Women of the Pandemic

by Lauren McKeon

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  When she arrived at the Canada–U.S. border, Nicole Folz called Shelley Uvanile-Hesch on a hunch. Uvanile-Hesch is the president and founder of the Women’s Trucking Federation of Canada (WTFC), a non-profit that encourages and supports women truckers. She had been off the road since her husband and driving partner, Chris, had died in a workplace accident in August 2019. In the days after taking Folz’s call, she would return to the road, driving essential supplies across the country in a fifty-three-foot trailer that, on its sides, featured photos of women frontline medical workers against a hot pink backdrop. It read “STAY HOME SAVE LIVES” and “#FlattenTheCurve.” It would be her only drive. As soon as she began the trek, she also began to receive violent threats about the trailer. The wrap also featured the WTFC logo, identifying her. People emailed and messaged on social media to explain, in detail, the harm that would come to her if she crossed into the U.S. They threatened to hurt her wherever they found her. They threatened to run her off the road. She finished the drive in fear and decided she was done. But before any of that happened, Uvanile-Hesch answered her phone. After listening to a distraught Folz, she called Ontario premier Doug Ford on his cellphone. Within ten minutes, Folz had an apology from Public Health Ontario for her ordeal and, at last, a plan.

  She pushed her open passport against the window at the crossing and was waved through. Uvanile-Hesch had made sure her load was already cleared to cross. Next, Folz drove her truck back to the yard, sanitized everything, lurched to her car, and drove to a hotel near the Toronto airport that the government had set up for people who, like her, couldn’t safely recover at home. She arrived at 9:30 p.m. on Good Friday and felt like she’d walked onto a movie set. Everything was wrapped in white plastic: the walls, ceiling, elevator, floors, tables—all of it. Onsite nurses were dressed in head-to-toe PPE. Folz draped her buffalo plaid shirt over a chair and fell asleep. She was admitted to the hospital the next morning for testing. After one false-negative result, she received her diagnosis: positive. She also received an official letter that informed her she’d have to stay in the hotel for two weeks minimum. When Folz got back from the hospital that day, she decided that other truckers needed to know about her experience. So did younger people who thought the virus would skip over them, like a rock bouncing across water. She pulled up her Facebook profile and began to type: “Wellllll. It happened.” She went on to detail her struggle and her symptoms and also posted a photo of her room. In it, a T-shirt-clad teddy bear sat on a white, fleece blanket, emblazoned with the Canadian Red Cross symbol, a loose red thread dangling. Dozens of comments rolled in, hitting over one hundred.

  After that brief burst of energy, Folz slept for “three days, pretty much straight.” She hardly left her bed, and a nurse visited her three times a day. Medical staff paid particular attention to her temperature, which remained feverish for a week before breaking. At one point, she even got “the whole COVID toe thing.” Among the many odd emerging COVID-19 symptoms, including a diminished sense of smell, some people noticed chilblains or frostbite—a condition usually associated with overexposure to cold air. Chilblains are caused by the inflammation of small blood vessels and can cause itching, swelling, blistering, and red or purple patches. In the coming months, there would be considerable medical controversy over “COVID toes,” with some studies denying the connection and others supporting it. One study largely surveyed people with no typical symptoms but who suffered from skin lesions. In such cases, the SARS-CoV-2 virus was found in patients’ sweat glands and attached to the walls of the skin’s blood vessels. Whatever researchers agreed on (or not) didn’t matter the night Folz woke up with burning, itching toes, swollen like rows of miniature eggplants. She didn’t feel better until the Tuesday of the week after she arrived. She finally ate then, savouring the meal. Soon after, she tested negative.

