other teachers across the nation, jumped out of her seat and exclaimed, “That’s a great idea!” After receiving news that she had made it to the semifinal round, she spent many nights drafting plans and rehearsing what she would say during her interview. She looked in the mirror and maintained eye contact, “The thing I want everyone to remember is, I’m not going to be the only private citizen in space, I’m planning on taking the whole country with me.” Her reflection nodded and flashed a coy grin. Perfect.

Christa sat in the cockpit of Challenger. Despite over a year of training, she still felt like she was not fully prepared for what was about to happen. Going through the ‘vomit comet,’—a small appetizer of weightless euphoria quickly followed by intense nausea experienced during the KC-135’s nosedive—was one thing, but a full-fledged launch was a whole different animal.

The press that led up to the mission had propelled Christa into national stardom. The other day, when a waitress asked for her autograph, it reminded Christa of writing a hall pass for her students during their free period. Judith, the mission specialist, checks the external tank ullage pressure, then the engine supply helium pressure, “right engine helium tank is a bit low.”

She thinks about her oldest, Scott, and her youngest, Caroline, and wishes that she spent more time with them this past year. It gives her strength knowing that they are watching her, hundreds of miles away, along with the rest of the nation. When they came to tour the space station and met the astronauts, Caroline had told her she liked the cafeteria’s tuna fish sandwiches, while Scott liked the batting cages down the road. She closes her eyes and silently vows to make her daughter a tuna fish sandwich first thing when she returns to Concord. The NASA flight control countdown is reaching its end and she hears Judith say, “Aaalll right,” followed by Mike, the pilot, “Here we go.” She braced herself as the air rushed towards her, facing the mouth of an open lion as it roars, the impact the throttle of a steam locomotive.

And then it launches.

Among a crowd of viewers, Barbara claps her hands in excitement. It is a perfect afternoon, blue skies not a single cloud in sight. As Challenger rises

in the air, painting a thick brushstroke of smoke, she waves at her departing friend, “Bye Christa, bye crew… see you later!” The winds whip against her face and stirs her hair, but her eyes are transfixed on the rocket that is rising higher… higher… higher until it hurts to crane her neck further in its backwards arc. She shouts one final, “bye!” into the air, hoping it will reach her friends, already separated by miles within the span of seconds.

T+73 seconds.

The students inside the auditorium continue to cheer well past blastoff. Challenger is once again heading into space, but this time with Mrs. McAuliffe aboard, as if the whole room was travelling into space with her. On the screen, CNN correspondent Tom Mintier is saying something,...NASA…delays…, but the noise drowns out the broadcast. The spaceship travels in a diagonal trajectory, piercing a hole through an invisible plane on the two-dimensional screen. The raster scan projects electron screams of reds, greens, blues converging into a firework of flaming-copper clouds. The students continue to cheer. Tom stops mid-sentence, but no one notices amidst the noise. The camera zooms out to reveal a sentence of smoke ending in an em dash eruption, then a two-pronged split in diverging directions like bull horns rushing towards then away then into a maddening spiral. And then it is death, silence. “An explosion”, says Tom, describing only what he can see, unable to place the horror of an entire nation into words.

Barbara watches as her friend drops from the sky like an angel stripped of her wings. The falling debris leaves thin wobbling streaks in their wake, an unsteady hand against a blue canvas. Behind her, nameless faces voice their concerns, “that’s not right… that’s not right… that’s not right at all.” Then they are moving, rushing off the platform, searching for someone who can tell them it will be alright. That the explosion looked worse than it actually was. That Christa would walk out of the wrecked hull that landed somewhere over the Atlantic with her hair singed and in a scratchy, shaking voice tell her to stop crying. The viewing platform is now empty, I can no longer see Barbara, only the steaming evidence of the Challenger’s 73-second journey into orbit, already dispersing into the afternoon air. The video of Barbara was received by NASA from a 3/4” videotape under the Freedom of Information Act, never to be broadcasted to the public.

17 APR 2020

BY Bowen Chen ILLUSTRATION Gemma Brand-Wolf DESIGN Ella Rosenblatt

+++ A few days before Challenger was set to launch, a crowd of reporters, wearing button-down shirts, suits and blazers, carrying bulky camera equipment, line up in a long L shape around the crew members, who have donned NASA jumpsuits, the color of the evening sky.

They have followed the astronauts to Kennedy Space Station, each one prepared to address their audience with a brief remark on the upcoming journey. Ron McNair, one of three mission specialists aboard the crew of seven, introduces Christa, who walks up to the microphone, long accustomed to speeches and the press, delivers a monologue with the slight air of hometown charm and superficiality that pulls on the nation’s heartstrings.

“We watched Columbia go over the Houston area this morning and that was a thrill.”

As she speaks, her eyes dart away from the cameras for a second towards the sky, exposing a fleeting smile.

How could she know that 17 years from now, as the Columbia began its descent back into earth’s atmosphere, a piece of foam insulation would break off and strike the left wing of the orbiter leaving the spacecraft to disintegrate into a flaming comet? It would be NASA’s second fatal operation, following only the infamous Challenger that she was so excited to board, still standing in one piece and waiting to make history in only a few days. Christa would make it only 46,000 feet in the air, barely breaching the stratosphere, a far distance from her planned escape into orbit.

President Ronald Reagan, in his speech honoring the Teacher in Space Program (TISP) finalists, cracks a joke to an audience easy to please in the presence of the nation’s most important figurehead. “I also want to tell you that your shuttle doesn’t blast off for a while yet, so there’s still time to back out.” The audience laughs and the finalists smile. Barbara hopes that President Reagan’s remarks are directed at her, still ignorant of the prophecy to be carved in the face of one of the nation’s greatest tragedies. For Barbara, that shuttle would blast off much later than she could have possibly imagined. In fact, it would be over 20 years until she prepared to board the Endeavor on a new mission and pick up the torch of her fallen comrade to become the nation’s first teacher in space. But by then, no one seems to care except those whose memories of January 28, 1986 play on an infinite loop in their dreams, a bruise that never seems to heal. When asked about

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

Christa during her preflight interview, Barbara says, “Christa was, is, and always will be our teacher in space, the first teacher to fly.”

Later, the public would find out that the Challenger’s explosion was due to O-ring malfunctions, rubber rings used to connect different sections of the shuttle’s solid rocket boosters, failure to form a seal, allowing hot gas to leak through, ultimately leading to the explosion of several liquid hydrogen tanks. Later investigations uncovered that the O-ring issue had been brought up several times before and highlighted NASA’s irresponsibility in bypassing safety checks.

NASA confirmed that at least three of the astronauts survived the initial break-apart, as indicated by the activation of the shuttles Personal Egress Air Packs, but with no evacuation protocols in place, they could only wait for their freefall to conclude. When the cabin impacted with the Atlantic at over 200 mph, no one could have survived the crushing force of over 200 Gs. What was left of the shuttle was instantly crushed, including the astronauts inside.

