Does a pandemic define a generation? (audio)

Episode transcript

Jessica Mendoza: Welcome to “Rethinking the News” by The Christian Science Monitor. I’m Jessica Mendoza.

Samantha Laine Perfas: And I’m Samantha Laine Perfas.

Jess: Today, we’ll be hearing from Ryan Lenora Brown, the Monitor’s South Africa bureau chief. Ryan is the lead reporter in the Monitor’s new special global report, “21 in ‘21.”

Sam: Ryan and our colleagues spent three months interviewing 21-year-olds around the world, to find out how they were coping with the pandemic at such a pivotal point in their lives.  

Jess: We’ll be talking to Ryan about how and why she came up with the project. We’ll also learn a bit more about the 21-year-old she followed, Sindi Dlambewu. 

Google Maps voice: In 300 meters, turn right.

Ryan Lenora Brown: OK, so, I am in my car now. I’m driving from where I live in central Johannesburg to see Sindi, who has just had her baby. It’s Monday now… 

Jess: When 2020 began, Sindi was focused on becoming the first in her family to finish college. She’s studying to be a teacher. 

Sam: Even after COVID-19 hit and South Africa went into lockdown, she kept up her studies in the single room she shared with her cousin and her cousin’s five-year-old daughter. Then, a few weeks into lockdown, Sindi learned she was pregnant.

Jess: Ryan met with Sindi four or five times in the last few months of her pregnancy. They talked about Sindi’s plans, what it meant to her to have a baby, and how she intended to make her dreams come true. 

Here’s our conversation with Ryan.

[Music]

Jess: Ryan, thanks for joining us. 

Ryan: Thanks for having me, guys. 

Jess: One thing that I always get asked when I’m working on a story and then I wind up talking to “regular people,” is: how do we find them as sources? Could you talk about finding Sindi? How did you meet her? 

Ryan: So when we decided the focus of this project was going to be 21-year-olds around the world, a stat that I came across was that it is just about the average age that a woman in South Africa has her first child. So then I thought, it would be really interesting to follow a woman who’s 21, who’s about to have her first kid. But then I was trying to find someone who was this exact age, 21, and a pretty exact amount pregnant. You know, I knew we were going to follow these 21-year-olds for maybe two or three months. So I was sort of looking for somebody who was exactly six to seven months pregnant. So I – you know, I tried first on my own and I basically just kept hitting a wall. It was too –

Jess: Specific?

Ryan: Yeah, it was – exactly. It was too specific. I actually ended up hiring a local journalist in Soweto, which is the major township in Johannesburg, and he just asked around among people he knew and ended up finding Sindi and put us in touch.  

[Door buzzing]

Sindi: Hello?

Ryan: Hi! It’s Ryan. I’m outside.

Sindi: All right, come in. 

Ryan: OK, see you soon.

[Sounds of movement, Ryan and Sindi greeting each other]

Sam: What did she say when she was asked? Was she like, What is this crazy project or was she excited about it? 

Ryan: Yes, yes. To all of that. Basically, I think, like a lot of people who I interview, she found it deeply odd that I would want to just follow her around, ask her questions about her life.

Ryan: Did I ever tell you my mom is a social worker?

Sindi: No.

Ryan: Yeah.

Sindi: That’s what I wanted. I wanted to be a social worker, but you have to have a police clearance, testimonial letters. It’s not easy to get those things. 

Ryan: Yeah. Yeah. 

Sindi: So. Maybe I’ll enjoy being a teacher or I will just try to get another degree. 

Ryan: At the same time, I think she had never met an American before. She was, like most of us, home basically all the time. And so the idea of getting to know somebody new and from a quite different world to her, I think was intriguing to her in the same way it was intriguing to me. 

Sam: So you were able to get to know Sindi during this really pivotal moment in her life in South Africa, but the project actually covers the entire world. Can you talk a little bit more about the scope of the project?   

Ryan: OK, so in the end, we had 13 reporters involved. There were 12 21-year-olds and they were in 11 countries. Four in North America. We had two in Europe. We had one in Africa. We had three in the Middle East. And then we had two in Asia. My idea when I thought of this project was that I wanted something that would be both very sprawling and very intimate – something that would cast a wide net and look at what this pandemic was like in a lot of different places in the world, you know, whether you were a Sudanese refugee in Jordan, or you were, you know, a college student in the U.S., or a guy trying to start a business in France, you know, so that we could tell a kind of global story about what this pandemic has been like for young people. 

But I also wanted it to be really focused on personal, individual stories, right. Like, all of the different voices in the series and in the story, just speak for themselves. They just speak about an individual’s complicated experience of this very complicated year. Often in journalism, people have to be representative of some category. They have to speak for some broader group of people. And I wanted this to be much more at a sort of human individual level. 

Ryan: … you’ll have your certificate, your degree… 

Sindi: If I have a teacher’s degree I’ll be able to teach outside South Africa. I can go to China or India or somewhere else. Like for five years… 

Jess: So of the other 21-year-olds in this series whose story struck you most? 

