Time capsule buries children’s memories of Uruguay’s pandemic

RIO DE JANEIRO, BRAZIL – Mouth masks, alcohol gel, documents, and the memory of how Uruguayan children lived through the Covid-19 pandemic are some of the objects that the country will bury in a time capsule destined to be opened by its creators.

In letters and drawings, students from different schools in the department (province) of Florida, about 100 kilometers north of Montevideo, tell how they lived the last 500 days.

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Undoubtedly, the arrival of the SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus in Uruguay changed their lives, as it did with every person in the world.

“I had a great time”, says Tadeo, one of the few students who attend the rural school Cerros de La Macana. On a yellow sheet of paper, the little boy draws his family and tells the story of when he and his family locked some cows together.

On the other hand, Martina chooses to write on a computer inside a school where one of the walls holds a phrase by writer Eduardo Galeano: “Each person shines with his own light among all the others.”

According to the mayor of Florida, Guillermo Lopez, this idea is “to recognize those who have played a fundamental role in the fight against the pandemic, which is the health personnel.”

To this end, the inventiveness of the youngest members of the community was called upon, whose work will be kept together with different objects and documents.

However, unlike what happens with many of these capsules, the Florida capsule will not be closed for a long period of time, but will see the light in 10 years so that young people can observe what they wrote in 2021.

Lopez stresses the importance of this initiative in the midst of a world in which “the ephemeral, the instantaneous and the changing is the characteristic.”

Meanwhile, teacher Adriana Trezza emphasizes that she thought the idea was “great” because it will make it possible to recount events that neither the teachers nor the children had previously experienced. “We thought it was great for them to tell how they lived those moments, especially when they could not come to school,” she adds.

Those stories will sleep for the next ten years in the Assembly Square, one of the emblematic places of Florida, a department that, on July 10, 2031, will celebrate the first 175 years of its creation.

On that day, the treasures that the capsule will hold will be uncovered by those in charge of filling it with their stories.

López is proud of this and tells of the importance young people have had in Florida since Uruguay decreed the health emergency on March 13, 2020.

As an example of this, he recalls that in January, they were in charge of carrying out a campaign that sought that those who had left the department for the summer vacations maintained the most extreme precautions when returning home to avoid contagions.

Surely, this move and others that were made helped Florida to be one of the departments with the lowest number of cases during the last 17 months. Despite this, the coronavirus affected nearly 6,000 people there and claimed 79 lives.

“The young people here in Florida have been protagonists of that collective responsibility that has allowed us to deal with the pandemic in a better way,” concludes Lopez.

Now, some of them will keep their memories in a small capsule, waiting to open them in a decade and recall the memories of a distant past.