TISP was supposed to be only the first step in a series that would lead to America’s dream of civilian space travel. In 1986, three weeks before Challenger lifts off, John Noble Wilford of the New York Times wrote, “NASA expects to include private citizens on other flights to communicate the space experience from nontechnical perspectives…In time, poets, painters, laborers, musicians and others will get to fly.” At the time, NASA had already accepted applications from journalists for a trip the following Fall. The Challenger accident brought dreams of an egalitarian outer space to a halt. It wasn’t the straw that broke the camel’s back, it was a fleet of F-16 bombers. It would be three years until NASA flew its next space operation.

Even today, nearly 35 years later, dreams of civilian space-travel have not been realized. +++ When I ask my friends about the teacher in space mission, or Challenger, few know what I am talking about or only have vague notions of the incident.

In the span of over three decades, the tragedy has been buried under the weight of history. Many of McAuliffe’s former students have gone on to become teachers themselves. Scott Reynolds, a 1987 Concord High School alumnus who now teaches science at the nearby St. Paul’s School, brings his students to a local cemetery each year to conduct an exercise linking deaths to wars and diseases. As the school bus drives

by McAuliffe’s gravestone, he asks his students if they know who she is, who she was. Among his class of nearly 30, there is always one, one who remembers.

In Emilia Kai Bock’s 2010 documentary, Human Heart, I watch Claire Boucher, more commonly known by her stage name, Grimes, peel a photograph of McAuliffe off her refrigerator. “Who is she?”, Bock asks Boucher. “I forget her name, she was a grade three teacher who died on… Challenger?”, Boucher tentatively responds. “I don’t know, I just think it…I just love this color of blue.” Boucher points to McAuliffe’s jumpsuit, the same one she wore during the crew press release. She flips the photograph over. On the back, words written in black sharpie sprawl in a child’s handwriting: yesterday’s dreams R 2morrows Rainbows.

Boucher stares at the words, “It just somehow seems

so…yeah.” A feeling of sadness lies behind her voice.

The camera zooms in on McAuliffe’s face. “She’s dead”, Boucher says.

During Morgan’s preflight interview, she says, “Christa’s saying was, I touch the future, I teach.”

Watching Boucher with her photograph of McAuliffe and unable to understand my own obsessions with the Challenger mission, I begin to think that McAuliffe’s message holds truer than she could have known. While she never did make it to space, I believe that her story finds those who need it, who continue to learn from it.

Sitting on my couch, listening to “Oblivion,” Grimes’s 2012 single off her album Visions, I feel like I can hear a bit of McAuliffe beyond the veil of ephemera and synthesizers, reaching out to me from a planet far, far away.

BOWEN CHEN B’21 needs some space.

Note to the Reader: As with many others, the events of the Challenger mission left me enthralled and I embarked on a fever-dream obsession that led to this piece. Dear Reader, if this piece left you with many questions, let me clarify, for proprietary reasons and more, where you may have been misled. I am not telepathic, the interiority on display was all sourced from various online print and film materials. That scene within the cockpit of Challenger, moments before blastoff may have left you wondering, how could he possibly know? In that case, the dialogue was all sourced from a transcript of the Challenger operational recorder voice tape. In her interview with the New York Times, a week before the mission launch, Christa talks about her children’s visit to Kennedy Space Station, ‘Caroline singling out the tuna fish sandwiches and Scott mentioning the batting cage down the street’. I doubt she ever made that vow, but would like to think that she was thinking of them, right until the end. The truth is, the Barbara and Christa I have written so much about are characters within my mind’s eye, on paper Morgan and McAuliffe, their factual counterparts. The scene I have written where Barbara rehearses her lines in the mirror are taken from video footage of her semifinalist interview, broadcasted by Idaho Public Television. The opening scene to this story was written based on the account of Kristin Jacques, one of McAuliffe’s former students, in her interview with CBC radio.

FEATURES

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BY Olivia Kan-Sperling ILLUSTRATION Eliza Macneal DESIGN Daniel Navratil

A proscenium play: Newport, Rhode Island. The set has lots of neo-baroque curlicues. Also metal pipes and gears, perhaps serving specific functions, perhaps equally, confusingly, ornamental. The inside of the house like a cross section: like a painting in a frame that discloses what goes into building this house. Maybe: a complex water filtration system. Tunnels through which small animals scurry, larger tunnels in which servants loiter in silhouette. Train tracks that go ‘round and ‘round the stage, with a miniature train. A drawing room with a huge window that takes up most of the back wall: a view onto a churning sea lashed by rain. Probably it is a screen looping an animation with the realistic physics of a scientific simulation.

Girl in expensive dress: pale-pink silk with cream rosettes. She paces in front of the window, looking all around. She sighs and sinks into a nice chaise longue center stage. She rings a silver bell. A whirring of gears as a complex mechanism springs into action, one that runs around the frame of the scene. It spouts tea, milk, and sugar into a small porcelain cup which she holds up imperiously (accomplished through exaggeratedly well-articulated sounds of WHIRRING, SPLASHING, PLOPPING).

ADA: Dear Diary.

Today is my fifth day at the Breakers. Mama has a migraine; Papa is away. Rain and thunder. Very tedious for July. There is the party soon and Peter and all the rest will come down. Love, Ada.

MAN 1: Cornelius MAN 2: Charlie MAN 3: Henry MAN 4: William MAN 5: John Jr. MAN 2: It’s good to see each other MAN 3: Hum hum hum.

MAN 1: Ho ho.

Puffing on cigars. This next part flows up and down, sometimes overlapping. They make whole arm gestures without bending a wrist, but not much facial expression, putting hands on waistcoats and resonating with each other.

MAN 4: When I was a little boy – MAN 5: Mm yes I was a little boy once too MAN 2: I looked out at a sea just like this on Long Island MAN 1: Or somewhere else, I don’t really remember MAN 2: The sea was moving just like this MAN 3: It seemed bigger though MAN 1: I was smaller MAN 5: When I was out West– MAN 4: I remember the sky. It was terrible –– all yellow at the top, or was it red, I can’t remember, they have a different kind out there MAN 3: Different kind of air there MAN 1: Blooooood red MAN 2: And the grass moving just like the sea back home MAN 5: I was afraid when I was out there MAN 3: My papa told me MAN 2: But when I first saw one of those big machines I thought, wow MAN 2: Choo chooooooo MAN 1: From coast to coast, hand over hand MAN 5: Hand to mouth to all the way over here MAN 2: Choo chooooooooooooooo.

MAN 3: Hummmm.

She shifts to lie on the chaise longue the other way. The rain BREAKS at the window. The light outside dims until the view is barely perceptible, mostly black, and the electric candles on the walls begin to emit a soft orange glow, POPPING alight loudly. She falls asleep. The house creaks and sighs in the loud wind. The TICKING of a grandfather clock, the clock striking midnight. A young MAID comes out of the woodwork. She wanders around straightening things, taking away the porcelain teacup.

She kneels in front of Ada and replaces all of the rosettes with rosettes of another color. She takes a candy from a glass bowl and eats it while looking at the audience.