Ryan: So I’m not exaggerating when I say that I have incredibly talented colleagues and they found the most incredible group of 21-year-olds all over the world. And I think any one of the 12 21-year-olds in this series could have been the subject of their own cover story. And it would have been just a total blockbuster. But I was only able to include six of them in the main cover story. And so there were some of the other six that – would love to have given readers even more insight into their lives. 

So, for instance, there was a young woman called Bhuvi in India, who is an engineering student, the first person in her family to go to university. Her mother has spent Bhuvi’s whole life working, going door-to-door on a bicycle, selling milk, cleaning rich people’s houses, so that Bhuvi might have a better life than she had. And so she has this sort of really powerful sense of ambition and drive. Then at the same time, she’s 21. She's also sort of obsessing about what her dating profiles look like. She’s learning like, American slang from watching TV. So she seemed both young and old at the same time in a way that I think is quite telling of that age and that stage of life. 

And then I was also really intrigued by the story of Nuha, who is a Darfuri refugee from Sudan living in Jordan. And when the pandemic hit, she was studying to be a beautician, which she thought, I think, was a career that would future-proof her, that there will always be people in the world who needed to make themselves look beautiful. And being able to provide that service would always be this really valuable skill set. And nobody could have seen a year where suddenly the world is in sweatpants and nobody needs to look pretty for weddings or celebrations or anything like that anymore. And so just seeing how she navigated that was really interesting. 

And then there was a woman in Mexico City, is a fine arts student, Jimena. And her year was really interesting because her year was really boring. 

Jimena Perez Sanchez: … those months, we didn’t go out until October, when that spin class happened… 

Ryan: She lives with her parents, was able to make it dynamic by – she started making a small piece of art every single day and posting it on her Instagram. To sort of remind herself that time was going on, that things were changing. 

Jess: And she was the one who also got COVID, right? 

Ryan: Yeah, she did. She thinks she got it when she went to a spin class, which was one of the very few times that she went out this year – 

Jimena: Well, I was actually sick, and so my mom was. 

Ryan: – and she ended up getting sick and then giving it to her mom as well.

Jimena: And it was really difficult for the both of us because we weren’t expecting it. 

Ryan: And so she also wrestled with this tension that I saw in the stories of a lot of the 21-year-olds between, you know, feeling young and unbreakable, and feeling like you want to be a bit reckless in your life, and now is the time. And having the kind of weight of this pandemic, this thing that demands caution, on your shoulders. 

Jimena: Then after that I understand we all can be in the safety-ness space, but that doesn’t mean that you can’t be sick. We’re in an atmosphere that – how you say, frágil? 

Whitney Eulich: Fragile.

Jimena: Fragile. Yeah, in a fragile atmosphere. And that made me more conscious about the whole situation that the planet is living in right now … 

Ryan: You know, I think she really dealt with a lot of guilt and shame and worry about having gotten her mom sick for what in the times before, this would have been just a small, everyday pleasure, going to an exercise class. 

[Music]

Whitney Eulich: Hi everyone, I’m Whitney Eulich, the Monitor’s Latin America editor and one of the reporters involved in the “21 in ‘21” project. For the last few months, I’ve had the pleasure of following Jimena Perez Sanchez, an art student in Mexico City. She’s really tried to take advantage of this challenging time by using her isolation during the pandemic as inspiration for her art. It’s led to some really creative work that you can check out on our website, csmonitor.com/21in21. You can read more about Jimena or any of the other 12 young adults we met during this project there. And I hope you enjoy stepping into their shoes for a moment, coming of age in the pandemic. So go check it out: csmonitor.com/21in21. 

[Music]

Jess: Welcome back. Today on “Rethinking the News,” my colleague Samantha and I are talking with Ryan Lenora Brown, the Monitor’s South Africa bureau chief. She’s also the lead reporter in our new project, “21 in ‘21.” Here’s Sam. 

[Music]

Sam: I really like what you said earlier about this project being both massive in scope, but also so intimate. You know, getting a glimpse into this young person's life about having to deal with the tension that the pandemic has brought is really interesting. I'm curious, what was it about this age in particular that made you want to get that glimpse? What was it about the age 21 specifically?  

Ryan: Yeah, so there's a few things. One is that when researchers or anybody who studies this kind of thing looks at what defines generations, it’s very often big events that happened when this group of people were either teenagers or young adults. You know, so we have a whole generation who is defined by growing up during the Great Depression, or by watching the Berlin Wall fall, or by 9/11. For this next generation of people, this is likely to be their Great Depression, their 9/11, their Berlin Wall falling. It’s likely to define how they see the world probably for the rest of their lives. 

And 21 in particular, it’s a significant age in a lot of different places in the world and different societies. And what does that look like if you're a Chinese woman who's taking the GRE and trying to get back to the U.S. for grad school and and staring down visa laws, potentially changing? 

Lucy Wang: … I know it’s really difficult for us to get back to the United States ...

Ryan: Or what does it mean if you're a young labor organizer in Germany and suddenly you can't organize people, you know, how do you still take a social movement forward? 

Cosima Steltner: … I thought a lot about if I even should go to these meetings, even if they take place and if they’re allowed to take place. ...