  Folz left the COVID-19 hotel exactly two Fridays after she arrived, at precisely 9:30 p.m. She drove to Bancroft and tiptoed into her house after midnight, home for the first time in months. She knows her dad should have kept his distance, but he heard her—probably wasn’t sleeping too soundly, anyway. He bolted out of his bed and hugged her, and pretty soon they were both crying. It was relief, love, something that words can’t describe. “My dad is a big softie,” said Folz. But even as they embraced, she knew she’d give him something to worry about soon. Folz stayed home for just under a week until she got back in her truck and out on the open road. Her dad, obviously, didn’t want her to go. She had a job to do, though, and she tried not to be scared while doing it. People needed supplies and they needed people like her to transport and deliver them. As she drove through Baltimore, through New York, and once again through North Carolina and Louisiana, she was glad to see there were new safety measures and that people kept their distance. She hoped that other truckers were better informed, that their companies and their governments had clear plans in place. She felt alive and excited to be on the road again, freedom zinging through her like Pop Rocks. The feeling of being let down hadn’t left her, though, not really, not yet. Without Uvanile-Hesch, and her community of truckers, she didn’t know what would have happened.

  “THE WEIGHT ON MY SHOULDERS FELT SO ENORMOUS.”

  Mita Hans, co-founder of Caremongers-TO

  Three

  COMMUNITIES COME TOGETHER

  Any person entering North Preston, Canada’s largest and oldest Black community, will pass a thicket of Maritime wilderness and a burgundy-and-white banner that declares, “We’ve come this far by faith!” Maybe they’ll take a moment to reflect on the community’s storied 200-year-plus history, and the people who built it: Black Loyalists who arrived after the American Revolution and slaves who escaped the U.S. during the civil war. Then, they might walk by the long brown-brick elementary school, with the Nova Scotia flag rippling in the grey winds. Or, they’ll pass the recently renovated St. Thomas United Baptist Church, maybe pause to listen to the thumping gospel and the hundreds of joyous voices rising up on the air. They might hear a train chugging along the tracks, too, or someone, quite sincerely, telling them they have a beautiful smile. In April 2020, as people travelled further in on the empty streets, however, they likely would have passed something new as well: one of the more than 250 signs reading “During the shutdown of COVID-19, PLEASE NO VISITORS.” The blue-and-red warnings were taped to the front doors of the community’s most at-risk homes. “Above all else,” they read, “I’m staying home for you. #SpreadLoveNotTheIllness.” Thanks to LaMeia Reddick and her fellow advocates, a person walking through the close-knit town that month would also pass another new fixture: North Preston’s COVID-19 dedicated testing site—the only place where many of the area’s most vulnerable were able to get swabbed for the virus. If they needed to, and many did, they, too, could go in.

  Reddick has dedicated most of her adult life to North Preston, the community where she grew up. The twenty-nine-year-old was already in a state of deep grief when a mystery virus began to make headlines. She’d spent the previous months helping care for her sick grandmother, and then, once the cancer completely took over the family matriarch’s body, every day mourning her death, fogged in loss. Initially, that’s what was real to her, not the virus. She’d taken a break from her advocacy work, at both BLxCKHOUSE, a community centre headquartered in the basement of her family home, and the One North End Community Economic Development Society, a social innovation lab. If you knew Reddick, who is also a community engagement consultant; a founding member of the Change is Brewing Collective, a group lobbying to bring diversity to the food and beverage industry; and often the first to volunteer for a community project, you’d know this sense of stillness signalled just how bottomless her grief was. If you knew her at all, you would also not have been shocked that once she did realize the threat COVID-19 posed to North Preston, she acted.

  She laughs when she recalls the moment she realized the pote
ntial gravity of the virus. In mid-March, the NBA announced that it would suspend games. She was chatting with one of her family members, who is also a community advocate, who told her the news: “This is real.” But little of the public health messaging had reached North Preston—not unusual for the marginalized community, noted Reddick. Indeed, the province’s Black communities are notoriously underserviced. Some don’t have health care centres. Those that do, such as North Preston, have facilities that often operate on reduced hours. In non-pandemic times these scarce resources can have a disastrous trickle-down effect. For example, one CMAJ study showed that, when compared to the rest of the province, the wider Preston area had significantly higher rates of heart disease and stroke, Type 2 diabetes, and mental illness—grim findings that can largely be blamed on poorer access to preventative care and pervasive discrimination within the system. What’s more, such disparate findings are not uncommon in Black communities around the Western world. Given that, it’s no wonder Reddick, and others in North Preston, had started to ask themselves: how much worse would an already-lopsided system get during a global pandemic?