Contemplative puffing. They leave together, patting each other on the back.

WELCOME TO THE BREAKERS. Night, with a dim spotlight on MAID, who is sullen or maybe a little bit evil.

MAN 1: Have you seen the Times? … We’ll have to keep an eye on what’s happening in Missouri …

MAN 2: and Kentucky …

MAID: Hello (or Hullo, etc.) and welcome to the Breakers. This is a brand new house, built in 1893 by architect R. M. Hunt. Before, there was another house called the Breakers on this land, owned by a tobacco manufacturer and racehorse owner. Sadly, it quickly and mysteriously burned to the ground in 1892.

She gives more boring history on the house, most of which can be read about online or elsewhere, or listened to on TRACK TWO of your self-guided audio-tour device, which is provided by the Newport Preservation Society in partnership with TEXTRON SYSTEMS. We thank them for their sponsorship of this event.

As I said, this is a brand new house. We have an intercom. We have freshwater and saltwater in every lavatory, plus soapy bubbles in six colors. If you press this button here, a complex and modern system will spring into place which allows you to positively shoot items such as black currant scones with whipped maple cream butter from the kitchen all the way up to the morning room. Unfortunately, it is a drafty house and sometimes the scones will get cold on their way up. This button here releases the smell of fresh rhododendrons into the room. This is Mrs. Vanderbilt’s favorite smell.

She looks.

Thank you. Please do not touch anything.

She fades back into the woodwork. Ada thrashes about on the chaise longue: a bad dream.

METALLIC INTUITION. The sky lightens to a dull gray. Five MEN come into the room, each in a black waistcoat with a gold chain. They stand and sit in pleasing group portrait arrangement. Recall that Ada is still sleeping on the chaise longue. They look at each other and say each other’s names appreciatively while lighting each other’s cigars, or maybe the house lights the cigars.

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MORNING. The rain fades to a drizzle. The candles go out. The sun breaks pink and yellow on the ocean. Sound of birds CHIRPING and QUIET WHIRRING of gears.

Ada sits up, disoriented. The doors SPRING open on Mrs. Vanderbilt, the MOTHER. She isn’t walking, but standing on a wheeled platform that moves her on a circuit around the room, like a model train. Talking past one another: MOTHER: Ada ADA: Mother MOTHER: It’s a bit bright in here, isn’t it?

ADA: Did you hear the storm?

MOTHER: Your father left last night on business ADA: I couldn’t sleep MOTHER: You’re up early ADA : I––It made me feel very strange. I had this dream––um. Like the water, like it was coming in.

Through the window. Really fast and sudden, you know, breaking through the window,

ADA: Peter is coming down today, you know, he’ll be here by noontime. I don’t know what I’ll say…

MOTHER: Forgive me. I must go tell Annie to prepare the éclair-making machine…

By now, they have successfully switched sides of the room, trading positions without crossing paths, and exit through opposite doors in a flutter.

An INTERLUDE in which the MAID enters and does hopscotch and cartwheels insolently in the empty room.

COURTSHIP SCENE. Ada enters. She looks out the window pensively. The sea is calm. A loud and wistful SIGH. Her SUITOR comes in on a train. He flings his suitcase offstage, where it makes a RUBBERY BOUNCING sound. Nothing but naturalism as they chase each other frantically around the chaise, hiding beneath it, sitting and standing, scootching closer and farther, placing hands awkwardly on pleats of skirt and then withdrawing them, fiddling with tassels, and patting absentmindedly: PETER: My dearest darling!

ADA: I’ve gotten your letters PETER: I sent them // Just for you ADA: Yes I know <3 PETER: I want you to marry me.

ADA: It said in your letters.

PETER: Yes I know <3 PETER: I came here on a train ADA: I’ve been looking out the window …

PETER: OH, Ada! ADA: OH, Peter! // I am changed since last spring, you don’t understand all the new things that are happening in the world, and all the things happening in my head, you just simply can’t understand!

PETER: Oh, NO Ada, it is you that doesn’t understand!

I’ve seen the tracks laid down. I've seen the backs that lay down the tracks. I am a man of business. I do not have the time. I am changed since last spring.

ADA: I do not want to go on a train to see the tracks, I want to go on a steamboat to see the ocean and Monte Carlo.

PETER: Monte carlo, Monte Carlo! No time for that!

Mon-tee car-low is not where the sausage is made, Ada! ADA: I don’t care for making sausages!

She runs off crying. He runs after her.

CHAISE LONGUE MONOLOGUE. Mrs. Vanderbilt comes in from the opposite door to the one she has recently exited from, apparently still speaking: Yes, and the ice room must all be in order otherwise we won’t have any sorbet Saturday.

She peers through the window as a silent steamboat passes.

She sinks onto the chaise in talking-cure-patient pose. As she speaks, the storm builds silently behind the window.

From nervous to agitated, her hands moving with a lot of wrist:

They are moving about absentmindedly, circuiting through the room in slow semi-circles, without making eye contact.

It’s something about the cushions – these cushions.

They’ve given me so much trouble. This couch is teal.

Well it’s a chaise longue. Anyway, a very very hard MOTHER: Did you hear the storm? It’s not natural, for color. I thought it would be nice because of the ocean, you know? And I really do like it, I like the ocean. But July. Our third day of rain.

I didn’t know what to put on it in terms of cushions.

ADA: Or maybe the window wasn’t there? And Jane Monroe has such nice cushions, they have tassels. everything was under water. All of the candlesticks, So but then – until Mr. Curtis came and he had just the and the grandfather clock, and the newspaper with most lovely silk, from China, he said. I thought they today’s news, and the cushions with the Chinese silk, were so perfect, and really a bargain too. But they’re and me. so.

Uncomfortable.

I’m not sure – they’re too slippery.

MOTHER: I know it’s irrational, but well I don’t like Do you think so?

And. And. being here without your father, ADA: And you, and Annie, and all the pots and pans in the kitchen. Swimming up and down and every direction. And– MOTHER: It’s irrational, not natural, I… ADA: And well anyways I accidentally fell asleep here.

MOTHER: And your Father, well. (Gesturing to the paper) It’s all in there. Some… something or other on the tracks in Kentucky or Missouri or someplace.

Suddenly: a loud PEAL of thunder, a lighting change, she CRIES out, arms aflutter. Then collapses unconscious in A POSE. MAIDS’ CHORUS. One maid melts out of the woodwork and stands in the room. Then another. One or both of them say:

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Humm humm la li la Then another. And another. And another. And three more.

Now, there are very many: Hummm humm la di dum.

