The Big Shut-In

Krista is Diné (also known as Navajo), and is a reporter for the Navajo Times, a daily newspaper out of Window Rock, Arizona. Her community was hit tremendously hard by COVID, and she’s struggled throughout with losing not only friends and family, but also the people she sees as the very cultural lifeblood of her tribe.

Tomorrow is Fat Tuesday… but how fat will it be, in this extremely lean year? We check in with Andrew, a resident of New Orleans and a true believer in that city’s power to rise and overcome, to learn about how to party in a time of plague (and why).

Rae was over the moon when she found her dream Ph.D. program in Tokyo Japan. Unfortunately, as the pandemic unfolded she found herself isolated in a tiny apartment in a strange city and unable to communicate with those around her for months on end.

Janet is a Korean-American mother of two navigating the expatriate life in Hong Kong, a not-quite-exactly-Chinese city struggling with the upheaval of massive political protests on top of COVID lockdowns. Stuck for more than a year in a tiny apartment with two small kids in a destabilized city where she doesn't speak the language while she watches her native Los Angeles suffer from afar, is it any wonder she feels torn and crazed and disconnected?

Leaving home to move on to a college campus is all about new connections – living with roommates, going to classes, joining clubs, playing sports, socializing, dating… all of which, of course, are either severely curtailed or banned outright under COVID protocols. So what is it like to live in a dorm right now? In this episode, Char gets the insider’s view from Seth Grossman, Director of Housing and Residence Life at City College, and Angie, a freshman living on campus at the College of Staten Island.

Naz had already taken on a huge responsibility when she moved in with her very elderly mother and became her caregiver. Then COVID hit, and the merely challenging became almost overwhelming. She dug deep, though, into her faith and her own strength, and found ways to not only push through but even see the blessings in the time they had together.

It's 2021, and we finally have several viable vaccines for COVID-19, but that doesn't mean the pandemic is over. They need to be manufactured, they need to be distributed... and even then very real cultural obstacles exist to vaccinating enough of the population to allow social distancing to end. In this episode, we hear from people in the CUNY community who are working hard to make the vaccine not only available but also acceptable to the people who need to receive it.