The closer we get to the one-year anniversary of the national lockdown, the more people are expressing their exhaustion and issues with their mental health.
And while everyone’s experiences and emotions throughout the past year are justified, there are some who could not stay at home during the lockdown and risked their lives to work on the frontline every day.
Community members and organisations have been out in full force expressing their appreciation for the frontline workers, especially over the past two months, and ActionSA is no different. Over the weekend of 20 February, members of the party from throughout Johannesburg went to various hospitals to express their deepest gratitude to the staff. Local members, including Gauteng Chairperson of the party, John Moodey, spent their Sunday morning at Life Flora Hospital, thanking not only the nurses, but the cleaning staff too.
According to John, he visited the local hospital for the first time on Thursday, 18 February to ask for permission to address the staff three days later, and he was invited to sit in on a meeting with the special medical frontline team dealing specifically with Covid-19 cases. John said that these medical personnel and their managers would be unavailable on the Sunday as they would be very busy with their ward rounds, but he and his team still returned to thank the rest of the hospital staff anyway.
Life Flora was chosen specifically because John was eager to express his appreciation to the team that had taken care of his six-year-old grandson who had undergone surgery earlier in the week. This was not the only team he had a special message of thanks for. “I thanked [the nurses] for their unwavering dedication in nursing a former colleague and friend, who after three weeks, died as a result of Covid. But in that time, they never gave up on him,” said John.
On the Sunday, John repeated the words he had spoken to the Covid-19 team that had brought them to tears. “You are very much appreciated. You swallow your fear and risk your lives and the health of the people in your home, just to save the lives of strangers. Thank you for your selfless service to our people,” he said.
John finished off his statement by saying that he was extremely moved by the reactions to a simple ‘thank you’ and that it was a spiritual experience.
