How Are Lower Incomes of Bangladesh Experiencing COVID-19: Preliminary findings from an ongoing research.
2020.06.24
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Lower income people’s experience on COVID-19 related message
Considering this context, we are conducting this research to understand how lower income people perceive on those key terms, how they are responding to these messages , what are their experiences amid this pandemic and social stigma around COVID-19. In this article we will share our preliminary results on people’s perception on “Social Distancing”, “Stay at Home”, “Quarantine”, “Locked-down”, “Hand Washing with Soap” and “Hand Sanitizing”. In our study the lower income people are defined as those people who are living their lives in daily income. In particular, by lower income people we mean rickshaw and van puller, day laborer (skilled and unskilled), housemaid, garment worker, hawker, shoe-maker and other people of similar professions.
Three or four months ago I got to know from television that a virus has been spreading from China. Hundreds of thousands of people go admitted into hospitals, thousands of people are dying. From a Bangladeshi television channel, I heard a news but they used many English term. But I understood that, the medicine of this disease has not discovered. The disease is infectious. And there is a possibility of death due to this virus. Other than that, I did not understand what they were saying to prevent this disease. I cannot remember about the name of medicine, but they advised to use it on hand. Beside this, they also told to wash hands with soap. They also advised many more, but I could not understand all.
The story tells about the perception of key messages that are being disseminated as part of awareness mechanism to prevent coronavirus. Specifically, we tried to understand the concept “Stay at home”- a key messages, from an Anthropological perspective by exploring lower income people’s social reality. Generally, home is conceptualized as a place of protection or shelter but it does not have any unitary definition. Rather, it involves with socio-cultural aspects, emotion and historical aspects of a particular place and space in different cultural context. Thus, the definition of home changes according to time, difference of characters and situation (Irene 1999). In Bangladesh, home indicates residential arrangement and it is impossible to draw a sketch of home. ‘Home’ is a debatable concept in Anthropology discipline which is often expressed by “Chula”, “Bari”, “Khana” or “Roof” (Bertocci 1970; Jansen 1987). The idea of home is not homogenous depending on people’s social and economic context. For example, in the urban space many people living in open space or footpath (homelessness), apartment, private space and slum whereas in rural areas ‘Bari’ is a symbol status, remittances and migration have changed this notion. The social reality of the people who are living on the street or footpath contradicts with the notion of home as because they do not have an arrangement in regards to the popular norm home. Open space or street or footpath is home for those people which is not similar to modern apartment, flat, rural ‘bari’ neither to slum. We should consider the term home from holistic manner.