Aside from everything we face because of the coronavirus and its spread, in times of difficulty one brings out the best in himselfAnd always this ends up leaving valuable news along the way.
This is the story of Julienne Van Hul, a British newspaper "The Guardian" I was writing this past week. Van Hul, now 91, lives alone at home due to the global recession of COVID-19, and Stephanie McQuaid, her grandson, is a temporary nurse who thinks it is important to protect her grandmother now.
This granddaughter and grandmother are bonded with strong relationships. When McQuaid's mother died, she started phoning her grandmother, thereby filling the space left for both of them. Now, as McQuaid himself says, her grandmother is her best friend.
Given the confinement recommendations designed to protect the elderly, McQuaid became deeply concerned about his grandmother, who was supposed to start being alone full-time. To reduce this, and thus make it easier to separate, She had the idea of giving her an iPhone she had at home without using it so she could communicate with SpaceTime with her. This met the incredible challenge of teaching a 91-year-old to use Apple software, in addition to having them maintain a safe distance to avoid potential sources of opposition.
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In any case, McQuaid did not split due to circumstances. He bought a SIM card with a data plan (since his grandmother did not have internet at home) and arranged for an older person to be able to use it, in addition to adding other family contacts so they could contribute too. He cleaned the iPhone with great care, following Apple's guidelines on the discovery of a deadly virus and kept it in a zip bag so it wouldn't be contaminated with the virus from its cleaning. After this she only has to go to Emyvale, where her grandmother lives in Ireland and has left her iPhone repaired and disinfected on the porch of her house. Van Hul pulled it again, and this is where the real challenge began.
To teach their grandmother how to use Apple, each of them stood on the other side of a large window overlooking the grandstand's library with a lot of patience and his iPhone to train his grandmother, classes began, originally the exclusive use of SpaceTime on the smartphone.
Van Hul was skeptical at first, thinking his grandson was trying to teach him madness. The pressure he had to use on the screen or the home button in the temple was at odds with him at first, McQuaid said. However with little practice, even though Van Hul doesn't know how to make SpaceTime calls alone, of course you already know how to answer incoming calls, so now you can call her without a problem and see if she's alive. The significance of his grandson's grandson made perfect sense to him once she began to see that all her relatives could contact her now, especially his grandchildren living in Calgary.
As McQuaid says:
"Explaining to someone who has never owned a smartphone or actually something more important than television or radio has been a real challenge."
McQuaid says that the added value of being able to see your family members in the mirror is what really makes the difference from her grandmother, who according to her own account could share her opinion on the recent haircut of one of her grandchildren.
Unfortunately there are points against your new device, as mentioned in "The Guardian". By the time they took pictures of the article and wanted to make a show of the old woman and her granddaughter making a video call, Van Hul had forgotten to charge her app, so they couldn't teach the new skills they had acquired, even though they promised grandparents to continue the exercise.
In these difficult times take care of our elders, who are severely affected and at high risk of developing the virus, it is a very important task. In addition to his physical care, in this case the emotional company plays an important role, and we must never forget the importance of keeping in touch with them, comforting them and showing that we love them. In addition, if like McQuaid we are able to teach our elders how to use SpaceTime, they eventually give us thanks.