Now, they do a dance, pair by pair, rhythmic stamping and clapping, stepping back and forth and up and down and do-si-do-ing. The storm rages on... Cartwheels and hopscotch. No sound but their shoes and hands against each other. The wordless crescendo of cheerleading. Except they are saying words (Lines are distributed among the ~14 actors. Some should be said all together, some individually, some overlapping, to build a rise and fall of voices and rhythms): HALF OF MAIDS: Humm hum la li la OTHER HALF: Fum fum da di da MAID 1: la di daaa ALL: one two three, one two three MAID 2: one two MAIDS 3-5: one two three MAID 6: Pine MAID 7: Plaster MAID 8: Platinum HALF OF MAIDS: Pine Plaster Platinum MAID 6: Pine Plaster Platinum OTHER HALF: Plaster Plaster Platinum MAID 9: Up and a down and a MAID 9-11: Aaaallllll aroundddddd ALL: Eighteen hundred and ninety three // We came on over across the sea Sixty-five black currant scones // We wiped and polished until they shone // Four hundred, five hundred, six hundred more // They found us when we washed ashore One two three one two // One two three one Up from the deep // Out of the sea Over the land // Down in the sand Pine // Plaster //Platinum Ten trays of teacups // (Pine) Nine racing horses // (Plaster) Eight foreign yew trees // (Platinum) Seven squirrels scurrying Six soapy colors Five black satin waistcoats // Four fires burning // Threeeee railroad lines Two ladies swooning, two oceans swimming One big ole continent Pine plaster platinum MAID 12: Pine Pine Pine MAID 13: Plaster MAID 14: Platinum MAID 1: One big ole continent MAID 4: One two three one two MAID 5: One two three one MAID 6: Hum hum la di da M AID 7: Hum hum la di dum The rain has quieted. They all slip away, except for one.

MOTHER wakes up. She grasps at her head. She has a migraine. She leaves.

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MEET PETER. Peter comes riding in on a train. The MAID explains.

MAID: Meet Peter.

The train goes around, and around, vee r y slo oo wlyy.

Peter looks at around him and at us, smiling in awe.

Maybe the window plays a reel of the Out West.

MAID: Peter has been Out West. He’s been learning the business. How the sausage is made // How the tracks are laid // How the backs are paid.

PETER (shouting into distance): Oh Ada, today I have been at the Grand Canyon. It’s pretty damn big, let me tell you.

MAID: Peter has been at his best. Rise and shine, eggs and sausage. And such.

PETER: Oh Ada, no time to read the Coleridge you have sent. Plenty of ridges here though, and plenty of coal! (as if waiting for a response): Oh Ada! We will get married ! ! ! ! ! Oh Ada? Oh Ada!!!!

ACT 2. THE DESERT. Nighttime again. A maid comes out of the woodwork and lights the candles, winks at the audience, and flits off.

A maid comes out of the woodwork and closes the door.

She does a little tip-toe waltz around the room, winks at the audience, and flits off.

A maid comes out of the woodwork and closes the door.

She walks to the candles, and flips one over onto the lace doily. She winks at the audience, and flits off.

Something like: static and fire on the screen / a train rushing towards the window / an oil fire. Then, it is very dark.

THE GOLD MINE. As dark as in a gold mine. Chooo choo: The train comes around. Only a dim, dinky light on the train. It casts strange shadows on the walls that jump and move about. But Peter is not on the train… It’s the BREAKERS. The BREAKERS now are men in dirty working clothes, wearing headlamps that give off a golden sparkle. choo chooo // chooo chooo one two three one two one two three one Up from the deep // Over the sea // Out of the land // Down in the sand They disembark. Stretch their legs. Point headlamps at things. Whistle. Move around. Shadows are moving all along the walls. A MAID appears, holding a candle to light her way. This can overlap with what the Breakers are saying, or not. She tells the STORY OF THE GOLD RUSH, 1849 (omitted). The BREAKERS go across the room in rows and lines, grids that roll and sweep over the room. They move fluidly like shadows. They say: ch ch ch ch // ch ch ch scrreeecchh

smoke really thick in the air a different kind of air up there up there // down here, a seam in the earth, // or a rip or a tear: a big fire in the coal mines, a big fire in my eye... a hole in the ground, // or a hole in the air: a big fire in the oil fields, a big fire in the sky...step on a track, break a mother’s back // chew on a shoe, bite on a screw... gun to the head... choo chooo: butter and bread best go to bed best go to bed A CHIMING of many grandfather clocks. MRS. VANDERBILT appears at a door in a white nightgown.

She is sleepwalking or something. She wanders in a waltz among the figures of the Breakers, standing still as stone.

She murmurs, very worried: MOTHER: Black currant jam..!? Fifty-five pillowcases, and they have all been smeared with jam! // Strawberry compote on the sheets, and it won’t come out, I will have to ask Annie but she is nowhere to be found… I cannot believe …Annie has let the strawberry compote on the sheets… Blackberry preserves, cherry preserves… All preserved… All on the bedclothes––They have become so dirty. Oh, who knew black currant jam could be so dirty! And so sticky! Annie!! Annie?? There is jam all over the bedclothes and I cannot get it out!

And we will not have enough for the strawberryand-custard tarts this evening…

She exits through the other door.

ADA appears at another door. She paces in front of the window, looking all around but not seeing the Breakers. She sighs and sinks into the chaise longue. She rings a silver bell. The WHIRRING of gears becomes a CRUNCHING that doesn’t seem right. Tea is NOT poured into her cup, or maybe it tastes very bad.

ADA: Dear Diary. Today is my sixth day at the Breakers. Mama has a migraine; Papa is away. Dear Diary, I am. I am, I am … The storm has made me–– The rain is so very… // I think I am–– // I think I, um, hear things in the walls, like there are things moving.

Um. Umm, like–– hello?? is someone there?? ???????...

Like. Probably it’s just, // Annie says there’s squirrels in the walls. This is common. I can’t imagine where there’s room to be.

Good night. Love, Ada. She falls asleep. Day starts to break. Slowly, the normal lights and machines and sounds of the house, which had fallen silent during this sequence, come back on. But the house is not the same. The BREAKERS move away.

OLIVIA KAN-SPERLING B’20 is on her 31st day at the Breakers.

LITERARY

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foreign corresp

BY Victoria Caruso ILLUSTRATION Yukti Agarwal DESIGN Daniel Navratil

FROM ITALY TO NEW YORK The first six weeks I spent in Bologna were nothing short of a dream: I was studying abroad in the culinary capital of Italy, riding on the back of Vespas like Lizzie McGuire, and wandering the city’s portico-covered streets. Eight years of learning Italian and a longheld desire to understand the country of my mother’s childhood stories had led me there. During my last two weeks in Italy, despite the fact that study abroad programs across the country were closing due to the coronavirus, I felt safe. At the time, there were zero cases in Bologna and conversations about the virus, on both interpersonal and governmental levels, made the health crisis out to be more of a disruption to daily life than a threat to well-being. I could have never imagined that in two week’s time, I would be back on Long Island, sitting in my childhood bedroom under self-quarantine.

On February 23, I was notified by the University of Bologna that all academic activities would be canceled for the week. Though outbreaks had begun in Italy, the closest was located in the northern region of Lombardy, which is about a two-hour drive from Bologna. The closing of Bologna’s schools, museums, and libraries seemed like a necessary precaution to prevent any spread.

