"Each day, I summon the words they need to survive this plague, and cling to my dough."
Telephonic Tagalog interpreter @marivisoliven translates conversations between doctors and Filipino patients—while stress baking, she writes in our latest #WhereIGo: zps.la/3azHeL8
In the last year, the uptick of COVID-related calls led Soliven to bake so much that her stand mixer broke down.
In her essay, Soliven takes us through a conversation she interpreted in July 2020 between a doctor and an elderly Filipino patient suffering from COVID pneumonia.
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The doctor's call came in the middle of Soliven's weekly stress-baking ritual. "I need to give you a heads up," the doctor told Soliven. "Her condition is worsening and we must discuss treatment options. It may be difficult."
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"'Difficult' doesn't faze me," Soliven writes. "I’ve helped Filipinos get through thousands of difficult conversations: 9-1-1 calls, domestic violence reports, court trials, deportation hearings. I find the words they need to get through the ordeal."
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Soliven doesn't like sweets, so delivering her baked goods to quarantined friends became "yet another calming routine." She has baked pineapple upside down cake and conducted contact tracing interviews, made banana bread and read the Lord's Prayer to an ICU patient.
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Now, Soliven finds hope while translating COVID vaccine appointments for Filipino patients. "The miracle is happening," she writes. "I know it will happen for the rest of us, so I remind myself to be patient and wait for my next loaf to rise.
Before we get started, get to know tonight’s speakers in our virtual green room:
Brownstein spoke with us back in October about the book that changed his life in college, the song that changed his life in high school, and what’s inspired him in the last year: zps.la/3d6FxF6
@julianbarnes covers our nation’s intelligence agencies for the @nytimes. He called into the virtual green room to chat about why the whoopie pie belongs to Maine, his COVID guilty pleasure, and life (and death) as an amateur chicken farmer: zps.la/32CZEGT
Back in 2014, Barnes wrote an essay for us describing the time a fox got into his chicken coup—and how the Pentagon officers he covered at the time watched the security video and commented on his coup’s “force protection measures.” zps.la/3pqSQFM
This election season, we’ve been focusing on stories that bring perspective to the state of American democracy. From takes on India to El Salvador, Machiavelli to “American Horror Story,” these pieces offer a fresh lens on tonight.
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Last Tuesday, @joemmathews processed how “peculiar and personal” the stakes of this election are for him—in that the results may determine which of his two old friends ends up on the U.S. Supreme Court:
On Thursday, historian W. Scott Poole (@monstersamerica) wrote about how the horror genre is experiencing a “global renaissance” thanks to the “politics of wounded rage” propelling the real world.
In India, there is no such thing as Election Day. “Democracy, unlike candy, does not come out of a vending machine delivering instant gratification,” Roy contends.
It took 11 million election officials over a month to conduct the 7 phases of India’s 2019 general election.
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The stages allow security and electoral officials to follow the election around the country as different regions vote. Even when it takes a week for the winner to be announced after the last polling day, Roy writes, Indian voters don’t lose faith in the value of their vote.
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When author and editor Elaine Elinson heard Trump Jr. urge supporters to “join the Army for Trump’s election security operation” and “help us watch them,” her mind went back to 1994, when she was an election observer in El Salvador.
That March, after a 12-year civil war left more than 75,000 dead or disappeared, Salvadorans headed to the polls for the first democratic election in a generation. Elinson, then a @ACLU_NorCal staffer, was one of hundreds of international observers sent by the United Nations.
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Their role at the polling booths was to “create a visible presence so that the voters would feel safe,” writes Elinson. The idea was that by showing up, anyone who “tried to menace voters would be deterred.” Elinson was issued a blue shirt labeled “Misión Observadora.”
Today we published two stories about the experience of “distance learning.”
One is from Alizé Basulto Ibarra, a senior about to graduate from Coalinga High School. One is from Brian Crosby, a retiring English/journalism teacher at Herbert Hoover High School in Glendale.
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At the start of spring semester, everything was going according to plan for class president Alizé. She’d been accepted to her dream school, UCLA.
But then the pandemic hit, and “school just ended in the middle of the sentence.”
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At first, Alizé “responded like a teenager, treating this as a vacation from schoolwork and an excuse to stay up late.”
As the virus spread, she realized that she needed to keep studying—and so did her four younger siblings, ages 15, 10, 9, and 8.
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