Ryan: What does it look like if you're a young Black American woman voting in a presidential election for the first time, you know, in the era of George Floyd and Black Lives Matter? 

Olivia Holt: … of course, Columbia County is predominantly white. I think I was the only young Black girl there.  

Ken Makin: Okay.  

Olivia: But I’m sure there were one or two older Black people… 

Ryan: Of course, people who are this age now, 21, you know, like they’re not far off from being the decision makers in any society in the world, you know, sort of being leaders, being the parents, being the voters, all of that. So how they make sense of this pandemic and what they take away from it will be really important for the world for a long time to come, even if we don't quite yet know in what ways. 

Jess: And you talked about this a little bit earlier. What did you take away, ultimately, about what it’s like to be 21 in this particular moment? And was it what you expected when you first pitched the project? 

Ryan: You know, being 21 in this moment was very different, depending on who you were, right. Like the guy we followed in Afghanistan, who’s sort of a semi-professional boxer, who has tried once to be smuggled to Europe. His life and his experience of this year was very different, say, than a Canadian university student trying to figure out how to keep the Indigenous community at her university connected to one another in a time of isolation, you know. But I think what was surprising to me was, despite how extraordinarily different all those experiences were, there were these kind of common threads that ran through all of them. 

Wherever you were in the world, technology became this total lifeline. It became people’s sort of tether to the outside world, but also this profound fatigue that people had with it. For a generation who are, you know, they grew up basically like with a smartphone in their hands. For that generation to be exhausted by the amount of tech in their life, I think, took a lot. And that was an experience that I saw over and over, all over the world, people just craving face-to-face interactions and savoring what little of that they were able to have in this year. 

And then there was also this, I found, kind of a global tension between that life they had been envisioning, and whatever life would come after this pandemic. So just that, you know, that sense of uncertainty, I think, that we all have felt this last year, but that was really heightened by the fact that these were young people at these turning points in their lives. 

Sam: Ryan, as we wrap up the conversation, I’m wondering, has working on this project changed you or your perspective in any way? Has it made you feel more connected to others at a time that we feel very fragmented and disconnected as a society? 

Ryan: Yeah, it definitely has. Meeting Sindi was a really powerful reporting experience. But just also for me personally, it was a really profound way to reach across that divide in the society where I live. You know, she lives maybe 15 miles from me, and in some ways, it’s a completely different world. 

And, you know, she was somebody who I met as a professional contact, obviously, for a story. 

But just given the circumstances of this year, she’s also one of the few people I’ve really met and felt like I got to know a bit at all this year. So I think that made the relationship deeper for me, maybe, than source-journalist relationships often are. I was very grateful in – in the sense that journalism, as it often does, gave me, you know, an excuse that I wouldn’t have had otherwise to meet and really get to know somebody whose life and whose world were quite different than mine. 

[Door creaks open]

Ryan: Hi! Hello, baby girl. 

Sindi: She’s always hungry, this one. 

Ryan: You’re always hungry? Oh, but now you’re taking a nap… 

Jess: One thing we haven't asked you about is that Sindi actually gave birth in January. It was later than expected? Could you talk about that? 

Ryan: Yeah. So I guess, like everything in the year 2020 and now in the year 2021, you know, the end of Sindi’s pregnancy involved an outsized amount of waiting around. Her due date was at the beginning of January, and that sort of came and went. Another week came and went. Another week came and went. And she still hadn’t gone into labor. She joked to me, like, “I don’t think this baby wants to come into this world,” which felt very profound. She did end up finally having the baby in mid-January.  

Ryan: Oh, Sindi, she’s beautiful.

Sindi: Thank you.

Ryan: She had a pretty quick and problem-free labor, and her and her partner, Bongani, decided to call the baby Nkazimulo, or Nkazi for short, which means “brightness.” 

Sindi:  Do you want to hold her? 

Ryan: Absolutely. 

Ryan:  Which I just thought was such a lovely name for a baby born in the beginning of 2021, in what will hopefully be a better and kinder year, and a brighter year, for all of us. 

Jess: Thank you so much, Ryan, for joining us today. 

Ryan: Yeah, thanks for having me on and giving me the chance to talk about these interesting 21-year-olds and the incredible work that my colleagues did on this series. 

[Music]

Ryan: When you see her now, like in person, what do you hope for her future? What do you want her life to be like?

Sindi: I want her life to be easier than mine. That’s why I want to push. I want to do it for her. I don’t want her to struggle. I want her to go to private school, not like me. I just want her to be perfect, her life to be perfect.

[Music]

Sam: Thank you for joining us. You can read about Sindi and the other 21-year-olds in this series by visiting our site. Go to csmonitor.com/21in21. 

Jess: There are also some beautiful photos of each of them, along with essays told from their points of view. Again, you can find everything at csmonitor.com/21in21. 

Sam: This episode of “Rethinking the News'' was hosted by Jessica Mendoza and me, Samantha Laine Perfas. Clara Germani was the editor. Sound design was by Morgan Anderson and Noel Flatt. Produced by The Christian Science Monitor, copyright 2021. 

[End]