Healing by Writing: Cultivating Care with Frontline Workers
Channeling our words, our voices, and our stories to give and receive care
By now it should no longer be news that COVID-19 has brought devastating and disproportionate loss, anguish, and incredible stress to Black and brown communities around the world. The Filipino/a/x community, — that is, my community — has been hit particularly hard as we make up a large part of the care industry and the frontlines of this pandemic.
All around the globe, we can be found working in hospitals as nurses, as nannies to children of wealthy families, as caregivers in senior’s homes, as in-home and personal support workers to the sick.
34.4% of internationally-trained nurses around the world are from the Philippines — that’s fully a third of the world’s nurses. In Canada specifically, Filipino/a/xs make up 1 in 20 healthcare workers and more than 90% of the migrant caregivers providing in-home care under the Live-In Caregiver program.
But those are just the numbers. Those are the faceless and forgettable statistics.
They don’t tell you the stories of my titas, my titos, my ates, and my kuyas—blood-related or not — and the textured lives that they lead, not just as frontline workers, but as human beings.
Cultivating Care Through Our Writing Workshops
A few months ago, I had the sincere privilege of facilitating writing workshops on behalf of Living Hyphen, specifically for Filipino/a/x caregivers, nurses, personal support workers, and other essential workers in an attempt to move past these cold and unfeeling numbers and get to the heart of our caregivers’ stories. The stories of the people who are working day in and day out to serve, protect, and keep each and every one of us safe during this global pandemic.
In partnership with North York Community House (NYCH), a multi-service settlement agency, we developed Cultivating Care — a writing and storytelling workshop that explores what it means to give and receive care from afar.
We hosted two 2-hour writing workshops in December and January where we gathered 15 Filipino/a/x frontline workers, carving out a restorative space where we could write and share out loud our experiences with a supportive and encouraging community. Each participant was offered compensation for their time and energy because giving time to a workshop like this means taking time away from something else — be it work, family time, or even just time to catch up on rest.
As frontline workers in the midst of the greatest global health crisis of our generation, there isn’t often much time, space, or even energy to dedicate to telling one’s stories. Add to that the fact that the Filipino/a/x community often shies away from and outright shames emotional conversations around hardship, stress and anxiety, and mental health. This Cultivating Care writing workshop aimed to break down these barriers and create a nourishing environment where caregivers could give back to themselves in a small, but powerful way.
Creating a Zine!
I’m so excited to share that since then we’ve also created a zine holding the stories of many of the Filipino/a/x frontline workers who shared space and time with us. Together with our friends at the Department of Imaginary Affairs (DIA), a non-profit with a mission of elevating the stories of first-generation Canadians and youth, we put together a small artifact to pay tribute to these important stories that don’t often make it in the mainstream media despite being such an integral part of the Canadian story, and what will one day become history.
While it won’t be available to the public, we have shared a copy with each workshop participant as a reminder of our collective power as storytellers and caregivers, in all the different ways that might take shape in our lives.
It’s also a reminder that writing is a process of healing and self- and community-care that doesn’t need to be for public consumption. It can be simply and powerfully for ourselves.
As I will often share in our writing workshops, 95% of my writing will never see the light of day. They are simply rough notes, disjointed thoughts, and passing musings that I’ve jotted down in my journal for myself. As a reminder, as a small testimony of my life.
We forget all too soon the things we thought we could never forget. We forget the loves and the betrayals alike, forget what we whispered and what we screamed, forget who we were. […] It is a good idea, then, to keep in touch, and I suppose that keeping in touch is what notebooks are all about. – Joan Didion
Igniting A Movement and Shifting the Culture
The Cultivating Care workshops are just one small piece of a larger project called Stories of Care that strives to highlight and amplify the voices and stories of Filipino/a/x frontline workers.
Led by Jennifer Chan (a pandemic friend turned collaborator!), Stories of Care started as a project at the North York Community House whose settlement workers have been serving many Filipino immigrants. Seeing the need to create a space for these stories firsthand, Jenn initiated a six-week writing course in the summer of 2020 before modifying the writing model to less-time intensive sessions with larger participation.
Stories from that original workshop have since been featured in a digital exhibition at the DesignTO Festival. In partnership with the DIA, Jenn commissioned three Filipinx artists to take these stories of care and interpret them into visual art as a way to spark widespread and necessary conversations about the ways in which Filipino/a/x frontline workers are taking care of Canadians during this pandemic.
What began as an experimental project is slowly igniting a movement to prioritize the voices of our community caregivers — a group of people who have all too often been ignored and even silenced. While there is much physical healing to do across Canada and around the world from this illness, there is also much healing to do on the emotional level. Not just in the Filipino/a/x community but in wider immigrant circles too, the culture of shame is all too pervasive when it comes to speaking about mental health, burnout, and stress.
As we recover physically, economically, and socially from this pandemic, we must also heal the stigma of mental health issues and create new pathways for vulnerability and open and honest conversation.
On the Privilege of Living In Between Cultures During A Global Pandemic
At the onset of this pandemic, I wrote about the privilege of living in between cultures during this trying time, of slipping easily back and forth between places as it suits me, as it conveniences me, and, in this specific moment, as it keeps me safe.
I asked this critical question:
How do I use my hyphenated identity to act as a very real bridge in time of crisis and beyond? How do I fully embody my role and carry out my responsibility as a, well, living hyphen?
I hope that creating these spaces serves as just the beginning of leveraging my hyphenated identity to act as a bridge during this time of crisis.
I cannot tell you enough how meaningful it has been for me to have had the opportunity to facilitate this writing workshop specifically for my community, and especially during this time. I have often felt helpless during this pandemic without much to offer in a tangible sense. But I do have words, and I must remember that that is healing too.
On behalf of Living Hyphen, I am humbled to have had the opportunity to listen to and document these stories of care, even if in just one small way. We hope to continue to build spaces for healing and connection during this immensely difficult time for the Filipino/a/x community — and beyond.
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