In May 2021, one of us, Mirco Göpfert, received a handwritten letter from Uganda
via his professional postal address. It was written by a young girl, it said, whose father
had passed away from HIV/AIDS, whose mother had died in a storm, and who was
left with her two younger brothers, with neither shelter nor garden, in a village that
had been ravaged by the storm that had killed their mother. Prior to the deaths of
her parents, she had been attending college for a three-year course in midwifery until
the college was closed ‘due to the Corona virus, which attacked the world’. This letter
was captivating. For one thing, after a year of the continuous and ever-increasing
virtualization of communication in teaching, research and private communications,
the physical immediacy of the handwritten letter almost felt like a blow to the
stomach. And unlike most of the unsolicited emails most of us are familiar with,
in which people unknown to oneself are asking for financial assistance in response
to particular situations of personal, regional or national crisis affecting someone
somewhere, this letter referred to a crisis that hit everyone everywhere.