During the past two weeks, the main tasks that I worked on were speaking in Persian. My language partner was flexible with our learning plan during these two past weeks as the distress coronavirus in the world has increased. My last journal was about the spread of this virus in Iran and the struggles that it was causing on people of this nation, including the closing of schools and worship sites. Most of our time was spent discussing and analyzing the increase of this virus in Iran and around the world. At this point, there were only identified cases of the virus in the state of Washington in the US. We not only looked at news provided by Afghan and Persian channels but also looked at news from American channels like the New York Times to compare the language that was used to talk about this virus.
What we hoped to accomplish this week was to analyze the impact of a global issue that started in one country but how it rapidly spread around the world. What I learned from this lesson is that our world is more connected than we think. Be it via travelling abroad, forced migration or economic imports/exports, there was a great potential for this virus to spread around the world. At this point, this virus is not only impacting people in China or Iran but a great spread has also been seen in Italy and Spain. The second major thing that we discussed was the unpreparedness of countries to handle such situations. Most countries including Iran spend a lot of money and resources in developing nuclear weapons, however, at a time like this, those things are meaningless. Some governments and political institutions continue to call this virus a scam but from what we have seen in China and Iran, I think the rest of the world should be concerned about this virus. The third thing that I discussed with my language partner was how the news about this virus was being communicated to people. We questioned if at a moment like this, is it rational to use a kind of language that hides the truth from people for the sake of not causing them panic? Given Iran’s approach to this which I discussed in my last journal, I don’t think it is wise to hide the truth from the people and manipulation should not be used to persuade people to stay calm. Language can be a great tool to send awareness to people but at the same time, it can be used to persuade people to do the wrong things.
Since this virus has reached Iran, this topic has made its way into our learning plan. The reason for this is that it continues to impact the social, economical and political issues that we are analyzing and reading on the news about Iran and Afghanistan. Regardless, my community partner and I continue to work on some of the goals that we had set during the first week. Last few weeks, I took the time to type on my computer in Persian, this week because it was more discussion-based, I took notes in my notebook. Similar to the last weeks, the strategies that we used during this week were mainly through watching videos, listening and speaking. I watched videos on BBC Persian, New York Times and Tolo News.
Picture Credit: The Atlantic
Comments
It would be interesting to look comparatively at the ways media in different countries discussed the virus. For example, the authorities here use the euphemistic “social distancing.” In Baku, where I have several friends, they use the more direct “quarantine.” I wonder what insights could be drawn from such a comparison.