stay home stay safe essay 250- 300 words
Answers
Explanation:
On 23 January this year the world watched as the Chinese government put the city of Wuhan into a strict lockdown and ordered all residents to stay at home. Since then the invisible Coronavirus has been rampaging across the globe, defying borders to bring fear, death and daily living restrictions that we could not have imagined when we celebrated the dawn of a new decade, just a few months ago.
In the UK right now we are all being told to STAY AT HOME to slow down the spread of COVID-19 and to reduce pressure on the health and emergency services. In New Dehli this week the government ordered India’s 1.3 billion people to stay home; last week the Governor of California commanded his 40 million residents to stay at home; and in Germany, South Africa, Morocco, Hungary, Italy, France, Spain and many other countries it is the same story. We are all now AT HOME, 24/7.
‘Home’ is a word in the English language which is distinct and different from the word ‘house’. In many languages there is no special word for home, so for English language learners this can be a problem area in which direct translation doesn’t usually help. With my students in class I draw a row of houses on the whiteboard and put a heart over the door of number 21. I tell them, “There are many houses on my street, but only one of them is home, my home”.
Home is where I live and where I have an emotional and physical connection with the things and people there. A house is a building which people can live in, but home is the place where I belong, where I take my shoes off and put on my pyjamas. Where I relax, where I am known and loved.
I cannot, and should not, write about home without considering the 70.8 million people who are currently displaced worldwide. (Displaced means that they are refugees or seeking asylum in another country – they have left everything that was normal, familiar and homely, and currently have no place to call home). Closer to home, too many people sleep on the streets of our cities – they are homeless. They also have nowhere to call home, nowhere to unpack their bags, make a meal of their choice and sleep in a bed. A hostel or a refugee camp is a temporary house and a refuge from the cold, but it is not home.
These days we are all working from home, schooling from home, exercising at home, and spending all of every day at home. For some of us this is bringing the unexpected pleasure of more time with our families, the joy of meals returning to the kitchen table, after-dinner games and movie nights, projects completed and a generally slower pace of life. For some of us the pressure of being confined in a small space 24/7 is unbearable; tension and arguments are common, loss of income is real, the pressures of distance learning/working are overwhelming and the fear of sickness is constant. For those who live alone, these are quiet, lonely months. Home is not always ‘Home Sweet Home’.