Initially, there appeared to be some panic among the residents in my neighborhood. When I went to my local grocery store the next day, I stepped into the aftermath of a post-apocalyptic raid. The clunky green produce bins at the store’s entrance were empty, the pasta aisle was wiped clean, and a large piece of metal from a refrigerator vent was lying broken on the floor.

But after a day or two, the store was quickly restocked and the fear seemed to have subsided.

On February 27, Nicola Zingaretti, the leader of the Italian Democratic Party, posted an Instagram photo of himself raising a glass of traditional Italian

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spritz, surrounded by a group of people for “an aperitivo in Milan.” In the caption, he encouraged Italians to “not change our habits.” He continued, writing “our economy is stronger than fear. Let’s go out to drink an ‘aperitivo’, a coffee, or eat a pizza.” That same day, ABC News reported that Luigi Di Maio, Italy’s foreign minister, blamed overblown media coverage for the tanking of the nation’s tourism. “In Italy, we went from the risk of an epidemic to an ‘info-demic’of confirmed disinformation,” Di Maio said, “which at this moment is hitting our flow of tourists, our business and our whole economic system.”

As politicians urged residents to continue their lives as usual, I picnicked in the grassy Giardini Margherita, surrounded by tightrope walkers, musicians, and families. Crowds still formed around bus stops and people still packed themselves into bars.

With time off from classes, my roommates and I went to Barcelona for the weekend, but the trip was more of a vacation than an escape.

The following day, Brown University sent an email to students of the Bologna program stating that the university did not recommend the program’s cancellation. We were given the option to go back to the United States, but the majority of us had no intention of leaving voluntarily. I did have some friends, however, who expressed heightened concern about staying due to chronic medical conditions. By giving us the option to stay, Brown reinforced the idea that Bologna was safe. “The situation’s just getting better, so this is an email for the people who are really afraid and just want to go back,” said Lucas Sanchez, a Brown student on the program.

After reading the email, those still in Bologna responded to the news by heading to bars while my roommates and I popped celebratory champagne and danced around our hotel room. The confidence we felt was quickly shattered. An hour into our celebrations, I was alerted by an email from the US Embassy that travel warnings for Italy were increased to a Level 3: Reconsider Travel, due to a recent outbreak of COVID-19.

Once I saw the updated travel advisory, I knew the program was over.

There was a rumor among the students that a Level 3 warning would mean the need to start packing our bags. I grieved the loss of an experience I had been dreaming about for years, unaware of the intensity of the wide-scale grief to come in the following weeks. My roommates tried to calm me down, worried about the hotel's thin walls as I sobbed on the bathroom floor. The next few hours I sat huddled with my roommates on the bed, anxiously waiting as universities began to individually pluck their students out of our study abroad program and wondering when we’d be next. At 2:36 AM, four hours after I received the first email that said we could stay, Brown sent a second email that suspended the program. I was able to return to Bologna one last time before heading home to New York.

When I arrived in Bologna, I expected to feel a dramatic shift. A man in a neon red suit and mask checked my temperature at the airport, which made me feel both anxious and

safe as it was an indication that officials were trying to keep the virus from entering the city. At the same time, some tourist attractions, like Le Due Torrí—Bologna’s famous towers that offer picturesque views of the city— were beginning to open up again. To address the fear of the coronavirus and incentivize people to continue going out, the municipality of Bologna decided to offer free “culture cards,” which gave discounts to museums, events, and movies throughout the city. Matteo Lepore, the Deputy Mayor of Bologna explained that the cards meant to “help with the culture sector after the forced stop.” On March 1, it was reported that over 10,000 people filled the streets, waiting in line to receive this discount card. On this day, Italy had a total of 1,694 cases of coronavirus and 34 deaths. I discussed the initiative over lunch with Martina, a friend who lives close to Bologna. She was excited for cultural events to reopen again, but disappointed that I wouldn’t be there to experience them.

Based on the relaxed attitudes of politicians and my Italian friends, it seemed like the situation in the city was starting to get better just as I was leaving. I realize now how irresponsible the hopeful promotion was, as it prioritized a sector of industry over the health of thousands who waited in line to collect the card and attended events across the city. A little over a week later, those living in Italy were ordered to stay in their apartments indefinitely unless given special permission or buying groceries.

On March 5, the day I left, 148 people had died from the virus in Italy. As of April 15, the death toll was 21,645.

By the time I flew back to the US, the UN health agency had already urged all countries to act against the rapid spread of the virus after a dramatic surge in new cases. When I arrived in New York, I noticed that the safety procedures were lagging behind Italy’s policies. Unlike the masked Red Cross worker that took my temperature in Italy, the officials that greeted me at JFK didn’t wear the same protective gear and didn’t check to see if I was ill. I told them that I was coming from Northern Italy, but there was no conversation about recommended quarantine or self-isolation. Sixteen other students from my program confirmed with me that they had not been checked as they entered various airports across the country nor were their airport officials wearing masks. Had I not seen the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention guidelines or Brown’s email advising me to quarantine, I probably wouldn’t have known what to do. Though I followed procedure and self-quarantined for 14 days, the lack of intervention at the airport seemed to trivialize the severity of the situation.

Rapidly changing situations and a lack of clarity were not exclusive to my experience in Italy.

Misinformation and a delayed US response to the crisis made it difficult to know what to believe or how seriously to act. I saw pictures of friends hosting large gatherings at their universities one day and being sent home the next. I’ve watched as my state’s health care system has quickly become crushed by the virus, reporting more cases than any other country in the world.

While individuals should be taking measures, like practicing social distancing to curb the spread of the virus, a pandemic requires large scale action, achieved by rapid and comprehensible social policies. As someone who has traveled from one coronavirus hotspot to another, I’ve witnessed in detail what happens when governments fail to communicate clearly and underestimate the need for urgent action in times of crisis.

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spondents

BY Gemma Sack ILLUSTRATION Yukti Agarwal DESIGN Daniel Navratil

FARM TO QUARANTINE I landed in Spain on March 3, the same day health officials reported the country’s first death from the coronavirus. At that point, 114 cases had been confirmed there. Less than two weeks later, I returned home to New York, a day after the Spanish government declared a state of emergency and 7,753 cases had been confirmed. Of course, in retrospect—with lockdown as the new normal—it’s easy to say that I should have seen what was coming. However, the Spanish government, the people around me, and I all refused the reality of the pandemic until it was inescapable.

I was traveling during a semester off, and had planned to stay in Spain for about two months. I would spend a few days in Madrid, a weekend in Granada, and then I would volunteer on a farm in Andalusia for three weeks. From there, I would figure it out.

Madrid felt remarkably lived-in and relaxed, which I loved. During the day, the plazas and cafes were crowded with groups sitting and drinking; at night, people thronged in the bars, restaurants, and streets. Museums were filled with tourists and children on school trips. As the number of confirmed cases in Spain rose (a significant percentage of which were in Madrid), I barely paid attention. Nothing around me seemed to have changed. I figured that it would only make me anxious to follow the country’s prognosis closely—it felt like there was nothing I could do.