  As she and other community members watched the case counts climb across the country, including in nearby Halifax, following a St. Patrick’s Day party, they grew increasingly concerned. They began to think, Wow, when COVID-19 hits North Preston, it’s going to hit hard. Reddick decided to team up with members of the non-profit ACCE HFX, a collective that supports arts, community, culture, and economics for Black Canadians in the province. Together, they contacted health advocates as well as medical leaders within the Nova Scotia Health Authority and, as a group, formed the Preston Community Response Team. Reddick knew they had to get loud to make sure North Preston would be ready for the virus. Call it a vision, foresight, or a lifetime of experience. She and the others all feared, or maybe just understood, that North Preston and the surrounding communities of East Preston, Cherry Brook, and Lake Loon would be forgotten. Nobody would include them in social distancing awareness campaigns, they wouldn’t get good information about community spread or symptoms in a way that spoke to them directly, and the testing sites would be so far away they might as well be on the moon. As one community member would put it, “We don’t get much help at all. The little we do have, we have done it ourselves.”

  Together, Reddick and the other members of the volunteer response team coordinated a push for care. They contacted health authorities to lobby for testing sites. They worked with doctors to learn about the enigmatic virus and its transmission, and then passed on the reliable, fact-based information to everybody they could. They told the system what they needed and how they needed it delivered. On April 7, the Nova Scotia government finally said it would establish testing clinics in North Preston and East Preston—but the good news did not come without a heavy dose of racism. In his press conference announcing the move, Premier Stephen McNeil followed an age-old pandemic-shaming tactic: he not only blamed the most at-risk and underserved communities for their own poor health outcomes, he suggested they were at fault for everyone else getting sick, too. In breaking previous self-imposed anonymity rules and naming North Preston, he scolded, “And while we are using resources, doubling down on testing, and trying to keep people healthy, the reckless and selfish few in these communities are still having parties. I can’t even believe that after everything we’ve been talking about, some of you think it’s okay to have a gathering or a party.”

  North Preston residents called out the premier’s statements for what they were, and he refused to apologize. “We’re already fighting the battle of being Black, the battle of being from North Preston,” said one resident, Miranda Cain, who had laboured to get the town the resources it needed. “And now we’re fighting the battle of being from North Preston and Black and with an infectious disease.” That battle didn’t slow down after the communities got their testing sites, either. Reddick and the rest of the response team had to work hard to encourage people to get tested. Given the area’s harsh history and continued maltreatment, many people understandably distrusted the system now deployed to help them—and the testing site’s initial too-small, shabby conditions inside the local North Preston community centre had only made the hesitancy worse. Reddick joined others in calling friends, family, and acquaintances to assure them it was safe to get tested. She explained the test, what it involved, and why it was so important for people to get it done after others in North Preston had tested positive. Having the response team work with medical professionals, however, did help people get over the hurdle of fear. Reddick said hundreds of residents were tested. It was tough and exhausting, and she was eventually glad when health agencies with more capacity took over the job; she hadn’t imagined a full-time job fighting the pandemic. But in that moment she knew it was exactly what she was supposed to be doing. Like hundreds of other women across the country, she’d stepped up to help both her friends and neighbours, as well as people she’d never met, survive. “I kept thinking,” she said, “that if we don’t mobilize and take the COVID-19 crisis head-on, then we are not going to have a community to do anything for in the future.”

