DISHEARTENED
“How are you?” asks my Danish friend, Tove, calling from Santiago, Chile, where she lives. We are speaking in Danish, and I pause a bit before I select a word to describe how I feel. “ Modløs ,” I finally say. (Discouraged, disheartened, dispirited are some translations, all of them applicable). She counters with “ vemodig” (sad, melancholic), and we both laugh at our plight. ‘Depressed’ is next, she adds, and we chuckle again, the way Danes often react to a shared bad situation. Like me she has been largely confined to her house for more than 13 months under the much stricter Chilean quarantine rules, and like me she has received her second shot of the Chinese CoronaVac (Sinovac) vaccine, which, we have just learnt, will not be authorized for inclusion in a European vaccination passport, and thus not grant us access to Denmark. Both of us are lucky to live in nice houses with a view and a garden, but the enforced confinement is getting to us and draining our ...