On Monday, I left for the farm where I would be volunteering, and where I would have neither cell phone service nor WiFi access. By then, 1,231 cases and 30 deaths had been confirmed. I spent the next four days in blissful ignorance—making cheese, building a greenhouse, watching sunsets over the Sierra Nevada—as the world began to shut down around me. I heard tidbits from the other Spanish volunteers about their families, but I was unaware when President Trump announced the ban on travel from Europe that Wednesday, and still in the dark on Thursday as the Spanish government closed museums and restricted public gatherings (the country’s first significant measures to address the spread of the virus).

On Friday morning, when I was able to connect to a WiFi hotspot, I opened my phone to a barrage of messages from the last few days asking what I was going to do, and when I was coming home. “got that flight yet??” a friend studying abroad in Barcelona had texted me two days earlier. Before I had even read the news, I told her to call me, but she responded, “i’m on

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

the plane.”

After an initial panic, I returned to Granada that day to consider my options somewhere with more stable WiFi. I was probably safest on the farm, where I had little contact with the outside world, and I figured that as a U.S. citizen in a European country, there would always be a way for me to get home. If I went home, I would be returning to quarantine in New York City, which was rapidly shutting down and bracing for the worst to come.

Someone I worked with suggested that after leaving the farm, I should find a place on the Costa del Sol—Spain’s beachy southern coast—and stay. “Why not just sit it out here and enjoy the pandemic?” It was a very tempting fantasy. (I met some people in my hostel in Granada that weekend who, despite the circumstances, had just arrived and were planning to vacation as usual. I wonder what happened to them.) I am both optimistic and deterministic about my life: I believe that things generally work out in some way and ought to be that way for some reason. If I had any gut feeling then, it was to put this conviction to the test and resist both the homing instinct and the hysteria, weathering what would come on my own.

But when I arrived in Granada, I realized how much had changed in four days. On a Friday night, the streets were empty, most bars and restaurants were closed, and from the conversations I eavesdropped on, the virus was all people were talking about.

Newspapers reported Spain was just a few days behind Italy; this was the first time I saw it and believed it. I wondered what could change overnight—how much advance notice was needed to impose a Milan-style lockdown? How committed were the Schengen countries to open borders, really? The realm of what was possible seemed to have exploded, and with the deluge of news from Italy, the US, and the rest of the EU, it felt impossible to keep track of what was fact and what was projection. It was evident to me that, whatever happened, any degree of normal travel was no longer viable; as calm and capable as I told myself I could be, it felt more foolish than intrepid to resist the trajectory of the world around me.

I booked a flight out of Lisbon for Sunday morning because I heard a rumor that the Madrid airport was going to shut down and I didn’t want to take the risk.

(I would have been fine.) When I tried to take an overnight bus from Sevilla to Lisbon, I had to argue with the

driver to let me on: he was convinced that the Spanish border had already closed, and only Portuguese citizens would be allowed to cross. (Nothing happened.)

From Lisbon, my journey was eerily smooth. The airport was crowded and operating as usual. When I landed in Newark, after a brief health questionnaire and the scan of a forehead thermometer, I was cleared to pass through the shortest customs line I have ever waited in.

The number of coronavirus cases in New York has now surpassed that in all of Spain—the governments of both regions, which have the highest numbers of cases worldwide, are facing the consequences of their prolonged inaction. Both comprehended the crisis at the same pace as their citizens, despite months of forewarnings, watching the pandemic unfold outside of their respective borders but refusing to grasp that it had already arrived at home.

I have been sheltering-in-place in Brooklyn for just over a month now. Meanwhile, a friend from the farm told me that he and the other European volunteers just left last week, as it was becoming increasingly difficult to travel by bus within Spain. I could have flown to New York from Madrid any day this week, as long as I was able to get to the airport.

NEWS

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AMAZON STRIKES WAREHOUSE WORKERS IN STATEN ISLAND INSPIRE WALKOUTS ACROSS THE COUNTRY It is often said that in times of crisis, people and nations show their true colors. Blurry lines sharpen as the good sarmatians and swindlers reveal themselves.

Amid the global pandemic, the e-commerce giant Amazon has also faced a reckoning. After workers in his Staten Island warehouse fell ill, Chris Smalls organized a walkout on March 30 to close the building for sanitation. Over the past month, hundreds of Amazon workers across the country have gone on strike to demand safer working conditions. The College Hill Independent had the opportunity to speak to some of these workers, including Smalls.

While publicly hailing their warehouse workers’ bravery for continuing to work, Amazon fired Smalls.

Leaked notes from a meeting of Amazon leadership, including CEO Jeff Bezos, uncovered a plan to smear Smalls’ reputation. Amazon General Counsel David Zapolsky wrote of Smalls, “He’s not smart, or articulate, and to the extent the press wants to focus on us versus him, we will be in a much stronger PR position than simply explaining for the umpteenth time how we’re trying to protect workers.” The disparity between Amazon’s public and private comments illustrate a culture in which employee safety, including the possibility of contracting and dying from COVID-19, is secondary to reputation and profits. +++ Weeks before employees halted work and walked out of Amazon’s Staten Island warehouse on March 30, Chris Smalls was already getting worried. Smalls, an assistant manager, had worked for Amazon for five years and oversaw 60 to 100 ‘pickers,’ workers who pick goods off of shelves and place them on conveyor belts for shipping. His job included “making sure [his associates] are safe, first and foremost.” At the beginning of March, employees began complaining to Smalls about the lack of cleaning supplies, masks, and gloves. Soon, people fell sick. “Certain employees couldn’t finish their tasks. Vomiting, dizzy, fatigued—I’ve seen it all,” Smalls told the Independent, “Domino effect, one by one. It was a very scary situation.”

Because Smalls was afraid for his own well-being, he took time off of work, relying on money from his 401(k) to get by. When he returned, the situation had gone from bad to worse. His colleague Barbra Chandler tested positive for the coronavirus but was advised by human resources to keep the news private.

After finding out about the positive case, Smalls raised his worries to HR. He urged the factory to shut down to allow workers to quarantine for 14 days. Instead, his concerns were “swept under the rug.”

Frustrated by the lack of response from managers, Smalls decided to take action into his own hands by planning a walk out. For Smalls, it was initially difficult to convince colleagues to strike.

Driven by increasing demand, Amazon is one of the few companies hiring during the epidemic. Over the

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past month, Amazon hired over 100,000 new associates in the US with plans to bring on 75,000 more.

The pace at which Amazon filled its open positions is testament to the precarity of the American labor force.

As workers across the country are laid off, many are looking for new sources of income, regardless of the potential health risks. Meanwhile, many currently employed workers cannot afford to go on strike and risk losing their job. “At the time right now, people don’t have any options,” Smalls said, “They don’t have any choice. And the company knows that.”

Despite initial resistance, Smalls continued to engage fellow workers, eventually gaining traction. “I was visible. I was accessible for questions,” Smalls explained, “Me being on a supervisor level and having direct communication with management, people respected that. People believed what I was telling them.

