These lockdown days, I find it soothing and uplifting to read real stories about survival. The one I remember best is the so called «Andes Flight Disaster”, October 1972, when a chartered flight from Montevideo bound to Chile, crashed against a glacier. Among the passengers, there were 19 members of the Old Christian Club Rugby Union Team. One of the few survivors, Carlitos Páez Vilaró, said something in an interview that still resonates in my memory: “After 8 days, we learnt that the search was over. Nobody was coming to rescue us. That was both a piece of bad and good news, because we realized that everything depended on us, on our own efforts and skills”.
Somehow, in the midst of this unending Covid 19 pandemic, I feel that a lot depends on us too, common people, until a vaccine is found. These last 3 months, we’ve had to recycle ourselves, to adapt ourselves to new ways of working, of communicating, of surviving. And –moreover- we have no clue what the post pandemic world will be like. A real challenge. Similar to the rugbiers’ one.
Published in Buenos Aires Times