Austin from Gen7 - Reflections on Coronavirus Experience

COVID-19 began to hit the US and it became evident that this wasn’t going to blow over so easily.  I was in Hawaii, thousands of miles from my home in Colorado.  I began to fear getting stuck in Hawaii away from my family, and so I decided to cut my volunteer trip short by a week and a half.  Traveling home, I could feel the tension in the air.  Within less than a week of getting home, my state went into a stay at home order, issued by the governor.  I was lucky enough to be able to stay home all the time except for a few runs to the grocery store.  My mom on the other hand, works in the lab at a hospital and is considered an essential worker right now. We are taking all the precautions we can to stay clean and healthy.  

The hardest part for me is being separated from my peers. I am usually very social, so now I am separated from my friends which is slowly wearing on me. I do get afraid sometimes about the consequences of the virus, but know that my family is doing what we can to stay safe. I'm grateful to be back with my family, and that we are all still healthy.  I worry for those in other parts of the country and the world that are getting hit harder by the virus. I’m praying that good can come from this slow down in many areas of the world.
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I want to be out in the world more, but I know it's better to stay at home until things are cleared up more. This is something that my generation has never experienced, even our parents haven’t. This feels like it could be a turning point in many people's lives.

I see Gen7 as a powerful way to empower the world’s youth to cooperate and communicate on the issues that face us. It’s really important, especially going forward. There’s a lot of good that was done by previous generations, but also a lot of hurt. Now I feel it’s a matter of integrating everything together and healing all of the intergenerational and intercultural trauma. I’m working on a project with a friend in Colorado to create a discussion group to build each other's perspectives and work on respectful disagreement and building consensus. With Gen7, our cooperative projects with CYL are a great way of doing this as well. It allows more people to learn about a culture and lifestyle different than their own, and work on building intercultural communication skills. On top of this it helps give back to the world community.