When they see a leader, sacrificing, putting their career on the line, there’s got to be some truth to it.” In other words, Smalls led by example. At 12:30 PM on March 30, over 100 workers walked out of the Staten Island warehouse, demanding more safety precautions, paid sick leave, hazard pay, and that the factory close for cleaning.

By the end of the day, Smalls was fired. Amazon accused Smalls of violating safety precautions. After Smalls came into contact with Mrs. Chandler, the worker who contracted the coronavirus, Amazon put Smalls under quarantine and told him to stay away from his co-workers. Amazon claims Smalls was terminated because he returned to the warehouse, violating social distancing guidelines. Smalls disputes Amazon’s motives, questioning why he was the person to be put under quarantine out of the hundreds of workers with whom Mrs. Chandler interacted. “They didn’t even try to quarantine the person she drives to work with every single day,” Smalls said, “What does that tell you right there?” Instead, Smalls argues that the quarantine was a pretense to prevent him from organizing. The right to organize is protected by both New York State and federal law. Labor rights organizations and politicians have since called for investigations into Smalls’ terminations, including New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio and former presidential candidate Bernie Sanders.

While Smalls chanted and held picket signs in New York, Amazon employees in a Detroit warehouse were being told of a second confirmed coronavirus case within their facility. Fears of contamination compounded existing frustrations over shortage of cleaning supplies and the crowded conditions. Mario Crippen is a ‘stower’ at the Detroit warehouse. He receives items into the warehouse and scans them into the warehouse’s database. Crippen has three young children at home and was worried about their safety should he contract the virus. “On my lunch break, I look at the news and noticed New York was doing a walk out, Crippen told the Independent, “I [wrote] on private Facebook group with my co-workers and said, ‘If New York can do it we can do it too.’”

To spread his message, Crippen distributed pocket-size flyers. “I passed it to people I know, so they could pass it to people they know. And sooner rather than later, the word got around the whole building.” As in New York, workers’ demanded that Amazon close and sanitize the building, stop processing non-essential items, and extend paid sick leave. Soon, the growing movement faced resistance management.

“The managers found out that we were trying to participate in a walk-out.” said Crippen. “They didn’t know who the ring-leaders were…People were getting intimidated by the managers, saying they were going to get fired if they participated in the walk-out. You are going to lose your job, your benefits, so it’s best you don’t participate.” Crippen reported that while workers were inspired by the defiance of the New York strike, excitement turned to anxiety after learning of Smalls’ subsequent termination. Organizers report that around 40 of the 136 workers on shift walked out on April 1. Amazon insists that there were less than 15.

It is anyone’s guess on how many would have participated if not for fear of reprisal.

A third strike, on April 3 and 4 in Chicago, is notable both for its similarities and differences with the two wal-outs that preceded it. The demands and grievances of Chicago workers mirrored those in New York and Detroit. After hearing of two confirmed cases of coronavirus in their facility, workers shouted, “Clean it up! Shut it down!” as they marched outside. However, while Mr. Smalls and Mr. Crippen built support from the ground up, the strike in Chicago relied on existing infrastructure and experience.

In the blistering heat wave that struck Chicago during the summer of 2019, a small group of colleagues gathered to discuss the lack of clean drinking water at the warehouse. On their feet all day, workers often walk 10 to 15 miles in a warehouse that spans two football fields. Amazon has previously received criticism for failing to provide water or air conditioning in warehouses where temperatures exceed 100 degrees. In 2011, Amazon hired paramedics and ambulances to station themselves outside a warehouse in Allenstown, Pennsylvania and treat workers with heat-related injuries, rather than install air conditioning. Although Amazon has since expanded air conditioning in facilities across the country, the warehouse in Chicago was still without A/C when workers delivered a petition for drinking water to managers. Surprised by their employee’s boldness, managers nervously promised to install water lines as soon as possible.

This victory inspired workers to organize into a formal group, DCH1 Amazonians United to address other grievances. (DCH1 is the name of the Chicago warehouse.) Over the past year, DCH1 Amazonians United led the fight for paid time off for part-time and seasonal workers. After months of ignoring their demands, Amazon relented on March 23, allowing all workers to accrue paid time off, to be used for either sick or personal reasons. Proud of their accomplishments,

17 APR 2020

BY Bilal Memon ILLUSTRATION Alex Westfall DESIGN Ella Rosenblatt

Amazonians United remains skeptical of Amazon's intentions. In a blog post, the group wrote, “Amazon is giving us PTO [paid time off] because they see our movement growing and they want to calm our anger during this Coronavirus Peak by giving us what they already owed us. But Amazon did not ‘give’ us PTO— we took our PTO from Amazon’s greedy hands.” The struggle for PTO built solidarity between workers and fueled animosity towards their employer, enabling DCH1 Amazonians United to react quickly after managers refused to close down the plant. +++ Throughout the weeks of strikes, Amazon has repeatedly claimed that it is doing everything within its powers to ensure their workers’ health. They state that they are providing safety equipment, setting up sanitizing stations, checking temperatures, instituting social distancing, increasing wages by $2 an hour, and giving those diagnosed with the coronavirus paid sick leave. Smalls says that these measures are insufficient and too late. “They’re being reactive instead of proactive…This is sugarcoating.” He says Amazon only responded when their public image was threatened and without substantially addressing the major grievances. Workers with young children, elderly parents, or underlying health conditions must choose between risking the lives of themselves or their loved one, and a paycheck that puts food on the table. Workers demand that these vulnerable groups be given paid leave as well. As for the $2 raise, Smalls calls it “blood money.”

Equally troubling, the spread of the virus within factories has continued. 10 Detroit workers have become infected, and New York organizers reported that 25 people had tested positive during a second strike

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at the warehouse on April 6. Amazon only admitted on Tuesday that a manager in its Hawthorne, California warehouse died on March 31 from complications brought on by the coronavirus. Crippen, the worker from Detroit, reveals that Amazon’s safety measures are not implemented in practice—even the basics are not met. “They have put more hand sanitizing stations, but a lot of those stations have not been filled or are completely empty,” Crippen reported, “A lot of doorknobs, handrails, elevators buttons are touched, but I am not seeing them clean on a frequent basis. They say they are supposed to clean these items six times a day. I have a friend who works in the cleaning crew of the building. They say they are short-staffed during the night shift, so those extra measures are not being done.” Additionally, Crippen told the Independent, the social distancing rules Amazon publicized to the press are impossible to follow in the warehouse. The assembly lines often require workers to be in close proximity. The solution demanded by workers across the country: temporarily close the warehouses for sanitation, while continuing to compensate workers.

On Wednesday, Amazon said it would halt all shipping in France after a court reprimanded it for failing to protect workers and ordered it to deliver only food, hygiene, and medical products. The suit was brought

by SUD-Commerce, a union representing Amazon warehouse employees. Amazon’s worst nightmare is that after the dust settles, American Amazon workers will have become more like their French counterparts.