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  The federal government officially launched the Canada Emergency Response Benefit (CERB) on April 6, providing two thousand dollars each month to out-of-work Canadians. The release announcing the program said the cash would help people “put food on the table and keep a roof over their head.” To be sure, it was a relief for millions of suddenly jobless Canadians. But the move was also one that had been an agonizingly long time coming. By then, many people had already been without a paycheque for weeks. Others, including the elderly, people with disabilities, those with poor health, and single parents with nobody to watch their kids, couldn’t have trekked out to get food even if they did have the funds. All across the country, people struggled toward the possibility of tomorrow. And, incredibly, all across the country others offered what they could. A group of Vancouver activists established a survival fund to dole out no-questions-asked increments of twenty-five to one hundred dollars for things such as electricity bills, groceries, diapers, baby formula. An Indigenous artist named Lianne Spence raised funds to help buy and deliver groceries to elders in the Prince Rupert area. Libraries transformed themselves into foodbanks. And in Toronto, a disability support worker named Mita Hans offered to help one neighbour and unknowingly sprinkled the seeds for a worldwide mutual-aid movement.

  Hans grew up in East Africa, or, as she put it, “the area that spawned Ebola.” An incoming pandemic means something different, she told me, when your grandfather has had dengue fever—when you yourself remember what childhood malaria felt like. When you know these things in your DNA, then something like a treacherous new coronavirus isn’t abstract. It’s real. It is “big shit.” Hans had been following reports from China. They were vague and disjointed, but all stacked up they felt like something familiar, something dangerous. Hans is also Sikh, and, growing up, when bad things happened her community taught her to ask, “What can I do to help fix this?” After her family moved to Etobicoke when she was thirteen, Hans organized a fun fair to rally her neighbourhood together. As an adult, following the 2015 terrorist attacks in Paris and a subsequent rise in racism and Islamophobia, she co-created BuddyUpTO. Two men had attacked a Toronto woman wearing a hijab, and the Facebook group allowed anyone who felt unsafe travelling to their destinations to request a buddy. When it comes to helping people, Hans noted, “I’ve been doing this my whole life.” When the pandemic arrived she wasn’t about to sit back.

  With every new project, Hans asks herself three questions. One: Who are the most vulnerable? Two: What do they need? And, three: How can we get it to them? She started to seriously consider those questions again after knocking on a neighbour’s door in mid-March. Hans worried that her neighbour, who has mobility issues and is on the Ontario Disability Support Program (ODSP), wouldn’t be able to navigate a packed grocery store or secure
the government-recommended two weeks’ worth of supplies. Initially, the neighbour tartly told Hans to “stop scaremongering her.” Hans replied that she wasn’t trying to scare her; she cared. Turning the encounter over in her head later on, near midnight, she began to think about those who would get hit hardest: racialized and Indigenous communities, LGBTQ+ people, the disabled, seniors, the poor and underhoused, everyone on the margins—the same people who always get the knockout blows when crisis comes, compounding already existing issues. She decided to create another Facebook group to connect people who could offer help with the people who needed it. Thinking of the earlier conversation with her neighbour, Hans gave the group a pointedly clever name: Caremongers-TO. She imagined that a couple dozen friends, at most, would sign up to become “caremongers.” By March 24, the group had nearly twenty thousand members and was being modelled both across Canada and in thirty-five different countries.

  One of those members was Valentina Harper, a fellow activist and friend. Harper grew up in Chile during the dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet and came to Canada during the 1980s. When Hans asked for help with her new project, Harper remembered how, only a month before, Hans had immediately said yes when Harper was grief-worn and needed help—in this case, with emptying her father’s house following his death. And so, without thinking too much about it, Harper also said yes. Together, they worked to get advisers from communities that had some of the highest needs. An Indigenous elder signed up, and so did members of the Black Medical Students’ Association of Canada. They built a structure that prioritized the most vulnerable and got them the help they needed, without judgment or restrictions. Any person could join the Caremongers-TO Facebook group in their area, post a request, and wait for help to arrive. Many people asked for groceries and other essentials. Others needed face masks, help paying bills or rent, a way to escape an abusive situation, temporary shelter, or medical supplies for chronic conditions. Later on, some asked for help figuring out their CERB paperwork or talking to their landlord. Anything. Everything.