From its inception, Amazon has cracked down hard against organized labor. In 2001, Amazon laid off 850 call center employees in Seattle after they attempted to unionize. Eighteen years later, a unionbusting training video for managers leaked onto the internet. The video’s animated protagonist advised, “We are not anti-union, but we are not neutral either…

Our business model is associated with speed, innovation, and consumer obsession—things that are not usually associated with union.” Amazon’s strategy is to scare and intimidate workers into silence. Beyond Smalls, Amazon has fired a warehouse worker in

Minnesota and two Seattle tech workers, all of whom criticized Amazon for putting workers’ lives in jeopardy.

If there is one central dichotomy that governs COVID-19 society, it is the difference between the essential and the non-essential. Amazon proudly proclaims on its blog, “Our employees are heroes helping people get the products they need delivered to their doorsteps, products they might not otherwise be able to get while maintaining social distancing.”

Stunned by the duplicity, workers rightly respond, then why aren’t we treated as heroes? Mapped onto our shocked economy—where investors spend their days doing crossword puzzles and nurses work from dawn to dusk—the language of ‘essential’ begins to sound a lot like the centuries old rhetoric of the divide between the ‘productive’ and ‘parasitic’ classes. Scared for their lives, warehouse workers are realizing the value of their labor and the power of organization. And all while Amazon’s stock continues to rise.

BILAL MEMON B’22 no longer orders from Amazon.

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Inspired by the Chinese tradition of burning spirit money (joss paper) for passed loved ones and a special packaging I once saw at a Chinese supermarket. The packaging had various items on it, including watches, bags, and jewelry. I always knew of this tradition, and participated in it often growing up. But I had never seen papers that represented commodities other than money (after research it is likely a more environmental-friendly alternative to burning real items such as cars, which has happened). It was a bewildering momentâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;the idea that commodities and the consumeristic culture we indulge in during our lifetime should be passed on to the afterlife is so compelling to me. Although this symbolic act seems like an idea that screams for critique, it is in fact just an extremely long-held tradition practiced out of love and mourning.

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the list

4.17.2020 covid-19 resources and community aid funds

This week, and for the foreseeable future, the Indy will publish community aid funds and other ways you can contribute to coronavirus relief in lieu of our traditional event listings. If you are able, we encourage you to support these efforts to alleviate the financial and health burdens that coronavirus has taken on communities here in Providence.

TODAY (FRIDAY 4/17) Free Them All car rally at the RI Statehouse from 12PM - 1:15PM Join Incarcerated Workers Organizing Committee PVD, Never Again Action Rhode Island, AMOR RI - Alianza para Movilizar Nuestra Resistencia, Formerly Incarcerated Union of Rhode Island and Black and Pink Providence in demanding improved conditions and the release of prisoners at the ACI. Para más asistencia en Español, llama el línea de apoyo de AMOR a 401-675-1414

HEALTHCARE RESOURCES These Community Health Centers accept all insurance, and have a sliding-scale system based on income for patients without insurance.

• Blackstone Valley Community Health Center: Pawtucket & Central Falls - 722-0081 • Thundermist: West Warwick & Woonsocket - 615-2800 • Tri-County Health Center: Johnston & N. Providence - 351-2750 • Providence Community Health Center: Providence - 444-0570 • East Bay Community Action Program: Riverside & Newport - 437-1008 Free clinics - free and low-cost health services • Clinica Esperanza, Providence - 347-9093 • Rhode Island Free Clinic, Providence - 274-6347 If you have COVID-19 symptoms, there are several locations in Rhode Island where you can get tested. For more information, please visit https://health.ri.gov/covid/testing/.

Several urgent care and primary care providers in RI have set up respiratory clinics to evaluate patients suspected of having COVID-19. For a list of these clinics and more information, visit the link above.

Drive-up testing sites are located at URI in South Kingstown, CCRI in Warwick, and Rhode Island College in Providence. These sites require that your doctor orders a test and a testing appointment is made in advance. These testing sites do not accommodate individuals who arrive on foot or via public transportation.

CVS Health is operating drive-through Rapid COVID-19 Testing at Twin River Casino in Lincoln. In order to make an appointment, you must go through an online pre-screening.

FOOD AND HOUSING RESOURCES Free meals for kids are being offered at most public schools; see https://health.ri.gov/diseases/ncov2019/about/foodsites/ for more.

Project LETS intake form for people in need of immediate housing: tinyurl.com/requesthousing-ri Call United Way Rhode Island’s 2-1-1 hotline or visit https://rifoodbank.org/find-food/ to find a food bank or pantry near you.

PETITIONS AND DONATION OPPORTUNITIES General AMOR COVID-19 Community support fund. Donations go to support sanitation equipment for vulnerable populations, as well as direct financial assistance to families in need. Donate here: https://bit.ly/2UmYJXr. To get involved as a volunteer, packaging and distributing mutual aid, visit https://tinyurl.com/amor-covid-volunteer.

Prevent Coronavirus in the Criminal Justice System: 1. FANG Collective community bail fund: As jails and prisons become coronavirus hotspots, they present unsafe conditions to inmates, many of whom haven’t been convicted of a crime and are held because they couldn’t afford bail. Help bail people out from the Bristol County House of Correction and the Ash Street Jail through this fundraiser organized by the FANG Collective. https://www.gofundme.com/f/fangbailfund 2. Various local activist groups (AMOR, Never Again Action, Sunrise, DSA, Formerly Incarcerated Union, and many more) have organized a petition “asking Gina Raimondo to use her power during this state of emergency to grant parole to anyone eligible, allow medical furlough for all medically vulnerable incarcerated people, and ensure the ACI will provide adequate information and supplies to those held in detention.”

You can sign here: https://bit.ly/2UzVNWg. 3. ICE detainees at the Bristol County Correctional Center have written a letter to elected officials and activist groups raising concern about the spread of coronavirus in their unit, which includes many detainees with serious underlying medical conditions. The FANG Collective has mobilized in response. They explain: “The letter speaks of correctional officers who have continued to work their shifts despite having flu like symptoms, overcrowded conditions at the facility, and a medical professional at the facility telling people detained there that “infection of the whole ICE facility population is inevitable and will occur within the next 30 days.” To get involved: CALL and EMAIL the ICE facility in Bristol County and the County's congressional delegation and demand that the people held in ICE detention in Bristol County be released.

Contact info: Bristol County ICE Detention Center: 508-995-6400, select option 6, then option 2; Senator Elizabeth Warren: (617) 565-3170; Senator Ed Markey: 508-999-6462; Representative Bill Keating: 508-999-6462

MASKS If you work in an industry or own a company with medical supplies: Donate them through the RI Department of Health Medical Supply intake form. Help alleviate the nationwide shortage of protective equipment for healthcare workers. https://bit.ly/2JeIaqf If you want to contribute to mask-making efforts for essential workers, or if you would like to receive handmade masks made by Rhode Islanders, sign up here: https://www.projectmaskri.com. PLUS: Ocean State Job Lot is giving out fabric for free.

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